This crude play on the Belverde’s former title and the one she had recently acquired was signed “Carlo Gamba.”

Odo glanced curiously at the hunchback, who met the look with a composed smile.  “My enemies don’t do me justice,” said he; “I could do better than that if I tried;” and he effaced the words with a sweep of his shabby sleeve.

Other lampoons of the same quality were continually cropping up on the walls of Pianura, and the ducal police were kept as busy rubbing them out as a band of weeders digging docks out of a garden.  The Duchess’s debts, the Duke’s devotions, the Belverde’s extortions, Heiligenstern’s mummery, and the political rivalry between Trescorre and the Dominican, were sauce to the citizen’s daily bread; but there was nothing in these popular satires to suggest the hunchback’s trenchant irony.

It was in the Bishop’s palace that Odo read the first lampoon in which he recognised his friend’s touch.  In this society of polished dilettanti such documents were valued rather for their literary merits than for their political significance; and the pungent lines in which the Duke’s panaceas were hit off (the Belverde figuring among them as a Lenten diet, a dinner of herbs, and a wonder-working bone) caused a flutter of professional envy in the episcopal circle.

The Bishop received company every evening; and Odo soon found that, as Gamba had said, it was the best company in Pianura.  His lordship lived in great state in the Gothic palace adjoining the Cathedral.  The gloomy vaulted rooms of the original structure had been abandoned to the small fry of the episcopal retinue.  In the chambers around the courtyard his lordship drove a thriving trade in wines from his vineyards, while his clients awaited his pleasure in the armoury, where the panoplies of his fighting predecessors still rusted on the walls.  Behind this facade a later prelate had built a vast wing overlooking a garden which descended by easy terraces to the Piana.  In the high-studded apartments of this wing the Bishop held his court and lived the life of a wealthy secular nobleman.  His days were agreeably divided between hunting, inspecting his estates, receiving the visits of antiquarians, artists and literati, and superintending the embellishments of his gardens, then the most famous in North Italy; while his evenings were given to the more private diversions which his age and looks still justified.  In religious ceremonies or in formal intercourse with his clergy he was the most imposing and sacerdotal of bishops; but in private life none knew better how to disguise his cloth.  He was moreover a man of parts, and from the construction of a Latin hexameter to the growing of a Holland bulb, had a word worth hearing on all subjects likely to engage the dilettante.  A liking soon sprang up between Odo and this versatile prelate; and in the retirement of his lordship’s cabinet, or pacing with him the garden-alleys set with ancient marbles, the young man gathered many precepts of that philosophy of pleasure which the great churchmen of the eighteenth century practised with such rare completeness.