Passing from this high music to the company of Gamba and his friends was like leaving a church where the penitential psalms are being sung for the market-place where mud and eggs are flying.  The change was not agreeable to a fastidious taste; but, as Gamba said, you cannot clean out a stable by waving incense over it.  After some hesitation, he had agreed to make Odo acquainted with those who, like himself, were secretly working in the cause of progress.  These were mostly of the middle class, physicians, lawyers, and such men of letters as could subsist on the scant wants of an unliterary town.  Ablest among them was the bookseller, Andreoni, whose shop was the meeting place of all the literati of Pianura.  Andreoni, famous throughout Italy for his editions of the classics, was a man of liberal views and considerable learning, and in his private room were to be found many prohibited volumes, such as Beccaria’s Crime and Punishment, Gravina’s Hydra Mystica, Concini’s History of Probabilism and the Amsterdam editions of the French philosophical works.

The reformers met at various places, and their meetings were conducted with as much secrecy as those of the Honey-Bees.  Odo was at first surprised that they should admit him to their conferences; but he soon divined that the gatherings he attended were not those at which the private designs of the party were discussed.  It was plain that they belonged to some kind of secret association; and before he had been long in Pianura he learned that the society of the Illuminati, that bugbear of priests and princes, was supposed to have agents at work in the duchy.  Odo had heard little of this execrated league, but that it was said to preach atheism, tyrannicide and the complete abolition of territorial rights; but this, being the report of the enemy, was to be received with a measure of doubt.  He tried to learn from Gamba whether the Illuminati had a lodge in the city; but on this point he could extract no information.  Meanwhile he listened with interest to discussions on taxation, irrigation, and such economic problems as might safely be aired in his presence.

These talks brought vividly before him the political corruption of the state and the misery of the unprivileged classes.  All the land in the duchy was farmed on the metayer system, and with such ill results that the peasants were always in debt to their landlords.  The weight of the evil lay chiefly on the country-people, who had to pay on every pig they killed, on all the produce they carried to market, on their farm implements, their mulberry-orchards and their silk-worms, to say nothing of the tithes to the parish.  So oppressive were these obligations that many of the peasants, forsaking their farms, enrolled themselves in the mendicant orders, thus actually strengthening the hand of their oppressors.  Of legislative redress there was no hope, and the Duke was inaccessible to all but his favourites.  The previous year, as Odo