As for Gamba, Andreoni, though unwilling to admit a knowledge of his exact whereabouts, assured Odo that he was well and had not lost courage.  At court matters remained much as usual.  The Duchess, surrounded by her familiars, had entered on a new phase of mad expenditure, draining the exchequer to indulge her private whims, filling her apartments with mountebanks and players, and borrowing from courtiers and servants to keep her creditors from the door.  Trescorre was no longer able to check her extravagance, and his influence with the Duke being on the wane, the court was once more the scene of unseemly scandals and disorders.

The only new figure to appear there since Odo’s departure was that of the little prince’s governor, who had come from Rome a few months previously to superintend the heir’s education, which was found to have been grievously neglected under his former masters.  This was an ecclesiastic, an ex-Jesuit as some said, but without doubt a man of parts, and apparently of more tolerant views than the other churchmen about the court.

“But,” Andreoni added, “your excellency may chance to recall him; for he is the same abate de Crucis who was sent to Pianura by the Holy Office to arrest the German astrologer.”

Odo heard him with surprise.  He had had no news of de Crucis since their parting in Rome, where, as he supposed, the latter was to remain for some years in the service of Prince Bracciano.  Odo was at a loss to conceive how or why the Jesuit had come to Pianura; but, whatever his reasons for being there, it was certain that his influence must make itself felt far beyond the range of his immediate duties.  Whether this influence would be exerted for good or ill it was impossible to forecast; but much as Odo admired de Crucis, he could not forget that the Jesuit, by his own avowal, was still the servant of the greatest organised opposition to moral and intellectual freedom that the world had ever known.  That this opposition was not always actively manifested Odo was well aware.  He knew that the Jesuit spirit moved in many directions and that its action was often more beneficial than that of its opponents; but it remained an incalculable element in the composition of human affairs, and one the more to be feared since, in ceasing to have a material existence, it had acquired the dread pervasiveness of an idea.

With the Epiphany the wild carnival-season set in.  Nothing could surpass the excesses of this mad time.  All classes seemed bitten by the tarantula of mirth, every gondola hid an intrigue, the patrician’s tabarro concealed a noble lady, the feminine hood and cloak a young spark bent on mystification, the friar’s habit a man of pleasure and the nun’s veil a lady of the town.  The Piazza swarmed with merry-makers of all degrees.  The square itself was taken up by the booths of hucksters, rope-dancers and astrologers, while promenaders in travesty thronged the arcades, and the ladies of the nobility, in their white masks