than any material privation.  In Italy, as the Marquis had more than once remarked, people loved, gambled, wrote poetry, and patronised the arts; but, alas, they did not converse.  Coeur-Volant could not conceal from his Highness that there was no conversation in Pianura; but he did his best to fill the void by the constant exercise of his own gift in that direction, and to Odo at least his talk seemed as good as it was copious.  Misfortune had given a finer savour to the Marquis’s philosophy, and there was a kind of heroic grace in his undisturbed cultivation of the amenities.

While the Marquis was struggling to preserve the conversational art, and Alfieri planning the savage revenge of the Misogallo, the course of affairs in France had gained a wilder impetus.  The abolition of the nobility, the flight and capture of the King, his enforced declaration of war against Austria, the massacres of Avignon, the sack of the Tuileries—­such events seemed incredible enough till the next had crowded them out of mind.  The new year rose in blood and mounted to a bloodier noon.  All the old defences were falling.  Religion, monarchy, law, were sucked down into the whirlpool of liberated passions.  Across that sanguinary scene passed, like a mocking ghost, the philosophers’ vision of the perfectibility of man.  Man was free at last—­freer than his would-be liberators had ever dreamed of making him—­and he used his freedom like a beast.  For the multitude had risen—­that multitude which no man could number, which even the demagogues who ranted in its name had never seriously reckoned with—­that dim, grovelling indistinguishable mass on which the whole social structure rested.  It was as though the very soil moved, rising in mountains or yawning in chasms about the feet of those who had so long securely battened on it.  The earth shook, the sun and moon were darkened, and the people, the terrible unknown people, had put in the sickle to the harvest.

Italy roused herself at last.  The emissaries of the new France were swarming across the Alps, pervading the peninsula as the Jesuits had once pervaded Europe; and in the mind of a young general of the republican army visions of Italian conquest were already forming.  In Pianura the revolutionary agents found a strong republican party headed by Gamba and his friends, and a government weakened by debt and dissensions.  The air was thick with intrigue.  The little army could no longer be counted on, and a prolonged bread-riot had driven Trescorre out of the ministry and compelled the Duke to appoint Andreoni in his place.  Behind Andreoni stood Gamba and the radicals.  There could be no doubt which way the fortunes of the duchy tended.  The Duke’s would-be protectors, Austria and the Holy See, were too busy organising the hasty coalition of the powers to come to his aid, had he cared to call on them.  But to do so would have been but another way of annihilation.  To preserve the individuality of his state, or to merge it in the vision of a United