There had been those among them who had planned, fitfully, to face all this heavy monotony with light and lightness, to overlay it with skin of marble, stone, or even, as a last lame resort, with stucco. Their ambitions had declined upon a policy of laisser faire; in many buildings the very holes for their scaffolding remained unfilled—ineptitude yawning from a hundred mouths. Turin, under the rule of Victor-Amadeus III., was still Rome before Augustus, lacking its splendid autocrat. At the same time there was this much to its credit: it had never bred, or allowed to self-breed within its walls, a race of tyrants.
The Savoy princes were the militant monks of history, always keeping a reserve of cloister for contingencies. They were recluses by conviction, freebooters by constitution. The first duke of them all had died a hermit. The grandfather of the present King, the “Piedmontese Lear,” had abdicated (prematurely) on a religious sentiment. It had been his pious intent to efface the feudal system, age-dishonoured. It was the policy of his grandson to attempt its restoration. He made a mistake, being a vain, weak man. It is not the wisdom of the proletariat, but the folly of its rulers which opens the ways to revolt. Worse than the grudging of wise concessions is their rescinding when they have become establishments. Victor-Amadeus made much of his army, which was a warlike father’s perfected bequest to him. He also made much of his nobility, with the result that, according to the popular waggery, there was, in his reign, a general to every private. So he consistently favoured birth, ignored intrinsic merit apart from it, alienated the sympathies of his people, and opened his passes thereby to the hordes of the French Revolution. It was always a figure of speech to say that he strode the Alps. He had lost his French stirrup long before he knew it, and was jogging lop-sided to his fall.
In the meantime, lacking the soul of Augustus, he left Turin much as he found it, and, in place of bread and circuses, fed up discontent on the public lottery. His kingdom was rotten when it tumbled.
Montaigne in his time found Turin a small town, situated in a watery plain, not very well built nor very agreeable. Some two hundred years later the ineffable Count Cassanova passed a verdict on it not much handsomer. It was densely populated and full of spies, he said. It boasted, as a fact, at the latter date, a population of some ninety thousand souls. But it was not crowded nevertheless, except to one who saw eyes at every turn. A city’s numbers are not to be calculated by one who moves exclusively in its markets. Turin’s population, if regularly distributed over its area, would have shown most of its quarters relatively empty.
It looked its best on a moonlight night, when along its canal-like streets the cobble-stones glinted and sparkled like very ripples on water, and the great hulks aligned on either side became shadowy leviathans anchored at rest. Its worst was kept for twilight drenchings, when the mists trooped down from the distant Alps and, blotting out the intervening slopes—the Superga, the hill of the Capucins, and others, a green high-stretching swarm—made one shoreless swamp of all the level town.
On such an evening, a man, going, with humped shoulders and dripping hat, down the Via del Po, which was one of Turin’s principal thoroughfares, cursed the city’s original settlers with all his soul of venom. He was, nevertheless, so bent on a particular errand, that nothing less than a flood would have diverted him from it. Presently he ran to a stop before a dimly-lighted shop window, and peered eagerly up at certain labels and vouchers which were pasted to the glass within. There were other inquisitors at the same business, quite a throng of them, and one and all, including the newcomer, like rude and ravenous poultry.
The shop itself might have been, in its dinginess and gloom, a mere money-changer’s office; which at the same time it was in a measure, only on a national scale. There were pious frescoes daubed on its walls, as if in irresistible association of hucksters with the temple. On either side of its door was hung a slim red board, the one headed “Torino,” the other “Genova.” Each board was ruled into five sections, and each section contained a number. These numbers represented, more or less, the victims of what the wags called the torture of the wheel. The office was, in fact, one of the many bureaux of the never-ending State lottery.
The stranger having examined, to his hunger or satisfaction, the numbers on the boards and the hieroglyphics in the window, stepped back into the rain with a click of his strong teeth together.
“Weeding, weeding!” he thought, exultant and rageful in one. “Next week will reach the grand climacteric—for me. My God! and what then?”
As he reflected, or muttered, chafing like a fettered beast, the form of a man, advancing up the street, came between himself and the light. Instantly he started, uttered a violent exclamation, and quickly pursuing the figure, accosted and halted it.