"A P," said Lowrich. "And now look for the second."
The list was long, but the abbot went down it to the final and thirty-eighth chapter without being disconcerted for a moment and without making a single mistake.
"Guessing an initial letter out of twenty-four to choose from, can be thought of as an outlandish freak of good fortune, with the devil well out of it," Apostolo observed sadly, "but to do that same trick thirty-eight times on the trot, the game must be rigged. Take this tome, abbot, and we'll never talk of it again."
"May God keep me, oh phoenix of bibliophiles," answered Lowrich, "from taking advantage to such an extent of your innocence and candour! What you have just witnessed is nothing more than a trick hardly worthy of a schoolboy, and which shortly you will be able to do just as well as I can. Know then that the author of this book judged it meet to conceal in the initial letters of his chapter headings his name, his profession and his secret love, so that, joined together, these letters make a sentence, the secret of which I cannot advise you to seek in the Universal Biography in Paris, as it would make you lose the wager that I have just won. Besides, that simple and touching sentence is easy to remember: Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit, Friar Francesco Colonna loved Polia very much. Now you know as much about this as Bayle and Prosper Marchand."
"How strange it is," Apostolo said, half to himself. "This friar of the Dominicans fell in love. There's a story there somewhere."
"Why not?" replied Lowrich. "Pick up your quill again and let's look for your pot boiler, being as you have to have one."
Apostolo made himself comfortable on his chair, dipped his quill in the ink, and wrote what follows, starting with the title I have wandered away from in too long a digression:
FRANCISCUS COLUMNA, A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOVELLA.
The Colonna family is certainly one of the most important in Rome and in Italy, but not all its branches were equally prosperous. Sciarra Colonna, a passionate Ghibelline, who made Boniface VIII the prisoner of the Agnani, and got carried away, in the ecstasy of his victory, to the point of slapping the Supreme Pontiff, was made to suffer cruelly for his violence under John XXII. He was exiled from Rome for life in 1328, had his children stripped of their nobility as was he, and all his worldly goods confiscated to enrich Stefano Colonna, his brother, who had never abandoned the party of the Guelphs. The descendants of the unfortunate Sciarra died, as he himself did, in Venice, in obscurity and poverty. By 1444 only one of them was left alive to inherit such misery. Francesco Colonna, born at the start of that year was twice made an orphan, losing his father, killed on the day before he was born, and his mother who died giving birth to him. Francesco, piously adopted by none other than Jacopo Bellini, the famous history painter, and tenderly brought up with his own children, showed himself worthy of the generous care he had had from his adoptive father and from the illustrious brothers of the latter, Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. From the age of eighteen onwards, he repeated in the history of painting the precocious triumphs of the young Mantegna: Giotto had another rival. Fate, however, which did not cease to dog Francesco's life, did not allow his young successes to be wreathed in glory, and it is under the name of Mantegna or one of the Bellinis that the masterpieces of his brush are admired today.
Painting, however, was far from being the exclusive focus of his studies and affections. He only accorded it an importance that was secondary among the arts that beautify man's earthly sojourn. Architecture, on the other hand, which raises monuments to the gods, solemn intermediaries between earth and heaven, took up the greater part of his thoughts, but he did not look for its laws and marvels in the gigantic creations of contemporary art, the bizarre and often grotesque whims and fancies of a fantasy, lacking, according to him, the outward grace of reason and taste. Carried forward by the motion of the Renaissance, which was by then starting to make itself felt in Italy, Francesco only still belonged as far as faith went to this modern world renewed by Christianity. He wholly admired Antiquity and worshipped at its shrine, and a strange alliance had taken place in his mind between the beliefs of a religious man and the aesthetics of a pagan. He took this preoccupation too far to see in modern languages themselves nothing other than rustic jargons more or less totally corrupted by Barbarians, which were only good to allow men to negotiate the material necessities of life, and which were not capable of rising to translate eloquently or poetically ideas and feelings. The result of this was that he had forged for his own usage a sort of intimate dialect in which Italian only served to define certain elements of syntax and the odd soft inflexion, but which was much more redolent of the followers of Homer or of Titus Livius and Lucan than of Petrarch and Boccaccio. This singular turn of mind, which was at that time the defining hallmark of original powers of organisation and a personality destined, to all appearances, to exert a great influence on the century, had isolated Francesco from the rest of the world. He gave to it the general impression of being a melancholic seer who had fallen prey to an illusory genius that had rendered him insensitive to the gentle ways of life in society. He was sometimes seen nevertheless in the palazzo of the illustrious Leonora Pisani, the heiress, at the age of eight and twenty, to the greatest fortune ever known in the whole of the Veneto after that of her cousin Polia, the only daughter of the last of the Poli in Treviso. The house of Leonora was then the sanctuary of poetry and the arts, and this muse's influence caused irresistibly to congregate around her all the talents of her age. It was soon noticed that Francesco was going there more often, although more absorbed in his daydreams and sadder than usual, but his visits suddenly became less frequent, and then he stopped coming altogether.