The Piccinino, Volume 1 (of 2)

by George Sand

For instance, we have seen that he was always beside the truth in his discoveries. He had assumed innumerable disguises and invented a thousand time-worn methods of watching what was taking place at Villa Palmarosa; and he was thoroughly persuaded that Michel was the princess's lover. He was a hundred leagues from suspecting the nature of the tie between them. He might easily have deceived Doctor Recuperati, whose unswerving uprightness lacked foresight and intelligence; and yet, desiring to steal the will from him, he had delayed from day to day, and had never succeeded in gaining his confidence in the slightest degree. It was impossible for him to play for five minutes the rôle of a well-meaning man, his face bore so unmistakably the stamp of unalloyed and unbounded baseness.

His vices embarrassed him, as he himself admitted, even proclaimed, when he was intoxicated. Dissolute, avaricious, and so intemperate that he fuddled his brain when lucidity was most essential to him, he had conducted a difficult intrigue to a successful end. The cardinal had for a long time made use of him as a police agent for whom no task was too vile, and he had never valued him except as a tool of the lowest order. In his days of cynical wit, the prelate had branded him with an epithet which we shall not attempt to translate, and from which he had never been able to rise.

Thus he had had no share in the family affairs and secrets of State which had filled the life of Monsignor Hieronymo. The contempt which he inspired in his master had survived his loss of memory, and the aged prelate, paralyzed and almost in his dotage, was not even afraid of him, and recovered the power of speech with him only to call him by the degrading sobriquet which he had previously bestowed on him.

Another proof of the abbé's idiocy was his cherished conviction that he could seduce all the women who aroused his desires.

"With a little money and a lot of lies," he would say, "with threats, compliments and promises, a man can obtain the proudest or the humblest of them."

Consequently he flattered himself that he could obtain a share of Agatha's fortune by effecting the removal of the man whom he presumed to be her lover. He was capable of but one thing, of placing Michel at the muzzle of a bandit's gun, and shouting fire! in a moment of disappointed vanity and greed; he would not have dared to kill him himself, just as he would not have dared to do violence to Mila, if she had threatened him with nothing more than a pair of scissors.

But, abject wretch that he was, he had a certain power for evil; it did not spring from him, the villainy of other men had invested him with it. The Neapolitan police lent him its dastardly and odious assistance when he requested it. He had caused many innocent victims to be exiled, ruined, or cast into dungeons, and he might very well have seized Michel without having recourse to the brigands of the mountain. But he wished to be able to surrender him, at need, for a heavy ransom, and he wished to have the terms of ransom discussed by avowed brigands, whose interest it would be not to betray him. His whole rôle consisted in seeking out the bravi and saying to them: "I have discovered a love intrigue which is worth something. Do the job, and we will divide the profits."

But herein again he had been gulled. A shrewd bravo, who worked in the city under the Piccinino's direction, and who would not have presumed to do anything without consulting him, had deceived the abbé by inviting him to a rendezvous at which he had not seen the real Piccinino, who was present, however, behind a partition. The Piccinino had thereupon threatened to break the head of the first of the two accomplices who should say a word or take a step without orders from him, and they knew that he was a man to keep his word. Indeed, the young adventurer governed his band with such extraordinary skill, with a mixture of gentleness and despotism so well blended, that his father had not been so loved and dreaded as he was, although, to be sure, he had acted upon a larger scale and his enterprises had been more extensive. He could be perfectly at ease, therefore; his secrets would not have been revealed under torture, and he was able to gratify the caprice which he frequently had, of carrying out entirely alone, without a confidant and without assistance, an undertaking in which he had no need of using main force, but only of craft and strategy.

That is why the Piccinino, sure of the success of his plan, which was of the simplest, chose to blend with it, on his own account, poetic, strange, and romantic incidents, or real passions, according to his whim. His vivid imagination and his cold nature involved him constantly in contradictory enterprises, from which he was always able to extricate himself, thanks to his great intelligence and his self-control. He had always sailed his craft so skilfully that, outside of his accomplices and the very small number of his intimate friends, no one could have proved that the famous captain, Piccinino, natural son of the Destatore, and the placid villager Carmelo Tomabene were one and the same man. The latter also was supposed to be a son of Castro-Reale; but there were so many others in the mountains who prided themselves upon that perilous origin!

[8]It is a double woolen surtout, of several different colors inside and out. It is worn as a protection against the sun's heat as well as against the cold.