“‘Goffredi,’ he replied, lowering the point of his weapon. ‘I do not wish to fight you, and I will not; I am too certain of killing you; and I should be very sorry to do that, for you are a good fellow. You might have assassinated me, and you did not do it. Let us be friends.’
“Not mistrusting him, and not being of a revengeful disposition, I held out my hand to take that which he had offered me, when he aimed a swift and skilful left-handed stab at my throat with a stiletto. I evaded the thrust, which only wounded my shoulder. Upon this I no longer restrained my anger, but instantly and furiously attacked the villain, who was forced to stand on his defence. Our weapons were equal, and he certainly had greatly the advantage over me in skill and practice. But, however it may have been, I laid him dead at my feet. He fell, sword in hand, without speaking a word, and with an infernal smile on his face. At this very moment there was a violent knocking and pounding at my door, and he may have thought that he should quickly be avenged. For my part, I did not know whether the two assassins, recovered from their stupor, had returned to the attack, or whether they had warned the police to come and arrest me; but, exhausted as I was with emotion and fatigue, I felt that I should be lost in either case. So I mustered up what strength I had left, and jumped out of the window. It was not more than about twenty feet high; I alighted upon the court-yard pavement without much injury, and holding my coat tight around me, to prevent the blood from my shoulder from indicating my track, I fled as far as my legs could carry me.
“It was well for me that I succeeded in gaining the country, for as this affair had passed without witnesses, it would necessarily have been a very bad one for me. It made no difference that I was in the right, that my behavior had been loyal and generous, and that my adversary was a cowardly scoundrel. He belonged to one of the first families in the kingdom, and the holy inquisition would have made but a single mouthful of a poor wretch like me.
“I found refuge for the night in a fisherman’s cabin, but I had not a single farthing about me with which to pay for the dangerous hospitality. Moreover, my torn and bloody clothes would not allow me to show myself by day; and my wound—whether it was severe or not I did not know—pained me extremely. I felt my strength failing, and I well knew that the whole police of the kingdom was already on foot, and hunting after me. Lying on a miserable mat, under a little shed, I wept bitter tears, not over my unfortunate destiny—I should have been incapable of such weakness—but because of the sudden and irreparable rupture of my relations with the good cardinal and with my amiable pupil. I felt that I loved them deeply, and I cursed the fate which had caused me to defile with blood the mansion where I had been received with so much confidence and kindness.
“However, it was escape, and not lamentation, that I needed to concern myself about. It occurred to me, of course, to find the little Jew who had asserted that he knew the mysterious friends or relations who were watching over me, or who had employed him to do so. I forgot to say that this Jew had established himself in Naples, where I had met him more than once. But it seemed to me too dangerous to return into the city, and I could not have written to him without running the risk of being discovered. Hence I gave up the idea.
“It is needless for me to relate in full my adventures in effecting my escape from the kingdom of Naples. I had managed to exchange my tattered clothes for some other rags not quite so suspicious in appearance, but I found it very hard to obtain food. The whole community knew that pursuit was being made after the ‘vile assassin’ of a nobleman, and poor vagrants were looked upon with distrust. If it had not been for the women, who are always more courageous and more humane than we men, I should have died of hunger and fever. My wound often forced me to halt in the most solitary and deserted spot I could find, and in some such hiding-place, lacking every kind of assistance, it seemed more than likely, on several occasions, that I should leave my bones, from sheer lack of strength to rise up and go forward. And yet, M. Goefle, can you believe that, even in this desperate situation, I experienced, at moments, a sense of delirious joy, as if, in spite of everything, I were enjoying a foretaste of my reconquered liberty. The open air, the motion, the freedom from conventional restraints, the sight of the open plains, whose distant horizons I might now expect to reach and pass—all, even to the hardness of my bed of rock, recalled to my mind the projects and aspirations of the time when I had really lived.
“At last I gained the frontiers of the Papal States in safety; and as I had not followed the road to Rome, but had made a detour through the mountains, I had every reason to hope that the spies on the lookout for me had been baffled. I stopped in a village, therefore, to dispose of my merchandise; for such was my horror of begging, and so angry did it make me to be refused, that, to avoid the temptation of beating the people who sent me off with rude brutality, I had taken it into my head—as I should have told you before—to become a merchant!”
“A merchant?” interrupted M. Goefle, “a merchant of what? You had not a penny to start with!”
“Very true, but I had a pen-knife in my pocket when I fled, and this took the place of capital. Although I had I never worked in sculpture, I was familiar enough with the principles of design, and one day, chancing to notice on the road a remarkably white and unusually soft layer of rock, it occurred to me to provide myself with a dozen or so fragments from it. These I broke off on the spot; and afterwards, while I was resting, carved into little figures of madonnas and cherubs, about as large as a finger. This stone, or rather chalk, which was scattered all about the country in this direction, was very light; I could carry as many as fifty of my little statuettes without inconvenience, and I used to sell them to the farmers and peasants for five or six baiocchi each. This was certainly all they were worth, and it was enough to furnish me with bread.
“For several days I had succeeded remarkably well in my new avocation, and I hoped, on seeing that it was market-day in this village, that I would be able to dispose in safety of my whole supply of merchandise. I found, however, but little custom, in consequence of the competition of a Piedmontese with a great tray of plaster figures; and so it occurred to me to sit down and execute my carving in sight of the crowd, who quickly gathered round me. This plan was extremely successful. The quickness of my work, and very likely the simplicity of its style, made it very popular, and the admiration and delight of these good folks, especially of the women and children, made my Piedmontese competitor extremely jealous and angry. He addressed me several times in a violent manner, without making me lose patience. I saw plainly that he meant to force a quarrel on me in order to drive me away, but I only made fun of him, telling him to go to work as I did, and make some of his statuettes, so as to show his talents to the company, a suggestion which was received with great applause; for in Italy even the lowest classes are fond of everything connected with art. So my rival found himself laughed at as a mere mechanic, while I was loudly declared to be a real artist.