Does the science of diplomacy consist in stating everything with frankness and simplicity?
Lastly, is not fashion, or the usages of decent society, an admirable mixture of dissimulation and deceptions?
As for the art I cultivated, what would it be without falsehood?
Encouraged by Torrini, I regained my assurance. I continued practising all my tricks, and showed him several new inventions of my own. My master paid me some compliments, to which he added sensible advice.
“I recommend you,” he said, “to moderate your vivacity. Instead of displaying so much petulance in your movements, affect, on the contrary, extreme calmness, and thus you will avoid those clumsy gesticulations by which conjurers generally fancy they distract the attention of their spectators, when they only succeed in wearying them.”
My professor then, adding example to precept, took the cards from my hands, and showed me in the same passes I had performed the finesses of dissimulation allied to sleight-of-hand. I looked on with sincere admiration: probably flattered by the impression he had produced on me, Torrini said:
“As we are now on the subject of card tricks, I will explain to you my game of piquet; but, in the first place, you must see the box I employ in its performance.”
And he handed me a small box, which I turned over a score times without detecting its use.
“You will seek in vain,” he said to me; “a few words would put you on the right track, but I prefer, although the remembrances it summons up are very painful, to tell you how this box fell into my hands, and for what purpose it was originally invented.
“About twenty years ago I was living at Florence, where I practised as a physician. I was not a conjurer in those days (he added, with a profound sigh), and would to Heaven I had never become so!