One old woman assured me, that when she was a child her father had let an apartment to the very man, and that he took the room for a month, and though he spontaneously offered ten times as high a price as the owner could ever have asked, he never slept there. He had secretly married a Roman girl who was imprisoned for breaking the law by marrying a Protestant, and he opened her prison doors with his ‘wand,’ that is, he bribed the jailer to admit him to pass all his time in prison with her; ultimately he carried her off to England, but she soon died there.
Another pointed out to me a shop where in former days had been a butcher, whose daughter had charmed a rich Englishman, who carried her off to his own country, and married her there. But this was a very tetra (sad, gloomy) story, for after many years she came back looking like the ghost of herself. She had gone away a blooming girl, the pride and the admiration of the whole neighbourhood; she came back prematurely grey, hollow-eyed, and thin as a skeleton.
She said it was the climate had disagreed with her, and further than that she would say nothing. But who knows what she may not have had to go through!
Bresciani has made the same tradition the groundwork of one of his most interesting romances.]
THE MARRIAGE OF SIGNOR CAJUSSE.[1]
There was a rich farmer[2] who had one only daughter, and she was to be his heiress. She fell in love with a count who had no money—at least only ten scudi a month. When he went to the farmer to ask her in marriage he would not hear of the alliance, and sent him away.
But the girl and he were bent on the marriage, and this is how they brought it about. The girl had a thousand scudi of her own; half of this she gave to him, and said: ‘Go over a certain tract of the Campagna and visit all the peasants about, and give five piastres to one and ten to another according to their degree, that they may say when they are asked that they all belong to Signor Cajusse. Then take papa round to hear what they say, and he will think you are a great proprietor, and will let us marry.’
Signor Cajusse, for such was his name, took the money and did as she told him, and then hired a carriage and came to her father, and said: ‘You are quite mistaken in thinking I’m too poor to marry your daughter; come and take a drive with me, and I will show you what a great man I am.’
So the farmer got into his carriage, and he drove him round to all the peasants he had bribed. First they stopped at a farm.[3]