He loathed the idea of harming any living creature, however undeserving that creature might be. Marietta was resolutely opposed to his seeing the old woman, but one day, when she was at church, he went up to visit the Mammaccia, who flushed with anger when she saw him enter the room. "This is a case where one plays the del Dongo," he said to himself.
"How much does Marietta earn in a month when she is working?" he cried, with the air with which a self-respecting young man, in Paris, enters the balcony at the Bouffes.
"Fifty scudi."
"You are lying, as usual; tell the truth, or, by God, you shall not have a centesimo!"
"Very well, she was getting twenty-two scudi in our company at Parma, when we had the bad luck to meet you; I was getting twelve scudi, and we used to give Giletti, our protector, a third of what each of us earned. Out of which, every month almost, Giletti would make Marietta a present; the present might be worth a couple of scudi."
"You're lying still; you never had more than four scudi. But if you are good to Marietta, I will engage you as though I were an impresario; every month you shall have twelve scudi for yourself and twenty-two for her; but if I see her with red eyes, I make you bankrupt."
"You're very stiff and proud; very well, your fine generosity will be the ruin of us," replied the old woman in a furious tone; "we lose our avviamento" (our connexion). "When we have the enormous misfortune to be deprived of Your Excellency's protection, we shall no longer be known in any of the companies, they will all be filled up; we shall not find any engagement, and, all through you, we shall starve to death."
"Go to the devil," said Fabrizio as he left the room.
"I shall not go to the devil, you impious wretch! But I will go straight away to the police office, where they shall learn from me that you are a Monsignore who has flung his cassock to the winds, and that you are no more Giuseppe Bossi than I am." Fabrizio had already gone some way down the stairs. He returned.
"In the first place, the police know better than you what my real name may be; but if you take it into your head to denounce me, if you do anything so infamous," he said to her with great seriousness, "Lodovico, shall talk to you, and it is not six slashes with the knife that your old carcass shall get, but two dozen, and you will be six months in hospital, and no tobacco."