"I beg Your Serene Highness's pardon; not only do I read the Parma newspaper, which seems to me to be very well written, but I hold, moreover, with it, that everything that has been done since the death of Louis XIV, in 1715, has been at once criminal and foolish. Man's chief interest in life is his own salvation, there can be no two ways of looking at it, and that is a happiness that lasts for eternity. The words Liberty, Justice, the Good of the Greatest Number, are infamous and criminal: they form in people's minds the habits of discussion and want of confidence. A Chamber of Deputies votes no confidence in what these people call the Ministry. This fatal habit of want of confidence once contracted, human weakness applies it to everything, man loses confidence in the Bible, the Orders of the Church, Tradition and everything else; from that moment he is lost. Even upon the assumption—which is abominably false, and criminal even to suggest—that this want of confidence in the authority of the Princes by God established were to secure one's happiness during the twenty or thirty years of life which any of us may expect to enjoy, what is half a century, or a whole century even, compared with an eternity of torment?" And so on.
One could see, from the way in which Fabrizio spoke, that he was seeking to arrange his ideas so that they should be grasped as quickly as possible by his listener; it was clear that he was not simply repeating a lesson.
Presently the Prince lost interest in his contest with this young man whose simple and serious manner had begun to irritate him.
"Good-bye, Monsignore," he said to him abruptly, "I can see that they provide an excellent education at the Ecclesiastical Academy of Naples, and it is quite simple when these good precepts fall upon so distinguished a mind, one secures brilliant results. Good-bye." And he turned his back on him.
"I have quite failed to please this animal," thought Fabrizio.
"And now, it remains to be seen," said the Prince as soon as he was once more alone, "whether this fine youngman is capable of passion for anything; in that case, he would be complete. . . . Could anyone repeat with more spirit the lessons he has learned from his aunt? I felt I could hear her speaking; should we have a revolution here, it would be she that would edit the Monitore, as the Sanfelice did at Naples! But the Sanfelice, in spite of her twenty-five summers and her beauty, got a bit of a hanging all the same! A warning to women with brains." In supposing Fabrizio to be his aunt's pupil, the Prince was mistaken: people with brains who are born on the throne or at the foot of it soon lose all fineness of touch; they proscribe, in their immediate circle, freedom of conversation which seems to them coarseness; they refuse to look at anything but masks and pretend to judge the beauty of complexions; the amusing part of it is that they imagine their touch to be of the finest. In this case, for instance, Fabrizio believed practically everything that we have heard him say; it is true that he did not think twice in a month of these great principles. He had keen appetites, he had brains, but he had faith.
The desire for liberty, the fashion and cult of the greatest good of the greatest number, after which the nineteenth century has run mad, were nothing in his eyes but a heresy which, like other heresies, would pass away, though not until it had destroyed many souls, as the plague while it reigns unchecked in a country destroys many bodies. And in spite of all this Fabrizio read the French, newspapers with keen enjoyment, even taking rash steps to procure them.
Fabrizio having returned quite flustered from his audience at the Palace, and having told his aunt of the various attacks launched at him by the Prince:
"You ought," she told him, "to go at once to see Father Landriani, our excellent Archbishop; go there on foot; climb the staircase quietly, make as little noise as possible in the ante-rooms; if you are kept waiting, so much the better, a thousand times better! In a word, be apostolic!"
"I understand," said Fabrizio, "our man is a Tartuffe."