“I feel I am a very inexperienced ruler. The count’s jokes humiliate me. Even at the council-table he jokes, and in general society he says things which you will say are not true. He declares I am a child, and that he leads me wherever he chooses. Though I am a prince, madam, I am a man as well, and such remarks are very vexatious. To cast doubt on the stories Mosca put about, I was induced to appoint that dangerous scoundrel Rassi to the ministry. And now here I have General Fabio Conti, who still believes him to be so powerful that he dares not confess whether it was he or the Raversi who suggested his making away with your nephew. I have a good mind to have General Fabio Conti tried. The judges would soon find out whether he is guilty of the attempted poisoning.”
“But have you any judges, sir?”
“What!” said the prince, astounded.
“You have learned lawyers, sir, who look very solemn as they walk through the streets. But their verdicts will always follow the will of the dominant party at your court.”
While the young prince, thoroughly scandalized, was saying a number of things which proved his candour to be far greater than his wisdom, the duchess was thinking to herself.
“Will it answer my purpose to have Conti dishonoured? Certainly not, for then his daughter’s marriage with that worthy commonplace individual Crescenzi becomes impossible.”
An endless conversation followed on this subject between the duchess and the prince. The prince’s admiration quite blinded him. Out of consideration for Clelia’s marriage with the Marchese Crescenzi, but on this account solely, as he angrily informed the ex-governor, the prince overlooked his attempt to poison a prisoner. But, advised by the duchess, he sent him into banishment until the date of his daughter’s marriage. The duchess believed she no longer loved Fabrizio, but she was passionately anxious to see Clelia married to the marchese. This came of her vague hope that she might thus see Fabrizio grow less absent-minded.
In his delight, the prince would have disgraced Rassi openly that very night. The duchess said to him laughingly:
“Do not you know a saying of Napoleon’s, that a man in a high position, on whom all men’s eyes are fixed, must never allow himself to act in anger? But it is too late to do anything to-night. Let us put off all business until to-morrow.”
She wanted to get time to consult the count, to whom she faithfully repeated the whole of the evening’s conversation, only suppressing the prince’s frequent references to a promise the thought of which poisoned her existence. The duchess hoped to make herself so indispensable that she would be able to get the matter indefinitely adjourned by saying to the prince, “If you are so barbarous as to make me endure such a humiliation, which I should never forgive, I will leave your state the next morning.”