“My business is to take everything seriously,” gently replied the baron, a wise and melancholy man. He was then engaged in organizing the far-famed Milan police, and had undertaken to prevent a revolution like that of 1746, which drove the Austrians out of Genoa. This Milanese police, which afterward became celebrated by its connection with the adventures of Pellico and Andryana, was not exactly cruel, but it carried laws of great severity into logical and pitiless execution. The Emperor Francis II was determined to strike terror into these bold Italian imaginations.
“Give me,” said Baron Binder to Fabrizio’s friends, “the proved facts as to what the young Marchesino del Dongo has been doing every day, from the moment he left Grianta, on the 8th of March, until his arrival last night in this city, where he is hidden in a room in his mother’s apartment, and I am ready to look upon him as the most charming and frolicsome young fellow in the town. But if you can not give me information as to the young man’s goings and comings for every day since his departure from Grianta, is it not my duty to have him arrested, however high may be his birth, and however deep my respect for the friends of his family? And am I not bound to keep him in prison until he has proved to me that he did not convey a message to Napoleon from the few malcontents who may exist among his Majesty, the Emperor-King’s, Lombard subjects? And further, gentlemen, note well, that even if young Del Dongo contrives to justify himself on this point, he will still remain guilty of having gone abroad without a regular passport, and also of passing under a false name, and knowingly using a passport issued to a mere artisan—that is to say, to an individual of a class infinitely inferior to his own.”
This declaration, merciless in its logic, was accompanied by all that show of deference and respect due from the head of the police to the exalted position of the Marchesa del Dongo and of the important personages who had come forward on her behalf.
When the marchesa heard the baron’s reply she was in despair.
“Fabrizio will be arrested!” she exclaimed, bursting into tears; “and once he is in prison, God only knows when he will come out! His father will cast him off!”
The two ladies took counsel with two or three of their closest friends, and in spite of everything they said, the marchesa wished to insist on sending her son away the following night.
“But,” said the countess, “you must surely see that Baron Binder knows quite well that your son is here. He is not a spiteful man.”
“No, but he desires to please the Emperor Francis.”
“But if he thought he could serve his own ends by putting Fabrizio into prison, he would have done it already, and if you insist on the boy’s taking to flight, you insult him by your want of confidence.”
“But the very fact that he admits he knows Fabrizio’s whereabouts is as good as telling us to send him away. No, I shall never breathe freely as long as I can say to myself, ‘In a quarter of an hour my boy may be shut up between four walls!’ Whatever Baron Binder’s ambition may be,” added the marchesa, “he thinks his personal position in this country will be strengthened by an affected consideration for a man of my husband’s rank, and the strange frankness with which he avows that he knows where to lay his hand on my son proves this to me. And besides, the baron calmly sets forth the two offences of which Fabrizio stands accused according to his brother’s vile denunciation, and explains that either of these entails imprisonment. Is not that as good as telling us that if we prefer exile to prison we have only to choose it?”