The Valley Of Decision

us brought him acquainted wasto have a lasting

or dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for hisown class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice,must have given small promise to the most discerning observer. It seemsindeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passedamong his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant youngn

ces. Among the youth oftheir class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, howeverobscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide ofrenovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to thesame uncharted deep. Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the youngerlad the seer who held in

ch that he was himself unconscious ofpossessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo's more v

musements separated him from his young friend, his tasteswere always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who aremore engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining forwhat escapes

fter years a pleasanter memory to Odo than his visits with Vittorio to

alents to the King's service, was lodged in a palace adjoining theAcadem

with the barocchismo of the seventeenth century and theeffeminate caprices of the rococo period. He had lived much in Rome, inthe company of men like Winckelmann and Maffei, in that society wherethe revival of classical research was being forwarded by the liberalityof Princes and Cardinals and by the indefatigable zeal of the scholarsin their pay. From this centre of aesthetic reaction Alfieri hadreturned to the Gallicized Turin, with its preference for the gracefuland ingenious rather than for the large, the noble, the restrained;bringing to bear on the taste of his native city the influence of a viewraised b

odagainst the walls and a niche at one end of the library contained amarble copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The sarcophagi with their wingedgenii, their garlands and bucranes, and porphyry tazzas, the fragments

resented to the youthonly the rich uncle whose crotchets must be humoured for the sake ofwhat his pocket may procure;

him: hints of traffic in far-off market-places and familiargestures of hands on which those very jewels might have sparkled. Nordid the Count restrict the boy's enquiries to that distant past; and forthe first time Odo heard of the masters who had maintained the greatclassical tradition on Latin soil: Sanmichele, Vignola, Sansovino, andthe divine Michael Angelo, whom the old architect never named withoutbaring his head. From the works of these architects Odo formed his firstconce

fashion of the day affected;and his imagination breathed freely on the heights of the LatinParnassus. Thus, while his friend Vittorio stormed up and down the quietrooms, chattering

s to play; and contact with theWaldensian and Calvinist heresies had stiffened Piedmontese piety into asombre hatred of schism and a minute observance of the mechanical rulesof the faith. Such qualities could be produced only at the expense ofintellectual freedom; and if Piedmont could show a few nobles likeMassimo d'Azeglio's father, who "made the education of his children hisfirst and gravest thought" and supplemented the deficiencies of hiswife's conventual training by "consecrating to her daily four hours ofreading, translating and other suitable exercises," the commoner viewwas that of Alfieri's own parents, who frequently repeated in theirson's hearing "the old maxim of the Piedmontese nobility" that there isno need for a gentleman to be a scholar. Such at any rate was theopinion of the old Marquess of Donnaz, and of all the frequenters ofCasa Valdu. Odo's stepfather was engrossed in the fulfilment of hisduties about the court, and Donna Laura, under the influence of poverty

se popularity or even security bybanishing the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained theirhold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastesthey affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious andpolitical conservatism, against which invisible forces were already feltto

r's friends veiled the emptiness of theirdays. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy'sconscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and hisdevotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious pra

disillusionment was to comefrom discovering n

nessed did not console him for thatchill hour of dawn, when, in the chapel at Donnaz, he had served themass for Don Gervaso, with a heart trembling at its own unworthiness yetuplifted by the sense of the Divine Presence. In the churches adornedlike aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed inartificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and wherethe florid passionate music of the mass was rend

e lit oneday on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Ac