2.4.

Professor Orazio Vivaldi, after filling with distinction the chair of
Philosophy at the University of Turin, had lately resigned his office
that he might have leisure to complete a long-contemplated work on the
Origin of Civilisation. His house was the meeting-place of a society
calling itself of the Honey-Bees and ostensibly devoted to the study of
the classical poets, from whose pages the members were supposed to cull
mellifluous nourishment; but under this guise the so-called literati had
for some time indulged in free discussion of religious and scientific
questions. The Academy of the Honey-Bees comprised among its members all
the independent thinkers of Turin: doctors of law, of philosophy and
medicine, chemists, philologists and naturalists, with one or two
members of the nobility, who, like Alfieri, felt, or affected, an
interest in the graver problems of life, and could be trusted not to
betray the true character of the association.

These details Odo learned the next day from Alfieri; who went on to say
that, owing to the increased vigilance of the government, and to the
banishment of several distinguished men accused by the Church of
heretical or seditious opinions, the Honey-Bees had of late been obliged
to hold their meetings secretly, it being even rumoured that Vivaldi,
who was their president, had resigned his professorship and withdrawn
behind the shelter of literary employment in order to elude the
observation of the authorities. Men had not yet forgotten the fate of
the Neapolitan historian, Pietro Giannone, who for daring to attack the
censorship and the growth of the temporal power had been driven from
Naples to Vienna, from Vienna back to Venice, and at length, at the
prompting of the Holy See, lured across the Piedmontese frontier by
Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, and imprisoned for life in the citadel of