hitherto winding through narrow glens, now swung to a ledge overhanging
the last escarpment of the mountains; and far below, the Piedmontese
plain unrolled to the southward its interminable blue-green distances
mottled with forest. A sight to lift the heart; for on those sunny
reaches Ivrea, Novara, Vercelli lay like sea-birds on a summer sea. It
was the future unfolding itself to the boy; dark forests, wide rivers,
strange cities and a new horizon: all the mystery of the coming years
figured to him in that great plain stretching away to the greater
mystery of heaven.

To all this Cantapresto turned a snoring countenance. The lively air of
the hills, the good fare of Donnaz, and the satisfaction, above all, of
rolling on cushions over a road he had thought to trudge on foot, had
lapped the abate in Capuan slumber. The midday halt aroused him. The
travellers rested at an inn on the edge of the hills, and here
Cantapresto proved to his charge that, as he phrased it, his belly had
as short a memory for food as his heart for injuries. A flask of Asti
put him in the talking mood, and as they drove on he regaled Odo with a
lively picture of the life on which he was about to enter.

"You are going," said he, "to one of the first cities of Europe; one
that has all the beauty and elegance of the French capital without its
follies and excesses. Turin is blessed with a court where good manners
and a fine tone are more highly prized than the extravagances of genius;
and I have heard it said of his Majesty that he was delighted to see his
courtiers wearing the French fashions outside their heads, provided they
didn't carry the French ideas within. You are too young, doubtless,
cavaliere, to have heard of the philosophers who are raising such a
pother north of the Alps: a set of madmen that, because their birth
doesn't give them the entree of Versailles, are preaching that men