have perverted a nature more self-centred than his. From this
perversion, and from many subsequent perils he was saved by a kind of
imaginative sympathy, a wondering joy in the mere spectacle of life,
that tinged his most personal impressions with a streak of the
philosophic temper. If this trait did not save him from sorrow, it at
least lifted him above pettiness; if it could not solve the difficulties
of life it could arm him to endure them. It was the best gift of the
past from which he sprang; but it was blent with another quality, a deep
moral curiosity that ennobled his sensuous enjoyment of the outward show
of life; and these elements were already tending in him, as in countless
youths of his generation, to the formation of a new spirit, the spirit
that was to destroy one world without surviving to create another.

Of all this none could have been less conscious than the lad just
preparing to enter on his studies at the Royal Academy of Turin. That
institution, adjoining the royal palace, was a kind of nursery or
forcing-house for the budding nobility of Savoy. In one division of the
sumptuous building were housed his Majesty's pages, a corps of luxurious
indolent young fops; another wing accommodated the regular students of
the Academy, sons of noblemen and gentlemen destined for the secular
life, while a third was set aside for the "forestieri" or students from
foreign countries and from the other Italian states. To this quarter Odo
Valsecca was allotted; though it was understood that on leaving the
Academy he was to enter the Sardinian service.

It was customary for a young gentleman of Odo's rank to be attended at
the Academy not only by a body-servant but by a private governor or
pedant, whose business it was to overlook his studies, attend him
abroad, and have an eye to the society he frequented. The old Marquess
of Donnaz had sent his daughter, by Odo's hand, a letter recommending