It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.



BOOK II. THE NEW LIGHT.

Zu neuen Ufern lockt ein neuer Tag.


2.1.

One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the
hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a
point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air was
light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his
servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.

The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of
Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of
yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the
great city in the bosom of the plain. The spectacle was fair enough to
touch any fancy: brown domes and facades set in new-leaved gardens and
surrounded by vineyards extending to the nearest acclivities;
country-houses glancing through the fresh green of planes and willows;
monastery-walls cresting the higher ridges; and westward the Po winding
in sunlit curves toward the Alps.

Odo had lost none of his sensitiveness to such impressions; but the sway