"I am sure of it. Baretti,--do you forget Baretti? he had the wine-shop at the end of the Contrada St. Lucia."
"The same; he is here now. He tells me that the Court is so completely in the hands of the Queen that they will not hear of any danger; that they laugh every time Cavour is mentioned; and now that both France and England have withdrawn their envoys, the King says openly, 'It is a pleasure to drive out on the Chiaja when one knows they 'll not meet a French gendarme or an English detective.'"
"And what does Baretti say of popular feeling?"
"He says the people would like to do something, though nobody seems to know what it ought to be. They thought that Milano's attempt t 'other day was clever, and they think it might n't be bad to blow up the Emperor, or perhaps the Pope, or both; but he also says that the Camorra are open to reason, and that Victor Emmanuel and Cavour are as legitimate food for an explosive shell as the others; and, in fact, any convulsion that will smash the shutters and lead to pillage must be good."
"I know he can. He has been Capo Camorrista eight years in one of the vilest quarters of Naples; and if there were a suspicion of him, he'd have been stabbed long ago."
"He came here to see whether anything could be done about assassinating the Emperor."
"I'd not have seen him, Carlo. It was most unwise to have spoken with him."
"What would you have?" said the other, with a shrug of his shoulders. "He came to set this clock to rights,--it plays some half-dozen airs from Mercadante and Verdi,--and he knows how to arrange them. He goes every morning to the Tuileries, to Moquard, the Emperor's secretary: he, too, has an Italian musical clock, and he likes to chat with Baretti."
"That is so English!" said Caffarelli; "but we Italians have a finer instinct for knavery, just as we have a finer ear for music; and as we detect a false note, so we smell a treachery, where you John Bulls would neither suspect one or the other. Baretti sees the Prince Napoleon, too, almost every day, and with Pietri he is like a brother."
"But we can have no dealings with a fellow that harbors such designs."
"_Caro amico_, don't you know by this time that no Italian of the class of this fellow ever imagines any other disentanglement in a political question than by the stiletto? It is you, or I, or somebody else, must, as they phrase it, 'pay with his skin.' Fortunately for the world, there is more talk than action in all this; but if you were to oppose it, and say, 'None of this,' you 'd only be the first victim. We put the knife in politics just as the Spanish put garlic in cookery: we don't know any other seasoning, and it has always agreed with our digestion."