"_Tu te trompes, ma soeur_," replied Giulio Franzini, Count di Peschiera, in French as usual--"_tu te trompes_; I knew it before he had gone through exile and penury. How can I know it now? But comfort yourself, my too anxious Beatrice; I shall not care for his consent till I have made sure of his daughter's." "But how win that in despite of the father?" "_Eh, mordieu!_" interrupted the Count, with true French gayety; "what would become of all the comedies ever written, if marriages were not made in despite of the father? Look you," he resumed, with a very slight compression of his lip, and a still slighter movement in his chair--"look you, this is no question of ifs and buts; it is a question of must and shall--a question of existence to you and to me. When Danton was condemned to the guillotine, he said, flinging a pellet of bread at the nose of his respectable judge--'_Mon individu sera bientôt dans le néant_'--_My_ patrimony is there already! I am loaded with debts. I see before me, on the one side, ruin or suicide; on the other side, wedlock and wealth." "But from those vast possessions which you have been permitted to enjoy so long, have you really saved nothing against the time when they might be reclaimed at your hands?" "My sister," replied the Count, "do I look like a man who saved? Besides, when the Austrian Emperor, unwilling to raze from his Lombard domains a name and a house so illustrious as our kinsman's, and desirous, while punishing that kinsman's rebellion, to reward my adherence, forbore the peremptory confiscation of those vast possessions, at which my mouth waters while we speak, but, annexing them to the Crown during pleasure, allowed me, as the next of male kin, to retain the revenues of one half for the same very indefinite period--had I not every reason to suppose, that, before long, I could so influence his majesty or his minister, as to obtain a decree that might transfer the whole, unconditionally and absolutely, to myself? And, methinks, I should have done so, but for this accursed, intermeddling English milord, who has never ceased to besiege the court or the minister with alleged extenuations of our cousin's rebellion, and proofless assertions that I shared it in order to entangle my kinsman, and betrayed it in order to profit by his spoils. So that, at last, in return for all my services, and in answer to all my claims, I received from the minister himself this cold reply--'Count of Peschiera, your aid was important, and your reward has been large. That reward, it would not be for your honor to extend, and justify the ill-opinion of your Italian countrymen, by formally appropriating to yourself all that was forfeited by the treason you denounced. A name so noble as yours should be dearer to you than fortune itself.'" "Ah, Giulio!" cried Beatrice, her face lighting up, changed in its whole character--"those were words that might make the demon that tempts to avarice, fly from your breast in shame."