Again Æsop halted, employing one of the familiar devices of rhetoricians, who lure their hearers to keener interest by such judicious pauses in the course of their exposition. The listening ruffians were as attentive as babes at a day-school, and Æsop, with a hideous distortion of his features, which he intended for a pleased smile, went on with his story: "Mademoiselle de Nevers had some fortune of her own, of course, but it was not large; it was not the feast for which the amative Mantuan had hungered. The Nevers's fortune was in the duke's hands, and remained in the duke's hands, for the duke married at much the same time as his sister; and the duke's wife and Gonzague's wife were brought to bed much about the same time, and each bore a son, and each son was named Louis after the twelfth duke, out of the affection his wife bore him, out of the affection his sister bore him, and out of the affection that sister's Mantuan husband pretended, in his sly Italian manner, to bear him." A belated patriotism stirring vaguely in Faenza's muddled mind tempted him to resent the hunch-back's slights upon the land which had been unlucky enough to mother him. "All men of Italy are not knaves," he growled, huskily, and, half rising from his seat with crimsoned visage, he was busying himself to say more, when Staupitz, who was as interested as the others in Master Æsop's scandalous chronicle, clapped one bear's paw on Faenza's shoulder and another bear's paw across Faenza's mouth, and thus forced him at once, by sheer effort of brute strength, to a sitting posture and to silence. This action on the part of the man whom for the time being he had consented to accept as his general, combined with the cold glance of cruelty and scorn which Æsop gave him, served to cool Faenza's hot blood. He heard Æsop say, dryly, "Some men of Italy are fools," and might perchance have flamed again, to his misluck, but that Staupitz, breathing thickly in his ear, whispered: "Idiot, he mocks a Mantuan. Are not you Naples born and bred?" Faenza, recovering his composure, resolved himself swiftly from an Italian in general to a Neapolitan in particular, with a clannish antagonism to alien states. He spat upon the floor. "Damn all Mantuans!" he muttered, and did no more to interrupt the flow of Æsop's discourse. "As I was saying, this princeling of Gonzague affected a great show of friendship for his ducal brother of Nevers, and this same friendship he left--it was, indeed, wellnigh all he had to leave--to his only son and only child, the present prince of Gonzague." He made a momentary halt, as if he were observing curiously the effect of his words upon his hearers, then resumed: