The people looked on the illustrious prisoner as a defender of their rights, and sympathized with him. To sharpen this sympathy, the adepts of the Italian _vente_ everywhere represented their chief as a martyr to his love of the people, and a victim of monarchy. Most injurious charges were everywhere circulated against Fernando IV. It was said that he had inherited the hatred of Carlos III. to the Monte-Leoni, and sought to follow out on the son the vengeance to which the father had fallen a victim. Nothing was omitted that could stimulate the favor of the superstitious and impressionable people of Naples. The same executioner, block and axe, which had been used at the father's death, by a strange fatality, would come in play again at the murder of the son. The imprisonment of the son at the Castle _Del Uovo_, where the father had died, gave something of plausibility to this story. But what most excited public curiosity was the strange incident which had taken place at _Torre-del-Greco_. All were impatient for its explanation. The double and impossible presence of the Count at the house of Stenio Salvatori, and within the fifty locks of the Castle _Del Uovo_, his contest with his enemy, the wound he was accused of having given him, his ubiquity at the same hour in different places, produced a thousand incredible versions, a thousand bets on this wonderful fact, unrivalled in the judicial annals of Naples. The name of Monte-Leone was so closely and intimately linked with the destiny of the Marquis de Maulear, with his friendship to Taddeo, and his love of Aminta, that he partook of the general interest inspired by the Count, and as a man of honor hoped for acquittal, notwithstanding the influence it might exert on his happiness.