Tiretta did not answer for a moment. His eyebrows were a little up, his lips a little compressed. Presently he opened them. “Let us speak without equivocation,” he said. “You wish me to go and act the part of Paolo to your Francesca.” Joseph smiled. “To speak what your heart believes of me.” “I am to talk of the fairy prince, of his virtues, of his graces, of his capacity for romantic love and more lasting affection.” “Say the best you can of me.” “Would you not fear Paolo?” “No, no, my friend--his duty, his loyalty, his insensibility; and much more than that.” “I flatter myself, you mean. Well, at least she would not flatter me.” “It would be your chance to prove yourself to her; to rectify false impressions. In these matters troubadours are privileged.” “Let me understand you fully. You think she _may_ have formed a prejudice against you; you want that impression corrected. Are you to marry her, then?” “It seems so.” “And how should I be accredited?” “Leave that to me. I will see that you are given the opportunity to approach her. The rest your heart will tell you.” “We are to communicate?” “And she and I, maybe, when you have paved the way. For friendship’s sake, Tiretta.” “For none other, you may be sure. I do not like my task.” “Put it into a song--into many songs. That will lighten it for you. I wish, for the occasion, I could sing myself. But, in spite of policy, I will woo my own way in this.” He dismissed the subject in a little. Its temporary glamour evaporated. After all he had much, and of paramount importance, to think upon apart from it. CHAPTER IV. LOVE’S AMBASSADOR The Italy of the eighteenth century has always given me a sense of distressing incongruity, such a sense of incongruity as I feel in the presence of performing animals, pitifully and patiently caricaturing their own native dignity in forced postures and mirthless habiliments. To see a petticoated elephant seated on a stool drinking tea, to see a dog on his hind legs, with a shako on his head, shouldering a musket, makes me, I confess, uneasy and ashamed. So in the land of the Visconti, of the Sforza, of the Medici, a land where both the magnificence of crime and the magnificence of achievement have always gone habited in a certain appropriate splendour, akin to that of the leopard in his forest and the tiger in his jungle, the vision of powder and patches, with their concomitants of mincing uncleanness and affectation, seems an outrage on one’s conception of the accepted fitness of things. If you would study that incongruity, as at least I feel it, in its more plausible phases, turn to the finer works of Canaletto; if in its grossest, read the memoirs of that arch-scoundrel Casanova--memoirs which to me, a fond enough student of the period in its prettier aspects, reek with that sort of fetor which gets into one’s clothes, as it were, and for a time infects all healthier savours.