Historical fiction; Italy -- History -- Revolution of 1848 -- Fiction; War stories
by Eugene to the Moscow campaign; he showed scars of old wounds: brown
spots, and blue spots, and twisted twine of white skin, dotting the
wrist, the neck, the calf, the ankle, and looking up from them, he
slapped them proudly. Nor had he personal animosities of any kind. One
sharp scar, which he called his shoulder knot, he owed to the knife of
a friend, by name Sarpo, who had things ready to betray him, and struck
him, in anticipation of that tremendous moment of surprise and wrath
when the awakened victim frequently is nerved with devil's strength;
but, striking, like a novice, on the bone, the stilet stuck there; and
Barto coolly got him to point the outlet of escape, and walked off,
carrying the blade where the terrified assassin had planted it. This
Sarpo had become a tradesman in Milan--a bookseller and small printer;
and he was unmolested. Barto said of him, that he was as bad as a few
odd persons thought himself to be, and had in him the making of a great
traitor; but, that as Sarpo hated him and had sought to be rid of him
for private reasons only, it was a pity to waste on such a fellow steel
that should serve the Cause. “While I live,” said Barto, “my enemies
have a tolerably active conscience.”
The absence of personal animosity in him was not due to magnanimity. He
doubted the patriotism of all booksellers. He had been twice betrayed
by women. He never attempted to be revenged on them; but he doubted
the patriotism of all women. “Use them; keep eye on them,” he said.
In Venice he had conspired when he was living there as the clerk of
a notary; in Bologna subsequently while earning his bread as a petty
schoolmaster. His evasions, both of Papal sbirri and the Austrian
polizia, furnished instances of astonishing audacity that made his name
a byword for mastery in the hour of peril. His residence in Milan now,
after seven years of exile in England and Switzerland, was an act of
pointed defiance, incomprehensible to his own party, and only to be
explained by the prevalent belief that the authorities feared to provoke
a collision with the people by laying hands on him. They had only once
made a visitation to his house, and appeared to be satisfied at not
finding him. At that period Austria was simulating benevolence in her
Lombardic provinces, with the half degree of persuasive earnestness
which makes a Government lax in its vigilance, and leaves it simply
open to the charge of effeteness. There were contradictory rumours as
to whether his house had ever been visited by the polizia; but it was a
legible fact that his name was on the window, and it was understood that
he was not without elusive contrivances in the event of the authorities
declaring war against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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