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Updated: June 5, 2025
Marcello had a bad chance at the start, and Maddalena dell' Armi, who knew the world well in all its moods, and had suffered by it and sinned for it, and had shed many tears in secret before becoming what she was now, foresaw danger, and hoped that her daughter's fate might not be bound up with that of her friend's son, much as she herself liked the gentle-hearted boy.
Maddalena dell' Armi had not believed that he would come, but she stopped at home that afternoon on the bare possibility. Aurora made up her mind that if he came she would shut herself up in her own room. She expected that he would certainly call before the evening, and was strangely disappointed because he did not. "Who was that lady with him last night?" she asked of her mother.
The Chief of Police was not discouraged yet. "You were knocked down and robbed by thieves, just after you had been talking with Aurora," he said, inventing what he believed to have happened. A faint light came into Marcello's eyes. "Aurora?" He repeated the name almost eagerly. "Yes. You had been talking to Signorina Aurora dell' Armi. You remember that?" The light faded suddenly.
He started, straightened himself, turned his head, and faced the Contessa dell' Armi. Close beside her was Aurora, leaning forward a little, with an expression of cold curiosity; she had already seen Regina, who did not withdraw her hand from Marcello's arm. "You here?" he cried, recovering himself quickly.
What they could not understand was that he should not find consolation in possessing their millions, and they could only account for the fact by calling him a person of the deepest feeling a feeling, indeed, quite past their comprehension. Even the Contessa dell' Armi was impressed by the unmistakable signs of suffering in his face.
She stopped, implying by her tone that even if Regina died, that would not be the greatest of Marcello's misfortunes. Besides, she had long foreseen that the relations of the two could not last, and the simplest solution, and the happiest one for the poor devoted girl, was that she should die before her heart was broken. Maddalena dell' Armi had often wished that her own fate had been as merciful.
"The Contessa dell' Armi," Marcello answered, with a shade of reluctance. "And the girl?" asked Regina, in a flash of intuition. "Her daughter Aurora." He turned away, lit a cigarette, and rang the bell. Regina bit her lip until it hurt her, for she remembered how often he had pronounced that name in his delirium, many months ago. She could not speak for a moment.
The charm of a treatise like that of Pandolfini on the family evaporates as soon as we try to make a summary of its contents. Enough, however, has been quoted to show the thoroughly bourgeois tone which prevailed among the citizens of Florence in the fifteenth century. Very important results were the natural issue of this commercial spirit in the State. Talking of the Ordinanze di Giustizia, Varchi observes: 'While they removed in part the civil discords of Florence, they almost entirely extinguished all nobility of feeling in the Florentines, and tended as much to diminish the power and haughtiness of the city as to abate the insolence of the patriciate. A little further on he says: 'Hence may all prudent men see how ill-ordered in all things, save only in the Grand Council, has been the commonwealth of Florence; seeing that, to speak of nought else, that kind of men who in a wisely constituted republic ought not to fulfill any magistracy whatever, the merchants and artisans of all sorts, are in Florence alone capable of taking office, to the exclusion of all others. Machiavelli, less wordy but far more emphatic than Varchi, says of the same revolution: 'This caused the abandonment by Florence not only of arms, but of all nobility of soul. The most notable consequence of the mercantile temper of the republics was the ruinous system of mercenary warfare, with all its attendant evils of ambitious captains of adventure, irresponsible soldiery, and mock campaigns, adopted by the free Italian States. It is true that even if the Italians had maintained their national militias in full force, they might not have been able to resist the shock of France and Spain any better than the armies of Thebes, Sparta, and Athens averted the Macedonian hegemony. But they would at least have run a better chance, and not perhaps have perished so ignobly through the treason of an Alfonso d'Este , of a Marquis of Pescara , of a Duke of Urbino , and of a Malatesta Baglioni . Machiavelli, in a weighty passage at the end of the first book of his Florentine History, sums up the various causes which contributed to the disuse of national arms among the Italians of the Renaissance. The fear of the despot for his subjects, the priest-rule of the Church, the jealousy of Venice for her own nobles, and the commercial sluggishness of the Florentine burghers, caused each and all of these powers, otherwise so different, to intrust their armies to paid captains. 'Di questi adunque oziosi principi e di queste vilissime armi sar
But the catastrophe that was to hurl him irretrievably from the eminence to which in three short years he had climbed was approaching with stealthy, relentless foot, and was even now upon him. "Cesar Borgia che era della gente Per armi e per virtu tenuto un sole, Mancar dovendo ando dove andar sole Phebo, verso la sera, al Occidente. "Girolamo Casio Epitaffi."
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