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Updated: June 21, 2025
It suffices for me that the son of Valeria Albo, my son, has forgot his duty to his mother and his respect for himself." Clelia Alba rose with effort from her chair, relighted her lamp at the old woman's rush candle, and went slowly and heavily up the stairs. She felt stunned and outraged. Her son! hers! to lie out of nights with a little nameless vagrant! Gianna caught hold of her skirt.
This is in brief the story of the Guidascarpi. They were the offspring of a Bolognese noble house, neither wealthy nor poor. In her early womanhood, Clelia was left to the care of her brothers.
One evening, as Fabrice stood in the pulpit, he saw Clelia before him. Her eyes were filled with tears; he looked so pale, so thin, so worn. But never had he preached as he preached that night. After the sermon he received a note asking him to be at a small garden door of the Crescenzi Palace at midnight on the next night. Eagerly he obeyed; when he reached the door, a voice called him enter.
Clelia Alba came within and closed the door, and locked and bolted it. The old woman Gianna had come downstairs with a lighted rush candle in her hand; she was scared and afraid. "What is it? What is it, madama?" Clelia Alba dropped down on the chair by the door. "It is it is that the beggar's spawn you would have me shelter is the leman of my son; and he has dishonoured his house and mine."
Clelia Alba looked down on her a few moments, then took the kerchief off her hair, and laid it gently, without awakening the sleeper, over the breast and the face of the child, on which flies were settling and the sun was shining. Then she picked up the empty earthenware bowl, and went indoors again. "I will go back to the river," said Adone. "I have left the net there." His mother nodded assent.
"Who knows where you will rest to-morrow?" she thought; and she went backwards down the ladder noiselessly so as not to awaken a sleeper, whose awaking might be so sorrowful. Gianna went back to the house and busied herself with her usual tasks; she could hear the voices of Adone and Clelia Alba in the chamber above; they sounded in altercation, but their words she could not hear.
At the fourth hour of the night? Is that an answer for a decent maiden?" Nernia was silent. "Go back to your room, and I will lock you in it; in the morning you will account to me." Nernia recovered her self-possession, though she trembled still. "Pardon me, Madama Clelia," she said humbly, "I must go out." She did not look ashamed, and her small brown face had a resolute expression.
Only Clelia Alba thought, "Perhaps Gianna's good heart misleads her. Gianna is rough; but she has a heart as tender at bottom as a ripe melon's flesh." Anyhow, she took her old servant's word and allowed the child to remain. She could not bring herself to turn adrift a female thing to stray about homeless and hungry, and end in some bottomless pit. The child might be the devil's spawn.
"I know," answered the person beneath, "that she has just this moment put away the manuscript of the novel 'Clelia, at which she is working so hard, and is writing some verses which she means to read to-morrow at Madame de Maintenon's. I implore you, Madame La Martinière, be so compassionate as to open the door. Upon your doing so depends the escape of an unfortunate creature from destruction.
She employed her whole influence to hasten forward the wedding of Clelia with the Marquis Crescenzi; she was jealous of the ascendancy the girl had gained over her beloved nephew. Fabrice, on reaching Parma, was well received by the young Prince. Witnesses, he was told, had been found who could prove that he had killed Giletti in self-defence.
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