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Updated: August 16, 2024
All the single ladies would now have been ready to bet, as confidently as Brigida had offered to bet eight months before, that Fabio d'Ascoli would marry again. For once in a way, report turned out to be true, in both the cases just mentioned. Invitations were actually issued from the Melani Palace, and Fabio returned from abroad to his home on the Arno.
All his mornings continued to be spent alone in the studio, and all his afternoons to be occupied by his clerical duties, until the day before the masked ball at the Melani Palace. Early on that day he covered over the statues, and locked the doors of the work-rooms once more; then returned to his own lodgings, and did not go out again.
"It had been decided first of all we should see Madame Mélani who had written the letter, and who was most likely the porter's wife, or my uncle's servant, and I got down as a scout in front of a seven-storied house and went into a dark passage, where I had great difficulty in finding the porter's den.
In settling all the arrangements connected with his masked ball, the Marquis Melani showed that he was determined not only to deserve, but to increase, his reputation for oddity. He invented the most extravagant disguises, to be worn by some of his more intimate friends; he arranged grotesque dances, to be performed at stated periods of the evening by professional buffoons, hired from Florence.
The next night, at the time of assembling specified in the invitations to the masked ball, Fabio was still lingering in his palace, and still allowing the black domino to lie untouched and unheeded on his dressing-table. This delay was not produced by any change in his resolution to go to the Melani Palace.
If she had known or guessed to whom those thanks ought to have been addressed! "They laid my uncle on his bed; he was certainly dead that time. "'Madame, Mélani said, 'we have no sheets to bury him in; all the linen belongs to those two young ladies, and when I looked at the omelette which they had not finished, I felt inclined to laugh and to cry at the same time.
"The Abbé and I rejoined my mother in the kitchen, and Mélani again offered us chairs, 'I knew quite well that it would not go of its own accord; we must try some other means, otherwise he will escape us. And they began deliberating afresh, my mother being of one opinion and the Abbé of another, while I held a third.
Still a little paler than usual, Father Rocco sat down by the nearest lamp, and shading his eyes, read these lines: "COUNT FABIO -It is the common talk of Pisa that you are likely, as a young man left with a motherless child, to marry again. Your having accepted an invitation to the Melani Palace gives a color of truth to this report.
I'll ask her, at any rate. Nothing can be lost by asking, and everything may be gained. Stop, my dear," he continued, seeing the girl turn to go into the house as he approached her. "Don't be afraid of me. I am steward to the Marquis Melani, and well known in Pisa as an eminently respectable man. I have something to say to you which may be greatly for your benefit.
It opened immediately, and an enormous dirty woman appeared before me, who barred the entrance with her open arms which she leant against the two doorposts, and grumbled: "'What do you want? 'Are you Madame Mélani? 'Yes. 'I am the Viscounte de Toumeville. 'Ah! All right! Come in. 'Well, the fact is my mother is downstairs with a priest. 'Oh!
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