«All Carbonari owe allegiance to the Alta Vendita, which has forty members, most of whom, dreadful to say, are the cream of the Roman aristocracy—plus, of course, several Jews.»
Simone had transformed Nubius into a personal hero, almost a male counterpart of Babette of Interlaken. And he mesmerized his companions by turning into an epic poem what Father Bergamaschi had told him in the form of a gothic tale—though concealing the small detail that Nubius was now dead.
Until one day he produced a letter, which had not been difficult to fabricate, in which Nubius proclaimed an imminent insurrection across Piedmont, town by town. The group, led by Simone, would play a dangerous and exciting part. They were to meet on a particular morning in the courtyard of the Osteria del Gambero d’Oro, where they would find sabers and rifles and four cartloads of old furniture and mattresses. Thus armed, they were to make their way to the junction of via Barbaroux and build a barricade to block entry from piazza Castello. And there they should await orders.
That was more than enough to stir the hearts of the twenty or so students who met on that fateful morning in the innkeeper’s courtyard and found the weapons they had been promised in several barrels. While they were looking around for the carts of furniture, without thinking to load their rifles, the courtyard was invaded by fifty or so policemen with their guns drawn. Powerless to resist, the boys surrendered and were disarmed, taken out and lined up facing the wall on either side of the entrance gate. «Come on, you rabble, hands up, silence!» an officer in plain clothes shouted with a scowl.
Although the rebels appeared to have been rounded up more or less at random, two policemen had positioned Simone at the very end of the line, right by the corner of an alleyway. At the agreed-upon moment, they were called away by their sergeant and went off toward the courtyard entrance. Simone turned to his nearest companion and whispered something. Seeing that the police were a fair distance away, the two darted off around the corner and began running.
«To arms, they’re escaping!» someone shouted. The two heard footsteps as they fled, and the shouts of policemen who had pursued them around the corner. Simone heard two shots. One hit his friend, though Simone was hardly concerned whether it was fatal or not. It was enough for him that the second shot was fired into the air, as agreed.
He turned into another street, then yet another. Far off, he could hear the shouts of his pursuers, who, following their orders, had taken the wrong route. Before long he was crossing piazza Castello on his way home, like any other citizen. His companions—who in the meantime had been taken away—all assumed he had escaped, and since they had been arrested together and immediately lined up facing the wall, none of the police officers could remember his face. So there was no need for him to leave Turin; he could return to work, and could even go to comfort the families of his arrested friends.
All that remained was to deal with Notaio Rebaudengo. The old man went to prison, as planned, and died of a broken heart a year later in prison, but Simonini felt no guilt about that. The score had been settled. The notary had given him a job, and Simone had been his slave for several years; the notary had ruined his grandfather, and Simone had ruined him.
This, then, was what Abbé Dalla Piccola had been describing to Simonini. And that he too felt exhausted after all these recollections was proven by the fact that his contribution to the diary stopped halfway through a sentence, as if, while he was writing, he had fallen into a state of slumber.
6. Serving the Secret Service
28th March 1897
Monsieur Abbé,
How curious that what is supposed to be a diary (to be read by its author alone) is turning into an exchange of messages. But here I am, writing you a letter, almost certain that one day, passing here, you will read it.
You know too much about me. You are a most disagreeable witness. And far too severe.
Yes, I admit it. In my conduct toward my would-be Carbonari comrades, and to Rebaudengo, I did not act in accordance with the morals you are supposed to preach. But let us be frank: Rebaudengo was a rogue, and when I think of all I have done since then, I seem to have practiced my roguery only on rogues. As for those boys, they were fanatics, and fanatics are the scum of the earth, because it’s through them, and the vague principles they espouse, that wars and revolutions happen. And since I had come to realize that the number of fanatics in this world will never diminish, I decided that I might as well profit from their fanaticism.
So I’ll resume my own recollections, if you’ll allow me. I was now in charge of what had been Rebaudengo’s office—and since I had been falsifying legal deeds back in Rebaudengo’s day, it should come as no surprise that I am still doing exactly the same here in Paris.
Now, I also well remember Cavalier Bianco. One day he said to me: «You see, Avvocato Simonini, the Jesuits have been banished from the Kingdom of Piedmont, but everyone knows they continue their scheming and recruit followers under false guises. It happens in every country from which they have been expelled. I saw an amusing caricature in a foreign newspaper. It showed several Jesuits who every year pretend they want to return to their country of origin (though naturally they are stopped at the frontier), until someone realizes that their brethren are already there, moving around freely and disguised as another order.
They are all around us, but we need to find out where. We know that back in the days of the Roman Republic some used to go to your grandfather’s house. It seems unlikely you have not kept in touch with them, and we ask you therefore to sound out their mood and their intentions. There’s a general feeling that the order is gaining influence again in France—and whatever happens in France might just as well be happening here in Turin.»
He was quite wrong to imagine I was still in touch with the good fathers, but I had been learning much about the Jesuits, and from a reliable source. During those years Eugène Sue had published his last masterpiece, Les mystères du peuple. He completed it shortly before his death in Annecy, in Savoy, where he was in exile, because he had long been a socialist sympathizer and had fiercely opposed Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état and proclamation of the empire.
Since no more feuilletons were being published as a result of the Riancey Amendment, Sue’s works were being issued in slim volumes, and had fallen foul of the rigors of many censors, including those of Piedmont, and therefore were difficult to come by. I remember finding it deathly tedious trying to follow this rambling story of two families, one of Gauls and the other of Franks, from prehistory to the time of Napoleon III, where the Franks are the wicked oppressors and the Gauls seem to have all been socialists since the time of Vercingetorix. But Sue, like all idealists, was now gripped by one obsession alone.
He had obviously written the last pages of his final novel while in exile, at the same time as Louis Napoleon had seized power and made himself emperor. To make these designs more odious, Sue had had a clever idea: since the Jesuits were the other great enemy of republican France from the time of the Revolution, all he had to do was show that Louis Napoleon’s seizure of power was inspired and directed by the Jesuits. It is true that the Jesuits had been banished from France since the July 1830 revolution, but in reality they had managed covertly to survive, and more easily after Louis Napoleon had begun his rise to power, tolerating them so as to remain on good terms with the pope.
There is a long letter in the book from Father Rodin (who had appeared in The Wandering Jew) addressed to the superior general of the Jesuits, Father Roothaan, in which the plan was set out in great detail. The last events in the novel take place during the final socialist and republican struggle against the coup d’état, and the letter seems to be written in such a way that what Louis Napoleon actually did is made to appear as if it hadn’t yet been done, which made his prediction all the more disturbing.
The opening of Dumas’ novel Joseph Balsamo naturally came to mind: it would have been quite sufficient to substitute Thunder Mountain with some more ecclesiastical setting—perhaps the crypt of an old monastery—and instead of Masons, to gather down there Loyola’s sons
