unt to keep the stiletto and defend
himself. During more than an hour, in complete obscurity, in this hall
full of furniture, the two men sought one another, fled from one another,
seized hold of one another, and pierced one another with their blades.
And when the doors were broken down and the servants rushed in they found
among the pools of blood, among the overturned tables and broken seats,
Costamagna with his nose sliced off and his hips pierced with two and
thirty wounds, whilst Onfredo had lost two fingers of his right hand, and
had both shoulders riddled with holes! The wonder was that neither died
of the encounter.

A century later, on that same bank of the Tiber, a daughter of the
Boccaneras, a girl barely sixteen years of age, the lovely and passionate
Cassia, filled all Rome with terror and admiration. She loved Flavio
Corradini, the scion of a rival and hated house, whose alliance her
father, Prince Boccanera, roughly rejected, and whom her elder brother,
Ercole, swore to slay should he ever surprise him with her. Nevertheless
the young man came to visit her in a boat, and she joined him by the
little staircase descending to the river. But one evening Ercole, who was
on the watch, sprang into the boat and planted his dagger full in
Flavio's heart. Later on the subsequent incidents were unravelled; it was
understood that Cassia, wrathful and frantic with despair, unwilling to
survive her love and bent on wreaking justice, had thrown herself upon
her brother, had seized both murderer and victim with the same grasp
whilst overturning the boat; for when the three bodies were recovered
Cassia still retained her hold upon the two men, pressing their faces one
against the other with her bare arms, which had remained as white as
snow.

But those were vanished times. Nowadays, if faith remained, blood
violence seemed to be departing from the Boccaneras. Their huge fortune
also had been lost in the slow decline which for a century past has been
ruining the Roman _patriziato_. It had been necessary to sell the
estates; the palace had emptied, gradually sinking to the mediocrity and
bourgeois life of the new times. For their part the Boccaneras
obstinately declined to contract any alien alliances, proud as they were
of the purity of their Roman blood. And poverty was as nothing to them;
they found contentment in their immense pride, and without a plaint
sequestered themselves amidst the silence and gloom in which thei