aura's cicisbeo was indeed a member of the
local Arcadia, and given to celebrating in verse every incident in the
noble household of Valdu, from its lady's name-day to the death of a pet
canary; but his own tastes inclined to the elegant Bettinelli, whose
Lettere Virgiliane had so conclusively shown Dante to be a writer of
barbarous doggerel; and among the dilettanti of the day one heard less
of Raphael than of Carlo Maratta, less of Ariosto and Petrarch than of
the Jesuit poet Padre Cevo, author of the sublime "heroico-comic" poem
on the infancy of Jesus.

It was in fact mainly to the Jesuits that Italy, in the early part of
the eighteenth century, owed her literature and her art, as well as the
direction of her religious life. Though the reaction against the order
was everywhere making itself felt, though one Italian sovereign after
another had been constrained to purchase popularity or even security by
banishing the Society from his dominions, the Jesuits maintained their
hold on the aristocracy, whose pretentions they flattered, whose tastes
they affected, and to whom they represented the spirit of religious and
political conservatism, against which invisible forces were already felt
to be moving. For the use of their noble supporters, the Jesuits had
devised a religion as elaborate and ceremonious as the social usages of
the aristocracy: a religion which decked its chapels in imitation of
great ladies' boudoirs and prescribed observances in keeping with the
vapid and gossiping existence of their inmates.

To Odo, fresh from the pure air of Donnaz, where the faith of his
kinsfolk expressed itself in charity, self-denial and a noble decency of
life, there was something stifling in the atmosphere of languishing
pietism in which his mother's friends veiled the emptiness of their
days. Under the instruction of the Countess's director the boy's
conscience was enervated by the casuistries of Liguorianism and his
devotion dulled by the imposition of interminable "pious practices." It
was in his nature to grudge no sacrifice to his ideals, and he might
have accomplished without question the monotonous observances his
confessor exacted, but for the changed aspect of the Deity in whose name
they were imposed.

As with most thoughtful natures, Odo's first disillusionment was to come
from discovering not what his God condemned, but what He condoned.
Between Cantapresto's coarse philosophy of pleasure and the refined
complais