Etiam cum gladio--surmounting the
episcopal chair; there the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and
stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the
"angelica vestis" of the tertiary order; and the "beatified" Duchess who
had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670,
and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to
serve all the purposes of bodily mortification. So the file descended,
the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby
porporato of the last century, who had donned the cardinal's habit at
four, and stood rigid and a little pale in his red robes and lace, with
a crucifix and a skull on the table to which the top of his berretta
hardly reached.

It seemed to Odo as he gazed on the long line of faces as though their
owners had entered one by one into a narrowing defile, where the sun
rose later and set earlier on each successive traveller; and in every
countenance, from that of the first Duke to that of his own peruked and
cuirassed grandfather, he discerned the same symptom of decadency: that
duality of will which, in a delicately-tempered race, is the fatal fruit
of an undisturbed pre-eminence. They had ruled too long and enjoyed too
much; and the poor creature he had just left to his dismal scruples and
forebodings seemed the mere empty husk of long-exhausted passions.

2.11.

The Duchess was lodged in the Borromini wing of the palace, and thither
Odo was conducted that evening.

To eyes accustomed to such ceremonial there was no great novelty in the
troop of powdered servants, the major-domo in his short cloak and chain,
and the florid splendour of the long suite of rooms, decorated in a
style that already appeared over-charged to the more fastidious taste of
the day. Odo's curiosity centred chiefly in the persons peopling this
scene, whose conflicting interests and passions formed, as it were, the
framework of the social structure of Pianura, so that there was not a
labourer in the mulberry-orchards or a weaver in the silk-looms but
depended for his crust of black bread and the leaking roof over his head
on the private whim of some member of that brilliant company.

The Duchess, who soon entered, received Odo with the flighty good-nature
of a roving mind; but as her deep-blue gaze met his her colour rose, her
eyes lingered on his face, and she invited him to a seat at her side.
Maria Clementina was of Austrian descent