The Viceroys by Federico De Roberto

be seen jutting from the highest, but the seats were still empty. Or they went round the other way, towards the chapel of the Blessed Uzeda, resplendent with votive lamps. And there they stopped, once out of the crush, to look at the hollow altar where could be seen, through glass, an ancient leather-covered coffin enclosing the saintly woman’s body. Then they tried to go back towards the middle of the church to read the inscriptions attached to the other altars, but the crowd was now compact as a wall. Don Cono Canalà, after glancing over the whole pyre, had made three or four attempts on his own to approach one of the epigraphs, but had not succeeded in pushing far enough ahead to read them. With his head back, his hat dented with all the shoving, his feet trampled, his shirt asweat, he wastacking like a boat in a storm. By politeness, and by saying ‘Please!… I beg you!… Excuse me!’ he finally got within sight of the first placard, where he read:
    BENEATH A WOMAN’S MORTAL REMAINS
BEAT
A VALIANT AND COMPASSIONATE HEART
AN ELECT AND GENEROUS SOUL
AN ALERT AND FERTILE SPIRIT
EVERY WHIT WORTHY
OF THE HIGH-MINDED RACE
WHICH SHE MADE HER OWN
    ‘Every whit?…’ said Baron Carcaretta, who found himself beside Don Cono. ‘Why “whit”?’
    ‘ “Wholly” or “entirely”. “Every whit worthy of the race …” How d’you like the concept?…’
    ‘Oh, it’s all right; I don’t understand why people go out of their way to find difficult words!’
    ‘You see …’ Don Cono then explained, insinuatingly, ‘epigraphic style must rise to the highest flights of sustained nobility … I could not use …’
    ‘Oh you wrote it, did you?’
    ‘Yes, sir … but not alone, actually. In collaboration with the Cavaliere Don Eugenio … My particular care was the form … I should like to sec the others, as I fear some slip in copying …’
    But the church was so crammed that they could scarcely advance two paces in a quarter of an hour, and all round people who could not move back or forward or see anything but the top of the pyramid were whiling away their impatience by chatting and saying whatever came into their heads about the princess. ‘Now her children can breathe at last! She held them in an iron fist …’ ‘Her children? Which?…’ ‘She forced Don Lodovico, the second son, to become a monk when his due was the title of duke. The eldest daughter she shut into a convent!… If she’d still lived, she’d have put the other in too … She married Chiara off because the girl didn’t want to … And all for love of just one of them, young Count Raimondo …’‘What about the father?…’ ‘The father, in his day, never counted a fig. The princess held him and her brother-in-law in her grip!’
    But all recognised that had it not been for her there would have been nothing left by that time. ‘An ignorant woman, yes, but a shrewd, calculating one!’
    ‘Is it true she couldn’t read or write?’
    ‘She could only read her prayer-book and her account-book!’
    Meanwhile Don Cono was nearing, at snail’s pace, the second inscription.
    DEPRIVED
OF THY FAITHFUL CONSORT
IN THIS MORTAL PILGRIMAGE
PROXY THOU STOOD
TO THY CHILDREN
FOR THEIR FATHER
    Even before making out the letters, Don Cono, who knew it by memory, was reciting the epigraph to the baron, pausing a little at each word, and longer at each line, waving a hand as if scattering holy water in order to underline the salient passages:
    ‘I wonder if you approve of the concept, “deprived … proxy thou stood …” ’
    But new waves of the crowd divided him from his companion once again. From terrace and steps now came a great hiss as strokes of the death-bell at last announced the procession’s departure from the palace.
    Round the Francalanza home it was still like a fairground, with all the waiting carriages and people quivering with impatience. Through the half-shut gates could be seen another crowd