Bellarion the Fortunate quotes

“Half god, half beast,” the Princess Valeria once described him, without suspecting that the phrase describes not merely Bellarion, but Man.

Aware of this, the anonymous chronicler who has preserved it for us goes on to comment that the Princess said at once too much and too little.

… he is to be seen standing upon the threshold of the secular world, known to him until that moment only from the writings of other men, yet better known to him thus than it is to many who have lived a lifetime among their fellows.

After all, to view a scene from a distance is to enjoy advantages of perspective denied to the actors in that scene.

Bellarion’s reading had been prodigious. There was no branch of learning—from the Theological Fathers to Vegetius Hyginus on The Art of War—to which he had not addressed his eager spirit.

a doctrine so subversive of theological teaching that a hundred years later it must have made him closely acquainted with the operations of the Holy Office and probably—in Spain certainly—have brought him to the fire.

This abominable heresy, fruit of much brooding, was that in the world there is not, nor can be, such a thing as sin.

And it was in vain that the Abbot, who loved him very dearly, sought by argument to convert him.

At the last the Abbot had again reminded him of the peace of the convent and of the strife and unhappiness that distract the world.

“Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.”

The mischief began—and you may account it symbolical—by his losing his way. This happened a mile or two beyond the township of Livorno.

“Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella.”

The mischief began⁠—and you may account it symbolical⁠—by his losing his way.

This happened a mile or two beyond the township of Livorno.

“You heard her say they are too good, and that she’ll remember it. You should be less ready to tell her all you see.

He is a fool who helps to make a woman wise.

”

There he lay, shivering in the warm night, and taking stock of his plight, an exercise which considerably diminished him in his self-confidence and self-esteem.

“Experience,” he had been wont to say⁠—being rather addicted, I gather, to the making of epigrammatic formulae⁠—“is the hornbook of fools, unnecessary for the practical purposes of life to the man of wit.”

It is possible that he was tempted to revise this dictum in the light of the events of that disastrous day, recognising that a little of the worldly experience he despised might have saved him most if not all of its disasters.

If he admitted this without yet admitting the fallacy of his aphorism, it was only to reach a conclusion even more humiliating. He had strayed from lack of experience, therefore it followed, he told himself, that he was a fool.

That is one of the dangers of reasoning by syllogism.

He had accepted the companionship of a man whose face pronounced him a scoundrel, and whose various actions in the course of the day confirmed the message of his face, and this for no better reason than that the man wore a Franciscan’s frock.

“My faith, sir, you are shrewd, for one who’s convent-bred.”

“There’s a deal of shrewdness, lady, to be learned in convents.”

And then, whether the beauty and charm of her so wrought upon him as to breed in him the desire to serve her, or whether he merely offered a bargain, a return for value received and to be received, it is probable that he did …

“The service may entail risk,” she warned him, “and a risk far greater than any you have run tonight.”

“Risk sweetens enterprise,” he answered, “and wit can conquer it.”

Her smile broadened, almost she laughed. “You have a high confidence in your wit, sir.”

There was no falsehood in the statement.

It was merely truth untruly told, truth unassailable under test, yet calculated to convey a false impression.

A thin smile parted the Prince’s shaven lips. “And when you had learnt sufficient, you found that a surer path to advancement might lie in the betrayal of these poor conspirators?”

Yet, despite these heartening reflections, Bellarion could not shake off his horror.

He had done murder, and he had done it in cold blood, deliberate and calculatingly.

Worse than all—his convent rearing asserting itself here—he had sent a man unshriven to confront his Maker. He hoped that the unexpectedness with which Spigno’s doom had overtaken him would be weighed in the balance against the sins which death had surprised upon him.

“Ah, you know the law? Trust a rogue to know the law.”

“Which is to make a rogue of every lawyer in the land,”

said Bellarion, and was rewarded by a titter from the crowd, pleased with a sarcasm that contained more truth than he suspected. “I know the law as I know divinity and rhetoric and other things. Because I have studied it.”

“A convenient tale,” he sneered, “but lame. Can you do no better?”

“Can any man do better than the truth?”

demanded Bellarion firmly, and in the circumstances impudently. “You ask me to explain things that are outside my knowledge.”

… if the prisoner’s identity prove to be as he says, and if his present position should be the result of a chain of unfortunate circumstances, we should by proceeding to extremes merely provoke against Montferrat the resentment of our exalted friend the Count of Biandrate.”

Thus was it demonstrated to Bellarion how much may hang upon a man’s wise choice of a parent.

The Podestà bowed his head. There was a moment’s silence before he spoke.

“Spells?” Bellarion stood boldly before him. He chose to be mysterious, to feed their superstition. He answered with a proverb that made play upon the name he had assumed.

“Did I not tell you that I am Cane? Dog will not eat dog. That is all the magic you have here.”

“An evasion,” said Lonate, like one who thinks aloud.

Gian Galeazzo had imagined his first wife, the sterile Isabella of Valois, to lie under the curse. Bellarion wondered what Gian Galeazzo thought of the answer to that vast prayer in marble when his second wife Caterina brought forth Gian Maria.

There are, Bellarion reflected, worse afflictions than sterility.

Gian Galeazzo had perished before his stupendous conception could be brought to full fruition, and under his degenerate son the work was languishing, and stood almost suspended, a monument as much to the latter’s misrule as to his father’s colossal ambition and indomitable will.

“On you, who account yourself lord of life and death.

To be Duke of Milan is not quite the same thing as to be God.

You should remember it.” Then he changed his tone. “That man you were hunting today beyond Abbiate was Francesco da Pusterla, I am told.”

Facino slowly nodded. “And you do not believe in miracles?” he asked.

“Your lordship’s patience with me is the first miracle I have witnessed.”

“It is the miracle you hoped for when you adopted me for your father?”

“If this were life,” he said to Bellarion one evening as they sauntered through the parklands where the red deer grazed, “a man might be content.”

“Content,” said Bellarion, “is stagnation. And man was not made for that. I am coming to perceive it. The peace of the convent is as the peace of the pasture to the ox.”

Facino smiled. “Your education progresses.”

There are men to whom death has brought a glory that would never have been theirs in life.

An instance of that is afforded by the history of Bellarion at this stage.

Stoffel considered him with grave eyes. “Are you afraid?”

“It asks courage. Which shows that whilst afraid I am not a coward. Life is full of paradox, I find.”

Stoffel laughed. “No need to protest your courage to me. I remember Travo.”

Here I have none. And who accepts such odds is not a brave man, but a fool. I don’t like broken bones; and still less a broken reputation. I mean to keep what I’ve won against the day when I may need it.

Reputation, Stoffel, is a delicate bubble, easily pricked.

To be unhorsed in the lists is no proper fate for a hero.”

From a mental vigour developed by those studies he drew an increasing consciousness of superiority over those with whom fate associated him, a state of mind which did not bring him to respect his fellow man.

Greed seemed to Bellarion, that morning, the dominant impulse of worldly life.

He saw it and all the stark, selfish evil of it wherever he turned his retrospective glance. Most cruelly, perhaps, had he seen it last night in the Countess Beatrice, who dignified it—as was common—by the name of ambition.

The whole of Facino’s army might have passed that way, seeing in that bright object a horseshoe and nothing more. But Bellarion’s mind was of a different order.

He read quite fluently in that iron shoe that it was cast from the hind hoof of a mule within the last twenty-four hours.

Two nights ago a thunderstorm had rolled down from the Montferrine hills, which were now hazily visible in the distance on his right. Had the shoe been cast before that, rust must have dimmed its polished brightness;

“If we come to terms,” said Beppo easily.

“I’m not in the business for the love of adventure.”

Vignate’s countenance sobered from its elation. His eyes narrowed. He became the man of affairs. “And your terms?” quoth he.

The solemnity of his countenance increased. He looked straight before him.

“In all this idle world there is naught so idle as to consider what we might be if it were different.”

She had no answer for a while, and they rode a little way side by side in silence, her attendants following out of earshot.

“It is surely necessary even in the lists. I remember at a tournament in Milan the valour and address of this knight Carmagnola. He bore off the palm that day. But, then, you were not present. You had a fever, or was it an ague?”

“Most likely an ague; I always shiver at the thought of a personal encounter.”

The Regent led the laugh, and now even Valeria smiled, but it was a smile of purest scorn.

“How well equipped you are!” she said.

“I came into the world, madonna, with nothing but my wits. I must do what I can with them.”

Abruptly, for there was no time to lose, he plunged into the business. “I desire to give you a word of warning in season, lest, with your great talent for misunderstanding, you should be made uneasy by what I hope to do.

Now, however, Messer Theodore was committed to a battle in which his own conscience would fight against him, weakening him by fear of discovery of his true aims.

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” said Bellarion to himself.

“And you’ll never stand to fight this out, my wicked one.”

Bellarion sighed.

“You must be supposing me a tradesman, even when I am really that quite senseless thing, a knight-errant.”

And he went out with Stoffel.

The Princess Valeria looked up from her embroidery on the word. Bellarion caught the movement and the glance in his direction. He knew the thought behind, and it was that thought he answered.

“In the field, my opponents use the same word to decry me. But those who are with me applaud my skill.”

He laughed. “Truth is an elusive thing, highness, as Pontius Pilate knew. The aspect of a fact depends upon the angle from which you view it.”

“In the field, my opponents use the same word to decry me. But those who are with me applaud my skill.” He laughed.

“Truth is an elusive thing, highness, as Pontius Pilate knew. The aspect of a fact depends upon the angle from which you view it.”

Filippo Maria sat back, his great chin sunk to his breast, his podgy white hands gripping the arms of his chair, his humour sullen.

She bent now to the board, and Filippo’s smouldering glance was upon the warm ivory beauty of her neck, and the swell of her breast revealed by the low-cut gown.

“It is human to despise what we do not understand,”

Bellarion was answering her.

“Each age has its own penalties, madonna. It is not only the elderly among humanity who need compassion.”

“Wisdom oozes from you like sweat from another.”

There was a tartness in her accents. “If I were your biographer, Bellarion, I should write of you as the soldier-sage, or the philosopher-at-arms.”

She was startled. “God save us!” she cried. “Does the soldier-sage contain a mere man, after all?”

“Your mouth, madonna, is too sweetly formed for acids.”

“The choicest fruits, sir, have an alloy of sharpness. What else about me finds favour in your eyes?”

“Have you come here to spy upon me?”

“Of course. Now you know why I broke my leg.”

She looked unutterable scorn. “The Princess Valeria is right in her opinion of you, in her disdain of you.”

The irony of the event provoked in him a terrible mirth.

“Poor purblind fool,” was his comment. “He never guessed when he was torturing Mombelli that he was torturing him into signing his own death-warrant.”

That, and the laugh with which he rode on into the city, left Bagio wondering whether his wits had turned.

Bellarion recited what he knew, then staggered out, on the arm of the servant who was to conduct him to the room prepared for him.

“What a world! What a dunghill!”

he muttered as he went. “And how well the old abbot knows it. Pax multa in cella, foris autem plurima bella!”

“I see that you mistrust me, too.”

“It’s a compliment,” said Bellarion.

“If it is, I don’t perceive it.”

“Ha! You believe in gratitude, Bellarion?”

“I must, since I practise it.”

There followed that night a council of the captains, and since they were still nominally regarded as in the service of Facino’s widow, the Duchess herself attended it, and since the fortunes of the legitimate ruler of Montferrat was one of the issues, the Marquis …

“Why?” Bellarion’s voice sounded amused. His face they could not see.

“Because I never spend myself in argument with those who learn only by experience.”

Again the Princess intervened. “Is that the best reason you can give? You allowed time, material, and energy, and now even a detachment of men to be wasted, merely that you might prove his folly to my Lord of Carmagnola?

Belluno swore softly, and vented a laugh of some little bitterness.

“He’s deep, always deep, by Saint Januarius! Never does he do the things he seems to do. Never does he aim where he looks.”

“Afraid,” Bellarion repeated quietly.

“I don’t charge like a bull. I like to know exactly where I am going.”

“In this case, I have told you.”

He wagged his head and even smiled over the thought of Belluno’s refusal to accept his parole, or rather over the thought that in offering it he had no notion of keeping it.

“I’d break more than my pledged word to get out of this,” said he to himself. “And only an idiot would blame me.”

He looked round the bare stone walls, and lastly at the window. He rose, and hopped over to it. Leaning on the sill, which was at the height of his breast, he looked out.

“Lord of Heaven, Messer Carmagnola! You’ve the repute of a great fighter, and, to be sure, you’re a fine figure of a man; also I must assume you honest. But I would sooner put my trust in your animal strength than in your wits.”

“Oh, aye, to be sure, you can throw out your chest and roar and strut. But use your brains for once, man.”

The boldly humorous red face was overspread by a sardonic grin.

“Let us waste it now,” said Barbaresco.

“Why, to beguile our leisure. No other entertainment offers.”

Carmagnola contained himself under that sardonic leer.

She looked at him almost slyly, for one normally so wide-eyed, and her answer all considered was a little cruel.

“Are you still unshaken in your confidence in your wits? Do you still think that you can trust them?”

That was the deathblow to his passion for her, as it was the deathblow of the high hopes he is suspected of having centred in her, seeing himself, perhaps, as the husband of the Princess Valeria of Montferrat, supreme in Montferrine court and camp.