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Every Italian is a conspirator, whether the question be the gravest or the lightest; all must be done in it ambiguously–secretly– mysteriously. Whatever is conducted openly is deemed to be done stupidly. To take a house, buy a horse, or hire a servant without the intervention of another man to disparage the article, chaffer over the price, and disgust the vendor, is an act of impetuous folly. “Why didn’t you tell me!” says your friend, “that you wished to have that villa? My coachman is half-brother to the wife of the fattore. I could have learned everything that could be urged against its convenience, and learned, besides, what peculiar pressure for money affected the owner.” Besides this, everything must be done as though by mere hazard: you really never knew there was a house there, never noticed it; you even sneer at the taste of the man who selected the spot, and wonder “what he meant by it.” In nine cases out of ten the other party is not deceived by this skirmishing; he fires a little blank-cartridge too, and so goes on the engagement. All have great patience; life, at least in Italy, is quite long enough for all this; no one is overburdened with business; the days are usually wearisome, and the theatres are only open of an evening!

It is, besides, so pleasant and so interesting to the Italian to pit his craft against another man’s, and back his own subtlety against his neighbour’s. It is a sort of gambling of which he never wearies; for the game is one that demands not merely tact, address, and cunning, but face, voice, manner, and bearing. It is temperament. Individuality itself is on the table; and so is it, that you may assume it as certain that the higher organisation will invariably rise the winner.

Imagine Bull in such a combat, and you have a picture of the most hopeless incapacity. He frets, fumes, storms, and sulks; but what avails it? he is “done” in the end; but he is no more aware that the struggle he has been engaged in is an intellectual one, than was the Bourgeois Gentilhomme conscious that he had been for forty years “talking prose.”

The Priest was doubtless the great originator of all this mechanism of secrecy and fraud. For centuries the Church has been the Tyrant of Italy. The whole fate and fortunes of families depended on the will of a poor, ill-clad, ignoble-looking creature, who, though he sat at meals with the master, ate and talked like a menial. To this man was known everything–all that passed beneath the roof. Not alone was he aware of the difficulties, the debts, the embarrassments of the family, but to him were confided their feelings, their shortcomings, their sorrows, and it might be their shame. From him there was nothing secret; and he sat there, in the midst of them, a sort of Fate, wielding the power of one who knew every spring and motive that could stir them, every hope that could thrill, every terror that could appal them. There was no escape from him–cold, impassive spectator of good or evil fortune, without one affection to attach him to life, grimly watching the play of passions which made men his slaves, and only interested by the exercise of a power that degraded them. The layman could not outwit him, it is true, but he could steal something of the craft that he could not rival. This he has done; how he has employed it any one can at least imagine who has had dealings in Italy.