In the churches adorned
like aristocratic drawing-rooms, of which some Madonna, wreathed in
artificial flowers, seemed the amiable and indulgent hostess, and where
the florid passionate music of the mass was rendered by the King's opera
singers before a throng of chattering cavaliers and ladies, Odo prayed
in vain for a reawakening of the old emotion. The sense of sonship was
gone. He felt himself an alien in the temple of this affable divinity,
and his heart echoed no more than the cry which had once lifted him on
wings of praise to the very threshold of the hidden glory--
Domine, dilexi decorem domus tuae et locum habitationis gloriae tuae!
It was in the first reaction from this dimly felt loss that he lit one
day on a volume which Alfieri had smuggled into the Academy--the Lettres
Philosophiques of Francois Arouet de Voltaire.
BOOK II. THE NEW LIGHT.
Zu neuen Ufern lockt ein neuer Tag.
2.1.
One afternoon of April in the year 1774, Odo Valsecca, riding down the
hillside below the church of the Superga, had reined in his horse at a
point where a group of Spanish chestnuts overhung the way. The air was
light and pure, the shady turf invited him, and dismounting he bid his
servant lead the horses to the wayside inn half way down the slope.
The spot he had chosen, though secluded as some nook above the gorge of
Donnaz, commanded a view of the Po rolling at his feet like a flood of
yellowish metal, and beyond, outspread in clear spring sunshine, the
great city in the bosom of the plain.
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