Sometimes, indeed, her look drove him forth in the Duchess's
train, but more often, drawing him from the crowd of pleasure-seekers,
beckoned the way to solitude and study. Under Crescenti's tuition he
began the reading of Dante, who just then, after generations of neglect,
was once more lifting his voice above the crowd of minor singers. The
mighty verse swept Odo out to open seas of thought, and from his vision
of that earlier Italy, hapless, bleeding, but alive and breast to breast
with the foe, he drew the presage of his country's resurrection.
Passing from this high music to the company of Gamba and his friends was
like leaving a church where the penitential psalms are being sung for
the market-place where mud and eggs are flying. The change was not
agreeable to a fastidious taste; but, as Gamba said, you cannot clean
out a stable by waving incense over it. After some hesitation, he had
agreed to make Odo acquainted with those who, like himself, were
secretly working in the cause of progress. These were mostly of the
middle class, physicians, lawyers, and such men of letters as could
subsist on the scant wants of an unliterary town. Ablest among them was
the bookseller, Andreoni, whose shop was the meeting place of all the
literati of Pianura. Andreoni, famous throughout Italy for his editions
of the classics, was a man of liberal views and considerable learning,
and in his private room were to be found many prohibited volumes, such
as Beccaria's Crime and Punishment, Gravina's Hydra Mystica, Concini's
History of Probabilism and the Amsterdam editions of the French
philosophical works.
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