The Leopard Read Online Free

guardianship of her son, then aged four. teen, on his uncle Salina. The lad, scarcely known before, had become very dear to the irascible Prince, who perceived in him a riotous zest for life and a frivolous temperament contradicted by sudden serious moods. Though the Prince never admitted it to himself, he would have preferred the lad as his heir to that booby Paolo. Now, at twenty-one, Tancredii was enjoying life on the money which his uncle never grudged him, even from his own pocket. "I wonder what the silly boy is up to now," thought the Prince as they drove past Villa Falconeri, whose huge bougainvillaeas cascaded over the gates like swags of episcopal silk, lending a deceptive air of gaiety to the dark.
    "What is he up to now?" For King Ferdinand, in speaking of the young man's undesirable acquaintances, had been wrong to mention the matter but right in his facts. Swept up in a circle of gamblers and ladies called "light," as the euphemism went, all dominated by his slim charm, Tancredi had actually got to the point of sympathizing with the Sect and getting in touch with the secret National Committee; maybe he drew money from them as well as from the Royal coffers. It had taken the Prince a great deal of labor and trouble, visits to a skeptical Castelcicala, and an overpolite Maniscalco, to prevent the youth from getting into real trouble after the Fourth of April "riots." That hadn't been too good; on the other hand, Tancredi could never do wrong in his uncle's eyes i so the real fault lay with the times, these confused times in which a young man of good family wasn't even free to play a game of faro without involving himself with compromising acquaintanceships. Bad times.
    "Bad times, Your Excellency." The voice of Father Pirrone sounded like an echo of his thoughts. Squeezed into a corner of the brougham, hemmed in by the massive Prince, subject to that same Prince's bullying, the Jesuit was suffering in body and conscience and, being a man of parts himself, was now transposing his own ephemeral discomfort into the perennial realms of history. "Look, Excellency," and he pointed to the mountain heights of the Conca d'Oro still visible in the last dusk. On their slopes and peaks glimmered dozens of flickering lights, bonfires lit every night by the rebel bands, silent threats to the city of palaces and convents. They looked like the lights that burn in sickrooms during the last nights.
    "l can see, Father, I can see," and it occurred to him that perhaps Tancredi was beside one of those ill-omened fires, his aristocratic hands throwing on sticks being burned to damage just such hands as his. "A fine guardian I am, with my ward up to any nonsense that passes through his head."
    The road was now beginning to slope gently downhill, and Palermo could be seen very close, plunged in complete darkness, its low shuttered houses weighted down by the huge edifices of convents and monasteries. There were dozens of these, all vast, often grouped in twos or threes, for women and for men, for rich and poor, nobles and plebeians, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, Redemptorists, Augustinians. . . . Above them rose squat domes in flabby curves like breasts emptied of milk; but it was the religious houses which gave the city its grimness and its character, its sedateness and also the sense of death which not even the vibrant Sicilian light could ever manage to disperse. And at that hour, at night, they were despots of the scene. It was against them really that the bonfires were lit on the hills, stoked by men who were themselves very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power.
    This was what the Prince was thinking as the bays trotted down the slope; thoughts in contrast to his real self, caused by anxiety about Tancredi and by the sensual urge which made him turn against the restrictions