"What do you mean—money!" said the landlady; "he has sixty-seven scudi which are entirely at your service. I myself," she went on, lowering her voice, "have forty scudi which I offer you with the best will in the world; one doesn't always have money on one when these accidents happen."

On account of the heat, Fabrizio had taken off his coat on entering the Trattoria.

"You have a waistcoat on you which might land us in trouble if anyone came in: that fine English cloth would attract attention." She gave our fugitive a stuff waistcoat, dyed black, which belonged to her husband. A tall young man came into the tavern by an inner door; he was dressed with a certain style.

THE LANDLADY

"This is my husband," said the landlady. "Pietro-Antonio," she said to her husband, "this gentleman is a friend of Lodovico; he met with an accident this morning, across the river, and he wants to get away to Ferrara."

"Oh, we'll get him there," said the husband with an air of great gentility; "we have Carlo-Giuseppe's boat."

Owing to another weakness in our hero which we shall confess as naturally as we have related his fear in the police office at the end of the bridge, there were tears in his eyes; he was profoundly moved by the perfect devotion which he found among these contadini; he thought also of this characteristic generosity of his aunt; he would have liked to be able to make these people's fortune. Lodovico returned, carrying a packet.

"So that's finished," the husband said to him in a friendly tone.

"It's not that," replied Lodovico in evident alarm, "people are beginning to talk about you, they noticed that you hesitated before turning down our vicolo and leaving the big street, like a man who was trying to hide."

"Go up quick to the bedroom," said the husband.

This room, which was very large and fine, had grey cloth instead of glass in its two windows; it contained four beds, each six feet wide and five feet high.

"Be quick! Be quick!" said Lodovico, "there is a swaggering fool of a constable who has just been posted here and began trying to make love to the pretty lady downstairs; and I've told him that when he goes travelling about the country he may find himself stopping a bullet. If the dog hears any mention of Your Excellency, he'll want to do us a bad turn, he will try to arrest you here, so as to get Teodolinda's Trattoria a bad name.

"What's this?" Lodovico went on, seeing Fabrizio's shirt all stained with blood and his wounds bandaged with handkerchiefs, "so the porco shewed fight, did he? That's a hundred times more than you need to get yourself arrested, and I haven't bought you any shirt." Without ceremony he opened the husband's wardrobe and gave one of his shirts to Fabrizio, who was soon attired like a prosperous countryman. Lodovico took down a net that was hanging on the wall, placed Fabrizio's clothes in the basket in which the fish are put, went downstairs at a run and hastened out of the house by a back door; Fabrizio followed him.

"Teodolinda," he called out as he passed by the bar, "hide what I've left upstairs, we are going to wait among the willows, and you, Pietro-Antonio, send us a boat quickly, we'll pay well for it."

Lodovico led Fabrizio across more than a score of ditches. There were planks, very long and very elastic, which served as bridges across the wider of these ditches; Lodovico took up these planks after crossing by them. On coming to the last canal he took up the plank with haste. "Now we can stop and breathe," he said; "that dog of a constable will have to go two leagues and more to reach Your Excellency. Why, you're quite pale," he said to Fabrizio; "I haven't forgotten the little bottle of brandy."

"It comes in most useful; the wound in my thigh is beginning to hurt me; and besides, I was in a fine fright in the police office by the bridge."

"I can well believe it," said Lodovico; "with a shirt covered in blood, as yours was, I can't conceive how you ever even dared to set foot in such a place.

Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, tr C. K. Scott Moncrieff