21 Teacher to the Nation For he hadn’t forgotten everything from those salons. Pagans often speak more wisely than they know. The French had rebelled against the arbitrary abuse of power; and no one in Italy wrote with more fire against that than didManzoni. French intellectuals had taken up the cause of the poor; and the hero and heroine of Manzoni’s greatest work, The Betrothed, are but a poor young tailor, Renzo, and his promised spouse, Lucia. Manzoni was not a sentimentalist. He saw that reason brought light, but reason led to God, who is light. Enlightenment without God is red in tooth and claw: men will but more efficiently tear one another to ribbons. The Church led men to the true light. Night, and a pistol Another scene. It is night, in a castle atop a mountain overlooking the town of Lecco. A man sits in his study. He is not young. His life is etched upon his face: a life of will, the exercise of power, an almost ascetic disdain for common pleasures, a keen intellect wasted. He is holding a girl in a roombelow. He has kidnapped her from a convent in Lecco, where she was hiding from a local nobleman, Don Rodrigo. She was promised in marriage to a peasant, a young tailor. Why has he done this? What is this Don Rodrigo to him? The man’s name arouses such fear that no one dares to breathe it. He is L’Innominato: “The
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