Notes on novelists, with some other notes, by Henry James.

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NOTES ON NOVELISTS

account (as full accounts were conceived in those days) of the
trial before the Roman courts, with inquiries and judgments by
the Tuscan authorities intermixed, of a certain Count Guido
Franceschini of Arezzo, decapitated, in company with four confederates-these latter hanged-on February 22, i698, for the
murder of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her ostensible parents, Pietro and Violante of that ilk.
The circumstances leading to this climax were primarily his
marriage to Pompilia, some years before, in Rome-she being
then but in her thirteenth year-under the impression, fostered
in him by the elder pair, that she was their own child and on
this head heiress to moneys settled on them from of old in the
event of their having a child. They had in fact had none, and
had, in substitution, invented, so to speak, Pompilia, the luckless base-born baby of a woman of lamentable character easily
induced to part with her for cash. They bring up the hapless
creature as their daughter, and as their daughter they marry
her, in Rome, to the middle-aged and impecunious Count
Guido, a rapacious and unscrupulous fortune-seeker by whose
superior social position, as we say, dreadfully decaduto though
he be, they are dazzled out of all circumspection. The girl,
innocent, ignorant, bewildered, scared and purely passive, is
taken home by her husband to Arezzo, where she is at first
attended by Pietro and Violante and where the direst disappointment await the three. Count Guido proves the basest
of men and his home a place of terror and of torture, from.
which at the age of seventeen, and shortly prior to her giving
birth to an heir to the house, such as it is, she is rescued by a
pitying witness of her misery, Canon Caponsacchi, a man of
the world and adorning it, yet in holy orders, as men of the
world in Italy might then be, who clandestinely helps her, at
peril of both their lives, back to Rome, and of whom it is
attested that he has had no other relation with her but this of
distinguished and all-disinterested friend in need. The pretended parents have at an early stage thrown up their benighted
game, fleeing from the rigour of their dupe's domestic rule, dis