The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich (top fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

“But really to rouse the town against the Jesuits one must speak plainly; and if you do that how will you evade the censorship?”

“I wouldn’t evade it; I would defy it.”

“You would print the pamphlets anonymously? That’s all very well, but the fact is, we have all seen enough of the clandestine press to know⁠—”

“I did not mean that. I would print the pamphlets openly, with our names and addresses, and let them prosecute us if they dare.”

“The project is a perfectly mad one,” Grassini exclaimed. “It is simply putting one’s head into the lion’s mouth out of sheer wantonness.”

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid!” Galli cut in sharply; “we shouldn’t ask you to go to prison for our pamphlets.”

“Hold your tongue, Galli!” said Riccardo. “It’s not a question of being afraid; we’re all as ready as you are to go to prison if there’s any good to be got by it, but it is childish to run into danger for nothing. For my part, I have an amendment to the proposal to suggest.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I think we might contrive, with care, to fight the Jesuits without coming into collision with the censorship.”

“I don’t see how you are going to manage it.”

“I think that it is possible to clothe what one has to say in so roundabout a form that⁠—”

“That the censorship won’t understand it? And then you’ll expect every poor artisan and labourer to find out the meaning by the light of the ignorance and stupidity that are in him! That doesn’t sound very practicable.”

“Martini, what do you think?” asked the professor, turning to a broad-shouldered man with a great brown beard, who was sitting beside him.

“I think that I will reserve my opinion till I have more facts to go upon. It’s a question of trying experiments and seeing what comes of them.”

“And you, Sacconi?”

“I should like to hear what Signora Bolla has to say. Her suggestions are always valuable.”

Everyone turned to the only woman in the room, who had been sitting on the sofa, resting her chin on one hand and listening in silence to the discussion. She had deep, serious black eyes, but as she raised them now there was an unmistakable gleam of amusement in them.

“I am afraid,” she said; “that I disagree with everybody.”

“You always do, and the worst of it is that you are always right,” Riccardo put in.

“I think it is quite true that we must fight the Jesuits somehow; and if we can’t do it with one weapon we must with another. But mere defiance is a feeble weapon and evasion a cumbersome one. As for petitioning, that is a child’s toy.”

“I hope, signora,” Grassini interposed, with a solemn face; “that you are not suggesting such methods as⁠—assassination?”

Martini tugged at his big moustache and Galli sniggered outright. Even the grave young woman could not repress a smile.

“Believe me,” she said, “that if I were ferocious enough to think of such things I should not be childish enough to talk about them. But the deadliest weapon I know is ridicule. If you can once succeed in rendering the Jesuits ludicrous, in making people laugh at them and their claims, you have conquered them without bloodshed.”

“I believe you are right, as far as that goes,” Fabrizi said; “but I don’t see how you are going to carry the thing through.”

“Why should we not be able to carry it through?” asked Martini. “A satirical thing has a better chance of getting over the censorship difficulty than a serious one; and, if it must be cloaked, the average reader is more likely to find out the double meaning of an apparently silly joke than of a scientific or economic treatise.”

“Then is your suggestion, signora, that we should issue satirical pamphlets, or attempt to run a comic paper? That last, I am sure, the censorship would never allow.”

“I don’t mean exactly either. I believe a series of small satirical leaflets, in verse or prose, to be sold cheap or distributed free about the streets, would be very useful. If we could find a clever artist who would enter into the spirit of the thing, we might have them illustrated.”

“It’s a capital idea, if only one could carry it out; but if the thing is to be done at all it must be well done. We should want a first-class satirist; and where are we to get him?”

“You see,” added Lega, “most of us are serious writers; and, with all respect to the company, I am afraid that a general attempt to be humorous would present the spectacle of an elephant trying to dance the tarantella.”

“I never suggested that we should all rush into work for which we are unfitted. My idea was that we should try to find a really gifted satirist⁠—there must be one to be got somewhere in Italy, surely⁠—and offer to provide the necessary funds. Of course we should have to know something of the man and make sure that he would work on lines with which we could agree.”

“But where are you going to find him? I can count up the satirists of any real talent on the fingers of one hand; and none of them are available. Giusti wouldn’t accept; he is fully occupied as it is. There are one or two good men in Lombardy, but they write only in the Milanese dialect⁠—”

“And moreover,” said Grassini, “the Tuscan people can be influenced in better ways than this. I am sure that it would be felt as, to say the least, a want of political savoir faire if we were to treat this solemn question of civil and religious liberty as a subject for trifling. Florence is not a mere wilderness of factories and money-getting like London, nor a haunt of idle luxury like Paris. It is a city with a great history⁠—”

“So was Athens,” she interrupted, smiling; “but it was ‘rather sluggish from its size and needed a gadfly