Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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At this point the Marquis caught sight of a letter he had overlooked, a letter bearing an Italian postmark.

“From Mother,” he said.

As he read it his expression lightened. He even smiled. Yet this letter too had complaints to make. But they were gentle, resigned.

The echoes of his mother’s voice, awakened in his memory by her words, called up before him the old white palace of the Torre Biancas, one of the monuments of his distant Tuscany. Huge, in ruins now, surrounded by gardens of the past, with vast halls whose floors were tiled, and whose ceilings were gay with paintings of mythological scenes, it had long contained a wealth of famous paintings that hung on its bare walls, marking out their squares and rectangles in the dust gathering for centuries on the slowly crumbling plaster.

But the pictures and the priceless bits of statuary had already vanished from their places when the Marquis’ father took possession of his ancestral halls. His only resource for an income lay in the archives of the Torre Biancas. Autographs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and other Florentines who had had correspondence with his ancestors, paid the expenses of one generation....