It was a change of tactics, which
the strictest moralist must have admitted to involve an improvement
in moral conduct, that got the hardly treated Diva into trouble.
The Austrian Government, as we all know, is, or was, a paternal
government-a very paternal government. And the governor who ruled in
the Lombard capital was quite as much intent on playing the
"governor," in the modern young gentleman's sense of the word, as
good old paternal Franz himself in his own Vienna. But this paternal
government was not of the sort which ignores the well-authenticated
fact that "young men will be young men." On the contrary, it
proceeded always, especially as regarded its more distinguished
sons, on the largest recognition of this truth. Wild-oats must be
sown; the "governor" knew it, and the law allowed it. But they
should be so sown as to involve as little prejudicial an after-crop,
as may be--as little prejudicial especially to those distinguished
sons who cannot be expected to refrain from such natural sowing.
And enchanting Divas may assist in such sowing, and be tolerated in
so doing by a not too rigidly exacting paternal government--may be
held in so assisting not to step beyond the sphere of social
functions assigned to them by the natural order of things in a
manner too offensive to the mild morality of a paternal government,
as long as such joint wild-oat cultivation shall in nowise threaten
to interfere with the future tillage of less wild and more
profitable crops by those distinguished young scions of noble races,
to whose youthful aberrations a paternal government is thus wisely
indulgent.
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