"For my part I don't believe that La Bianca is dead at all. What
proof have we of the fact? Somebody has been told that somebody else
heard some other pumpkin-head say so. Report, signori miei, is an
habitual liar, and I for one never believe a word she says without
evidence of the truth of it," said the Conte Luigi Spadoni, a man
who was known to make a practice of reading French novels, and was
therefore held to be an esprit fort and a philosopher, in accordance
with which character he always professed indiscriminate disbelief in
everything.
"Oh come, Spadoni, that won't do this time. Bah, you are the only
living soul in the town that don't believe it then. Evidence, per
Dio! Go and ask the men at the Porta Nuova, who received the body,
when the contadini brought it in," cried a dozen voices at once.
"But Spadoni has the weakness of being so excessively credulous,"
said a bald young man with gold spectacles, looking up from a game
of chess he was playing in a corner.
"Who, I? I credulous? That is a good one! Why I said, man alive,
that I disbelieved it," cried Spadoni, eagerly.
"I know it, and very credulous indeed it seems to me, to believe
that all the people, who say they have seen the prima donna's dead
body, should be mistaken in such a fact, or conspiring without
motive to declare it falsely.
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