It was always he who answered this question; he would give a carefully considered account of what he knew, taking care, however, to present a well-arranged little bouquet of news from which his cautious tweezers had extracted both thorns (descriptions of many a jaunt to Naples, allusions to the lovely legs of Aurora Schwarzwald, dancer at the San Carlo) and premature buds (“send news of the Signorina Angelica” —“In Ferdinand II’s study I found a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto which reminded me of the Signorina Sedàra”). So he would put together an insipid picture of Tancredi which bore very
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