THE OTHER HALF-ROME is chiefly impressed by the spectacle of a young wife and mother butchered by her husband in cold blood:  and can only think of her as having been throughout a victim.  It does not absolve Violante, but it allows something for honest parental feeling in the old couple’s desire for a child; and something for the good done to this human waif by its adoption into a decent home.  According to this version, it is the Count and his brother who lay the matrimonial trap, and the Comparini parents and child who fall into it.  “The grim Guido is at first kept in the background.  Abate Paolo makes the proposal.  He is oily and deferential, and flatters poor foolish Violante, and dazzles her at the same time.  ‘His elder brother,’ he says, ’is longing to escape from Rome and its pomps and glare.  He wants his empty old palace at Arezzo, and his breezy villa among the vines,’—­and here the emptiness of both is described so as to sound like wealth.  ’Poor Guido! he is always harping upon his home.  But he wants a wife to take there—­a wife not quite empty-handed, since he is not rich for his rank—­but above all, with a true tender heart and an innocent soul—­one who will be a child to his mother, and fall into his own ways.  Many a parent would be glad to welcome him as a son-in-law, but report tells him that Violante’s daughter is just the girl he wants.’”

“The marriage takes place.  Foolish Pietro is talked over and strips himself of everything he has.  He and his wife have no choice but to go and live with their son-in-law and his mother and brother.  They meet with nothing under his roof but starvation, insult, and cruelty, and return home after a few months, duped and beggared, to ask hospitality of those whom they had once entertained.  Violante, overwhelmed by these misfortunes, confesses that Pompilia is not her child, and Pietro proclaims the fact; not that he wishes to leave Pompilia in the lurch, but because he thinks this a sure way of getting her back.—­Count Guido is clearly not the man to wish to retain as his wife a base-born girl without a dowry, and whom he has never loved.—­But the case must be settled by law, the law pronounces in Count Guido’s favour so far as the actual marriage portion is concerned; and Count Guido clearly lays his plans so as to half-drive and half-tempt his wife into the kind of misconduct which will rid him of her without prejudicing his right to what she has brought him.”

This half of Rome accepts Pompilia’s story of all that led to her flight, and Caponsacchi’s statement that he assisted in it simply to save her life.  It thinks the husband’s intrigues sufficiently proved by the fact that the Canon owns to having received letters which the wife denies having written, and which must, therefore, have been forged.  Count Guido, it declares, has had no wrongs to avenge, and supposing he had wrongs, he has adopted too convenient a mode of avenging them.  “He demands protection from the law, and the moment its balance trembles against him he flies out of court, declaring that wounded honour can only be cured by the sword.  At all events he has given the law plenty to do:  three courts at work for him, and an appeal to the Pope besides.  If any law is binding on mankind it is that such as he shall be made an end of.  He is the common enemy of his fellow-men.”