The palace retained by Zanoni was in one of the less frequented quarters of the city.  It still stands, now ruined and dismantled, a monument of the splendour of a chivalry long since vanished from Naples, with the lordly races of the Norman and the Spaniard.

As he entered the rooms reserved for his private hours, two Indians, in the dress of their country, received him at the threshold with the grave salutations of the East.  They had accompanied him from the far lands in which, according to rumour, he had for many years fixed his home.  But they could communicate nothing to gratify curiosity or justify suspicion.  They spoke no language but their own.  With the exception of these two his princely retinue was composed of the native hirelings of the city, whom his lavish but imperious generosity made the implicit creatures of his will.  In his house, and in his habits, so far as they were seen, there was nothing to account for the rumours which were circulated abroad.  He was not, as we are told of Albertus Magnus or the great Leonardo da Vinci, served by airy forms; and no brazen image, the invention of magic mechanism, communicated to him the influences of the stars.  None of the apparatus of the alchemist—­the crucible and the metals—­gave solemnity to his chambers, or accounted for his wealth; nor did he even seem to interest himself in those serener studies which might be supposed to colour his peculiar conversation with abstract notions, and often with recondite learning.  No books spoke to him in his solitude; and if ever he had drawn from them his knowledge, it seemed now that the only page he read was the wide one of Nature, and that a capacious and startling memory supplied the rest.  Yet was there one exception to what in all else seemed customary and commonplace, and which, according to the authority we have prefixed to this chapter, might indicate the follower of the occult sciences.  Whether at Rome or Naples, or, in fact, wherever his abode, he selected one room remote from the rest of the house, which was fastened by a lock scarcely larger than the seal of a ring, yet which sufficed to baffle the most cunning instruments of the locksmith:  at least, one of his servants, prompted by irresistible curiosity, had made the attempt in vain; and though he had fancied it was tried in the most favourable time for secrecy,—­not a soul near, in the dead of night, Zanoni himself absent from home,—­yet his superstition, or his conscience, told him the reason why the next day the Major Domo quietly dismissed him.  He compensated himself for this misfortune by spreading his own story, with a thousand amusing exaggerations.  He declared that, as he approached the door, invisible hands seemed to pluck him away; and that when he touched the lock, he was struck, as by a palsy, to the ground.  One surgeon, who heard the tale, observed, to the distaste of the wonder-mongers, that possibly Zanoni made a dexterous use of electricity.  Howbeit, this room, once so secured, was never entered save by Zanoni himself.