On such questions a child of Odo’s age could obviously have no pronounced opinion, the less so as Filomena’s facts varied according to the seasons or her mood, so that on a day of east wind or when the worms were not hatching well, she had been known to affirm that the pagans had painted the chapel under Virgil’s instruction, to commemorate the Christians they had tortured.  In spite of the distance to which these conflicting statements seemed to relegate them, Odo somehow felt as though these pale strange people—­youths with ardent faces under their small round caps, damsels with wheat-coloured hair and boys no bigger than himself, holding spotted dogs in leash—­were younger and nearer to him than the dwellers on the farm:  Jacopone the farmer, the shrill Filomena, who was Odo’s foster-mother, the hulking bully their son and the abate who once a week came out from Pianura to give Odo religious instruction and who dismissed his questions with the invariable exhortation not to pry into matters that were beyond his years.  Odo had loved the pictures in the chapel all the better since the abate, with a shrug, had told him they were nothing but old rubbish, the work of the barbarians.

Life at Pontesordo was in truth not very pleasant for an ardent and sensitive little boy of nine, whose remote connection with the reigning line of Pianura did not preserve him from wearing torn clothes and eating black bread and beans out of an earthen bowl on the kitchen doorstep.

“Go ask your mother for new clothes!” Filomena would snap at him, when his toes came through his shoes and the rents in his jacket-sleeves had spread beyond darning.  “These you are wearing are my Giannozzo’s, as you well know, and every rag on your back is mine, if there were any law for poor folk, for not a copper of pay for your keep or a stitch of clothing for your body have we had these two years come Assumption—.  What’s that?  You can’t ask your mother, you say, because she never comes here?  True enough—­fine ladies let their brats live in cow-dung, but they must have Indian carpets under their own feet.  Well, ask the abate, then—­he has lace ruffles to his coat and a naked woman painted on his snuff box—­What?  He only holds his hands up when you ask?  Well, then, go ask your friends on the chapel-walls—­maybe they’ll give you a pair of shoes—­though Saint Francis, for that matter, was the father of the discalced, and would doubtless tell you to go without!” And she would add with a coarse laugh:  “Don’t you know that the discalced are shod with gold?”

It was after such a scene that the beggar-noble, as they called him at Pontesordo, would steal away to the chapel and, seating himself on an upturned basket or a heap of pumpkins, gaze long into the face of the mournful saint.