While confessing his guilt to Camilla, Leonardo has excused it by an emphatic delineation of Michiella’s magic sway over him. (Leonardo, in fact, is your small modern Italian Machiavelli, overmatched in cunning, for the reason that he is always at a last moment the victim of his poor bit of heart or honesty:  he is devoid of the inspiration of great patriotic aims.) If Michiella (Austrian intrigue) has any love, it is for such a tool.  She cannot afford to lose him.  She pleads for him; and, as Camilla is silent on his account, the cynical magnanimity of Camillo is predisposed to spare a fangless snake.  Michiella withdraws him from the naked sword to the back of the stage.  The terrible repudiation scene ensues, in which Camillo casts off his wife.  If it was a puzzle to one Italian half of the audience, the other comprehended it perfectly, and with rapture.  It was thus that young Italy had too often been treated by the compromising, merely discontented, dallying aristocracy.  Camilla cries to him, ‘Have faith in me! have faith in me! have faith in me!’ That is the sole answer to his accusations, his threats of eternal loathing, and generally blustering sublimities.  She cannot defend herself; she only knows her innocence.  He is inexorable, being the guilty one of the two.  Turning from him with crossed arms, Camilla sings: 

’Mother! it is my fate that I should know Thy miseries, and in thy footprints go.  Grief treads the starry places of the earth:  In thy long track I feel who gave me birth.  I am alone; a wife without a lord; My home is with the stranger—­home abhorr’d!—­But that I trust to meet thy spirit there.  Mother of Sorrows! joy thou canst not share:  So let me wander in among the tombs, Among the cypresses and the withered blooms.  Thy soul is with dead suns:  there let me be; A silent thing that shares thy veil with thee.’

The wonderful viol-like trembling of the contralto tones thrilled through the house.  It was the highest homage to Vittoria that no longer any shouts arose nothing but a prolonged murmur, as when one tells another a tale of deep emotion, and all exclamations, all ulterior thoughts, all gathered tenderness of sensibility, are reserved for the close, are seen heaping for the close, like waters above a dam.  The flattery of beholding a great assembly of human creatures bound glittering in wizard subservience to the voice of one soul, belongs to the artist, and is the cantatrice’s glory, pre-eminent over whatever poor glory this world gives.  She felt it, but she felt it as something apart.  Within her was the struggle of Italy calling to Italy:  Italy’s shame, her sadness, her tortures, her quenchless hope, and the view of Freedom.  It sent her blood about her body in rebellious volumes.  Once it completely strangled her notes.  She dropped the ball of her chin in her throat; paused without ceremony; and recovered herself.  Vittoria had too severe an artistic instinct to court reality; and as much as she could she from that moment corrected the underlinings of Agostino’s libretto.