To these arts of statecraft he added a quite unusual legal acumen and forensic ability.  For the last fifteen years he had been in receipt of large annual retaining fees from the principal commercial firms of the country; that of one shipping company alone amounted to fifty thousand francs.  They found it worth their while since, without doing a stroke of work for them, he gave his tacit support to their most nefarious undertakings.  A useful man!  As a lawyer in private cases his reputation was tremendous.  Judges and juries had been known to faint with emotion at his dramatic gestures, his fiery eloquence.  He could pull anybody out of a scrape.  Wherever he spoke the Court was crowded to listen to his impassioned arguments, to look upon the cold fire of his blue eyes, his carefully adjusted dress, his fair hair turning to grey, his smooth face which he kept shaven for no other reason—­so he used to declare—­than because he reverenced the fashions of the old papal regime.  “Just like an Englishman,” people said.

He had lately put on flesh; it inspired confidence.  Moreover, he never married; that also was something out of the common—­it pointed to independence, to lack of ordinary human frailties.  In short, he was so perfect a compound of vice and intelligence that even his dearest friends could not put their finger on the exact spot where the one began and the other ended.  And the whole of this unique mixture was placed at the disposal of the Vatican.  Don Giustino was the implacable enemy of modernism, a living disproof of the vulgar assertion that freemasonry is the sole key to success in modern Italy.  A formidable man!  And growing more formidable every day, as his wealth increased.  His income was already such that he could afford to be honest; nothing but the force of old habits kept him from developing into a positive saint.

It stands to reason that a person of this caliber would have sniffed at a paltry remuneration of five thousand francs offered by an obscure country priest.  But Don Giustino was a good son of the Church.  He had never forgotten the recommendation of his old patron to succour the humble and distressed; he specialized, as a lawyer, in defending murderers and rescuing them from the secular arm.  They were enthusiasts suffering under a sense of wrong; they belonged to the class of the honest poor; they were victims of governmental greed and social injustice.  Motives, not deeds! he would say.  And the motives of the poor must be judged by other standards than those of the rich.  They have other lives, other temptations.  Trust the people.  The people, under proper guidance of the priests. . . .