f Mantua,
who had no connection with the society, but was charged with having
heard from Pellico that he was a member. Pellico and his companions
were still lying untried in the horrible Venetian prisons, called,
from their leaden roofs, the 'Piombi,' when the events of 1821 gave
rise to a wholesale batch of new arrests. As soon as they knew of a
movement in Piedmont, the Lombard patriots prepared to co-operate in
it; that they were actually able to do nothing, was because it broke
out prematurely, and also, to some extent, because their head, Count
Confalonieri, was incapacitated by severe illness. But though their
activity profited not at all to the cause, it was fatal to
themselves. The Austrian Government had, as has been stated, a
correct general notion of what was going on, but at the beginning it
almost entirely lacked proofs which could inculpate individuals. In
the matter of arrests, however, there was one sovereign rule which all
the despotic Governments in Italy could and did follow in every
emergency: it was to lay hands on the most intelligent, distinguished
and upright members of the community. This plan never failed; these
were the patriots, the conspirators of those days. The second thing
which the Austrians made a rule of doing, was to extort from the
prisoners some incautious word, some shadow of an assent or admission
which would place them on the track of other compromised persons, and
furnish them with such scraps of evidence as they deemed sufficient,
in order to proceed against those already in their power. In their
secret examination of prisoners, they had reduced the system of
provocative interrogation to a science. They made use of every
subterfuge, and, above all, of fabricated confessions fathered on
friends of the prisoner, to extract the exclamation, the nod of the
head, the confused answer, which served their purpose. The prisoners,
men of good faith, and inexperienced in the arts of deception, were
but children in their hands, and scarcely one of them was not doomed
to be the involuntary cause of some other person's ruin--generally
that of a dear and intimate friend.

The first to be arrested was Gaetano De-Castillia, who went with the
Marquis Giorgio Pallavicini on a mission to Piedmont while the
revolution there was at its height. They even had an interview with
the Prince of Carignano, 'a pale and tall young man, with a charming
expression' (so Pallavicini describes him), but had obta