UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY Read Free

rickety wooden spiral staircases constructed to ensure that no space is left unused. Graft together a Frenchman and a Jew (perhaps of German origin), as you do with plants, and you end up with what we have now, the Third Republic.
     
    If I have become French, it's because I couldn't bear being Italian. Being Piedmontese (by birth), I felt I was only the caricature of a Gaul, but more narrow-minded. The people of Piedmont flinch at the idea of anything new. They are terrorized by the unexpected: to get them to move as far as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (though very few of Garibaldi's men were Piedmontese) required two Ligurians, a hothead like Garibaldi and an evil character like Mazzini. And let's not mention what I discovered when I was sent to Palermo (when was it? I'd have to work it out). Only that conceited fool Dumas loved those people, perhaps because they adored him more than did the French, who always regarded him as a half-caste. He was liked by the Neapolitans and Sicilians, who are mulattos themselves, not through the fault of a strumpet mother but through generations of history, born from the interbreeding of faithless Levantines, sweaty Arabs and degenerate Ostrogoths, who took the worst of each of their hybrid forebears — laziness from the Saracens, savagery from the Swabians, and from the Greeks, indecision and a taste for losing themselves in idle talk until they have split a hair into four. In any event, it's quite enough to see the guttersnipes in Naples who fascinate foreigners by gulping down spaghetti, which they stuff into their gullets with their fingers, spattering themselves with rancid tomato. I've never seen them do it, but I know.
    The Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, finds himself more at ease with a dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only in changing sides with the wind — and I saw what happened to those Bourbon generals the moment Garibaldi's adventurers and Piedmontese generals appeared.
    The fact is that the Italians have modeled themselves on the clergy, the only true government they've had since the time that pervert the last Roman emperor was buggered by the barbarians, because Christianity wore down the pride of the ancient race.
    Priests . . . How did I come to know them? At my grandfather's house, I think. I have a vague memory of shifty looks, decaying teeth, bad breath and sweaty hands trying to caress the back of my neck. Disgusting. They are idle and belong to a class as dangerous as thieves and vagrants. They become priests or friars only to live a life of idleness, and idleness is guaranteed by their number. If there were, say, one priest for every thousand people, they'd have so much to do that they couldn't laze about eating capons. And from the most unworthy priests the government chooses the stupidest, and appoints them bishops.
    You have them around as soon as you are born, when they baptize you; you have them at school, if your parents have been so fervent as to send you to them; then first communion, catechism, confirmation; there's a priest on your wedding day to tell you what to do in bed, and the day after at confession to ask you how many times you did it, so he can arouse himself behind the grille. They talk with horror about sex, but every day you see them getting out of an incestuous bed without so much as washing their hands, and they eat and drink their Lord, then shit and piss him out.
    They keep saying that their kingdom is not of this world, then take everything they can lay their hands on. Civilization will never reach perfection until the last stone of the last church has fallen on the last priest, and the earth is rid of that evil lot.
    The communists have spread the idea that religion is the opium of the people. That's correct, because it is used to keep a lid on people's temptations, and without religion there would be twice the number of people on the barricades, whereas