A letter from Nubius, head of the Alta Vendita, to Volpe dated 3rd April, 1824:
Dear Fox,
“but intelligent ears might well guess everything. It is the need to inspire fear or jealousy in some neighbor or friend that leads some of our brothers to such guilty indiscretions. The good success of our work depends on the deepest mystery, and in the Sales we must find the initiate, like the Christian of the Imitation , always ready for ama nesciri et pro nihilo computari . I’m not speaking for you, dear Fox; I’m sure you don’t need this advice. You must, as well as I, know the value of discretion and self-forgetfulness in the presence of the great interests of humanity; but even if, doing the examination of conscience, you find yourself in a contravention, please think about it carefully; for indiscretion is the mother of betrayal.
“There is a certain part of the clergy who bites the hook of our doctrines with a marvelous vivacity: it is the priest who will never have any other job than to say Mass, no other relief than to wait in the café for the bell to ring two hours after ‘ Hail Maryto go to bed. This priest, the greatest idler of all the idlers who clutter up the Eternal City, seems to me created to be the tool of the secret societies. He is poor, ardent, unemployed, ambitious; he knows himself disinherited of the goods of this world; he believes he is too far from the sun of protections to be able to warm his limbs, and is therefore always muttering against the unjust distribution of the honors and goods of the Church. To this ingredient of statesman priests, with no employment and no other character than a ragged cloak like their hat which has lost all trace of its primitive shape, we go on adding, as far as possible, a mixture of Corsican and Genoese priests who arrive in Rome with the tiara in the suitcase. Since Napoleon was born on their island, there is not one of these Corsicans who does not believe himself to be a papal Bonaparte. This ambition, which is now vulgar, has been favorable to us. It has opened up ways for us that would probably have been unknown to us for a long time. It serves us to consolidate, to illuminate the path we take, and their lamentations, enriched with all the comments and all the curses, offer us support points of which we would never have thought. It has opened up ways for us that would probably have been unknown to us for a long time. It serves us to consolidate, to illuminate the path we take, and their lamentations, enriched with all the comments and all the curses, offer us support points of which we would never have thought. It has opened up ways for us that would probably have been unknown to us for a long time. It serves us to consolidate, to illuminate the path we take, and their lamentations, enriched with all the comments and all the curses, offer us support points of which we would never have thought.
‘The earth ferments, the seed develops, but the harvest is still far away'”.