Don Emanuele and Lelia

Don Emanuele and Lelia are connected chiefly through his attempt to shape her conduct without telling her the full purpose of his plans. He presents himself as a guide concerned with her eternal welfare, but arranges a sequence of pilgrimages, permissions, and encounters intended to place her in a morally charged situation. Their relationship is therefore less a direct exchange than a contest over who will direct Lelia’s choices—and over whether spiritual ends can justify deception.

The Chaplain’s Claim to Guide Lelia

Don Emanuele’s concern for Lelia is framed in religious terms. Before acting, he prays for help and light against what he sees as the devil’s opposition to his designs for her salvation. In his private reckoning, Donna Fedele and Gorlago have become opposing influences upon the girl: he casts the former as proud and the latter as lustful. This framing gives his intervention the force of a spiritual struggle, but it also places Lelia’s own understanding and judgment in the background. He sees himself as a fisherman of souls, interpreting tangled circumstances as a providential problem whose right solution he must discover.

The morning after a conversation between Lelia and the archpriest, Don Emanuele reports that Lelia may be willing to accompany Siora Bettina Fantuzzo on a visit to Monte Berico and perhaps a journey to Castelletto. He tells Bettina to attribute this information to the archpriest, although it came from Don Emanuele himself. When Bettina hesitates over the false attribution, he directs her to say what he has instructed, assuring her that the Lord wills it. The episode establishes the method that defines his connection with Lelia: he does not merely advise her through an intermediary but scripts what that intermediary should say, making concealment part of his pastoral strategy.

A Pilgrimage Turned into a Plan

Don Emanuele’s instructions to Bettina grow more specific as the pair walk toward Lago. He asks her to keep the plan secret even from the archpriest, presenting the secrecy as necessary because Providence has shown him a narrow path toward the salvation of two souls. Bettina is troubled by the prospect of withholding something from her brother-in-law, Don Tita, but submits to Don Emanuele’s authority. His confidence in the plan is striking: although Lelia’s cooperation, her father’s permission, and other people’s actions remain uncertain, he speaks as though the future can already be laid out.

The proposed itinerary begins with a pilgrimage to Monte Berico. Bettina is to observe Lelia’s wishes about receiving the sacraments; afterward they are to go to the station, where Bettina will say that she feels unwell and has changed her mind about Castelletto. Instead, she will suggest attending Mass at the Santo in Padua. Once there, she is to persuade Lelia to visit Casa Camin, ostensibly out of consideration for her father, Girolamo da Camin. Don Emanuele says that someone is staying there who should not be: Gorlago, whose announced destination had been Lombardy and who was said to have separated from Girolamo. He insists that Lelia’s meeting with her is necessary, but withholds the reason from Bettina.

Lelia, Her Father, and the Inheritance

The stakes of Don Emanuele’s scheme are not only devotional. Lelia is the universal heir to Marcello Trento’s estate, while her father’s arrival and claim on her are already part of the unsettled family situation. Girolamo da Camin has sent word that he is her father and is coming to see her; Lelia acknowledges that she is his daughter and that she is twenty years and a few months old. Don Emanuele’s planned visit to Casa Camin places this inheritance and the father-daughter relationship inside his religious design.

The narration makes his material calculation explicit. Don Emanuele hopes that contact with Gorlago will be so repellent to Lelia that she will take refuge in religion; one practical consequence, as he imagines it, would be that the Trento wealth would not feed her father’s vices. He has thus secretly abandoned Girolamo as an ally, although his plan also includes the possibility that the scandal in Padua may have spiritual benefit. The arrangement is designed around an encounter Lelia does not know is being engineered. Her father is presented as the ostensible reason for the visit, while the concealed purpose is to confront her with the relationship between him and Gorlago.

Authority, Scruple, and Irony

Bettina’s distress gives the plan a measure of its moral cost. She fears the lies and the scenes that might follow, and admits that she has recoiled from thinking about the relationship between Girolamo and Gorlago. Don Emanuele answers her hesitation not with an explanation but with a solemn gesture of submission to a higher will. The narrator, however, makes clear that he has reasons he does not disclose: he believes the shock of a degrading encounter may turn Lelia toward the Lord and prevent the inheritance from financing her father’s conduct. His claim that the plan is providential therefore coexists with a calculated use of concealment and emotional shock.

Don Emanuele’s conduct is further set against his own concern for ecclesiastical standing. At a meal, he praises Don Tita, whose election as bishop is public, while privately regarding him as mediocre and easily led; he expects to become the new bishop’s secretary, only to be discarded by the man who had flattered him. The contrast does not erase his concern for Lelia, but it complicates the authority with which he directs her: his religious language serves a sincere sense of spiritual purpose and a practical, self-interested world of clerical maneuvering.

Lelia’s Agency and the Limits of the Evidence

The plan repeatedly depends on Lelia’s assent while trying to manage the information on which that assent would rest. Don Emanuele instructs Bettina to respect Lelia’s wishes concerning the sacraments, yet also directs her to invent a change of travel plans and to present a visit to Casa Camin as a filial courtesy. At the villa, he gives Lelia a blessed rosary, said to be an errand entrusted to him by the bishop, for her use when approaching the sacraments. This gesture offers a visible sign of religious care beside the concealed itinerary being prepared for her.

The evidence establishes Don Emanuele’s intentions and the machinery he sets in motion, but does not establish the eventual result of the proposed encounter. Their relationship is consequently defined by an unresolved tension: he seeks Lelia’s salvation by arranging the circumstances around her, while the plan’s reliance on secrecy risks treating her less as a moral agent than as someone to be moved toward a desired conclusion. The episode makes that tension central to his role as her would-be spiritual guide.