Donna Fedele and Don Emanuele's opposition

Donna Fedele and Don Emanuele's opposition is a struggle over the care and future of Lelia Camin. Fedele offers practical protection without treating Lelia’s vulnerability as permission to command her; Don Emanuele presents paternal authority and religious instruction as remedies, while his private resentments and ambitions compromise that professed care. The contrast makes their conflict more than a contest between two advisers: it tests when spiritual concern becomes an effort to govern another person’s life.

The Dispute over Lelia

Don Emanuele regards Lelia’s attachment to Fedele as the central danger. In conversation with the physician Girolamo Molesin, he argues that the girl must be separated from Fedele’s influence and returned to her father’s home, even by force of law if necessary. He attributes Lelia’s resistance to her father to Fedele’s suggestions, and imagines that the parish priest and the priest’s devout sister could cultivate the religious impulse he believes lies dormant in her. In his account, Lelia is indifferent to wealth and ready to surrender it to her father. His proposed rescue therefore depends on taking her out of the household and relationships in which she has found support.

Fedele’s conduct supplies a competing answer to what Lelia needs. When Lelia’s father, Girolamo da Camin, visits, Fedele makes Lelia receive him, despite preparing her for the possibility that she may refuse a meeting. The encounter is strained: Lelia stands rigidly while her father kisses her and offers her money, and Fedele does not disguise that the girl is unwell. Her intervention does not erase Lelia’s estrangement, but it allows the meeting to occur without pretending that a paternal claim has already restored intimacy.

The difference sharpens when Lelia is with Massimo Alberti in Valsolda. Fedele insists that Lelia cannot remain there and plans to take her away, even though Lelia begs to stay and dreads returning to Velo d’Astico. Fedele considers a safer alternative: if her father permits, Lelia might stay with Fedele’s cousin in Santhià while Fedele continues to Turin. After discussion, she gives way on the question of paternal permission and makes practical arrangements for the journey. Her decision is restrictive, but it is directed toward shelter and a viable destination, not toward isolating Lelia for a vocation chosen on her behalf.

The Motives Beneath Don Emanuele’s Piety

The narrative complicates Don Emanuele’s public language of religious zeal by tracing the emotions beneath it. He feels rancor toward Fedele for her religious independence, her friendship with the suspect priest Don Aurelio, and her protection of Massimo, whom he regards as a troublesome modernist. He renames this hostility priestly zeal in his own conscience and prays for Fedele’s salvation; yet the account shows that personal resentment repeatedly presses through that pious justification. He wants to undertake the effort himself because he considers his superior too mild.

His response to Lelia is similarly entangled. The scent of roses she wears in the confessional troubles and irritates him; he has told her not to wear perfume, then advised her to confess to the parish priest instead. He imagines her shut away in a convent, removed from love and worldly pleasure. After learning that she had contemplated suicide, supposedly to escape life with a disreputable father who had sold her, he turns that crisis into an opening for a religious plan: separate her from Fedele, make use of her isolation at the Montanina villa, and foster a vocation to the cloister. His scheme also promises, in his thinking, to remove the scandal surrounding Carolina Gorlago. The account does not present this plan as simple disinterested guidance; it reveals how his severity, envy, and discomfort with female desire mingle with his religious convictions.

Authority, Protection, and Material Dependence

The opposition is shaped by the limits Lelia faces as well as by the advisers’ beliefs. The letter announcing her inheritance identifies her as twenty years and a few months old, while also reporting her father’s claim that she is a minor. Don Emanuele’s appeal to paternal rights thus carries immediate practical force: Lelia’s ability to choose where to live cannot be treated as wholly independent of her father’s authority. The conflict over spiritual influence is inseparable from the question of who can control her residence and resources.

Fedele’s protection is practical rather than absolute. She has to manage Lelia’s meetings, travel, and need for a safe place, and she recognizes that her role as a self-appointed maternal figure does not give her the same freedom as a biological mother. In Valsolda, she refuses to let Lelia stay with Massimo, requires him to leave for Dasio, and asks to see the two together later in her presence. At the same time, she listens to Massimo’s account of Lelia’s letter to her father, accepts that the expected reply may not be negative, and arranges the Santhià journey around Lelia’s fear of going back to Velo. Her care includes limits, but it also responds to the girl’s stated distress and changing circumstances.

A Conflict of Religious Claims

Don Emanuele’s attempt to direct Lelia belongs to a wider contest over religious authority. He objects to Fedele’s independence in matters of belief and to her protection of Massimo, whose crisis of faith is laid out in a letter to Fedele. Massimo describes doubts developing through theological and institutional conflict, and fears that a break with Catholicism would leave him with no positive religious certainty. Don Emanuele’s impulse to manage Lelia’s spiritual future therefore stands against a world in which belief is already unstable and cannot be settled merely by assigning a young woman to a more obedient household.

The narrative’s later treatment of Don Aurelio’s words at Benedetto’s burial offers a pointed contrast to Don Emanuele’s certainty. Don Aurelio acknowledges that a religious speaker may err, emphasizes the distinction between theological mistakes and a life devoted to the Gospel, and asks listeners to forgive rather than judge what they do not understand. That appeal does not resolve the opposition between Fedele and Don Emanuele, but it makes its moral stakes clearer: Fedele’s protection leaves room for Lelia’s particular needs, whereas Don Emanuele’s plan claims to know what her suffering means and what future should follow from it. Their conflict exposes the danger of turning religious authority into personal dominion, especially when the person being directed has little control over her own home.