Lelia Camin and Girolamo Camin

Lelia Camin and Girolamo Camin are father and daughter by birth, but their relationship is defined by mistrust rather than affection. Lelia’s inheritance from the Trento household brings their estrangement into direct conflict with her father’s financial interests: he seeks renewed access to her and her property, while she fears that his presence will compromise the independence she has tried to preserve.

Identity and Family Background

Lelia is the daughter of Girolamo Camin and Chiara Camin, who were born in Padua and used the name da Camin. Her father, known familiarly as Momi, is described as a failed and repeatedly bankrupt businessman who had also become involved in politics. His household offered Lelia little security: after Chiara separated from him, Girolamo kept a coarse woman as housekeeper and tolerated her acting as though she were its mistress. Chiara, meanwhile, settled in Milan with an elderly Austrian man, inherited a modest fortune after his death, and later opened her home to clergy and religious women while allowing them to believe she was a widow. The family’s outward respectability thus conceals histories that Lelia comes to regard with contempt.

Lelia’s judgment of her parents begins early. By twelve, through what she saw and heard at home and through an acute awareness of tendencies she believed she recognized in herself, she felt she understood them. She despised those tendencies and her mother, and that contempt sometimes showed through the strict correctness of her manners. Her rejection of her parents is therefore not a sudden response to the later inheritance dispute; it is rooted in a long-formed sense of moral distance from the household in which she grew up.

Separation and the Trento Household

When Lelia was sixteen, she believed she returned Andrea Trento’s love. After Andrea’s death, his parents took her into their home, Montanina, so that she would be protected from the world’s corruptions and remain close to their dead son’s memory. Girolamo accepted this arrangement in return for money. Lelia recognized the transaction concealed in her father’s presentation of it as a sacrifice for her benefit. She briefly recoiled, feeling that her family’s honor had been entrusted to an unworthy father, but her disgust with the conditions at home and her grief for Andrea led her to accept.

At Montanina, Lelia understood that one condition of the arrangement was that Girolamo could not enter the house. She felt both relief and pain at that exclusion. Her residence with the Trentos was not a legal adoption, and she initially behaved toward them with reserve, believing herself valued chiefly as a relic of Andrea. Yet the separation from her father also gave her a form of protection: his exclusion from Montanina kept him away from a place she feared he would contaminate by his presence. Her relation to Girolamo was thus shaped not only by personal disgust but by the practical boundary that made her new home possible.

Inheritance and Competing Claims

Lelia’s refusal to become Girolamo’s financial resource continues after she has settled at Montanina. She is determined not to take the Trento property, which is substantial though not enormous. She understands her place in the household as a gift to Andrea’s parents in memory of him, not as a bargain entitling her to further compensation. She also fears being judged a calculating flatterer or fortune hunter. If Marcello Trento leaves her an inheritance, she anticipates a distasteful struggle with her father, who writes her ignoble letters asking for money and feigns poverty. She imagines him arriving at Montanina after Marcello’s death, clinging to the estate and invading the home from which he had been barred.

Marcello, for his part, worries that Girolamo and Chiara might use their daughter’s inheritance to gain entry to Montanina. He considers how to protect the house but recognizes that Lelia would refuse an explicit testamentary condition or penalty compelling her to exclude her parents. Their conflict is therefore present even before Girolamo returns in person: Lelia’s fear of him helps shape Marcello’s proposed arrangements, while Marcello’s concern confirms how closely her inheritance is bound up with the family she has left behind.

After Marcello’s death, the will is opened before the magistrate of Schio. A letter from the estate’s agent reports that Lelia is the universal heir and that the maid Teresina Scotz receives a daily legacy of five lire. The same letter relays a telegram from Girolamo in Padua: he offers condolences, declares himself Lelia’s father, calls her a minor, and announces that he will arrive that evening. Lelia, the agent adds, has acknowledged that she is Girolamo’s daughter but stated that she is twenty years old and a few months. The difference between her age and her father’s assertion makes the question of dependence especially pointed: he invokes a paternal claim at the moment her inheritance gives that claim material force.

Girolamo’s Return and Lelia’s Resistance

Before visiting Lelia, Girolamo has a financial plan. With only a few months of his remaining authority over her, he intends to appropriate as much movable wealth as possible, present himself as humble and contrite so she will grant him generous support once she comes of age, and persuade his associate Francesco Molesin that the arrangement will help secure favorable terms with creditors. He does not expect to bring Lelia fully under his control, and he knows that she would leave him if he tried to keep her at home alongside Carolina Gorlago. His intentions combine a desire to retain his existing attachment to Gorlago with a calculated effort to obtain money and influence from his daughter.

His approach to Donna Fedele Vayla di Brea is hesitant. He speaks in broken phrases, repeatedly says that he wishes to leave Lelia free, and expresses approval of her planned journey to Turin. Donna Fedele understands that he is formally asking to see his daughter and, having earlier insisted that Lelia receive him if he came, arranges the meeting. Lelia receives Girolamo standing, rigid and unsmiling. He kisses her on both cheeks; she shivers but allows it, does not offer him a seat, and keeps her body stiff as a statue. He praises the journey, then gives her a packet of ten-lire notes, saying that the money is hers and that he will render an account in a few months. The gesture presents him at once as a father providing money and as a man already accounting for his temporary management of funds. Lelia’s cold reception offers no sign that the display has restored intimacy.

Renewed Estrangement

Later, while staying in Valsolda, Lelia has written to her father and is waiting for his reply. Donna Fedele expects a negative answer and insists that Lelia cannot remain there; Massimo Alberti agrees that Lelia must leave with her. Lelia’s aversion is not simply to leaving Massimo or the place where they have met again: she says that returning to Velo would fill her with horror and that only a few months remain before she becomes her own mistress. Donna Fedele considers asking Girolamo’s permission to place her at Santhià with a cousin, but after a brief discussion decides that Lelia will travel with her to Turin and then continue to Santhià, where the cousin will meet her. She gives up requiring paternal permission, judging the cousin’s home safe and Lelia’s dread of returning to Velo decisive. The decision does not reconcile father and daughter; it demonstrates how little practical trust Lelia places in his household and how others must weigh his claimed authority against her safety and wishes.

Their relationship remains caught between biological kinship and lived estrangement. Girolamo repeatedly presents himself as Lelia’s father, but the story grounds her resistance in years of contempt, his earlier bargain over her placement, his requests for money, and his plans for the inheritance. The estate does not repair the bond. Instead, it exposes the difference between claiming a daughter and earning her confidence: Girolamo can announce his paternal status and seek an account of her property, while Lelia continues to guard the distance that has separated them since childhood.