However, I had not travelled so far to meet Northmen, and I learnt far
more from the one Italian who sat by my bedside day after day, Giuseppe
Saredo. It was amusing to note the difference between his ways and the
Northmen's. He did not come in; he exploded. At six o'clock in the
evening, he would rush in without knocking at the door, shouting at one
and the same time Italian to the people of the house, and French to me.
He talked at a furious rate, and so loudly that people who did not know
might have fancied we were quarrelling, and he changed his seat once a
minute, jumped up from the easy chair and seated himself half in the
window, began a sentence there and finished it sitting on my bed. And
every second or third day he either himself brought books to entertain
me or sent large parcels by a messenger.
He had risen to be professor at the University of the the capital,
without ever having been either student or graduate. His family were too
poor for him to study. For many years, when a lad, he had never eaten
dinner. His occupation, when at last he began to get on, was that of
proof-reader in a printing establishment, but he tried to add to his
income by writing melodramas for the boulevard theatres in Turin.
He thought he had written over fifty. He told me: "The manager generally
came to me on a Sunday, when we were at liberty, and said: 'We must have
a new play for next Sunday.
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