Thanks to his unfailing memory, he
was able to repeat these citations verbatim, and to marshal his own
counter-arguments. But in Marcolina he had to cope with an opponent who
was little inferior to himself in extent of knowledge and mental acumen;
and who, moreover, excelled him, not perhaps in fluency of speech, but
at any rate in artistry of presentation and clarity of expression. The
passages Casanova had selected as demonstrating Voltaire's spirit of
mockery, his scepticism, and his atheism, were adroitly interpreted by
Marcolina as testifying to the Frenchman's scientific genius, to his
skill as an author, and to his indefatigable ardor in the search for
truth. She boldly contended that doubt, mockery, nay unbelief itself, if
associated with such a wealth of knowledge, such absolute honesty, and
such high courage, must be more pleasing to God than the humility of
the pious, which was apt to be a mask for lack of capacity to think
logically, and often enough--there were plenty of examples--a mask for
cowardice and hypocrisy.
Casanova listened with growing astonishment. He felt quite incompetent
to convert Marcolina to his own way of thinking; all the more as he
increasingly realized that her counterstrokes were threatening to
demolish the tottering intellectual edifice which, of late years, he
had been accustomed to mistake for faith.
Pages:
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53