How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success. (4.41)
The narrator lets the cat out of the bag as far as Tancredi and Angelica's marriage is concerned when he tells us that despite all of the romance we've seen between the two lovebirds, their marriage isn't going to be all that great. This is Lampedusa's skepticism coming out, basically saying that passion can never last in the long run. We're curious to know what his wife thought about passages like this one.
Quote #8
"Oh, I don't know! I think I heard something about half of Chibbaro!" (5.65)
Father Pirrone shows how scheming he can be when he convinces his distant cousin to marry his niece. How does he do this, you ask? By promising his cousin's father all of the land he was originally supposed to get in his father's inheritance. Okay, so maybe that sounds a bit confusing. All we need to know for the purposes of this passage is that marriage here is way more about the transfer of property than it is about love.
Quote #9
[In] recent years the consequences of the frequent marriages between cousins due to sexual lethargy and territorial calculations, of the dearth of proteins and overabundance of starch in the food, of the total lack of fresh air and movement, had filled the drawing rooms with a mob of girls incredibly short, unsuitably dark, unbearably giggly. (6.25)
No getting around it. You can't have cousins marrying cousins for generation after generation without some sort of genetic imbalance happening. In this passage, Lampedusa tries to explain the ill effects of inbreeding as well as he can, although he's definitely no doctor.