In the first draft of his Lettre to Chauvet, Manzoni categorically dismisses the possibility of mixing the tragic and the comic in drama. When he turned to the new genre of the novel, however, he took this possibility on board. Indeed, it even seemed necessary in a truthful representation of the actual world of human beings, where life is a blend of the tragic and the comic, of the sublime and the lowly. The magnificent realism of the Promessi Sposi consists of its capacity to show and communicate to the reader the many and contradictory aspects of human life, the material outer dimension of its events but also its innermost secrets. Moreover, the new genre of the novel (the modern genre that Manzoni added to Italian literature) was itself a mixed genre, a blend of traditional genres. The Promessi Sposi contains a lyrical dimension (Lucia’s Addio ai monti and the episode of Cecilia’s mother), a tragic dimension (in the stories of the Innominato and Gertrude), an oratorical dimension, in sacred preaching (Cardinal Federigo in discussion with the Innominato and later with Don Abbondio), an essay dimension (historiographic reconstruction and analysis), melodrama, as opera buffa (the adventures in Chapter VIII’s notte degli imbrogli, the “night of deception”), and a tragicomic and at times grotesque dimension (the figure of Don Abbondio, and the scenes of the rioting Milanese crowds). The comic dimension in its various forms (farce, burlesque, irony, parody) is constantly mixed with others. It often interrupts dramatic situations to relieve the tension and to balance the narrative (such as in the scene where Renzo’s capons peck each other, in Chapter III). Manzoni’s comedy may also be in the form of satire (especially on the seventeenth century, the irrationality of its power system, its justice, culture and even its religion). Comedy is also an intellectual weapon used by Manzoni to criticize and debunk the cultural values of the longstanding classicist tradition, now surpassed by romanticism.