Which is True?
I knew one Benedict?, who filled earth and air with the ideal;
and from whose eyes men learnt the desire of greatness, of
beauty, of glory, and of all whereby we believe in immortality.
But this miraculous child was too beautiful to live long; and
she died only a few days after I had come to know her, and I
buried her with my own hands, one day when Spring shook out her
censer in the graveyards. I buried her with my own hands, shut
down into a coffin of wood, perfumed and incorruptible like
Indian caskets.
And as I still gazed at the place where I had laid away my
treasure, I saw all at once a little person singularly like the
deceased, who trampled on the fresh soil with a strange and
hysterical violence, and said, shrieking with laughter: "Look
at me! I am the real Benedicta! a pretty sort of baggage I am!
And to punish you for your blindness and folly you shall love
me just as I am!"
But I was furious, and I answered: "No! no! no!" And to
add more emphasis to my refusal I stamped on the ground so
violently with my foot that my leg sank up to the knee in the
earth of the new' grave; and now, like a wolf caught in a trap,
I remain fastened, perhaps for ever, to the grave of the ideal.