What could the beams of the brightest sunlight reveal to George, that

this simple chant in the night had not already revealed to him? All the

scattered images, recent and ancient, those still vibrating with the

keen sensation which had given birth to them and those buried in the

deepest recesses of his memory, all these were bound together

internally, and composed for him an ideal spectacle which carried him

over the most vast and most august reality. His land and his race

appeared to him transfigured, uplifted from time, with a legendary and

formidable aspect, weighty with mysterious, eternal, and nameless

things. A mountain, like unto an enormous primeval stump, reared up in

the centre in the form of a breast, perpetually covered with snows; and

the sloping sides, the promontories devoted to the olive-trees, were

bathed there by an inconstant and sad sea, on which the sails bore the

colors of mourning and flame. Roads wide as rivers, green with grass,

and sown with bare rocks, with gigantic vestiges scattered here and

there, descended from the heights to conduct to the plains the

migrations of the herds. The rites of dead and forgotten religions

survived; incomprehensible symbols of powers fallen since centuries

subsisted there intact; the usages of primitive peoples, gone forever,

persisted there, transmitted without change from generation to

generation; the rich fashions, strange and useless, were retained there

as witnesses of the nobility and the beauty of an anterior life. Long

strings of horses laden with wheat-corn passed there; and the devotees

rode on the loads, their heads crowned with ears of corn, with belts of

paste, and deposited at the foot of a statue the cereal offerings. The

young girls, with baskets of wheat on their heads, led along the roads a

she-ass bearing a still larger basket on its crupper, and, with their

offering, they went towards the altar, singing. The men and boys,

crowned with roses and with dewy berries, climbed in their pilgrimage on

a rock on which was impressed a footprint of Sampson. A white bullock,

fattened for a year on a rich pasturage, covered by a vermilion

_gualdrape_ and ridden by a child, advanced with pomp among the

standards and candles; it knelt on the threshold of the temple, in the

midst of the applause of the people; then, arrived at the centre of the

nave, it voided its excrements, and the devotees drew from this steaming

matter presages as to their agriculture. On feast days the fluvial

populations bound their heads with bryony and, at night, they crossed

the water with songs and music, bearing in their hands branches full of

leaves. At daybreak, in the fields, the virgins washed their hands,

feet, and faces in the fresh dew, to accomplish a vow. On the

mountains, on the plains, the first sun of the spring was saluted by

ancient hymns, by the clash of crashing metals, by cries and dances.

Throughout the entire district the men, women, and children sought the

first serpents emerged from their lethargy, seized them alive, and wound

them around their necks and arms, so as to present themselves thus

ornamented before their Saint, who would render them proof against

venomous bites. On the inclines of the sun-bathed hills the young

toilers, with their yoked oxen, in presence of their old men, rivalled

one another as to who should trace the straightest furrow from the

hill-top to the plain; and the judges awarded the prize to the

conqueror, while the father, in tears, opened his arms to his

well-deserving son. And so, in all the ceremonies, in all the pomps, in

all the labors, in all the games, in the births, in the loves, in the

marriages, funerals, everywhere was present and visible a georgic

symbol, everywhere was represented and venerated the great producer

Earth, from whose womb gushed forth the sources of all that was good and

joyful. The women of the family gathered at the house of the newly

married, bearing on their heads a basket of wheat-corn, on the wheat a

loaf of bread, and on the loaf a flower; they entered one by one, and

sprinkled a handful of that augural grain on the head of the happy wife.

At the foot of a dying man's bed, when the death-agony was prolonged,

two kinsmen deposited a ploughshare, which had the virtue of

interrupting the horrors and of hastening death. The tool and the fruit

thus assumed superior significance and power. A profound sentiment and

continual desire for mystery gave to all these environing things an

active soul, benign or malignant, of good or evil augury, that

participated in every vicissitude of fortune, by a manifest or occult

action. A vesicating leaf pressed on the bared arm revealed love or

indifference; the hearth-chain; thrown in the road exorcised the

menacing hurricane; a mortar placed on the edge of the window recalled

the lost pigeons; the swallowed heart of a sparrow communicated wisdom.

Mystery intervened in every event, envelopes and bound every existence;

and the supernatural life dominated, concealed, and absorbed the

ordinary life by creating innumerable and indestructible phantoms, which

peopled the fields, inhabited the houses, encumbered the heavens,

troubled the eyes.

Mystery and rhythm, those two essential elements of every cult were

scattered everywhere. Men and women continually expressed their soul in

song, accompanied by song all their labors under roof and heaven,

celebrated by song both life and death. Around the cradles and around

the biers, music was shed, slow and persistent, very ancient, as

ancient, perhaps, as the race whose profound sorrows they manifested.

Sad, grave, fixed in immutable rhythm, they seemed the fragments of

hymns that had belonged to the immemorial liturgies which had survived

the destruction of some great primordial myth. They were few in number,

but so dominating that the new songs could not displace them or diminish

their hold. They were transmitted from generation to generation like an

inner heritage, inherent in the corporeal substance; and each one, on

awaking in this life, heard them resound in himself like an innate

language to which the voice gave a visible form. Just as well as the

mountains, the valleys, and the rivers; just as well as the customs, the

vices, the virtues and beliefs, they termed a part of the structure of

the country and of the race. They were as immortal as the glebe and as

the blood.

Such was the country, such was the race, visited by this New Messiah, of

whom the old peasant had related the life and miracles. Who was this

man? An ascetic, ingenuous and innocent as Semplice, the worshipper of

the sun? A cunning and covetous charlatan, who was trying to play upon

the credulity of his devotees for his own profit? Who, really, was this

man who, from the border of a small river, could gather, by his name

alone, multitudes from both near and far, induce mothers to desert their

children, awaken in the souls of the most ignorant the visions and the

voices of another world?

And, once more, George evoked the figure of Oreste, attired in his red

tunic, going up the little, sinuous river, where, beneath the endless

shivering of the poplars, a stream of water ran over a bed of polished

sand.

"Who knows," he thought, "if this unexpected revelation will not be my

salvation? In order that I should be myself again, in order that I

should recognize my true essence, do I not need to put myself in

immediate contact with the race from which I have sprung? In burying

again the roots of my being in the natal soil, shall I not suck up a

pure and revivifying sap, which will have the power to expel all that is

false and heterogeneous in me, all that I have consciously and

unconsciously received by a thousand contagions? Just now, I do not

seek the truth; I seek only to recuperate my own substance, to replace

in myself the characters of my race, so as to strengthen them and render

them as intense as possible. In thus harmonizing my soul with the

diffused soul, I shall recover that equilibrium which I lack. For the

intellectual man, the secret of equilibrium is to know how to transport

the instincts, the wants, the tendencies, and the fundamental sentiments

of his race to a superior order."

Mystery and rhythm were scattered everywhere. Near by, on the foaming

beach, the sea breathed at equal intervals; but during the pauses one

heard, more and more feebly, the cadences of the waves, which touched

the shore at constantly increasing periods. Reverberated, doubtless by

the echo of some sonorous hollow, the chant of the pilgrims was heard

once more, then died away. Over the Vasto d' Aimone the sky was lit up

by frequent flashes of lightning, and in the calm moonlight the flashes

appeared red. Hippolyte was dreaming, leaning against the trunk of a

tree, her eyes watching the silent flashes.

She had not made a single movement. Her prolonged immobility in the

same attitude was frequent enough; and, at times, it took on a

cataleptic appearance which was almost alarming. She had then no longer

the young and kind aspect which the plants and beasts knew so well, but

the appearance of a taciturn and indomptable creature in whom were

concentrated all the isolated, exclusive, and destructive virtues of the

passion of love. The three divine elements of her beauty--her brow, her

eyes, her mouth--had perhaps never attained such a degree of symbolic

intensity to illustrate the principle of the eternal feminine

fascination. It seemed that the serene night favored this sublimation of

her form, that it liberated the true, ideal essence of her being, that

it permitted her lover to know her entirely, not by the acuteness of

view but by that of thought. The summer night, full of lunary

brilliancy and of dreams, and of pale or invisible stars, and of the

most melodious marine voices, seemed the natural field of that sovereign

image. The same as the shadow grew at times out of entire proportion to

the body that caused it, the same as against the infinity of that

background, the fatality of love rendered the person of Hippolyte higher

and more tragic for the spectators whose prescience became every instant

more lucid and more terrible.

Was it not, in the same immobility, the same woman who, from the height

of the loggia, had contemplated the single white sail on the dead

waters? It was she; and now again, in spite of the night which

despoiled her person of all brutal reality, the same hatred moved under

the sentiment excited by her--that mortal hatred of the sexes which is

at the bottom of love, and which, occult or openly, subsists at the

bottom of every effect, from the first glance up to extreme disgust.

"So," he thought, "she is the Enemy. As long as she lives, as long as

she can exercise her empire over me, she will prevent me from putting

foot on the threshold I perceive. And how can I recover my substance,

if a great portion of myself is in the hands of this woman? Vain is the

aspiration towards the new world, towards a new life. As long as love

endures, the axis of the world rests on a single being, and life is shut

in by a narrow circle. To revive and conquer, I must free myself from

love; I must deliver myself from the Enemy."

Once more he imagined her dead.

"Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. From a

precarious and imperfect existence, she would enter into an integral and

definite one, freed forever from her weak flesh, so frail and sensual.

Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other

means."

Suddenly, Hippolyte started violently, as if an extraordinary shudder

had shaken her. She said, alluding to the common superstition:

"Death has just passed."

And she smiled. But her lover, struck by the strange coincidence, could

not repress an instinctive movement of stupor and fright.

"Could she have _felt_ my thought?"

The dog began to bark with sudden fury, and they both rose at the same

time.

"Who is it?" said Hippolyte, uneasy.

The dog barked with renewed energy, still turned in the direction of the

olive-groves. Candia and the old man came out of the house.

"What is it?" repeated Hippolyte, uneasy.

"Who can it be?" said the old man, gazing into the darkness.

The sound of a human voice came from the olive-trees, an imploring,

sobbing voice. Then appeared an indistinct form, which Candia

immediately recognized.

"Liberata!"

The mother carried on her head the cradle, covered with a dark cloth.

She walked erect, almost rigid, without turning, without deviating from

her path, absorbed in herself, mute like a sinister somnambulist,

blindly impelled towards an unknown goal. And a man followed her

bareheaded, beside himself, sobbing, imploring, calling her by her name,

bending, beating his sides or burying his hands in his hair with

gestures of atrocious despair. Grotesque and miserable, following the

steps of the deaf woman, he howled, amidst his sobs:

"Liberata! Liberata! Listen! Listen! Come back to the house! Oh, my

God, my God! where are you going? What are you going to do? Liberata!

Listen! Listen! Oh, my God, my God!"

He implored to retain her, to stop her; but he did not touch her. He

held his hands out to her with gestures frantic with pain; but he did

not touch her, as if some mysterious cause prevented him, as if a charm

had rendered that person intangible.

Candia neither went to meet her, nor did she bar her way. She simply

asked the man:

"What's the matter? What's happened?"

The man, with a gesture, signified her dementia. And that recalled to

the memory of George and Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "She is

mad. She has become mute, signora. She has not spoken for three days."

"She is mad. She is mad."

Candia pointed to the covered cradle, asking again in a low voice:

"Is he dead?"

The man sobbed louder. And that recalled to the memory of George and

Hippolyte the words of the gossips: "He's stopped crying. Poor

creature! Is he asleep? He looks like a little corpse. He doesn't

move. He's asleep, he's asleep.... He's not in pain now."

"Liberata!" cried Candia, with all the strength of her lungs, as if to

rouse the impassive creature. "Liberata! Where are you going?"

But she did not move her, did not prevent her from going her way.

Then, all were silent, and watched.

The mother continued to advance, tall and erect, almost rigid, without

turning, fixing before her her dilated and dry eyes, her mouth tightly

closed, a mouth which seemed closed as by a seal, as if already vowed to

perpetual silence and deprived of breath. On her head she balanced the

cradle, changed into a coffin; and the lamentation of the man assumed

the continuous rhythm of a monody.

The tragic couple crossed the court in this way, descended the path

recently beaten by the steps of the pilgrims, and on which still floated

the religious soul that the hymn had left there.

And the lovers, their hearts oppressed by pity and horror, followed with

their eyes the figure of the funereal mother, who disappeared in the

night, in the direction of the flashing lightning.

*CHAPTER IV.*

Now it was no longer Hippolyte, but George, who proposed long

excursions, long explorations. Condemned to "be always waiting for

life," he believed in going to meet it, to find and gather it in the

visible realities.

His factitious curiosity was attracted now to those things which,

scarcely capable of effectively moving the surface of the soul, could

not penetrate it and stir it to its depth. He tried to discover, between

his soul and certain things, connections which did not exist; he tried

to shake the indifference of his inmost being, that inert indifference

that had rendered him so long a stranger to all external agitation.

Collecting all the perspicuous faculties he possessed, he applied

himself to find some living resemblance between himself and the

surrounding nature that he might reconcile himself in a filial way with

that nature, and vow to it eternal fidelity.

But there was not awakened in him the extraordinary emotion which had

several times exalted and astounded him in the first days of his stay at

the Hermitage, before the arrival of the loved one. He could

resuscitate neither the panicky intoxication of the first day, when he

had believed he truly felt the sun in his heart, nor the melancholy

charm of the first solitary walk, nor the unexpected and divine joy

which had been communicated to him on that May morning by the song of

Favetta and the perfume of the furze, freshened by the dew. On the

earth and on the sea, men cast a tragic shadow. Poverty, disease,

dementia, terror, and death lay in wait, or were exhibited everywhere on

his path. A wave of fierce fanaticism was sweeping from one end of the

country to the other. Night and day, far and near, religious hymns

resounded, monotonous and interminable. The Messiah was expected, and

the poppies in the wheat recalled the image of his red tunic.

Around him, faith consecrated every vegetable form. The Christian

legend twined itself around the trunks of the trees, blossomed amid the

branches. On the knees of the Madonna, a fugitive, and pursued by the

Pharisees, the Infant Jesus was changed into wheat that overflowed.

Hidden in the bin, he made the dough rise and rendered it inexhaustible.

Over the dry and thorny lupines which had wounded the Virgin's gentle

feet was suspended a curse; but the flax was blessed, because their

hulls had dazzled the Pharisees. Blessed also the olive-tree for having

given shelter to the Holy Family in its open trunk, in the form of a

cabin, and for having lighted it with its pure oil; blessed the juniper

for having held the Infant enclosed in its tufts; and blessed the holly

for the same courteous service; and blessed the laurel because it

springs from the soil sprinkled by the water in which had been washed

the Son of God.

How could he escape the fascination of the mystery which spread over all

created things and transfigured them into signs and emblems of another

life?

George, troubled by these suggestions, which provoked in him the

confused rising of all his mystic tendencies, said to himself: "Oh! if I

possessed the true faith, that faith which enabled Saint Theresa to

_actually_ see God in the host." And this was not a vague or passing

desire: it was a profound and fervent aspiration of his entire soul, and

it was also an extraordinary anguish, which distressed all the elements

of his substance; because he felt that this was the secret of his

unhappiness and weakness. Like Demetrius Aurispa, George was an ascetic

without a God.

And he reappeared to his mind, a mild, meditative man, with a face full

of a virile melancholy, and a single white curl in the centre of his

forehead, among the black hair, giving him an odd appearance.

Demetrius was his real father. By a singular coincidence of names, that

spiritual paternity seemed consecrated in the legend inscribed around

the marvellous ostensory given by the ancestors, and preserved in the

cathedral at Guardiagrele.

[Double dagger symbol] EGO DEMETRIUS AURISPA ET UNICUS GEORGIUS FILIUS

MEUS DONAMUS ISTUD TABERNACULUM ECCLESIAE S. M. DE GUARDIA, QUOD FACTUM

EST PER MANUS ABBATIS JOANNIS CASTORII DE GUARDIA, ARCHIPRESBYTERI, AD

USUM EUCHARISTIAE.

[Double dagger symbol] NICOLAUS ANDRAE DE GUARDIA ME FECIT A.D.

MCCCCXIII.

Both, in fact, beings of intelligence and sentiment, bore the mystic

heredity of the house of Aurispa; both had the religious soul, inclined

to mystery, apt to live in a forest of symbols or in a heaven of pure

abstractions; both loved the ceremonies of the Latin Church, sacred

music, the perfume of incense, all the sensualities of worship, the most

violent and the most delicate. But they had lost faith. They knelt

before an altar deserted by God. Their misery arose therefore from a

metaphysical need, which implacable doubt prohibited to blossom, to

satisfy, to repose on the divine lap. As they had not conformed

themselves in such a manner that they could accept and sustain the

battle for vulgar existence, they had learned the necessity of

seclusion. But how could the man exiled from life rest in a cell which

lacked the sign of the Eternal? Solitude is the supreme proof of the

humility or the sovereignty of a soul; because it is only borne on the

condition of having renounced all for God, or on the condition of having

a soul so strong that it might serve as an immovable foundation for a

world.

All at once, one of them, feeling perhaps that the violence of his pain

began to exceed the resistance of his organs, had wished to transform

himself by death into a higher being; and he launched into the mystery,

from which he contemplated the survivor with undimmed eyes.--_Ego

Demetrius Aurispa et unicus Georgius filius meus_.

Now, in his lucid moments, the survivor comprehended that he would in no

way succeed in realizing the type of exuberant life, the "Dionysiac"

ideal seen as in a lightning flash beneath the great oak, when he had

tasted the bread freshly broken by the young and joyous woman. He

realized that his intellectual and moral faculties, too disproportioned,

would never succeed in finding their equilibrium and their model. He

realized, finally, that, instead of striving to reconquer himself for

himself, it was himself he should renounce, and that two ways only could

lead him to it: either to follow the example of Demetrius, or to give

himself to heaven.

The second alternative fascinated him. In considering it, he made an

abstraction of the unfavorable circumstances and immediate obstacles,

impelled by his irresistible desire to completely construct all his

illusions and to inhabit them for a few hours. On this natal earth, did

he not feel himself enveloped by the ardor of faith much more than by

the fire of the sun? Had he not in his veins the purest Christian

blood? Did not the ascetic ideal circulate in the branches of his race,

from the noble donor Demetrius down to the pitiful creature named

Joconda? Was it, therefore, impossible that this ideal should be

regenerated in him, should be elevated to its supreme heights, should

attain the limit of human ecstasy in God? In him, all was ready to

magnify the event. He possessed every quality of the ascetic; the

contemplative mind, the taste for symbols and allegories, the faculty of

abstraction, an extreme sensibility for visual and aural suggestions, an

organic tendency towards dominating images and hallucinations. He

lacked but one thing, a great thing, but which perhaps was not dead in

him, and only slumbered: the faith, the ancient faith of the donor, the

ancient faith of his race, that which came down from the mountain and

chanted praises on the seashore.

How to awaken it? How to resuscitate it? No artifice would be

efficacious. He must wait for a sudden spark, an unexpected shock. He

must, perhaps, like the followers of Oreste, see the lightning flash and

hear the Word in the midst of a field, at the turn of a road.

And, once more, he recalled the figure of Oreste, attired in his red

tunic, advancing along the side of a little, sinuous river, where,

beneath the shivering of the poplars, a stream of water coursed over a

bed of polished sand. He imagined a meeting, a conversation with

Oreste. It was at noon, on the coast, close to a field of wheat. The

Messiah spoke like a simple, humble man, smiling with virginal candor;

and his teeth were as white as jasmine. In the great silence of the

sea, the continuous murmur of the breakers at the foot of the promontory

imitated the distant chords of an organ. But, behind this mild person,

in the gold of the ripe harvest, waved the poppies, violent symbols of

desire.

"Desire!" thought George, thus recalling his mistress and the corporeal

sorrow of his love. "Who will kill desire?" The admonitions of

Ecclesiastes recurred to him. _Non des mulieri potestatem animae tuae.

A muliere initium factum est peccati, et per illam omnes morimur_. He

saw, at the sacred dawn of the ages, in a delicious garden, the first

man, solitary and sad, attracted by the first companion; and he saw this

companion become the scourge of the world, spread everywhere pain and

death. But voluptuousness, contemplated as a sin, appeared to him

prouder, more disturbing; it seemed to him that no other intoxication

equalled the frantic intoxication of the embraces to which the martyrs

of the early church surrendered themselves, in the prisons where they

awaited punishment. He evoked pictures of women who, mad with terror and

love, presented for kisses their faces bathed in silent tears.

In aspiring to faith and redemption, what did he, therefore, but aspire

to new thrills and spasms, to unknown voluptuous sensations? Infringe

on duty and obtain pardon; commit a fault and confess it tearfully;

confess the slightest miseries while exaggerating them, and accuse

oneself of mediocre vices while magnifying them almost to enormity;

incessantly place one's sick soul and ailing flesh in the hands of a

merciful physician--had not these things an entirely sensual

fascination?

From the beginning, his passion had been impregnated with a pious odor

of incense and violets. He recalled the Epiphany of Love, in the

deserted oratory of the Via Belsiana: the little, mysterious chapel was

plunged in a bluish penumbra; a choir of young girls garlanded the

rostrum, curved like a balcony; below, an orchestra of string

instruments stood up before the music stands of white pine; roundabout,

in the oaken stalls, were seated the few auditors, almost all gray or

bald; the chapel-master beat time; a religious odor of evaporated

incense and of violets mingled with the music of Sebastian Bach.

He recalled also the dream of Orvieto, conjured up once more the vision

of the silent city of the Guelphs: windows closed; grayish alleys in

which the grasses grew; a capuchin monk crossing a square; a bishop all

in black, descending from a carriage which has stopped in front of a

hospital, with a decrepit servant at the carriage door; a tower rising

against a white and rainy sky; a clock slowly chiming the hour; and all

of a sudden, at the bottom of a street, a miracle--the Duomo.

Had he not dreamt of taking refuge at the summit of that rock of tufa,

crowned by monasteries? Had he not, more than once, sincerely aspired

to that silence, that peace? And now this dream also returned to his

soul, suggested by an effeminate languor on this warm and ashy April

day. To have a mistress, or, to express it better, a sister-lover, who

would be very devoted; to go away yonder and stay there.... To spend

hours and hours in the cathedral, in front of it, around it; to go and

gather roses in the gardens of the convents; to visit the sisters and

eat preserves.... To love a great deal and sleep a great deal, in a soft

bed, all veiled in virginal white, between two praying-stools....

He was seized once more by the languid nostalgia of the darkness, of the

silence, of the closed and isolated retreat in which could blossom the

most frail flowers, the most subtle thoughts, the most disturbing

sensualities. All that dazzling sunlight on those lines, too distinct

and too strong, appeared almost offensive to him. And the same as the

image of the murmuring spring fascinates the brain of him who is

thirsty, so he was haunted by the cool and meditative shadow of a Roman

nave.

The summons of the bells did not reach as far as the Hermitage, or, at

least, it only arrived at rare intervals on the swells of a light

breeze. The church of the market town was too far away, commonplace

perhaps, certainly without any reputation for beauty or ancient

tradition. George wanted a retreat nearer at hand, and one worthy of

him, where his mysticism might flower aesthetically as in that deep

marble urn which enclosed the Dantesque visions of Luca Signorelli.

He recalled the abbey of Saint Clement at Casauria, seen in one of the

distant days of his adolescence, and he remembered that he had visited

it in the company of Demetrius. The recollection, like all

recollections connected with his kinsman, was as distinct and precise as

if it had dated only from the day before.

He and Demetrius were descending the highroad towards the abbey, still

hidden by the trees. An infinite calm reigned in the neighborhood of

the solitary and magnificent spot, over the wide road of grasses and

stones, deserted, uneven, as if marked with gigantic and silent

vestiges, and the beginning of which was lost in the mystery of the

distant and sacred mountains. One felt still floating there a

primordial holiness, as if the grasses and stones had just been trodden

by a long migration of biblical bands in search of a maritime horizon.

Below, on the plain, the basilica appeared--almost a ruin. All around,

the ground was encumbered with debris and brambles; fragments of

sculptured stone were heaped against the pillars; wild grasses hung from

every crevice; recent constructions, of brick and lime, closed up large

openings in the lateral arcades; the doors were off their hinges. A

band of pilgrims were taking a siesta in the court, brutishly, under the

very noble portal erected by Leonato the Magnificent. But the three

intact arched windows, above the several capitals, looked so graceful

and proud, and the September sun gave to the light and soft stone such a

precious appearance, that both of them, Demetrius and himself, had felt

they were in the presence of a sovereign beauty.

Fascinated by the remembrance, the survivor had only one wish, a

chimerical one--to return to the spot, to see the basilica again, to

take up his dwelling there so as to protect it from ruin, to restore it

to its primitive beauty, to reestablish there the great worship, and,

after so long a period of desertion and oblivion, renew the Chronicon

Casaurienne.

He said to Hippolyte:

"Perhaps we'll change our quarters. Do you remember the dream of

Orvieto?"

"Oh, yes," she cried; "the city of convents, where you wanted to take

me!"

"I want to take you to a deserted abbey, more lonely than our Hermitage,

beautiful as a cathedral, full of very old memories, where there is a

great candelabra of white marble, a marvellous work of art by some

unknown artist. Erect on the candelabra, in the silence, you will

illuminate with your face the meditations of my soul."

He smiled at this lyric phrase, while contemplating at the same time the

beautiful image evoked. And she, in the ingenuousness of her egotism,

with that tenacious animalism which is the basis of the feminine being,

was intoxicated by nothing more than by this passing poesy. Her

happiness was to appear in her lover's eyes idealized, like the first

evening in the bluish street, or again in the secret oratory amid the

religious music and the faded perfumes, or like on the wild path strewn

with furze.

In her most chaste voice, she asked:

"When do we go?"

"Will you go to-morrow?"

"Very well--to-morrow."

"Take care! If you rise, you won't be able to come down."

"What does it matter? I'll watch you."

"You will burn, you'll be consumed like a candle."

"I will light you."

"You will also light my funeral."

He spoke lightly; but at heart, with his ordinary intensity for

imaginary life, he composed a mystic fable. After long years of error

on the abyss of sensuality, repentance had come to him. Initiated by

this woman in all the mysteries which his concupiscence excited, he now

implored from the All Merciful the grace which would dissipate the

unbearable sadness of this carnal love. "Pity for my pleasures in the

past, and for my suffering in the present! Grant, O God! that I may have

the strength to accomplish the Sacrifice in your name!" And he fled,

followed by his mistress in search of the refuge. And, finally, on the

threshold of the refuge the miracle was accomplished; for the impure,

the corrupt, the implacable Enemy, the Rose of Hell, was now suddenly

cleansed of all sin, and stood, chaste and immaculate, ready to follow

her loved one to the altar. On the summit of the high marble

candelabra, which had not heard the voice of the light for centuries,

she burned in the inextinguishable and silent flame of her love. "Erect

on the candelabra, in the silence, you will illuminate the meditations

of my soul, until death." She was burning with an inner fire, without

ever claiming any food for the flames, without ever asking anything from

the loved one in return. She renounced forever all possession: higher

in her purity than God himself, since God loves his creatures but exacts

from them a reciprocity of love, and becomes terrible against those who

refuse to love him. Her love was Stylite love, sublime and solitary,

nourishing itself with one blood and one soul. She had felt fall around

her that part of her substance which was opposed to an entire offering.

Nothing disquieting or impure remained in her. Her body had been

metamorphosed into a subtle, agile, diaphanous, incorruptible element;

her senses had dissolved into one supreme and only voluptuousness. Set

up on the summit of the marvellous stela, she burned up from and enjoyed

her ardor and her splendor like a flame conscious of its own enflamed

existence.

Hippolyte listened intently, and said:

"Don't you hear? Another procession! To-morrow is the Vigil."

The dawns, the noons, the twilights and the nights rang with the

religious chants. One procession followed the other, in the hot glare

of the sun, in the silvery rays of the moon. All were emigrating to the

same land and were celebrating the same name, animated by the vehemence

of a similar passion, terrible and wretched in appearance, deserting on

the highroads the sick and the dying, without stopping, prompt to throw

down no matter what obstacle to reach the place where awaited them the

balm for all their ills, the promise of all their hopes. They marched,

marched ceaselessly, obliterating with their own sweat their footprints

in the endless dust.

What an immense irradiation of strength that simple image must possess,

to move and allure all these masses of heavy flesh! Almost four

centuries before, an old septuagenarian, in a plain devastated by the

hail, thought he perceived the Virgin of Mercy in the tops of a tree;

and since then, each year, on the anniversary of the apparition, all the

peoples of the mountains and the coast have gone on a pilgrimage to the

holy place to beseech mercy for its sufferings.

Hippolyte had already heard the legend from Candie; and for the past few

days she had nourished a secret desire to visit the Sanctuary. The

predominance of love and the habit of sensual pleasure had banished all

religious sentiment in her; but, a Roman of good family, and, what is

more, born in the Trastevere, brought up in one of those _bourgeois_

families in which, according to immemorial tradition, the key of the

conscience is always in the hands of a priest, she was a strict

Catholic, devoted to all the external practices of the Church, subject

to periodical returns of exalted fervor.

"Meanwhile, why should we not go to Casalbordino, too? To-morrow is the

Vigil. Let us go there--shall we? It will be a great sight for you.

We'll take the old man with us."

George consented. Hippolyte's desire corresponded with his own. He

thought it necessary to him to follow this deep current, to form part of

this wild conglomeration of men, to experience material contact with the

inferior classes of his race, those dense and immutable layers on which

the primitive impressions had perhaps been preserved intact.

"We'll start to-morrow," he added, seized by a kind of anxiety as he

heard the chant approaching.

Hippolyte told him, as related by Candie, some of the atrocious tests to

which the pilgrims had vowed to submit. She shuddered with horror. And,

while the chant grew louder, both felt a tragic breath pass over their

souls.

They were on the hill, at night. The moon was high in the sky. A cool

humidity extended over the vast vegetable masses, still vibrating from

the storm of the afternoon.

All the leaves were weeping, and these myriads of tears, scintillating

like diamonds in the moonlight, transfigured the forest. As George had

accidentally stumbled over the trunk of a tree, the luminous drops of

the shaken branches fell on Hippolyte, covering her with constellations.

She gave a little cry, and began to laugh.

"Ah, traitor!" she murmured, convinced that George had done it

intentionally.

And she took measures for reprisals.

Thus shaken, the trees and bushes threw off their liquid gems with a

lively crepitation, while Hippolyte's laughs resounded at intervals, on

the slope of the hill. George also laughed, suddenly forgetful of his

nightmare, permitting himself to be won by the seduction of youth,

permitting himself to be penetrated by this bracing nocturnal coolness

in which was distilled all the fragrance of the earth. He tried to

reach first the tree whose foliage seemed most heavily laden with water;

and she tried to reach it before him, running courageously on the

slippery declivity. They almost always reached the tree at the same

time, and they shook it together, both remaining under the shower. In

the unsteady shadow of the foliage the whiteness of Hippolyte's eyes and

teeth assumed extraordinary lustre; and the tiny drops, like diamond

dust, glittered on the pretty curls on her temples, on her cheeks, on

her lips, even on her eyelashes, trembling from her laughter.

"Ah, you magician!" cried George, letting go of the tree and seizing the

woman, who once more appeared to him in a mysterious flash of nocturnal

beauty.

He began to kiss her all over her face; and to his lips she was cool and

wet with dew, like fruit just plucked from the tree.

"There! there! there!"

He imprinted hearty, resounding kisses on her mouth, her cheeks, her

eyes, her temples, her neck, as insatiable as if the flesh were a

novelty to him. And, as she felt the kisses, Hippolyte took that almost

ecstatic attitude usual with her when she felt that her lover was in one

of his moments of true intoxication. At those times, she seemed anxious

to release from the depths of her own substance the sweetest and most

powerful perfume of love, to excite George's intoxication to the point

of anguish.

"There!"

He stopped, seized by anguish. He had reached the extreme limit of

sensation, and could not go beyond.

They said no more; they took each other's hand; they continued on their

way to the Hermitage, cutting across the fields because, in their

thoughtless frolic, they had wandered from the road. They felt now

indefinable lassitude and melancholy. George seemed astonished. So

Life, unexpectedly, like a furtive gesture in the shadow, had offered

him a new savour--a new sensation, real and profound, at the close of a

day full of anxiety, spent in a cloister of flitting phantoms! But was

that Life? Was it not rather Dreamland? "The one is always the shadow

of the other," he thought. There where is Life, there is Dreamland;

there where is Dreamland, there is Life.

"Look!" interrupted Hippolyte, with a start of admiration.

It was as if she illustrated with a picture the thought he had not

revealed.

In the moonlight, a vine was there, silent. The upright vine-stocks

were twined around the reeds like around agile thyrses; and the

streaming branches, diaphanous against the luminous horizon with a

thousand intertwinings of their subtle ribs, in the perfect immobility

of mineral things, and with an appearance of indescribably fragile and

ephemeral crystal, had neither terrestrial reality nor any communion

with the environing forms, but seemed to be the last visible fragment of

an allegorical world conceived by a theurgy and about to fade away.

Spontaneously arose in George's memory the verse of the hymn: "_Vinea

mea coram me est._"

*CHAPTER V.[*]*

[*] It should, perhaps, be mentioned here that the publication of "The

Triumph of Death" began in the Mattino, of Naples, on February 12, 1893,

while the publication of Emile Zola's work "Lourdes" only began in the

_Gil Blas_, of Paris, on April 15, 1894.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

Since dawn, train after train had vomited immense waves of humanity on

the platforms of the Casalbordino Station. People from the villages and

market towns mingled with fraternities from the most distant hamlets who

had not wished, or been able, to make the pilgrimage on foot. They

precipitated themselves in a tumult from the carriages, shouting,

gesticulating, and pushing each other to storm the wagons and coaches,

amid the cracking of whips and the tinkling of bells; or, again, they

fell into line, in long files, behind a crucifix, and, when their

procession started on the dusty road, they struck up the hymn.

Already frightened by the size of the crowd, George and Hippolyte turned

instinctively toward the sea close by, to wait until the crowd

dispersed. A field of hemp undulated peacefully before the blue

background of the waters. The sails shone like flames on the clear

horizon.

George said to his companion:

"Aren't you afraid? I fear the fatigue will hurt you."

She replied:

"Do not be alarmed; I am strong. Besides, to deserve a favor, must one

not suffer a little?"

He replied, smiling:

"Are you going to ask a favor?"

"Yes, only one."

"But are we not in the state of mortal sin?"

"That is true."

"Well, then?"

"I shall ask, just the same."

They had brought with them old Colas, who, acquainted with the

localities and usages, served them as a guide. As soon as the door of

their compartment was disencumbered they descended, and got into a coach

which started off at a gallop, with a great tinkling of bells. The

horses were decorated and plumed like _barberi_. The drivers wore

peacocks' feathers in their hats, and did not cease flourishing their

whips, accompanying the deafening cracks with hoarse cries.

Hippolyte, tormented by impatience and extraordinary uneasiness, as if

this day were to realize some great event for her, asked the old man:

"How long will it take to get there?"

"Half an hour at the most."

"Is the church very old?"

"No, signora. I can still remember the time when it didn't exist.

Fifty years ago, there was only a small chapel."

He drew from his pocket a sheet of paper folded in four, unfolded it,

and showed it to George.

"You can read it. It's the history of the church."

It was a picture, with the legend at the bottom. The Virgin, in a cloud

of angels, was seated on an olive-tree, and an old man was adoring her,

prostrated at the foot of the trunk. This old man was named Alexander

Muzio: and this is the story as told by the legend:

"In the year of Our Lord 1527, during the evening of the 10th of June,

the Sunday of the Pentecost, a storm broke over the district of

Casalbordino and devastated the vines, the corn, and the olive-groves.

The following morning, an old septuagenarian of Pollutro, Alexander

Muzio, proprietor of a wheat field at Pinno del Lago, started on his way

to visit it. His heart sank at the sight of the damaged crops; but, in

his profound humility, he praised the justice of God. Very devoted to

the Holy Virgin, he was telling his beads while walking, when, at the

end of the valley, he heard the bell ringing at the elevation of the

Mass. He immediately kneeled down and concentrated all his fervor for

the prayer. But while he prayed he saw himself surrounded by a

brilliancy which eclipsed that of the sun, and in this brilliancy

appeared to him the Mother of Mercy, robed in azure; and she spoke to

him sweetly: 'Go and carry the news. Let a temple be raised on this

spot, and I will distribute my favors here. Go to thy field, and thou

wilt find thy wheat intact.' She disappeared with her crown of angels.

And the old man rose, went as far as his field, found his wheat intact.

Then he hastened to Pollutro, saw the curate Mariano d' Iddone, related

to him the prodigy. In a few seconds the news had spread all over the

Casalbordino district. The entire population ran to the holy spot, saw

the dry soil around the tree, saw undulate the prosperous harvest,

recognized the miracle, and shed tears of penitence and feeling. Soon

afterwards the Vicar of Arabona laid the first stone of a chapel, and

the proxies for the edification were Geronimo di Geronimo and Giovanni

Fatalone, Casalesians. On the altar they painted the Virgin, with the

old Alexander prostrated in the act of adoration."

The legend was simple, commonplace, similar to a hundred others founded

on miracle. Since that first act of mercy, it was in the name of the

Virgin that ships were saved from the tempest, lands from the hail,

travellers from robbers, sick people from death. Placed amidst an

unfortunate people, the Image was an inexhaustible source of salvation.

"Of all the Madonnas in the world, ours is the one who does most good,"

said Colas di Sciampagne, kissing the sacred sheet before replacing it

in his bosom. "They say that another vision has been seen in the

kingdom. But ours is the best. Don't be afraid. She's worth all the

others----"

His tone and his attitude displayed that sectarian fanaticism which

fires the blood of all idolaters, and which, at times, in the region of

the Abruzzi, impels populations to ferocious wars for the supremacy of

an idol. The old man, like all his brothers in belief, did not conceive

the Divine Being outside of the painted image; it was in the image that

he saw and adored the real presence of the celestial personage. The

Image upon the altar, for him, was a creature of flesh and bones; she

breathed, smiled, winked, bowed her head, made gestures with her hand.

And everywhere it was the same thing: all the sacred statues, in wood,

wax, bronze, or silver, lived a real life in their vile substance or

precious metal. When they became old, when they broke, or were

destroyed in the course of the years, they did not give way to new

statues without giving savage signs of their anger. One day a fragment

of a bust, become unrecognizable and confounded with firewood, had

splurted blood under the axe and uttered threatening words. Another

fragment, planed and arranged among the staves of a vat, had manifested

its supernatural character by causing the apparition in the water of its

primitive and integral form.

"Hey, there!" cried the old man to a pedestrian, who was painfully

walking in the suffocating dust along the curbstone. "Hey, there,

Aligi!"

He turned towards his guests, adding with commiseration:

"He's a good Christian, a man of hereabouts. He's going to carry his

vow. He is convalescent. Do you see, signora, how winded he is? Will

you let him ride on the front seat?"

"Yes, yes. Stop, stop!" said Hippolyte, affected.

The carriage stopped.

"Run, Aligi! The gentlefolk are kind to you. Come, get up!"

The good Christian approached. He was gasping, bent over his stick,

covered with dust, bathed in perspiration, dazed by the sun. A collar

of reddish beard surrounded his chin from one ear to the other, and

framed his face dotted with freckles; locks of reddish hair emerged from

under his hat, sticking to the forehead and temples; his hollow eyes,

converging towards the base of the nose, of no precise color, recalled

those of epileptics. Gasping and hoarsely, he said:

"Thanks! God will reward you. May the Madonna protect you! But I

can't ride."

He held in his right hand an object wrapped in a white handkerchief.

"Is that your offering?" asked Colas. "Let us see."

The man opened the corners of the handkerchief, and showed a waxen leg

as livid as the leg of a cadaver and on it was painted a festering sore.

The heat had softened it and made it shiny, as if moist with sweat.

"Don't you see it's melting?"

And Colas stretched out his hand to feel it.

"It's soft. If you go on walking, it'll drip on to the road."

Aligi repeated:

"I can't ride. I made a vow to go on foot."

And, not without anxiety, he examined the leg by raising it to the level

of his oblique eyes.

On this scorching road, amid this dust, under this great strong light,

nothing sadder could be imagined than this emaciated man and that livid

thing, repugnant as an amputated limb, which was to perpetuate the

memory of a sore on walls already covered by silent and motionless

effigies of so many infirmities visited upon human flesh through all the

centuries.

"Hey, there!"

And the horses resumed their trot.

After the small hills were left behind, the road crossed a plain rich in

harvests, almost ripe. The old man, with his senile loquaciousness,

related the episodes of Aligi's malady, spoke of the gangrenous sore

cured by the Virgin's finger. To the right and left of the road the

sweet ears of corn surpassed the hedges, suggesting a beautiful

overflowing cup.

"There's the Sanctuary!" exclaimed Hippolyte.

And she pointed to a red brick edifice which rose in the centre of a

great, encumbered plain.

A few moments later, the carriage rejoined the crowd.

*CHAPTER VI.*

It was a marvellous and terrible spectacle, unheard of, without

resemblance to any conglomeration ever seen before, whether of men or

things; a pell-mell so strange, so violent and incongruous, that it

exceeded the most troubled dreams of nightmare. All the ugliness of the

eternal islet, all the shameful vices, all the stupors; all the spasms

and all the deformities of the baptized flesh, all the tears of

repentance, all the mockery of the debauchee; insanity, cupidity,

cunning, lewdness, stupidity, fear, mortal fatigue, stony indifference,

silent despair; sacred choirs, demoniacal shrieks, acrobatic

performances, the chiming of bells, the blasts of trumpets, discordant

cries, roars, sighs; the crackling of fires beneath cauldrons, heaps of

fruits and sugared delicacies, shop windows full of utensils, draperies,

arms, jewels, rosaries; the obscene contortions of dancing girls, the

convulsions of epileptics, the blows exchanged in angry brawls, the

flight of the hunted thief through the surging mob; the scum of the

worst corruptions vomited from out the filthy alleys of distant towns

and cast upon an ignorant and amazed multitude; clouds of parasites,

like gadflies about cattle, falling upon the compact crowd, incapable of

self-defence; every base temptation for the brutal appetite, every

fraud, every immodesty was exhibited in broad daylight--a pell-mell of

everything was there, seething and fermenting around the House of the

Virgin.

This House was a massive red brick structure, of vulgar architecture,

devoid of ornamentation. Against the exterior walls, against the

pillars of the portal, peddlers of sacred objects had established their

tents, arranged their stalls, and sold their wares. Close by were

erected canvas booths, conical in shape, ornamented with large pictures

representing bloody battles and cannibal feasts. At the entrance,

sinister-looking men, of ignoble and equivocal appearance, trumpeted and

vociferated. Shameless women, with enormous legs, swollen abdomens,

flabby breasts, clad in dirty tights and bespangled rags, glorified, in

extravagant jargon, the marvels hidden by the red curtain behind them.

One of these tattered ribalds, who looked like a monster engendered by a

dwarf and a sow, gave kisses from her sticky lips to a lascivious

monkey, while near her a clown, covered with powder and carmine, struck

an ear-splitting bell with frantic fury.

The processions arrived in long files, preceded by their cross-bearers,

chanting the hymn. The women held each other by a corner of their

dresses and walked like ecstatics, stupefied, their eyes wide open and

fixed. Those of Trigno wore robes of scarlet plush with a thousand

folds, caught up in the middle of the back, almost under the shoulders,

and crossed at the hips by a multicolored scarf which raised the dress,

tightened it, and formed a swelling like a hump. And as, broken by

fatigue, they wended their way--bent, their limbs staggering, dragging

shoes heavy as lead, they had the appearance of strange, gibbous

animals. Many had goitres; and their golden necklaces glistened beneath

the sunburnt swellings.

_Viva Maria!_

Above the crowd appeared the soothsayers, seated in front, opposite each

other, on a small, raised platform. Their head-bandage permitted a view

only of the loquacious mouth, tireless, full of saliva. They spoke in a

sing-song tone, raising and lowering their voices, their nodding heads

keeping time with the music. At intervals they reswallowed the

superabundant saliva, with a light, whistling sound. One of them

displayed a greasy playing-card, crying, "This is the anchor of good

hope!" Another, from whose enormous mouth darted in and out, between

decayed teeth, a tongue covered with a yellowish ecuma, leaned her whole

person towards the auditors, having on her knees her large varicose

hands and in the hollow of her lap a heap of copper coins. The

auditors, very attentive, did not lose a word, did not wink, did not

make a single gesture. But, from time to time, they moistened their

parched lips with their tongues.

Viva Maria!

New bands of pilgrims arrived, passed, disappeared. Here and there, in

the shadow of the booths, under big blue parasols, or even in the sun,

old women, broken by fatigue, lay on the dry grass, sleeping, their

bodies bent forward, their faces between their hands. Others, seated in

a ring, their legs wide apart, painfully and silently chewing carrots

and bread, caring for naught, indifferent to the surrounding tumult; and

one saw the too large mouthfuls pass with effort down their gullets as

yellow and wrinkled as the membrane of a tortoise. Several were covered

with sores, scabs or scars, without teeth, without eyelashes, without

hair; they did not sleep, did not eat; they lay motionless and resigned,

as if they awaited death; and upon their poor carcasses whirled a cloud

of thick and eager flies as over carrion in a ditch.

But in the booths, beneath the tents heated by the mid-day sun, around

the posts driven in the earth and ornamented with branches, was

exercised the voracity of those who had laboriously scraped together

until this day a few savings so as to accomplish the sacred vow, and

also to satisfy an enormous desire to indulge in the feast, long

anticipated during the meagre meals and rude toil. One saw their faces

bent over their porringers, the movements of their grinding jaws, the

gestures of their hands which rend, all their brutish actions in a

desperate struggle with the unaccustomed aliments. Large saucepans full

of a violet-colored mass were smoking in circular holes in the ground,

transformed into furnaces; and the appetizing vapors spread all around.

One young girl, lank and greenish as a locust, offered long rows of

cheese, shaped like little horses, birds, or flowers. A man who had a

face as smooth and soft as a woman's, with gold rings in his ears, with

hands and arms colored by aniline like dyers', offered for sale sorbets

which looked like poison.

_Viva Maria!_

New bands arrived, passed by. The mob surged about the portal, unable

to penetrate into the church, already invaded and jammed. Jugglers,

sharpers, sharks, gamesters, thieves, charlatans of all kinds, called

them, misled them, cajoled them. This brotherhood of plunder scented

its prey from afar, struck it like a thunderbolt, never missed its aim.

They allured the simpleton in a thousand ways, raising in him the hope

of rapid and sure gains; with infinite artifice, they persuaded him to

take chances--they excited in him an almost feverish cupidity. Then,

when he had lost all prudence and all clearsightedness, they robbed him

of his last penny, merciless, by the easiest and quickest frauds; and

they left him stupefied and miserable, laughing in his face and sneaking

away. But the example did not prevent the others from falling into the

trap. Each, deeming himself more clever and less gullible, offered to

avenge his ridiculed comrade, and plunged furiously to his ruin.

Incalculable privations, supported without respite in order to make a

little money, amounting to the savings of an entire year scraped

together penny by penny from the vital necessities--those inexpressible

privations which make the avarice of the countryman as sordid and as

greedy as that of mendicants--were all revealed in the trembling,

callous hand which drew the money from the bottom of the pocket to

expose it to chance.

_Viva Maria!_

New bands arrived, passed by. A constantly renewed torrent persisted in

cleaving the confused and surging mob; a cadence, always the same, rose

above the medley of all the acclamations. Gradually, against this

rumbling background of discordant sounds, the ear no longer discerned

anything but the distinct name of Mary. The hymn triumphed over the

uproar. The continuous and unchained tide battered the walls of the

Sanctuary heated by the sun.

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva Maria!_

For a few minutes longer George and Hippolyte, dismayed, afflicted,

contemplated this formidable crowd, from which arose a nauseating

stench, from which emerged here and there the painted faces of mimes and

the hooded faces of the fortune-tellers. Disgust arose in their

throats, impelled them to flee; and yet the attraction of this human

spectacle was stronger, retained them in this heaped-up horde, led them

to the spots where the worst misery was exhibited, where the worst

excesses of cruelty, ignorance, and fraud were revealed, where voices

howled or tears streamed.

"Let us get nearer the church," said Hippolyte, who, forgetting herself,

seemed to be invaded by the flame of insanity diffused by the passing

bands, whose wild fanaticism seemed to increase in fury as the sun beat

down more furiously on their heads.

"Are you not tired?" asked George, taking her hands. "If you like, we'll

go away. We'll look for some place where we can rest. I'm afraid it

may hurt you. We will go if you like."

"No, no; I am strong. I can stand it. Let us get nearer. Let us enter

the church. You see, everybody is going there. Do you hear how they

are shouting?" She was visibly suffering. Her mouth was convulsed, the

muscles of her face contracted; and her hand constantly tormented

George's arm. But her gaze never left the door of the Sanctuary, nor

that veil of bluish smoke through which, by turns, scintillated and

disappeared the little flames of the wax tapers.

"Do you hear how they are shouting?"

She staggered. The cries resembled those of a massacre, as if men and

women were cutting each other's throats, were struggling in oceans of

blood.

Colas said:

"They are asking favors."

The old man had not left his guests for an instant; he had taken a

thousand pains to open a passage for them in the crowd, to make a little

space about them.

"Do you want to go there?" he asked.

Hippolyte made up her mind.

"Yes, let us go."

Colas preceded them, pushing right and left with his elbows in order to

get near the portals. Hippolyte no longer touched the ground, almost

carried in the arms of George, who summoned all his strength in order to

support her and himself. A female beggar pursued them, kept at their

heels, pleading for charity in a lamentable tone, stretching out her

hand, at times advancing it so far as to touch them. And they saw

nothing but this senile hand, deformed by large knots at the joints, of

a bluish yellow, with long violet-hued nails, with the skin peeling

between the fingers--such a hand as might belong to a sick and decrepit

monkey.

Finally they arrived at the portal; and they leaned back against one of

the pillars, near the stand of a vender of rosaries.

The processions, while waiting their turn to enter, marched around the

church; they turned, turned without cease--heads uncovered, behind the

cross-bearers, without ever interrupting their chant. Men and women

carried a stick surmounted either with a cross or a bunch of flowers,

and leaned upon it with all the weight of their fatigue. Their brows

dripped with perspiration; streams of perspiration rolled down their

cheeks, soaked their clothes. The men had their shirts open at their

breasts, the neck bare, the arms bare; and on their hands, on their

wrists, on the backs of their arms, on their breasts, the skin was

checkered with marks tattooed in indigo, in commemoration of sanctuaries

visited, of favors received, of vows accomplished. Every deformity of

muscle or bone, every variety of physical ugliness, every indelible

imprint left by manual toil, intemperateness, and disease: heads pointed

and flat, bald or woolly, covered with scars or excrescences; eyes white

and opaque as globes of butter-milk, eyes glaucous and sad like those of

large, lonely frogs; flat noses as if crushed by the blow of a fist, or

hooked like the beaks of vultures, or long and fat like trunks, or

almost destroyed by eating ulcers; cheeks red-veined like the bunches of

the vine in Autumn, or yellowish and wrinkled like the belly of a

ruminant, or bristling with reddish hairs like the spears of maize;

mouths as thin as the gash of a razor, or wide open and flabby like

over-ripe figs, or shrunken and shrivelled like dry leaves, or furnished

with teeth as formidable as those of a wild boar; hare-lips, goitres,

erysipelas, scrofulas, pustules--all the horrors of the human flesh

passed, in the light of the sun, before the House of the Virgin.

_Viva Maria!_

Each band had its cross-bearer and its chief. The leader was a

strong-limbed, violent man, who incessantly stimulated the faithful by

the yells and actions of a maniac, sinking the laggards on their backs,

dragging the exhausted old men, swearing at the women who interrupted

the hymn to take breath. An olive-colored giant, whose eyes glittered

beneath a great shock of black hair, dragged along three women by the

three cords of three halters. Another woman marched in front, naked in

a sack from which only her head and arms appeared. Another, long and

emaciated, with a livid face and whitish eyes, marched along like a

somnambulist, without chanting, without ever turning, displaying on her

breast a red sash resembling the bloody bandage of a mortal wound; and

every moment she tottered, as if her limbs had no longer sufficient

strength to support her, and she were about to fall to rise no more.

Another, wild as a beast of prey, a true rustic Fury, with a

blood-colored mantle wound around her bony shanks, with glittering

embroideries on her bosom, like scales on a fish, brandished a black

crucifix to guide and excite her detachment. Another wore on her head a

cradle covered with a sombre cloth, like Liberata on the funereal night.

_Viva Maria!_

They turned, turned without cease; hastening their steps, raising their

voices, exciting themselves more and more to yell and gesticulate like

demons. Virgins, almost bald at the top of their heads, their scant

hair flowing loose and almost impregnated with olive-oil, stupid as

sheep, advanced in files, each holding her hand on the shoulder of her

companion, her eyes fixed on the ground, and full of repentance:

miserable creatures whose wombs were destined to perpetuate in the

baptized flesh, without enjoyment, the instincts and sadness of the

primeval beast. In a sort of deep coffin carried by four men lay a

paralytic, suffocating from obesity, with dangling hands, twisted and

knotted like roots by a frightful case of gout. A continual trembling

shook his hands; an abundant sweat dropped from his brow and bald head,

streaming down his big face, colored like a faded rose, covered with

fine network like the spleen of an ox. And he wore a number of

scapularies suspended from his neck, with the picture of the Image

spread over his abdomen. He wheezed and lamented as if already seized by

the terrors of the impending death-agony; round about him was an

unbearable stench, as of putrefying flesh; he exhaled from every pore

the atrocious torments which the last palpitations of life caused him.

And yet he did not wish to die, and so as not to die he had himself

carried in a coffin to the feet of the Mother. Not far from him, other

vigorous men, experienced in carrying massive statues on high standards

at holy festivals, dragged a lunatic by the arms; and the lunatic

struggled in their grasp, shrieking, his clothes in tatters, foaming at

the mouth, his eyes starting from their sockets, the veins of his neck

swollen, his hair dishevelled, as black in the face as a hanged man.

Aligi also passed, the man elect by grace, paler now than his waxen

limb. And once more they all went by again in their endless turning:

the three women led by halters passed; the Fury with the black crucifix

passed; and passed also the taciturn woman with the bloody scarf; and

she carrying the cradle on her head; and she dressed in a sack,

imprisoned in her mortification, bathed in silent tears which gushed

from beneath her lowered eyelids, a figure of the distant ages, isolated

in the crowd, as if enveloped in a breath of ancient penitential rigor,

and resurrecting in George's soul the great and spotless Clementine

basilica, whose rude, primitive crypt reminded him of the Christians of

the ninth century, the time of Ludovic II.

_Viva Maria!_

They turned and turned, without ever stopping, hastening their steps,

raising their voices, almost crazed by the sun which beat upon their

heads, excited by the yells of the fanatics and by the acclamations

heard within the church as they passed before the door, carried away by

a terrific frenzy which impelled them to sanguinary sacrifices, to the

tortures of the flesh, to the most inhuman tests. They turned, turned,

impatient to enter, impatient to prostrate themselves on the sacred

stone, to fill with their tears the furrows worn there by thousands upon

thousands of knees. They turned, turned, increasing in number, pushing,

jostling, with such an accordance of fury that they appeared no longer a

conglomeration of individuals, but a compact mass, some kind of blind

matter projected by a vertiginous power.

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva Maria!_

In the mass, a young man suddenly fell down, struck by an attack of

epilepsy. His neighbors surrounded him, carried him away from the

whirlpool. Others, numerous, left the mob which occupied the esplanade,

and ran to see the sight.

"What has happened?" asked Hippolyte, growing paler, with an

extraordinary change in her face and voice.

"Nothing, nothing--a sunstroke," replied George, taking her by the arm,

and trying to lead her away.

But Hippolyte had understood. She had seen two men forcibly open the

jaws of the epileptic, and insert a key in his mouth, doubtless to

prevent his biting his tongue. And, at the thought, she felt in her own

teeth that horrible grating, and an instinctive shudder shook her to the

inner-most depths of her being, there where the "sacred evil" slept with

a possibility of awakening.

Colas di Sciampagne said:

"It is someone who has the Saint Donat malady. Don't be afraid."

"Let us go--let us go away!" insisted George, uneasy, dismayed, trying

to lead his companion elsewhere.

"What if she were similarly taken, all at once," he thought. "What if

the disease attacked her here, in the midst of this crowd?"

A chill ran through him. He recalled the letters dated from Caronno,

those letters in which she had made the frightful revelation in hopeless

terms. And again, as then, he imagined: "Her hands, pallid and

shrivelled, and between the fingers the torn-out curl of hair."

"Let us go away! Do you want to enter the church?"

She remained silent, stupefied, as if by a blow on the head.

"Shall we enter?" repeated George, shaking her, and attempting to

dissimulate his own anxiety.

He would have liked to ask, also: "Of what are you thinking?" But he

did not dare. He saw in Hippolyte's eyes such profound sadness that he

felt his heart oppressed and a choking sensation in his throat. Then,

the suspicion that this silence and stupor might be the precursors of an

imminent attack filled him with a sort of panicky terror.

Without reflection, he stammered:

"Are you ill?"

These anxious words, which were a confession of his suspicion, which

revealed his secret fear, increased still more the trouble of the two

lovers.

"No, no," she said, with a visible shudder, benumbed with horror, and

pressed close to George, that he might defend her from the peril.

Hemmed in by the mob, dismayed, disgusted, miserable like the others, as

needful of pity and help as the rest, crushed like the others beneath

the weight of their mortal flesh, both, for a moment, felt in veritable

communion with the multitude in the midst of which they trembled and

suffered; both, for a moment, forgot in the immensity of human sorrow

the limits of their souls.

It was Hippolyte who was the first to turn towards the church, towards

the great portal, towards that veil of bluish smoke through which, by

turns, scintillated and disappeared the little flames of the wax tapers.

"Let us go in," she said, in a choking voice, without leaving George's

side.

Colas remarked that it was impossible to enter by the main entrance.

"But," he added, "I know another door--follow me."

With great difficulty they forced a passage. And yet, a false energy

sustained them; a blind obstinacy impelled them on, almost like that

displayed by the fanatics in their endless turning. They had caught the

contagion. From now on George no longer felt he was master of himself.

His nerves dominated him, imposed on him the disorder and excess of

their sensations.

"Follow me!" repeated the old man, stemming the torrent by sheer

strength of his elbows, and struggling fiercely to protect his guests

against the crush.

They entered by a side door into a sort of sacristy, from which could be

seen, through a bluish smoke, the walls entirely covered by votive

offerings of wax suspended there in proof of the miracles accomplished

by the Virgin. Limbs, arms, hands, feet, breasts, shapeless pieces

representing tumors, gangrenes, and ulcers, horrid representations of

monstrous maladies, pictures of violet and crimson sores which cried out

from the pallor of the wax--all these objects, motionless on the four

high walls, had a mortuary appearance, horrifying and frightful, evoking

the image of a charnel-house where are piled up all the limbs amputated

in a hospital. Heaps of human bodies encumbered the pavement, inert;

and in the heap appeared livid faces, bleeding mouths, dusty faces, bald

heads, white hair. They were nearly all old people, prostrated by a

spasm in front of the altar, carried in arms, and heaped in piles like

cadavers in time of a pest. Another old man arrived from the church,

carried in the arms of two men who were sobbing: the motion caused his

head to hang now on his chest, now on his shoulder; drops of blood

rained on his shirt front from lacerations of his nose, lips, and chin.

Behind him continued the hopeless cries of anguish, imploring the favor

which this old man had not obtained.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

It was an unheard-of clamor, more atrocious than the yells of a man

burnt alive without hope of salvation; more terrible than the cry of

shipwrecked sailors condemned to a certain death upon the nocturnal sea.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

A thousand arms were stretched towards the altar with savage frenzy.

The women dragged themselves along on their knees, sobbing, tearing out

their hair, striking their hips, bruising their foreheads on the stones,

twisting as if in convulsions or possessed. Many, on all fours,

sustaining the entire weight of their horizontal bodies on their elbows

and naked toes, advanced gradually towards the altar. They crawled

along like reptiles, they gathered themselves together, springing on

their toes, with progressive propulsions, and beneath their petticoats

could be seen their callous yellow soles, the projecting and pointed

ankle-bones of their feet. At times the hands seconded the efforts of

the elbows, trembling around the mouth which kissed the dust, near the

tongue which traced in this dust the sign of the cross, with a saliva

mixed with blood. And the crawling bodies passed over these bloody

tracings without effacing them, whilst, before each head, a man erect

struck the pavement with the tip of a stick in order to indicate the

right way to the altar.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

Kinswomen, dragging themselves along on their knees on each side of the

furrow, superintended the votive agony. From time to time they leaned

forward to encourage their unfortunate sisters. When the latter seemed

about to faint, they went to their relief, supported them under the

arms, or fanned their heads with a cloth. While doing this they shed

hot tears; and wept even more copiously when they assisted the old men

or adolescents, acquitting themselves of the same vows. For there were

not only women, but also old men, adults, adolescents, who, to approach

the altar, to be worthy to lift their eyes towards the Image, subjected

themselves to this torment. Each placed his tongue on the spot where

another had already left a wet trace; each struck his forehead or his

chin on the spot where another had already left a shred of his skin, a

drop of his blood, of his sweat, and of his tears. Suddenly a long ray

of sunlight penetrated the large portal into the interstices of the

crowd, illuminating the soles of the shrunken feet, calloused by the

arid soil or mountainous rocks, so deformed that they appeared less the

feet of human beings than the feet of beasts; illuminating bald and

hairy heads, white with old age, or light brown or black, supported by

bull-like necks which swelled in the effort, or shaking and weak like

the greenish head of an old turtle, out of his shell, or like a

disinterred skull still bearing a few grayish locks and a few shreds of

reddish skin.

Now and then, over this swarm of reptiles, a blue wave of incense spread

slowly, veiling for a moment this humility, this hope, and this bodily

pain, as if in compassion. New patients forced a passage, presented

themselves at the altar to solicit the miracle; and their shadows and

their voices covered the prostrate bodies that seemed as if they would

never be able to rise.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

The mothers exposed their dried-up breasts, which they showed to the

Virgin, imploring the blessing of milk, while behind them their

kinswomen carried the emaciated children, almost dying, who uttered

wailing cries. Wives prayed for the fecundity of their sterile womb,

and gave as offerings their clothes and marriage jewels.

"Holy Virgin, have mercy on me, in the name of the Son whom thou dost

bear in thine arms!"

They prayed at first in low tones, tearfully reciting their woes, as if

they were having a secret conversation with the Image, as if the Image

were bending forward from above to listen to their lamentations. Then,

gradually, they exalted themselves almost to the point of fury,

insanity, as if they wished, by their acclamations and insane gestures,

to compel consent to the prodigy. They summoned all their energy to

utter a superhuman shriek capable of reaching the very bottom of the

Virgin's heart.

"Have mercy on us! Have mercy on us!"

And they stopped, staring anxiously, with their dilated and fixed eyes,

in the hope of surprising, finally, a sign upon the visage of the

celestial person who scintillated in a reflection of jewels between the

columns of the inaccessible altar.

Another wave of fanatics arrived, took their places, spread out along

the entire length of the railing. Tumultuous cries and violent gestures

alternated with their offerings. Inside the railing which intercepted

the access to the large altar, priests received in their fat and white

hands the moneys and trinkets. In the act of tendering the right or

left hand, on either side, they balanced themselves like caged beasts in

a menagerie. Behind them, the clerks held large metal plates on which

the offerings jinglingly accumulated. On one side, near the door of the

sacristy, other priests were stooping over a table: they were counting

the money and examining the jewels, while one of them, bony and

brownish, made entries with a quill pen in a large ledger. They each

performed this task in turn, and then left it to officiate. From time

to time the bell sounded, and the censer was elevated amidst a cloud of

smoke. Long, bluish waves rolled around the tonsured heads and

dispersed on the other side of the railing. The sacred perfume mingled

with the human stench.

"_Ora pro nobis, sancta Dei Genitrix ..._

_Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi._"

At times, during unexpected and terrible pauses like those of a

hurricane, when the crowd was oppressed by the anguish of expectation,

one could distinctly hear the Latin words:

"_Concede nos famulos tuos._"

Beneath the large portal advanced with pomp a married couple, escorted

by all their relatives in a blaze of gold, in a rustling of silk. The

spouse, young and vigorous, had a head like a barbarian queen, with

thick and joining eyebrows, wavy and shining black hair, a fleshy and

blood-red mouth, in which the incisive, irregular teeth raised the upper

lip, shaded with a virile shadow. A necklace of large gold beads was

wound thrice around her neck; large gold hoops embellished with filigree

work hung from her ears, on her cheeks; a corsage scintillating like a

coat of mail confined her bosom. She marched gravely, entirely absorbed

in her thoughts, scarcely winking her eyelids, holding her ringed hand

on her husband's shoulder. The husband was also young, of medium

stature, almost beardless, very pale and with an expression of profound

sadness, as if devoured by a sad secret. The appearance of both seemed

to indicate the fatality of a primitive mystery.

Whispers spread around their passage. They themselves neither spoke nor

turned their heads, followed by their parents, men and women, entwined

in a chain by their arms, as if about to perform an ancient dance.

"What vow were they accomplishing? What favors were they asking?"

The news spread in a low tone from mouth to mouth: they asked for the

young man a return of genital virility, of which some evil influence

doubtless had deprived him. The virginity of his spouse still remained

intact; the conjugal couch was still immaculate.

When they were near to the railing they both raised their eyes toward

the Image silently; and they remained a few moments motionless, absorbed

in the same mute supplication. But, behind them, the two mothers

extended their arms, agitated their dried and wrinkled hands, which on

the marriage day had distributed in vain the augural grain. They

stretched out their arms and cried:

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

With slow gestures, the wife removed the rings from her fingers and

offered them. Then she took out the heavy golden hoops. Then she took

off her hereditary necklace. All this wealth she offered at the altar.

"Take it, blessed Virgin! Take it, most Holy Mary of Miracles!" cried

the mothers, with voices already rendered hoarse by their cries, with

demonstrations redoubled by fervor, each glancing at the other sidewise

to see that her neighbor was not surpassing her in ardor in the eyes of

the attentive crowd.

"Take it! Take it!"

They saw the gold fall, fall into the hands of the impassive priest;

then they heard the precious metal jingle on the clerk's plate, coin

acquired by dint of the persistent toil of several generations,

preserved for years and years at the bottom of the strong box, and

brought to light again at every new wedding-day. They beheld fall the

family wealth, fall, disappear forever. The immensity of the sacrifice

plunged them into despair, and their distress extended to their kinsmen.

The relatives ended by uttering piercing shrieks altogether. The young

man alone remained silent, keeping constantly fixed on the Image his

eyes, from which gushed two streams of silent tears.

Then there was a pause, during which one could hear the Latin words of

the service and the cadence chanted by the processions which were still

turning around the church. Then the couple resumed their first position,

and, their eyes still fixed on the Image, slowly fell back.

A new band, yelling furiously, now interposed between them and the

railing. For a few seconds the young woman towered a head above the

tumult, despoiled now of all her bridal jewelry, but more beautiful and

more vigorous, enveloped in a sort of Dionysiac mystery, exhaling over

this barbaric multitude a breath as of very ancient life; and she

disappeared, never to be forgotten. Exalted far beyond the time and the

reality, George's gaze followed her until she disappeared. His soul

lived in the horror of an unknown world; in the presence of a nameless

people, associated with rites of very obscure origin. The faces of men

and women appeared to him as if in a delirious vision, marked with the

stamp of a humanity other than his own, and formed of a different

substance; and the looks, the motions, and the voices, and all the

perceptible signs, struck him with stupor, as if they had had no analogy

with the habitual human expressions which he had known up to then.

Certain figures exercised over him a sudden magnetic attraction. He

followed them in the crowd, dragging Hippolyte with him; he gazed after

them on tiptoe; he watched all their actions; he felt their cries

reverberate in his own heart; he felt himself invaded by the same

madness; he himself felt a brutal desire to shout and gesticulate.

From time to time Hippolyte and he glanced at each other; they saw each

other pale, convulsed, aghast, exhausted. But neither one proposed to

leave the terrible place, as if they lacked the strength to do so.

Jostled by the mob, almost carried away at times, they wandered here and

there in the midst of the uproar, holding hands or arms, while the old

man made continuous efforts to help and protect them. A procession,

coming up, forced them against the railing. During several minutes they

remained there, prisoners, closed in on all sides, enveloped by the

smoke of the incense, deafened by the cries, suffocated by the heat, in

the thickest part of the gesticulating and insanity.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

It was the reptile women, who, arrived at last, rose to their feet. One

among them was carried by her relatives, rigid as a corpse. They stood

her on her feet; they shook her. She seemed dead. Her face was all

dusty, the skin flayed from her nose and forehead, her mouth full of

blood. Those who helped her blew in her face to bring her back to

consciousness, wiped her mouth with a cloth which became crimson, shook

her again and called her by name. All at once her head fell back; then

she threw herself against the railing, grasped the iron bars, stiffened

her whole body, and began to scream like a woman in delivery.

She yelled and struggled, drowning every other clamor. A torrent of

tears inundated her face, washing off the dust and blood.

"Madonna! Madonna! Madonna!"

And behind her, by her sides, other women surged, tottered, reanimated

themselves, implored:

"Mercy! Mercy!"

They lost their voices, grew pale, broke down heavily, and were carried

away inert masses, while others again seemed to surge up from below

ground.

"Mercy! Mercy!"

These shrieks, which rent the breasts that emitted them; these syllables

repeated without cease, with the persistence of the same unconquerable

faith; this thick smoke, which overhung like the cloud of a tempest;

this contact of bodies, this mixture of breaths, the sight of this blood

and these tears--all this made that at one moment the entire multitude

found itself possessed by a single soul, became a single being,

miserable and terrible, having but one gesture, but one voice, but one

convulsion, but one frenzy. All the evils melted into one single evil,

which the Virgin should destroy; all the hopes melted into one single

hope, which the Virgin should grant.

"Mercy! Mercy!"

And, beneath the scintillating Image, the little flames of the waxen

tapers trembled before this wind of passion.

*CHAPTER VII.*

George and Hippolyte were now seated in the open air, away from the

turmoil, beneath the trees, stupefied and faint, like two shipwrecked

people escaped from peril, mute, almost without power of thought,

although, from time to time, a shudder at the recent horror again ran

through them. Hippolyte's eyes were red from crying. Both, in the

Sanctuary, at the tragic moment, had been seized by a common delirium;

and, from fear of madness, they had taken flight.

They were now seated away from the turmoil, at the extreme end of the

esplanade, beneath the trees. This corner was almost deserted. One

only saw there, around several twisted olive-tree trunks, groups of

beasts of burden with empty pack-saddles, in an immobility of lifeless

forms; and they cast a sad aspect over the shade of the trees. In the

distance could be heard the murmur of the swarming multitude; one heard

the cadences of the sacred chants, the blasts of the trumpets, the

ringing of the bells; one perceived the pilgrimages developing into long

files, turning around the church, entering it and leaving it.

"Do you want to sleep?" asked George, who noticed that Hippolyte was

closing her eyes.

"No; but I have no longer the courage to look----"

George felt the same repugnance. The continuity and acuteness of the

sensations had overcome the resistance of his organs. The spectacle had

become intolerable. He arose.

"Come, get up," he said. "Let us go and sit down farther off."

They descended into a cultivated valley, seeking a little shade. The

sun was very ardent. Both thought of their house at San Vito, of the

beautiful, airy rooms, opening on the sea.

"Are you suffering much?" asked George, discovering on his friend's face

the manifest signs of pain, and, in her eyes, the sombre sadness that

lately, in the midst of the crowd, near the pillar of the portal, had

already frightened him.

"No. I am very tired."

"Do you want to sleep? Why not sleep a little? Lean against me.

Afterwards you will feel better. Will you?"

"No, no."

"Lean against me. We will wait until Colas returns before we go to

Casalbordino. Meanwhile, rest a little."

She removed her hat, bent towards him, and leaned her head. He looked

at her in this attitude.

"How beautiful you are," he said.

She smiled. Once more the suffering transfigured her, gave her greater

seductive charm.

He said again:

"How long it is since you gave me a kiss!"

They embraced.

"Now, sleep a little," he begged, tenderly.

His sentiment of love seemed renewed in him, after so many horrible and

strange things that had oppressed them. He began once more to isolate

himself, to recoil within himself, to repulse all communion that was not

with the elect of his heart. His mind freed itself with an

inconceivable rapidity from all the phantoms created during the period

of the mystic illusion, the ascetic ideal; he threw off the yoke of that

"divine" which he had tried to substitute for his inert will, from the

very hopelessness of arousing it. He now felt for "faith" the same

disgust that he had felt in the church for the unclean beasts that

crawled in the sacred dust. He saw again the fat and pale hands of the

priests who received the offerings, the continual balancing of the black

figures behind the closed railing. All that was ignoble, denied the

presence of that Lord whom he had hoped to know in an annihilating

revelation. But, finally, the great proof had been accomplished. He

had experienced the material contact with the inferior classes of his

race, and nothing had resulted from it for him but a sentiment of

invincible horror. His being had no roots in that ground, could have

nothing in common with that multitude which, like most species of

animals, had attained its definite type, had definitely incarnated in

its brutish flesh permanency of habit. For how many centuries, during

how many generations, had this immutable type been perpetuated? So the

human species had an absolutely inert basis which persisted beneath the

undulations of moving superior elements.

So the ideal type of humanity was not in a distant future, at the

unknown end of a progressive evolution; it could only manifest itself on

the crest of the waves, in the most elevated beings. He perceived now

that, in trying to find himself entirely and to recognize his veritable

essence by means of an immediate contact with the race from which he had

sprung, he deceived himself like a man who attempts to determine the

form, dimension, direction, speed, and power of a sea wave by the action

of the subjacent volume of water. The experiment had not succeeded. He

was as much a stranger to this multitude as to a tribe of Oceanians; he

was as much a stranger to his country, to the land of his birth, to his

fatherland, as he was to his family and to his hearth. He should

forever renounce that vain search for the fixed state, the stable

support, the assured help. "The sensation I have of my being resembles

that which a man would have, who, condemned to hold himself upright on a

ceaselessly oscillating and unbalanced surface, would feel his support

ceaselessly fail him, no matter where he placed his foot." He had used

this vision once to paint his perpetual anxiety. But why, since he

wished to preserve life, did he not become, by dint of method,

sufficiently strong and agile to become habituated to preserving his

equilibrium amid the diverse impulsions, and to dance even on the edge

of the precipice, freely and boldly? In truth, he wished to _preserve_

life. What proved that, as far as evidence could, was his successive

experiments themselves. In him a deep instinct, resting intact up to

then, arose with ever new artifices against mortal languor. That

ascetic dream which he had constructed with such richness, trimmed with

such elegance, was it anything else than an expedient for combating

death? He himself, since the beginning, had set himself the dilemma:

either to follow the example of Demetrius, or to give himself to Heaven.

He had chosen Heaven, to preserve his life. "Apply henceforth your mind

to acquire the disgust of truth and certitude, if you wish to live.

Renounce searching experience. Respect the veils. Believe in the

visible line and in the proffered Word. Do not seek beyond the world

any of the appearances that your marvellous senses have created. Adore

the illusion."

And he already found a charm in this fleeting hour. The profundity of

his conscience and the infinite extension of his sensibility filled him

with pride. The innumerable phenomena that, instant by instant,

succeeded one another in his inner world made the comprehensive power of

his soul appear to be illimitable. And that fleeting hour during which

he believed he could discover hidden connections and secret analogies

between the representations of Chance and his own sentiment possessed,

in reality, a singular charm for him.

In the distance could be heard the confused murmur of the wild crowd

from which he had just extricated himself; and that confused murmur

aroused in him, in flashes, the vision of a great, sinister furnace in

which demons were struggling in a tragic combat. And above this

incessant murmur he distinguished also, at every breath of the breeze,

the delicious rustling of the branches that shielded his meditation and

Hippolyte's repose. Hippolyte was resting in a doze, her mouth

half-open, scarcely breathing; and a light moisture dampened her brow.

Her hands were folded in her lap, ungloved, pale; and in imagination

George saw between the fingers the "plucked-out tuft of hair." Just as

this tuft of hair appeared and disappeared in the strong light, on the

burning soil, appeared also the phantom of the epileptic, he who had

unexpectedly fallen at the doorway writhing beneath the grasp of two men

who were trying to force open and place a key in his mouth. This

phantom appeared and disappeared, as if it were the dream of the

sleeping woman, and rendered visible. "What if she awoke and the

epilepsy returned?" thought George, with an inner shudder. "The image

that forms in my brain is perhaps transmitted to me from her. I see

perhaps her dream. And her dream is perhaps caused by an organic

disturbance that commences and will increase as far as an attack. Is

not a dream sometimes the presage of a malady that is breeding?" He

dwelt for a long time in the meditation of these mysteries of the animal

substance, vaguely perceived. Against the diffuse depths of this

physical sensibility, already enlightened by the five superior senses,

gradually appeared other intermediary senses, whose very subtle

perceptions disclosed to him a world up to then unknown. Was it

impossible that Hippolyte's latent malady furnished him with a condition

favorable for communicating with her in some extraordinary manner?

He regarded her attentively, as he had done in bed on that first day,

already so distant. He saw the light shadows of the hanging branches

tremble on her face. He heard the continual tumult that spread out from

the Sanctuary in the infinite light. Sadness again fell on his heart;

lassitude crushed him to earth again. He leaned his head against the

trunk of the tree and closed his eyes, without thinking of anything.

Slumber was about to seize him, when a start of Hippolyte awoke him.

"George!"

She awoke frightened, agitated, no longer recognizing the surrounding

spot; the strong light annoyed her, and she covered her eyes with her

hands, groaning.

"My God, how I'm suffering!"

She complained of a pain in her temples.

"Where are we? Oh! what an awful dream it was."

"I should not have brought you," said George, uneasy. "How sorry I am!"

"I have not strength enough to rise. Help me."

He raised her up by the arms. She tottered, and, seized by vertigo,

clung to him.

"What's the matter? Where do you suffer?" he cried in a changed voice,

seized by a panicky terror, believing that she was about to be taken

with a fit, there, in the open country, far from all help. "What's the

matter? What's the matter?"

He clasped her closely to him, pressing her to his heart, which beat

with horrible violence.

"No, no, it is nothing," stammered Hippolyte, who had all at once

understood his terror, and who had grown pale. "It is nothing. My head

is giddy. The sun has made me dizzy. It is nothing."

Her lips were almost white, and she avoided looking her lover in the

eyes. He could not yet succeed in dominating his anguish, and

poignantly regretted having awakened in her the fearful and shameful

preoccupation. His memory recalled this passage in a letter: "What if

the malady should seize me while in your arms? No, no, I will never see

you again; I do not wish to see you any more!"

She said, in a feeble voice:

"It's over. I'm better. But I'm thirsty. Where can I get a drink?"

"Over there, near the church, where the tents are," said George.

She refused vigorously, with a motion of her head.

"I will go. Wait for me here!"

She was obstinate in her refusal.

"Let us send Colas. He must be near by; I'll call him."

"Yes, call him, so we may return to Casalbordino. I will drink there.

I can wait. Let us go."

She leaned on George's arm. They remounted the hill. Arrived at the

top, they saw once more the plain swarming with people, the white huts,

the reddish edifice. Around the twisted trunks of the olive-trees still

stood, ever motionless, the melancholy forms of the beasts of burden.

Near them, in the same shade where they had previously sought a refuge,

an old woman was seated, who, to all appearances, seemed to be a

centenarian; she, also, was motionless, her hands placed on her knees,

the fleshless limbs only partly covered by her petticoat. Her white

hair hung down the sides of her waxen cheeks; the mouth, without lips,

resembled a deep furrow; her eyes were sealed forever beneath the

corroded eyelids; her entire air expressed a reminiscence of innumerable

pains.

"Is she dead?" asked Hippolyte in a whisper, stopping, seized by fear

and respect.

The multitude was pushing about the Sanctuary. The processions whirled

around chanting, beneath the cruel sun. One of these processions came

from under the great portal and turned towards the open space, preceded

by its cross-bearer. Arrived at the edge of the esplanade, men and

women stopped and turned towards the church in a half-circle, the women

squatting, the men upright, the cross-bearer in the centre. They prayed

and crossed themselves. Then they sent towards the church a great,

simultaneous cry--the last salutation. And they resumed then way,

intoning the hymn:

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva Maria!_

The old woman did not change her attitude. Something great, terrible,

and indefinitely supernatural emanated from her solitary old age in the

shadow of the arid and almost petrified olive-tree whose cleft trunk

seemed marked by a bolt from heaven. If she still lived, her eyes at

least did not see, her ears no longer heard, all her senses were

obliterated. Yet she had the appearance of a Witness who was looking

towards the invisible region of eternity. "Death is not as mysterious as

this remnant of life in this human ruin," thought George. And at the

same time there arose in his mind, accompanied by an extraordinary

emotion, the vague image of a very ancient myth. "_Why dost thou not

awaken the Mother secular who sleeps on the threshold of Death? In her

slumber resides the first Science. Why dost thou not interrogate the

wise earthly Mother?_" Vague words, the obscure fragments of ancient

epics, awoke in his memory; indefinite lines and symbols swayed and

enveloped him.

"Let us go, George," said Hippolyte, shaking him lightly, after an

interval of pensive silence. "How sad everything is here!"

Her voice was weak, and in her eyes was that sad shadow in which her

lover read an inexpressible horror and disgust. He dared not encourage

her, for fear she would feel in his encouragements the preoccupation of

the horrible menace that seemed to hang over her, since the moment that

she had seen the epileptic fall in the crowd.

But, a few steps farther on, she stopped again, choked by incoercible

anguish, strangled by a knot of sobs that she could not untie. She

looked at her lover, then gazed about her, distracted.

"My God, my God! What sorrow!"

It was a sorrow entirely corporeal, a brutal sorrow that arose from the

depths of her being like a compact and heavy thing, crushing her with an

insupportable weight. She would have liked to sink to the ground as if

beneath an enormous burden, never to arise again; she would have liked

to lose consciousness, to become an inert mass, to expire.

"Tell me, tell me, what can I do? What can I do to ease you?" stammered

George, pressing her hand, prey to a mad terror.

Was not this sadness perhaps the chrysalis of the illness?

For a few seconds, she remained with her eyes fixed and rather haggard.

She shivered beneath the shock caused by the clamor raised in the

vicinity by a procession which saluted the church on leaving.

"Take me away somewhere. Perhaps there is a hotel at Casalbordino.

Where can Colas be?"

George looked anxiously around, in the hope of discovering the old man.

He said:

"Perhaps he is looking for us in the crowd; or perhaps he has gone to

Casalbordino, thinking he will find us there."

"Let us go alone, then. Down below, yonder, I see some carriages."

"Let us go, if you like. But lean on me."

They directed their steps towards the highroad, which lay like a long

white ribbon on the other side of the esplanade. It seemed as if the

tumult followed them. The trumpet of a mountebank sent after them its

piercing notes. The always even cadence of the hymn, persistently

dominated all other sounds by its exasperating continuity.

_Viva Maria!_

_Viva Maria!_

A beggar unexpectedly appeared, as if he had sprung from below ground;

and he stretched out his hand.

"Charity, for the love of the Madonna!"

It was a young man, with his head bound in a red handkerchief, one

corner of which covered his eye. He raised this corner and showed an

enormous eye, swollen like a pocket, purulent, on which the winking of

the upper eyelids forced a shudder horrible to see.

"Charity, for the love of the Madonna!"

George gave him money; and the beggar again hid his deformity. But, a

little farther on, a man of gigantic stature, with an empty sleeve,

half-raised his shirt in order to show the red and furrowed cicatrice of

the amputation.

"A bite--a horse's bite! Look!"

And he threw himself on the ground, thus uncovered, and he kissed the

ground several times, crying each time, in a harsh voice:

"For pity's sake!"

Under a tree was another beggar, a bandy-legged fellow, on a kind of

seat composed of a pack-saddle, a goat-skin, an empty petroleum can and

large stones. Wrapped in a sordid covering from which protruded two

hairy legs, soiled with dry mud, he wildly shook his hand, twisted like

a root, to chase away the flies that assailed him in clouds.

"Charity! Charity! Have pity on a poor man! The Madonna will pardon

you. Have pity on a poor man!"

At the sight of other beggars who came running up, Hippolyte hastened

her steps. George made a sign to the nearest coachman. When they were

in the carriage, Hippolyte uttered a cry of relief:

"At last!"

George questioned the coachman:

"Is there a hotel at Casalbordino?"

"Yes, signor, there is one."

"How long will it take to get there?"

"A short half-hour."

"Let us go on, then!"

He took Hippolyte's hands, tried to cheer her up.

"Courage, courage! We will take a room; we can rest. We will see

nothing, hear nothing more. I, too, am exhausted with fatigue and my

head feels tired."

He added, smiling:

"Aren't you a little hungry?"

She responded to his smile. He added again, evoking the remembrance of

the old hotel of Ludovic Togni:

"It will be as it was at Albano. Do you remember?"

It seemed to him that she was becoming a little calmer. He wanted to

bring her to a state of light and joyous thoughts. He said:

"What has become of Pancrace? Ah! if we had one of his oranges. Do you

remember? I do not know what I would give for an orange. Are you very

thirsty? Are you suffering?"

"No.... I feel better.... I can hardly believe that the torture is

over.... My God! I shall never forget this day, never--never!"

"Poor soul!"

He tenderly kissed her hands. Then, pointing to the vegetation that

bordered the road:

"Look!" he exclaimed, "see how beautiful the corn is. Let us purify our

eyes."

To right and left the harvest stretched immaculate, already ripe for the

sickle, high and vigorous, breathing in the light by the slender points

of their innumerable ears, that, at certain moments, seemed to wave and

become converted into a volatile gold. Alone beneath the limpid arch of

heaven, they exhaled a spirit of purity by which both their hearts, sad

and tired, were refreshed.

"How strong the reflection is?" said Hippolyte, half lowering her long

lashes.

"You have your curtains."

She smiled. It seemed that the shadow of her sadness was about to be

dissipated.

Many carriages came in a long line from the opposite direction,

descending towards the Sanctuary. For a few minutes the road, the

bushes, the fields, all disappeared from around them in the dust.

"Charity, for the love of the Madonna! Charity! Charity!"

"Charity! In the name of the Virgin of Miracles!"

"Have pity on a poor, unfortunate man!"

"Charity! Charity!"

"Give me a piece of bread!"

"Charity!"

One, two, three, four, five voices, more and still more voices, the

voices of beings still invisible, burst forth in the midst of the cloud,

hoarse, penetrating, sharp, cavernous, humble, angry, plaintive, all

different and discordant.

"Charity!"

"Charity!"

"Stop! Stop!"

"Charity, in the name of the most holy Mary of Miracles!"

"Charity! Charity!"

"Stop!"

And through the dust appeared confusedly a growling mob of monsters.

One shook the stumps of his amputated hands, bleeding as if the

mutilation were fresh or badly cicatrized. Another had on his palms

disks of leather, that he used painfully to drag along the weight of his

inert body. Another had an enormous goitre, wrinkled and violet-hued,

that dangled like a pendant. Another, on account of an excrescence on

his lip, seemed to hold between his teeth the remains of a raw liver.

Another displayed a face devastated by a deep erosion that showed his

nasal cavities and upper jaw. Others exhibited similar horrors, freely,

with violent gestures, with almost menacing attitudes, as though to

enforce a right.

"Stop! Stop!"

"Charity!"

"Look! Look! Look!"

"Help me! Help me!"

"Charity!"

"Charity!"

"Help me!"

It was an assault--almost an extortion. They all seemed resolved to

demand a mite, even if they had to seize the wheels and hang on the

limbs of the horses.