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 débris 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 reëstablish 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 Émile 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.

"Stop!  Stop!"

While George sought for some money in his pockets in order to throw it
among the horde, Hippolyte pressed close to him, seized at the throat by
a feeling of disgust, powerless henceforth to master the fantastic
terror which invaded her in this powerful white light in this unknown
land where swarmed so lugubrious a life.

"Stop!  Stop!"

"Charity!"

"Pity!  Pity!"

But the coachman, becoming angry, rose suddenly on his seat, shook his
whip vigorously, and began to beat the beggars with all his might; and
he accompanied every blow with invectives.  The lash whistled.  Beneath
his blows the beggars howled maledictions, but did not retreat.  Each
wished his share.

"Give me some!  Give me some!"

Then George threw a handful of coins in the dust; and the dust covered
the scuffle of the monsters, choked their blasphemies.  The man with the
amputated hands and the fellow with the inert limbs still essayed to
follow the carriage for a moment; but, menaced by the whip, they
stopped.

"Don’t be afraid, signora," said the coachman.  "Nobody will get near us
now, I promise you."

New voices arose, groaning, yelling, invoking the Virgin and Jesus,
announcing the nature of their deformities and sores, recounting the
malady or misfortune.  On the other side of the ambush prepared by the
first bandits, a second army in tatters stretched along in a double
chain on the borders of the road as far as the houses of the distant
market town.

"My God, my God!  What a cursed country!" murmured Hippolyte, exhausted,
feeling herself fainting.  "Let us get away from here.  Let us go away!
Please, George, let us go back."

Nothing—not the whirlwind of madness that drove the fanatic bands around
the temple, nor the hopeless cries that seemed to issue from a place on
fire, from a shipwreck or a massacre, nor the inanimate and bloody old
men who lay in heaps along the court of the votive hall, nor the
convulsed women who crawled towards the altar tearing their tongues
against the stone, nor the supreme clamor that issued from the entrails
of the multitude confounded in an unique anguish and in an unique
hope—nothing, nothing, was as terrible as the spectacle of that great
dusty hillside blinding in the glare of the sun, where all these
monsters of human misery, all this débris of a ruined race, these bodies
vilified to the level of the unclean beast and excremental matter,
opened their rags to expose their impurities and proclaim them.  The
innumerable horde occupied the slope and the ditches; they had with them
their family, their progeniture, their relatives, their household goods.
One saw women half-naked and as lean as bitches who have just littered,
children green as lizards, emaciated, with rapacious eyes, their mouths
already withered, taciturn, breeding in the blood the hereditary
disease.  Each tribe possessed its monster: one-armed, bandy-legged,
subject to goitre, blindness, leprosy, epilepsy.  Each had as a
patrimony his ulcer to cultivate, from which to derive an income.  Urged
on by his own people, the monster left the group, advanced in the dust,
gesticulated and implored, for the common benefit:

"Charity, charity, if you hope for mercy!  Charity! Take pity on me!
Take pity on me!"

A monomere, black and flat-nosed as a mulatto, with a long leonine mane,
picked up the dust in the curls of his hair, then shook his head,
enveloping himself in a cloud.  A woman afflicted with hernia, of no
age, having no longer a human face, squatted on a post, raised her apron
to show her hernia, enormous and yellowish like a bladder full of suet.
Seated on the ground, a man afflicted with elephantiasis pointed with
his finger to his leg, massive as the trunk of an oak, covered with
warts and yellow crusts, dotted with black or hardened spots, so
voluminous that one would have said it did not belong to him.  A blind
man, on his knees, his hands stretched towards heaven in the attitude of
an ecstatic, had under his high and bald brow two little blood-stained
holes.  Others and still others showed themselves in the dazzling glare
of the sun, as far as the view could carry.  All the great hillside was
infested by them without an interval.  Their supplications continued
uninterruptedly, rising and falling in chorus, in discord, with a
thousand accents.  The vast extent of the solitary country, the deserted
and silent sky, the hallucinating reverberation of the fiery road, the
immobility of the vegetable forms—all these environments rendered the
hour tragic, evoked the biblical image of a road of desolation
conducting to the gates of a cursed city.

"Let’s go!  Let’s go back!  Please, George, let’s go back!" repeated
Hippolyte, with a shudder of horror, dominated by the superstitious idea
of a divine punishment, fearing other spectacles and more atrocious
ones, under this burning and empty sky in which there began to be heard
a metallic rumbling.

"But where can we go?  Where shall we go?"

"No matter where.  No matter where.  Let us go back over there, near the
sea.  We’ll wait there until it’s time to leave.  Please!"

The fast, the torture of thirst, the hot, oppressive atmosphere, had
increased in both their uneasiness of mind.

"Do you see?  Do you see?" she cried, as if in front of a supernatural
apparition.  "Do you see?  Will it then never end?"

In the light, the glaring and implacable light, advanced towards them a
band of tattered men and women, and in front of the band marched a sort
of crier who vociferated while agitating a copper tray.  These men and
women bore upon their shoulders a trestle covered with a mattress on
which lay an invalid of cadaverous appearance, a yellowish-looking
creature, thin as a skeleton, tightly wrapped in bands of cloth like a
mummy, the feet bare.  And the crier—an olive-colored and serpentine man
with the eyes of a madman—pointed to the dying woman, and related in a
high key that this woman, who had been ill from hemorrhage for years,
had obtained the miracle from the Virgin at the very dawn of that day,
and he begged for alms so that, cured of her disease, she could gain
fresh blood. And he shook the copper tray, on which tinkled a few coins.

"The Madonna has performed the miracle!  The miracle! The miracle!
Charity!  In the name of the Very Holy and the Very Merciful Mary,
charity!"

The men, the women, all together, contracted their faces as if about to
weep.  And the invalid, with a vague gesture, slightly raised her bony
hands, the fingers of which moved as if to seize something in the air;
while her bare feet, as yellow as her hands and face, shiny at the
ankles, had the rigidity of death.  And all that was exposed in the
glaring and implacable light—near, near, always nearer.

"Turn back!  Turn back!" cried George to the driver. "Turn back, and
whip up your horses."

"We’re there, signor.  What alarms you?"

"Turn back!"

The injunction was so imperative that the driver turned round his horses
amidst the deafening cries.

"Whip them up!  Whip them up!"

From the top to the bottom of the hill the carriage seemed, among the
clouds of thick dust, pierced every now and then by a hoarse yell.

"Where are we going?" asked the driver, bending down.

"Over there, over there, near the sea!  Whip them up!"

George was supporting Hippolyte, who had almost fainted, without trying
to revive her.  He had but a confused sensation of all that was going
on.  Real images, and fantastic images, whirled around his brain and
gave him hallucinations. A continual buzzing filled his ears, and
prevented him from hearing any other sound distinctly.  His heart was
oppressed with a keen anguish, as in the nightmare—the anguish to emerge
from the zone of this horrible dream, the anguish to recover his first
lucidity, to feel the loved creature palpitate on his breast, and to see
once more the tender smile.

    _Viva Maria!_

Once more the undulation of the hymn reached him; once more the House of
the Virgin appeared to him on the left amid the immense human swarm,
reddish in the solar conflagration, throned on the summits of the
profane tents, irradiating a formidable power.

    _Viva Maria!_
    _Viva Maria!_

The undulation faded away; and at a bend of the hill the Sanctuary
disappeared.  And, suddenly, a cool breath glided over the vast, waving
harvests.  And a long blue band cut the horizon.

"The sea!  There’s the sea!" cried George, as if he had just attained
salvation.

And his heart dilated.

"Courage, my soul!  Contemplate the sea!"

                                  *V.*

                          *TEMPUS DESTRUENDI.*

                              *CHAPTER I.*

The table, laid in the loggia, presented a gay appearance, with its
transparent porcelain, its bluish glassware, its crimson pinks, under
the golden light of a fixed, large lamp, which attracted the nocturnal
moths scattered in the twilight.

"Look, George, look!  A devil moth!  It has the eyes of a demon.  Do you
see them shine?"

Hippolyte pointed to a moth larger than the others, strange in
appearance, covered with a thick red flush, with projecting eyes which,
under the light, glittered like two carbuncles.

"It’s coming on you!  It’s coming on you!  Take care!"

She laughed heartily, making fun of the instinctive alarm that George
exhibited, in spite of himself, when one of these insects threatened to
alight on him.  "I must have it!" she cried, with the rapture of a
childish caprice.

And she tried to capture the diabolical moth, which, without settling,
flew around the lamp.  Her attempts, abrupt and violent, were
unsuccessful.  She upset a glass, knocked over a pyramid of fruit,
almost smashed the lamp-shade.

"What fury!" said George, who wanted to excite her. "But you won’t
succeed."

"I shall succeed," replied Hippolyte obstinately, and looking fixedly at
him.  "Will you make a bet?"

"What shall we bet?"

"Anything you like."

"Well, then, a love game."

"Very well, a love game."

In the warm light her face was colored with its softest and richest
tints, that ideal coloring, "a compound of pale amber and dull gold in
which were mingled, perhaps, a few tints of faded roses," in which
formerly George had thought he had found all the mystery and all the
beauty of the antique Venetian soul emigrated to the kingdom of Cyprus.
She wore in her hair a pink, ardent as desire.  And her eyes, shaded by
the lashes, shone like lakes between the willows in the twilight.

At that instant she appeared the woman of delights, the strong and
delicate instrument of pleasure, the voluptuous and magnificent animal
destined to ornament a banquet, to enliven a bed, to provoke equivocal
phantasies of an æsthetic sensuality.  She appeared in the supreme
splendor of her animalism—joyous, active, supple, lascivious, cruel.

George observed her with attentive curiosity, and he thought: "What
different appearances she assumes in my eyes!  Her form is sketched by
my desire; her shadows are produced by my thought.  Such as she appears
to me each instant, she is only the effect of my continual inner
creation. She exists only in me.  Her appearances change like the dreams
of an invalid.  _Gravis dum suavis_!  When was that?"  He retained but a
very confused recollection of the time when he had kissed her brow and
decorated her with this title of ideal nobility.  Now, this
glorification of the loved one had become almost inconceivable to him.
He remembered vaguely certain words that she had uttered and that seemed
to reveal a depth of soul.  "What spoke in her then?  Was it not my own
soul?  It was one of my ambitions to offer to my sad soul those sinuous
lips, so she might exhale her sorrow from an instrument of signal
beauty."

He looked at those lips.  They were slightly contracted, not
ungracefully, participating in the intense attention with which
Hippolyte waited for an opportunity to seize the night-moth.

She watched for it with sly prudence; she wanted, with one killing blow,
to shut up in the palm of her hand the winged prey that was whirling
restlessly around the light. She contracted her eyebrows and seemed to
be prepared for a spring, ready to jump.  She leaped forward two or
three times, but without success.  The moth was unseizable.

"Confess that you’ve lost," said George.  "I won’t abuse my privilege."

"No."

"Confess that you’ve lost."

"No!  Woe to him and to you, if I catch him."

And she resumed her hunt with trembling impatience.

"Oh, he’s gone," cried George, who had lost the agile flame-worshipper
from sight.  "He’s flown away!"

Hippolyte was really vexed; the wager had excited her.

She rose and cast a keen glance around the room, to discover the
fugitive.

"Here it is!" she cried, triumphant.  "There, on the wall!  Do you see?"

And she made a sign that she regretted she had cried out.

"Don’t stir," she went on in a low tone, turning towards her friend.

The moth had alighted on the luminous wall and stayed there motionless,
similar to a little brown spot.  With infinite precaution, Hippolyte
approached, and her beautiful body, slender and flexible, cast a shadow
on the white wall. Quickly her hand was raised, descended, closed.

"I have it!  I have it!"

And she exulted with childish joy.

"What forfeit shall I impose?  I’ll put it down your neck.  You are in
my power, too."

And she pretended she was about to execute her threat, as on the day she
ran after him on the hill.

George laughed, conquered by the spontaneity of that joy, which awoke in
him all that still remained to him of his youth.  He said:

"Come! now sit down and eat your fruit, quietly."

"Wait, wait!"

"What are you going to do?"

"Wait!"

She drew out the pin which held the pink in her hair, and put it between
her lips.  Then, gently, she opened her fist, took the moth by the
wings, got ready to transfix it.

"How cruel you are!" said George.  "How cruel you are!"

She smiled, attentive to her work, while the little victim beat its
wings, already despoiled.

"How cruel you are!" repeated George, in a lower but graver voice,
noticing on Hippolyte’s physiognomy an ambiguous expression, mingled
with complacency and repugnance, which seemed to signify that she found
a special pleasure in artificially exciting and tormenting her own
feelings.

He recalled that in several circumstances she had already shown a morbid
taste for this kind of excitation.  No pure sentiment of pity had
entered her heart, either in presence of the tears and blood of the
pilgrims at the Sanctuary or in the presence of the child in its death
agony.  And he saw her again quickening her step towards the group of
curious passers-by leaning against the parapet of the Pincio to
distinguish the traces left on the pavement by the suicide.

"Cruelty is latent at the bottom of her love," he thought.  "There is
something destructive in her, and this shows itself all the stronger as
the ardor of her caresses becomes more intense."

And he saw once more the frightful and almost Gorgonian image of this
woman, just as she had often appeared to his half-closed eyes in the
spasm of voluptuousness or in the inertia of the supreme exhaustion.

"Look!" she said, showing him the moth squirming on the pin.  "Look how
its eyes shine!"

She presented it in different ways to the light, as when one wishes to
cause the scintillation of a gem.  She added:

"What a beautiful jewel!"

And, with an easy gesture, she stuck it in her hair.  Then, fixing
George with her gray eyes:

"You do nothing but think, think, think!  What are you thinking of?  At
least, you used to talk—more perhaps than was necessary.  Now you have
grown taciturn, you have an air of mystery and conspiracy....  Are you
angry with me?  Speak, even if it will grieve me."

The tone of her voice, which had suddenly changed, expressed impatience
and reproach.  Once more she perceived that her lover had been only a
meditative and solitary spectator, a vigilant and maybe hostile witness.

"Do speak!  I prefer the cruel words of the old days to this mysterious
silence.  What’s the matter?  Doesn’t it please you to be here?  Are you
unhappy?  Are you tired of me?  Are you disappointed in me?"

To be thus suddenly and unexpectedly taken to task exasperated George,
but he repressed his anger—he even tried to smile.

"Why these strange questions?" he said calmly. "Does it worry you?  I am
always thinking of you and the things that concern you."

And quickly, with an amiable smile, fearing that she might suspect a
shade of irony in his words, he added:

"You fecundate my brain.  When I am in your presence my inner life is so
full that the sound of my own voice displeases me."

She was pleased with this affected phrase, which seemed to elevate her
to a spiritual function, to proclaim her the creator of a superior life.
The expression of her face became serious, while, in her hair, the
nocturnal moth squirmed continuously.

"Permit me to remain silent without being suspected," he continued,
appreciating the change produced by his artifice in this feminine soul,
which the idealities of love fascinated and exalted.  "Permit me to
remain silent. Do you ask me to speak when you see me dying under your
kisses?  Well, it is not your mouth alone which has the power to give me
sensations surpassing all known limits. Every moment you give me an
excess of sentiment and an excess of thought.  You will never imagine
what agitations are aroused in my mind by a single one of your gestures.
When you stir, when you speak, I see a series of prodigies. At times you
give me, as it were, a reminiscence of a life I have never lived.
Immensities of darkness are suddenly illumined and live in my memory
like unlooked-for conquests. What, then, are the bread, the viands, the
fruit—all those material things that make an impression on my senses?
What are the very operations of my organs, the external manifestations
of my corporeal existence?  When my mouth speaks, it seems almost as if
the sound of my voice cannot reach the depths in which I live.  It seems
to me that, not to disturb my vision, I should rest motionless and mute,
while you pass, perpetually transformed, across the worlds which you
have revealed."

He spoke slowly, his eyes fixed on Hippolyte, fascinated by this
extraordinarily luminous face crowned by hair dark and deep as the night
and in which a living and dying thing caused a continual palpitation.
This face, so near and yet which seemed to him intangible, and these
scattered objects on the table, and these high, purple flowers, and this
whirl of light-winged forms around the source of the light, and the pure
serenity which descended from the stars, and the musical breath which
rose from the sea, and all the images reflected by his feelings—all
seemed to him as in a dream.  His very person, his very voice, seemed
fictitious to him.  Her thoughts and words were associated in an easy
and vague manner.  As on the moonlit night in front of the marvellous
vine, the substance of his life and of the universal life was dissolved
in the mists of the dream.

                             *CHAPTER  II.*

Under the tent erected on the sand, after the bath, still half-nude, he
watched Hippolyte lingering in the sun by the water-side, wrapped in her
white peignoir.  He had almost painful scintillations in his eyes, and
the strong noonday sun caused him a novel sensation of physical trouble,
mingled with a sort of vague fear.  It was the terrible hour, the
supreme hour of light and silence, hovering over the chasm of life.  He
comprehended the pagan superstition, the holy horror of canicular
noon-times on the shore inhabited by a cruel and occult god.  At the
bottom of his vague fright stirred something like the anxiety of the man
who expects a sudden and formidable apparition. He appeared to himself
puerilely weak and cowardly, as diminished in courage and strength as
after a trial that has not succeeded.  In plunging his body into the
sea, in presenting his brow to the glare of the sun, in swimming a short
distance, in indulging his favorite exercise, in measuring his
respiration by the breath of the endless space, he had felt by
indubitable indications the impoverishment of his youth, the destructive
work of the enemy; he had felt once more the iron band tighten around
his vital activity, and so reduce a new zone to inertia and impotency.
The sensation of this muscular lassitude became all the deeper in
proportion as he regarded more attentively the figure of that woman
standing in the splendor of the day.

To dry her hair, she had unfastened it; and the curls, made heavy by the
water, fell over her shoulders, so dark that they almost appeared
violet.  Her erect and slender form, enveloped as in the folds of a
dress, stood out half against the glaucous surface of the sea and half
against the luminous transparency of the sky.  Scarcely could one see,
underneath the hair, the profile of her bent and pensive face. She was
wholly absorbed in the alternate pleasures of putting her bare feet in
the torrid sand and keeping them there as long as she could endure the
heat, then in plunging them, all burning, into the caressing waves that
licked the sand. This double sensation seemed to afford her infinite
enjoyment, in which she lost herself.  She tempered and fortified her
soul by the contact with free and healthy things, by the complacent
absorption of the salt water and the sunbeams. How, at the same time,
could she be so ill and so well? How could she conciliate in her being
so many contradictions, assume so many aspects in a single day, in a
single hour?  The taciturn and sad woman in whom epilepsy was breeding,
the mistress, eager and convulsed, whose ardor was at times alarming,
whose sensuality had at times the lugubrious appearance of agony—this
same creature, standing at the edge of the sea, had senses capable of
gathering and savoring all the natural delights shed over the
surrounding things, of appearing similar to the images of the ancient
Beauty leaning over the harmonious crystal of a Hellespont.

She had an evidently superior power of resistance. George viewed her
with a vexation which, becoming gradually concentrated, ended by
assuming the seriousness of rancor.  The sentiment of his own weakness
was disturbed by hatred in proportion as his perspicacity became more
lucid and almost vindictive.

Those bare feet, which by turns she burnt in the sand and cooled in the
water, were not beautiful; the toes were even deformed, plebeian, not at
all delicate—they bore the impress of a lowly origin.  George looked at
them attentively, saw only them, with an extraordinary clearness of
perception, as if the details of their shape had revealed a secret to
him.  And he thought:

"How many impure things are fermenting in that blood! All the hereditary
instincts of her race persist in her, indestructible, ready to develop
and arise against any restraint whatsoever.  I shall never succeed in
making her pure.  I shall be able only to superpose her real
individuality above the changing images of my dreams; and she will be
able only to offer to my solitary intoxication the indispensable
instrument of her organs."

But, while his intelligence reduced this woman to be but a simple
_motif_ for his imagination and despoiled of all value the palpable
form, the very acuteness of the present perception made him feel that
what attached him to her the most was precisely the real quality of that
flesh; not only what there was most beautiful in her, but, above all,
_what was least beautiful in her_.  The discovery of defect did not
loosen the tie, did not diminish the fascination.  The most vulgar
features had an irritating attraction for him.  He knew well this
phenomenon, which had often asserted itself. Often, with perfect
clearness of vision, his eyes had seen the slightest defects of
Hippolyte’s person accentuated; and they had been for a long time
subject to the attraction, they had been compelled to establish them, to
examine them, to exaggerate them.  And by his senses, in his mind, he
had felt an indefinable disquietude, almost always followed by the
sudden ardor of desire.  That, certainly, was the most terrible
indication of the great carnal obsession which a human creature
exercises over another human creature.  Such was the spell which was
obeyed by the nameless lover who, in his mistress, loved above all the
marks traced by the years on her white neck, the parting of the hair
every day wider, the faded mouth on which the salty tears made the savor
of the kisses more lasting.

He thought of the flight of years, of the chain riveted forever by
custom, of the infinite sadness of the love become a weary vice.  He saw
himself, in the future, tied to this flesh like the slave to his iron
collar, deprived of will and thought, stupefied and vacuous; he saw the
concubine fade, grow old, abandon herself without resistance to the slow
work of time, let fall from her inert hands the lacerated veil of
illusions, but preserve, nevertheless, her fatal power; he saw the
deserted house, desolate, silent, awaiting the supreme visitor, Death!

He recalled the shouts of the little bastards, heard on that distant
afternoon in the paternal house.  He thought:

"She is barren; her entrails have been visited by a curse. In it the
germs perish as in a fiery furnace.  She thus thwarts and betrays the
most profound instinct of life."

The uselessness of his love appeared to him like a monstrous
transgression of the supreme law.  But since his love was an uneasy
sensuality only, why had he, then, this character of ineluctable
fatality?  Was not the instinct of the perpetuation of the race the
unique and true motive of all sexual love?  Was not this blind and
eternal instinct the source of desire, and should not desire have as its
object, occult or manifest, the generation prescribed by Nature? How was
it, then, that so strong a tie attached him to the barren woman?  Why
was the terrible "will" of the Species so obstinate in demanding, in
exacting, the vital tribute of that organism ravaged by disease and
incapable of generating?  What was lacking in his love was the first
reason of love—the affirmation and the development of life beyond the
limits of individual existence.  What was lacking in the woman he loved
was the highest mystery of her sex—the suffering of her who gives birth.
And what caused the misery of both was precisely that persistent
monstrosity.

"Aren’t you coming in the sun?" asked Hippolyte, suddenly turning
towards him.  "Look how I am standing it!  I want to become really what
you say—_like an olive_. Shall I?"

She approached the tent, raising with her two hands the edge of her long
tunic, putting in her gestures an almost lascivious grace, as though
suddenly invaded by languor.

"Shall I?"

She stooped a little to enter the tent.  Under the abundance of snowy
folds, her thin and flexible body had movements of feline grace, exhaled
a heat and odor which spurred strangely the disturbed sensibility of the
young man.  And, while she stretched herself out on the mat beside him,
there fell all around his flaming face a shower of hair, still wet with
salt water, and through which shone the white of her eyes and the red of
her lips, like fruits among foliage.

In her voice, as on her face, as in her smile, there was a shadow, an
infinitely mysterious and fascinating shadow. It seemed as if she
divined her lover’s secret hostility, and was getting ready to triumph
over it.

"What are you looking at?" she asked with a sudden start.  "No, no;
don’t look at them!  They are ugly."

She withdrew her feet, hid them under the folds of her peignoir.

"No, no.  I forbid you."

She was vexed and ashamed for a moment; she frowned, as if she had
surprised in George’s eyes a spark of the cruel truth.

"Unkind man!" she said again, in an ambiguous tone of pleasantry and
rancor.

He replied, rather enervated:

"You know that, in my eyes, you are beautiful all over."

And he made the gesture as if to draw her to him and kiss her.

"No; wait.  Don’t look."

She arose and glided to a corner of the tent.  Rapidly, with furtive
gestures, she drew on her long black-silk stockings; then she turned
round, immodestly, an indefinable smile hovering on her lips.  And,
before George’s eyes, holding up, one after the other, her perfect legs
in their shining sheath, she fastened her garters above each knee. In
her action there was something wilfully lascivious, and in her smile
there was a touch of subtle irony.  And that mute and terrible eloquence
assumed in the young man’s eyes this precise signification: "I am always
the unconquered.  You have known with me all the enjoyments for which
your endless desire was thirsty, and I will clothe myself in lies that
will endlessly provoke your desire.  What matters to me your
perspicacity?  The veil that you tear I can repair in an instant, the
bandage that you pluck off I can fasten in an instant.  I am stronger
than your thought. I know the secret of my transfigurations in your
soul.  I know the gestures and the words that have the virtue of
metamorphosing me in your eyes.  The odor of my skin has the power to
dissolve a world in you."

In him a world was being dissolved while she drew near, serpentine and
insidious, to fling herself at his side on the coarse rush mat.  Once
more, the reality was converted into a confused fiction full of
hallucinating images.  The reverberation of the sea filled the tent with
a reflection of gold, mingled a thousand golden spangles in the threads
of the tissue.  Through the opening was a glimpse of the immensity of
the calm sea, the vast immobility of the waters under an almost
lugubrious blaze.  And, gradually, these very appearances faded away.

In the silence, he heard nothing more but the rhythm of his own blood;
in the shade, he saw nothing but two large eyes fixed on him with a kind
of fury.  She enshrouded him completely, as if she possessed the nature
of a cloud. And through all the pores of this ardent skin he inhaled the
marine fragrance like a salt volatilized through a flame. And in the
thickness of her still humid hair he beheld the mystery of the deepest
forests of sea-weed.  And, in the final bewilderment of his conscience,
he imagined he touched the bottom of an abyss falling to his death.

Then he heard, as if at a distance, amid the rustling of skirts,
Hippolyte’s voice, which was saying:

"Do you want to stay a little longer?  Are you asleep?"

He opened his eyes; he murmured, all dazed:

"No, I’m not asleep."

"What’s the matter?"

"I’m expiring."

He tried to smile.  He caught a glance of Hippolyte’s white teeth.  She
said, smiling:

"Do you want me to help you to dress?"

"No.  I’ll get dressed presently.  Go on; I’ll join you," he murmured,
with a sleepy tone.

"Then I’ll go back.  I’m too hungry.  Dress quickly, and come."

"Yes, immediately."

He started when he felt unexpectedly Hippolyte’s lips on his lips.  He
opened his eyes; he tried to smile.

"Have pity!"

He heard the crunching of the sand under her receding footsteps.  A
heavy silence again took possession of the beach.  At intervals, a light
splashing came from the edge of the sea and the neighboring rocks, a
feeble noise like that made by animals drinking in a trough.

A few minutes passed, during which he struggled against an exhaustion
that threatened to turn into lethargy. Finally, he sat up, not without
effort; he shook his head to dissipate his clouded thoughts; he looked
all around him with bewilderment.  He felt in his whole being a strange
sensation of emptiness; he was no longer able to coördinate his ideas;
he was almost incapable of thought, and to accomplish any act he needed
an enormous effort.  He threw a glance outside the tent, and was again
invaded by the horror of the light.

"Oh! if, on lying down again, I could never rise again.  To die!  Never
to see her again!"  He felt overwhelmed by the certainty that in a few
instants he must see this woman again, he must stay near her, he must
receive more of her kisses, he must hear her speak.

Before beginning to dress, he hesitated.  Several mad ideas passed
through his brain.  Then he dressed mechanically. He went out of the
tent, and the glare of the light made him close his eyes.  Through the
tissue of his eyelids he saw a great red light.  He had a slight
vertigo.

When he reopened his eyes, the spectacle of the external things gave him
an inexpressible sensation.  It seemed to him as if he saw everything
again after an indefinite time, during a different existence.

The sandy beach, beaten by the sun, had the whiteness of chalk.  On the
immense and lugubrious mirror of the sea the incandescent sky seemed to
subside, every second more under the weight of one of those gloomy
silences that accompany the expectation of an unknown catastrophe.  The
sandy promontories, with their large, deserted creeks, rose in the form
of towers above the black rocks, their crests wooded with olive-trees
that stood out against the torrid sky in the attitudes of anger or
madness.  Stretched out on the rocks, like some monster ready to spring
on its prey, the Trabocco, with its numerous machines, had a formidable
aspect.  In the entanglement of the beams and ropes, one could
distinguish the fishermen stooping towards the waters, steady,
motionless, like bronzes, and over their tragic lives hung the mortal
spell.

All at once, amid the silence, a voice struck the young man’s ears.  It
was the woman calling him from the height of the Hermitage.

He started; he turned round with an impressive palpitation. The voice
repeated its call, limpid and strong, as if it wished to affirm its
power.

"Come!"

While he climbed up the hill, the smoky mouth of one of the tunnels cast
in the air a rumbling reverberation which resounded throughout the gulf.
He stopped at the edge of the railroad, taken anew with a slight
dizziness; and the flash of an insane idea crossed his wearied brain:
"To lie down across the rails....  The end of all in a second!"

Deafening, rapid, and sinister, the train which passed swept in his face
the wind it displaced; then, whistling and rumbling, it disappeared in
the mouth of the opposite tunnel, the black smoke curling up in the sky.

                             *CHAPTER III.*

From dawn until twilight, the songs of the reapers—men and
women—alternated on the slopes of the fecund hill. Masculine choruses,
with a bacchic vehemence, were celebrating their joy at the abundant
feast and the richness of the old wine.  For the men of the scythe, the
time of the harvest was a time of abundancy.  Hour after hour, from dawn
to twilight, according to the old-time custom, they interrupted their
work to eat and drink on the field of stubble, among the newly made
sheaves, in honor of the generous master.  And each took from his
porringer the share of nourishment sufficient to satiate one of the
women.  Thus, at the hour of the repast, Boaz had said to Ruth the
Moabite: "Come thou hither, and eat of the bread, and dip thou thy
morsel in the vinegar.  And Ruth came and sat down beside the reapers,
and was sufficed."

But the feminine choruses were prolonged in almost religious cadences,
with a slow and solemn sweetness, revealing the original holiness of the
alimentary work, the primitive nobility of this task, where, on the
ancestral soil, the sweat of man consecrated the nativity of the bread.

George heard them and followed them, his soul attentive; and gradually a
beneficent and unhoped-for influence penetrated him.  His soul seemed to
gradually dilate, by an aspiration always broader and more serene in
proportion as the wave of the chant, propagated in the still torrid
noons, became purer, but in it the hope of the pacifying night began to
spread a species of ecstatic calm.  It was a renewed aspiration towards
the sources of life, towards the Origins.  It was, perhaps, the supreme
trembling of his youth attacked in the deepest part of its substantial
energy, the supreme panting towards the regaining of happiness lost,
henceforth, forever.

The harvest-time was drawing to its close.  Passing along the mown
fields, he caught a glimpse of the nice customs that seemed to be the
rites of a georgic liturgy.  One day he stopped close to a field already
despoiled, where the haymakers had just constructed the last haystack,
and he was a witness to the ceremony.

On the things exhausted by the heat hovered the limpid and sweet hour
that was about to gather in its crystalline sphere the impalpable ashes
of the consumed day.

The field was laid out in a parallelogram, on a tableland girt with
gigantic olive-trees, through the branches of which were glimpses of the
blue band of the Adriatic, mysterious as the velum perceived in the
temple behind the silver palms.  The high haystacks were erected at
intervals in the form of cones, massive, and opulent with the richness
heaped up by the arms of men, celebrated by the songs of women.  When
the toil was ended, the band of haymakers made a circle around its chief
in the centre of the field.  They were robust, sunburnt men, dressed in
linen. On their arms, on their legs, on their bare feet, they had
deformities which the long and slow endurance of manual labor imprints
on limbs that toil.  In the fist of each man shone a scythe, curved and
thin as the moon in its first quarter.  From time to time, with a simple
gesture of their disengaged hand, they wiped the sweat from their brows,
and with it sprinkled the ground where the straw was shining under the
oblique rays of the setting sun.

In his turn, the chief made the same gesture; then, raising his hand as
if to bless, he cried, in his sonorous voice, rich in rhythm and
assonance:

"Let’s leave the field, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of
the Holy Ghost!"

In chorus, the men of the scythe replied, with a great cry:

"Amen!"

And the chief went on:

"Blessed be our master, and blessed be our mistress!"

The men replied:

"Amen!"

And the chief, in a voice that gradually gathered strength and fire:

"Blessed be he who brought us good food to eat."

"Amen!"

"Blessed be he who says: ’Don’t put water in the wine of the haymaker!’"

"Amen!"

"Blessed be the employer who says to his lady: ’Give without measuring,
and put sapor in the wine of the haymaker!’"

"Amen!"

The benedictions extended from one to another: to him who had killed the
sheep, to him who had washed the herbs and vegetables, to him who had
polished the copper saucepan, to him who had seasoned the meats with
spices. And the chief, in the fire of enthusiasm, in the sudden
transport of a sort of poetic fury, expressed himself, all at once, in
couplets.  The band replied to him by immense clamors that reverberated
through all the creeks, while on the iron of the scythes the flashes of
the twilight, and the sheaves arranged on the top of the stacks, had the
appearance of flames.

"Blessed be the woman who sings beautiful songs while bringing pitchers
of old wine!"

"Amen!"

There was a thunderclap of joy.  Then all were silent, and watched
approach the chorus of the women, bearers of the last gifts of the mown
field.

The women, in double file, were singing, carrying in their arms the
large painted jars.  And the uninitiated spectator, seeing them advance
between the olive-trees, as through a colonnade, against the maritime
background, might imagine he saw one of those votive images that develop
harmoniously in bas-relief on the friezes of the temples or around the
sarcophagi.

As he went back to the house this image of beauty accompanied him along
the road, while he slowly wended his way amid the illusions of the
evening, in which were still floating the waves of the choruses.  At a
bend in the road, he stopped to listen to a melodious voice that was
approaching and that he seemed to recognize.  As soon as he recognized
it he started joyfully: it was the voice of Favetta, the young singer
with the falconlike eyes, with the vibrating voice that always awoke in
him the memory of that delicious May morning, resplendent on the
labyrinth of the blossoming furze, on the solitude of the garden of gold
in which, to his surprise, he thought he had discovered the secret of
joy.

Without suspecting the presence of the stranger, hidden by a hedge,
Favetta advanced, leading a cow by the tether. And she sang, her head
high, her mouth open towards the sky, the full light on her face; and
from her throat the song gushed forth, fluid, limpid, crystal as a
stream. Behind her the fine, snowy beast ambled gently, and at each step
its fetlock undulated, and its massive udder, swollen with milk by the
pasture, dangled between its legs.

When she perceived the stranger, the singer stopped singing, and seemed
about to halt; but he went to meet her with a joyous air, as if he had
met a friend of the happy days.

"Where are you going, Favetta?" he cried.

Hearing herself addressed by her name, she blushed and smiled with
embarrassment.  "I’m taking the cow to the shed," she replied.

As she had suddenly slowed down her step, the snout of the beast grazed
her hips, and her bold bust stood out between the large horns as in the
crescent of a lyre.

"You’re always singing," said George, admiring her in this attitude.

"Ah! signor," she said with a smile, "if we couldn’t sing, what could we
do?"

"Do you remember that morning when you plucked the furze flowers?"

"The first flowers for your lady?"

"Yes; do you remember?"

"I remember."

"Sing again for me the song you sang that day!"

"I can’t sing it alone."

"Well, sing another."

"Like that, all at once, in your presence?  I’m ashamed. I’ll sing on
the road.  Addio, signor."

"Addio, Favetta."

And she resumed her way along the path, dragging the peaceable beast
after her.  When she had gone a little way, she struck up the song with
all the strength of her voice that invaded the surrounding luminous
country.

The sun had just set, and an extraordinarily vivid light was shed over
the coasts and over the sea; an immense wave of impalpable gold mounted
from the occidental sky to the zenith and redescended to the opposite
side, the glassy transparency of which it penetrated with infinite
slowness. Gradually the Adriatic became more clear and more gentle,
approaching the green hue of the first leaves of the new shoots of
willows.  Alone, the red sails, as superb as if they were of purple,
broke the diffused light.

"It’s a holiday," thought George, dazzled by the splendid sunset,
feeling palpitate around him the joy of life. Where does the human
creature breathe for whom the whole day, from dawn to twilight, should
not be a Holiday consecrated by some new conquest?

On the hill, the songs in honor of the nativity of the bread continued
and alternated.  The long feminine files appeared on the slopes and
disappeared.  Here and there, in the still air, columns of smoke rose
slowly from invisible fires.  The spectacle grew solemn and seemed to
sink back into the mystery of the primitive centuries, in the holiness
of a celebration of rural Dionysiacs.

                             *CHAPTER IV.*

Since the tragic night on which Candia, lowering her voice, had spoken
of the witchcraft that hung over the men of the Trabocco, that great,
whitish framework, stretched along on the rocks, had more than once
attracted the strangers’ attention and excited their curiosity.  In the
crescent of the little musical bay, that bristling and treacherous form,
continually lying in ambush, seemed to deny the benignity of the
solitude.  At the burning and motionless noon-times, at the misty
twilights, it often took on formidable aspects.  At times, when all was
still, one could hear the grinding of the capstan and the creaking of
the timber.  During the moonless nights, the red light of the torches
was seen reflected by the water.

On an afternoon of oppressive idleness, George proposed to Hippolyte:

"Shall we go and visit the Trabocco?"

She answered:

"We’ll go, if you like.  But how can I cross the bridge? I have already
tried it once."

"I will lead you by the hand."

"The plank is too narrow."

"We’ll try."

They went there.  They descended by the path.  At the turn they found a
sort of stairway hewn in the granite, hardly practicable, and the
irregular steps of which stretched out as far as the reefs, at the end
of the shaky bridge.

"You see!  How can I manage?" said Hippolyte regretfully.  "Even looking
at it makes my head swim."

The first portion of the bridge was composed of a single plank, very
narrow, upheld by stanchions fixed on the rock; the other part, broader,
was formed of transverse thin deal boards, of an almost silvery
whiteness, worm-eaten, brittle, badly joined, so thin that they seemed
likely to break under the slightest pressure of the foot.

"Don’t you want to try it?" asked George, with an inner sense of strange
relief on finding that Hippolyte would never succeed in accomplishing
the perilous passage. "Look; someone is coming to lend us a hand."

A half-naked child ran toward them from the platform, agile as a cat,
brown as a rich golden bronze.  Beneath his unfaltering foot the deal
boards creaked, the rafters bent. Arrived at the end of the bridge, near
the strangers, he encouraged them by energetic gestures to confide in
him, looking up at them with his piercing eyes like the bird at its
prey.

"Don’t you want to try?" repeated George, smiling.

Irresolute, she advanced one foot on the shaking plank, looked at the
rocks and water, then drew back, incapable of conquering her agitation.

"I fear vertigo," she said.  "I am sure I should fall."

She added, with manifest regret:

"Go, go alone.  You’re not afraid?"

"No.  But what will you do?"

"I will sit down in the shade and wait for you."

She added again, with hesitation, as if to try and retain him:

"But why do you go there?"

"I’m going.  I’m curious to see."

She seemed sorry not to be able to follow him, vexed at letting him go
to a place which she could not reach herself; and what seemed to chagrin
and vex her was, not only having to renounce a curiosity and pleasure,
but also some other cause, not distinct.  What made her suffer, also,
was the temporary obstacle that was about to be interposed between her
lover and herself, that obstacle over which she was powerless to climb.

So essential had become the necessity of holding her lover always
attached to her by a sensible bond, to be with him in uninterrupted
contact, to dominate him, to possess him!

She said, a scarcely perceptible note of anger in her voice:

"Go, go along."

George became cognizant of a sentiment in himself that contrasted with
the instinctive sentiment of Hippolyte; it was a sort of relief to
establish beyond doubt that there was a place where Hippolyte could not
follow him, a refuge completely inaccessible to the Enemy, a retreat
defended by the rocks and by the sea where he could at last find a few
hours of real repose.  And these two impressions of their souls,
although indistinct and even somewhat puerile, but certainly opposed,
demonstrated the actual position of the lovers toward one another: the
one, a conscious victim destined to perish; the other, an unconscious
and caressing executioner.

"I’ll go," said George, with a shade of provocation in his voice and
attitude.  "Good-by."

Although he did not feel sure of himself, he refused the child’s
assistance, and was very careful to take bold and sure steps, not to
hesitate, not to vacillate on the shaking plank.  As soon as he had put
foot on the wider part, he hastened his steps, still preoccupied by
Hippolyte’s look, instinctively giving to his efforts the heat of a
hostile reaction.  When he trod the planks of the platform, he felt the
illusory sensation of finding himself on the bridge of a ship.  In one
second, the freshness of the short, splashing sea that broke on the
rocks revived in his memory certain fragments of the life that he had
lived on the Don Juan; and he felt through all his being a sudden thrill
at the chimerical idea of raising the anchor.

Immediately after, his gaze was attracted to the surrounding objects,
the slightest details of which he remarked with his usual lucidity.

Turchino had saluted him abruptly, with a gesture that neither word nor
smile softened, as if no event whatever, however unusual and
extraordinary it might be, would have the power to interrupt even for a
second the terrible preoccupation that appeared on his terrene face,
almost chinless, scarcely larger than a fist, with a long, prominent
nose, pointed like the snout of a pike, between two small, glittering
eyes.

The same preoccupation was legible in the faces of his two sons, who
also saluted in silence, and resumed their work without laying aside
their immutable sadness.  They were boys of over twenty, fleshless,
sunburnt, agitated by a continual muscular restlessness, like demoniacs.
All their movements had an air of convulsive contraction, of starts; and
beneath the skin of their chinless faces the muscles could be seen, at
moments, trembling.

"Is the fishing good?" asked George, pointing to the large, immerged
net, whose corners could be seen at the surface of the water.

"Nothing to-day, signor," murmured Turchino, in a tone of suppressed
anger.

After a pause, he added:

"Who knows?  Perhaps you’ve brought us good luck."

"Draw up the net.  Let’s see."

His sons began to manoeuvre the capstan.

Through the interstices of the planks could be seen the reflecting and
foaming waves.  In a corner of the platform stood a low cabin with a
straw roof, the summit of which had a layer of red tiles, and decorated
with a piece of sculptured oak in the form of a bull’s head with two
large, connecting horns—a charm against witchcraft.  Other amulets were
suspended from the roof, mingled with wooden disks, on which were glued
with pitch pieces of mirror, round as eyes; and a bunch of four-pronged
rusty forks lay before the low door.  To right and left, two large
vertical masts were erected, fixed on the rock, fastened at their bases
by stakes of all dimensions, that intercrossed and mingled, riveted to
one another by enormous nails, bound by iron wire and cordage,
strengthened in a thousand ways against the rage of the sea.  Two other
horizontal masts crossed the first two and stretched out like bowsprits