Pestalozzi, no, he wasn't a Minister of Finance of Italy: and neither was la Menegazzi. Both of them had a certain sense of value and nonvalue: she, if for nothing else, to be able to satisfy the whim of forgetting in the bathroom all about value (the topaz) inasmuch as she wouldn't have got any pleasure, in any part of her dithyrambic and trembling body, in forgetting in the bathroom nonvalue: a bottle-bottom. Jewels they were, those resplendent rubies, that was obvious, incubated and born in the originative millennia of the world. The expert could check and guarantee this, despite the cuts, the faceting, the polishing of art. Gems crystallized naturally from fused sesquioxide, following the principles of the system: and not a crystallized pretense in a light, a glory of falsehood, from a basin of excrement. As the impetus, the grief of a soul freezes in a cry, coagulates in notation, following the formal processes of thought: in a frozen cry! which is its own, and not the bawl of another, or of the market place of bawlings and of souls. The corporal scattered them with his fingers, with the gesture of a cook sorting rice before throwing it into the pot, scattered the stones, the jewels, the gold ornaments, the fabulous caramels, shining gems of the Maharajah in the depression of the miserable blanket. Of those appearances, wisps of gold or luminous grains on the dark color of the drapery, a dotted line stood out, like a string (seen, however, from above, and from afar, from a mountain or a plane) of electric globes in the curve of the Riviera: such as the illumination of Botafogo beads, in the bananiferous nights, all around the base of the Pao de Azucar. Those jewels, at that moment, seemed to burst and play over the bed from the mingled amassment of diverse thieving coups. But Pestalozzi, with a certain applied hesitation at first, then with smug certainty, thought that he could gradually recognize, in that scattered splendor, the debatable and ultradesired pearl necklace, two or three bangles, an amethyst, the garnet cross, the ball of lapil-laruli (so it was written), the corals, the jewelry, possessors of the names and the descriptions which figured, colleagues and brethren of the topass, in the first and following lines of the first and second sheets of the Martinazzi list, or rather, to be more precise, the Mantegazzi. Owners of the names and the titles, in general use, in some cases a tiny bit difficult: ring "of" ruby with two pearls, brooch with small black pearl and two emeralds, pendant "of" sapphire, as one might say of pastry, "surrounded" with brilliants, carcanet typed as carcanot, then corrected to carcano, of garnets in old (sic) style, string of (the o a hole, of course) white pearls (quite fake) et cetera, small ring et cetera, large brooch with onyx stone et cetera. A good reading exam for the aspiring carabinieri's course, thought Pestalozzi.