Can it really be that anything and everything is of interest?
I DON’T give a fig for his pokings and ferretings, but if he touches me again I shall give him a taste of my dagger! My mind is made up, whatever the cost!
Tonight when I was pouring his wine he took my hand and wanted to look at it, but I drew it back in anger. But the Prince smiled and said that I must show it to him. He studied it closely, with shameless impertinence, scrutinized the knuckles and the wrinkles around the wrist, and even tried to push up my sleeve so as to see my arm. I pulled it back again in my anger, for I was seething with fury. They both smiled as I stood there with flaming eyes.
If he touches me once more, I shall have his blood!
I cannot bear being touched by anyone, I cannot tolerate any kind of offense against my body.
There is a queer rumor going around that he has persuaded the Prince to give him Francesco’s body in order to cut it up and see what a human inside looks like. It cannot be true. It is too incredible. And they cannot possibly have taken down the body, for it is supposed to hang there as a warning to the people, and to shame the criminal. Thus ran the sentence and why should not this scoundrel be pecked to pieces by the crows as much as the others? I had the misfortune to be acquainted with him and know only too well that he deserved the extremest punishment. Many a time has he taunted me in the streets. If they take him down it will not be quite the same punishment as the other gallows-birds’.
I heard it first this evening. It is night now, so I cannot see if the corpse is still hanging out there.
I cannot believe that it is true, that the Prince could give his consent to such a thing!
IT IS true! The rascal is no longer on the gallows! And I have also discovered where he is; I surprised the sage in the middle of his nefarious handiwork!
I had noticed that there was something going on in the cellar, for a door which is generally closed was open there. I noticed that yesterday, though I did not give it a second thought. Today I went there to investigate and found the door still ajar. I entered a long dark passage and came to another door, which was not shut either, and I slipped noiselessly in. There in a large room stood the old man in the light of a narrow slit in the southern wall, bending over Francesco’s cloven body! At first I could not believe my eyes, but there it lay opened up, with the entrails visible, and the heart and the lungs, looking like an animal. I have never seen anything so disgusting, I could never even conceive of anything so revolting as the inside of a human being. But he stood bent over it, studying it with tense interest, while he carefully cut around the region of the heart with a slender knife. He was so fascinated by what he was doing that he did not even notice I was in the room. Nothing else seemed to exist for him except his nauseating occupation. But at last he raised his head and looked up with a contented gleam in his eyes. His face was as delighted as though he were at a festival. I could look at him as much as I wanted, for he was standing in the light whereas I was in the deep shadow. Besides, he was completely entranced as though he were a prophet communing with God. It really was repellent.
The peer of princes! A prince who busies himself interpreting conundrums in the bowels of a criminal, who burrows into corpses!
TONIGHT they sat up until after midnight and talked and talked as never before. They worked themselves up into an ecstasy with their talk. They spoke of nature, of its inexhaustible greatness and riches. One great continuity, a single miracle! The veins which lead the blood around in the body as the spring water is led around in the earth; lungs which breathe as the oceans breathe with their ebb and flow; the skeleton which supports the body as the stones support the earth and the soil which is its flesh; the fire within the earth which is like the warmth of the soul and which also has come from the sun, the sacred sun which was worshiped of yore and from which all souls originate, which is the source of all life and which illumines the heavenly bodies of the universe with its light. For our world is only one among the innumerable stars of the universe.
They were as though possessed, and 1 had to listen to them, regardless of what they said, without being able to protest. I am more and more convinced that he is a lunatic and on the way to making my Prince one too. It is incredible that my lord should be so weak and malleable in his hands.
How can anyone seriously believe in such fantasies? How can anybody believe in the continuity, the divine harmony in everything, as he also called it? How can anybody use such fine-sounding, meaningless words? Miracles of nature! I thought of Francesco’s guts and nearly vomited.
What bliss to behold the wonderful riches of nature, they exclaimed. There is so much to be explored. And man shall become rich and powerful by learning to know all that, all these secret forces, and how to make use of them. The elements shall bow before his will; fire shall serve him in humility, its turbulence held in curb; the earth shall bear fruit a hundredfold, because he has discovered the laws of fertility, the rivers shall be his obedient chained slaves, and the oceans shall carry his ships around the wide world which floats in space like a wonderful star. Even the air shall be subdued, for some day he will learn to imitate the flight of the birds and, buoyant as they, glide with them and the stars toward goals which no human thought can encompass.
Ah, life is wonderful and human existence unfathomable in its greatness!
There was no end to their jubilation. They were like children dreaming of toys, so many toys that they did not know what to do with them all. I looked at them with my dwarf’s eyes without moving a muscle of my ancient furrowed face. Dwarfs are not like children; they never play. I reached up to fill their beakers as they emptied them in the course of their garrulous speech.
What do they know of the greatness of life? How do they know it is great? It is only a phrase, something they enjoy saying. One might just as well affirm that it was small, insignificant, completely unimportant, an insect that one can crush on a fingernail. And one might add that it has no objection to being crushed on a fingernail, being just as contented with its end as with anything else. And why should it not be so? Why should it be so anxious to exist? Why should it strive for existence or for anything else either? Why should it not be completely indifferent to everything?
Look into the heart of nature? What pleasure can there be in that? And if they really could do such a thing it would fill them with terror. They think that like everything else it is made for them, for their well-being and their happiness, so that their life shall be great and wonderful. What do they know about it? How do they know that any heed is paid to them and their strange childish desires?
They think that they can read in the book of nature, that it is lying open before them. They even believe that they can look on ahead in the book and read the blank pages where nothing is written. Heedless, conceited lunatics! There is no limit to their shameless self-sufficiency!
Who knows what nature carries in her womb? Who can even guess at it? Does a mother know what she has conceived? How could she? She bides her time, and eventually we see the thing to which she has given birth. A dwarf could tell them about that.
He diffident! There I was wrong. On the contrary, he is the most arrogant person I have ever met. His whole spirit and being breathe arrogance. And his mind is so presumptuous that it would fain lord it like a prince over a world which it does not own.
He may appear diffident when he sets himself to investigating all manner of things, saying he does not know this or that, but is trying to resolve them to the best of his ability. But he thinks that he knows the end and aim of everything, and the reason why! His humility applies to the small things only, not to the great. It is a strange kind of diffidence.