The Prince seems rather overcome. I imagine that is why he is so reserved and uncommunicative. At least he is so with me, and yet I have sometimes had the pleasure of receiving his confidences, but that was on very different occasions. Now it seems as though he avoids me, I do not think he makes use of me quite as often as before. For instance, he did not personally give me the letter to Bernardo, but sent it by one of the courtiers.
Sometimes I think that he is almost beginning to fear me.
That red-cheeked peasant wench of the Princess’ is sick. At last she has lost some of her rubi-cundity. I wonder what can be the matter with her?
It is odd, but I do not fear the plague at all. I have a feeling that I shall never catch it, that it cannot affect me. Why? I just feel like that about it.
It is for human beings, for these creatures around me. Not for me.
The Princess sinks lower and lower. It is almost painful to witness her decline, the dissolution taking place within her, the neglect, indifference, and dirt which surround her. The sole trace of her birth and former personality lies in the obstinacy and fortitude with which she fulfills her destiny and prevents those around her from exercising any influence upon it.
Since the chamberwoman’s sickness, nobody is allowed to come near her and the room is in a worse state than ever. Now she eats nothing at all and is so emaciated that I can scarcely understand how she keeps alive.
I am her only visitor. She begs me to come and help her in her great need, to let her confess her sins to me.
I AM rather agitated. I have come straight from her and am terrifyingly conscious of the power which I sometimes exercise over human beings. I shall describe this visit.
As usual, I could see nothing at first. Then the windows outlined themselves, despite their thick curtains, as lighter parts of the wall, and I saw her crouching there by the crucifix, busy with her eternal praying. She was so absorbed in her orisons that she did not hear me open the door.
The room was so stifling that I could scarcely breathe. It was revolting. Everything nauseated me: the smell, the half-light, her shrunken body, the thin indecently exposed shoulders, the sinews ridging her neck, the untidy hair like an old birds’ nest, all that once had been worthy of love. A kind of fury convulsed me. I may hate human beings, but I do not like to see their degradation.
Suddenly I heard myself shouting furiously in the darkness, before she had noticed me or become aware of my presence.
“Why are you praying? Have I not told you that you may not pray? That I do not want your prayers?”
She turned around, not in fear but moaning softly like a flogged bitch with her eyes fixed humbly on me. That kind of thing does nothing to mitigate a man’s anger.
I went on mercilessly: “Do you think He cares about your prayers, that He forgives you because you kneel there, begging and praying and perpetually confessing your sins? It is easy enough to confess sins. Do you think He lets himself be fooled by that? Do you think He doesn’t see through you?
“It is Don Riccardo whom you love, not Him! Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think you can cheat me, deceive me with your devilish arts, with your penances, your scourgings of your lascivious body? You are longing for your lover though you say that you long for the One on the wall there! It is he whom you love I”
She looked at me in terror and her bloodless lips trembled. Then she flung herself at my feet groaning: “It is true! It is true! Save me! Save me!”
Her confession moved me powerfully.
“Voluptuous whore!” I exclaimed. “Feigning love for your Savior while in secret you lie with a lecher from hell! Betraying your God with one whom He has cast into the depths of hell! Diabolical woman, fixing your eyes on the Crucified One and proclaiming your burning love for Him, while all your soul rejoices in the embraces of another! Don’t you realize that He hates you? Don’t you realize it?”
“Yes, yes,” she moaned and writhed like a trodden worm at rny feet. It revolted me to see her cringing like that, it irritated me and oddly enough her behavior gave me no pleasure. She stretched out her hands to me. “Punish me, punish me, thou scourge of God!” she whimpered. She groped for the scourge on the floor and handed it to me and huddled up like a dog in front of me. I seized it, half-furious and half-nauseated, it whistled through the air over her loathsome body, and all the time I heard myself shrieking: “It is the Crucified One! He who hangs on the wall is scourging you now, He whom you have kissed so often with your glowing lying lips, whom you have professed to love! Do you know what love is? Do you know what He requires of you?
“I have suffered for you, but you have never cared about that! Now you shall know what it feels like to suffer!”
I was beside myself, I scarcely knew what I was doing. Knew? Of course I knew! I was taking revenge, retribution for everything! I was dispensing justice! I was exercising my terrible power over mankind! Yet I took no real pleasure in it.
She made no complaint while it was going on. On the contrary, she was very quiet and still, and when it was over she lay there as though I had relieved her of her sorrow and unrest.
“Burn forever in the fires of the damned! May the flames eternally lick the foul belly which has rejoiced in the horrible sin of love!”
With this judgment I left her, lying there on the floor as though in a swoon.
I went home. With thudding heart I mounted the stairs to the dwarfs’ apartment and shut the door behind me.
While writing this, my agitation has subsided, and I experience nothing but an endless void and boredom. My heart thuds no longer, I cannot feel it at all. I stare in front of me and my lonely countenance is dark and joyless.
Maybe she was right when she said that I was a scourge of God.
IT IS the evening of the same day and I am sitting here looking out over the town below. It is twilight and the bells have ceased their tolling and the domes and houses are beginning to fade away. In the half-light I can see the smoke from the funeral pyres coiling between them and the pungent smell reaches up to my nostrils. A thick veil shrouds everything, soon it will be quite dark.
Life! What is the point of it? What is its meaning, its use? Why does it go on, so gloomy and so absolutely empty?
I turn its torch downward and extinguish it against the dark earth, and it is night.
The peasant girl is dead. Her red cheeks could not stop her from dying. The plague took her, though for a long time nobody would believe it because she did not suffer the same pains as the others.
Fiammetta is dead too. She sickened this morning and after a couple of hours she was gone. I saw her when the phantoms from the Brotherhood came to fetch her. She was a horrible sight: her face was swollen and misshapen and presumably her body likewise. She was no longer a thing of beauty, but merely a disgusting corpse. They laid a cloth over her monstrous features and went away.
Here at the court they are terrified of the plague and want to get the dead out of the way as quickly as possible. But the order has been given that she is to be buried tonight with special honors. It does not really matter much, since she is dead.