Then the Duke said to Mazzagrogna, “Giovanni, it is your turn!”
And the latter, with a resolute gesture, opened the shutters and went out onto the balcony.
IV
A sonorous shouting greeted him. Five, ten, twenty bundles of lighted sticks were simultaneously thrust beneath the place where he was standing. The glare illuminated the animated faces, eager for carnage, the steel of the guns, the iron axes. The faces of the torch-bearers were sprinkled with flour, as a protection from the sparks, and in the midst of their whitened faces their reddish eyes shone singularly. The black smoke arose in the air, fading away rapidly. The flames whistled and, stretching up on one side, were blown by the wind like infernal hair. The thinnest and dryest reeds bent over quickly, reddening, breaking down and cracking like sky-rockets. It was a gay sight.
“Mazzagrogna! Mazzagrogna! To death with the seducer! To death with the crooked man!” they all cried, crowding together to throw insults at him.
Mazzagrogna stretched out his hands, as though to subdue the clamour; he gathered together all his vocal force and began, in the name of the king, as if promulgating a law to infuse respect into the people.
“In the name of His Majesty, Ferdinando II, and by the grace of God, King of both Sicilies, of Jerusalem——”
“To death with the thief!”
Two or three shots resounded among the cries, and the speaker, struck on his chest and on his forehead, staggered, throwing his hands above his head and falling downward. Upon falling, his head stuck between two of the spikes of the iron railing and hung over the edge like a pumpkin. The blood began to drip down upon the soil beneath.
This spectacle rejoiced the people. The uproar arose to the stars. Then the bearer of the pole holding the hanging corpse came under the balcony and held the body of Vincenzio Murro near to that of the majordomo. The pole was wavering in the air and the people, dumbfounded, watched as the two bodies jolted together. An improvised poet, alluding to the Albino-like eyes of Mazzagrogna and to the bleared ones of the messenger, shouted these lines: