I went to the salle d'armes. The rooms were empty, bathed in the greenish shadow made by the closed blinds, filled with that peculiar odor which rises from wooden floors when they are sprinkled. The maestro, deserted by his pupils, greeted me with the greatest demonstrations of amiability. I listened attentively to the minute details of the last assault; then I asked him for news of several of my friends who frequented the salle; finally I asked him about Filippo Arborio.
"He has not been in Rome for four or five months," replied the maestro. "I have heard that he has a very serious and almost incurable nervous malady. I heard it from Galiffa. But that's all I know about it."
He added:
"In fact, he was very, very weak. He only took a few lessons from me. He was afraid to fence; he could not bear to see the point of a sword before his eyes."
"Is Galiffa still in Rome?"
"No, he is at Rimini."
Shortly after I went away.
This unexpected news startled me. "If it were only true," I thought. And I took pleasure in imagining that it was one of those terrible maladies of the spinal cord or of the cerebral substance that reduce a man to the lowest degradations, to idiocy, to the most pitiful forms of madness, and finally to death. The knowledge I had gained from scientific books, the recollections of a visit I had paid to an insane asylum, the images, still more precise, that I retained of a special case of one of my friends, Spinelli, repassed through my memory in a crowd. And once more I saw poor Spinelli seated in his big red-leather arm-chair, the color of clay, every line of his face paralyzed, his mouth drawn and gaping, full of saliva and stammering incomprehensibly; again I saw the gesture he made every little while to receive in his handkerchief that inexhaustible saliva that ran down the corners of his mouth; again I saw the blond, thin, and sorrowful face of the sister adjusting a napkin beneath the invalid's chin as on a baby, and introducing into his stomach, with the pharyngeal sound, the nourishment he was no longer capable of swallowing.
"So much the better," I thought. "If I had fought a duel with so celebrated an adversary, if I had wounded him seriously, if I had killed him, the fact would certainly not pass unnoticed; it would be in every mouth, it would get into the papers, and perhaps the true cause of the duel would also be found out. This providential malady, on the contrary, spares me all danger, all annoyance, all gossip. I may well renounce a sanguinary joy, a punishment inflicted by my own hand (and, besides, am I sure of the result?), since I know that disease paralyzes and saps the power of the man I detest. But is the news true? Perhaps it is only a temporary illness?" A happy idea struck me. I jumped into a cab and drove to the office of his publisher. During the drive I mentally pictured to myself—with a sincere wish that he might be stricken by them—the two cerebral diseases most terrible for a man of letters, for an artist in language, for a stylist, aphasia and agraphia. And an imaginary vision presented their symptoms to me.
I entered the office. At first I could distinguish nothing, my eyes still blinded by the outer light. But I heard a nasal voice questioning me in a strange tone: