“My poor mother was the most impatient to start of any of us, and she felt an absolute confidence in our good fortune. It was decided that we should begin by visiting some of the islands of the Archipelago.
“I must ask leave to pass rapidly over what follows; the recollection is most painful. In crossing part of the Apennines on foot, my poor father received a slight wound in the leg, from striking it against a rock. Notwithstanding our urgency, he neglected the wound, and insisted on walking during the following days. The weather was terribly hot. When we reached the coast of the Adriatic, where we were to embark, he found himself obliged to rest for some days, and we succeeded in inducing him to allow a surgeon to visit him. But what was our terror to find that mortification had commenced! We were at a mere village, far away from all competent aid. Our country surgeon, who was little more than a mere barber, spoke unconcernedly of amputating the leg. Would it have saved him, or hastened his death? In so horrible a dilemma, my mother and I knew not what to resolve. My father, with heroic courage, decided to have the leg taken off, and spoke of travelling about the world with a wooden leg. We dared not subject him to the knife of a butcher. I determined to hasten to Venice—it was only fifty leagues distant. I obtained a horse, set out, broke him down by night, abandoned him, bought another, and continued my journey. I reached the city exhausted, but alive. I applied to one of the first surgeons of Venice, and induced him to return with me by agreeing to pay him a sum equal to the whole of Sophia’s property. We took a boat and returned by sea, with a speed that filled me with hope and joy. Ah, monsieur! if I should live a thousand years, the memory of that terrible day would, I believe, be as bitter as it is now. I found Silvio Goffredi dead, and Sophia Goffredi insane.”
“Poor fellow!” said M. Goefle, as the great tears fell from Cristiano’s eyes.
“Well, well,” said the latter, hastily wiping them away, “it will not do to be surprised by emotions of that kind. It shows that one has too forcibly driven them out of his mind, and they revenge themselves for it once for all, when they can seize their rights.
“The skilful physician whom I had brought with me could neither cure my mother, nor give me any hope that she would ever be cured. He was only able, by studying the character of her insanity, to instruct me how to deal with its more violent attacks. It would be requisite to comply with all her desires, no matter how unreasonable, and, in other matters, to assume over her the sort of influence, and even authority, which a father exerts over his child.
“I carried her back to Perugia, along with the body of our poor friend, which we had embalmed, in order to deposit it in the mausoleum which his wife was imagining for him on the shore of lake Thrasymene. What I suffered at thus bringing back my father dead, and my mother insane, to the place from which we had so joyously departed not three weeks before, it is impossible for me to express. When we went, Sophia was laughing and singing all the way. On our return, also, she laughed and sang; but how mournful was the music, and how heart-breaking the laughter! I had to lead her along, to reason with her, to amuse and persuade her as one does a child—this woman, who had been so intelligent and strong; who but yesterday I relied upon as my guide and support; for, Monsieur Goefle, I was hardly nineteen years old.
“When the remains of Silvio Goffredi had been interred, his widow became more calm. Indeed, this calmness came upon her so suddenly, and was so extreme, that it seemed an appropriate last act of the sad drama of her destiny. I soon perceived that she had become, so to speak, a total stranger to herself; she became wholly absorbed in one idea: that of the monument to be erected to her beloved Silvio. From that day she would neither think nor talk about anything else. It was impossible for me to pursue any employments of my own, for she hardly slept at all, and allowed me only a few hours’ sleep, I will not say every day, but every week. It was out of the question to put her into the hands of any one but myself; under the care of any one else she became irritated, and fell into frightful paroxysms; while, with me, she never had a single attack of fury or despair. She talked to me endlessly, not about her husband, for she seemed no longer to retain any clear individual recollection of him; he had, as it were, become a wholly imaginary being, whom she had never seen; but she discussed the epitaphs, the emblematic designs, the carvings, etc., with which she proposed to embellish her husband’s monument.
“I think I must have drawn two or three thousand different designs for her. Each new one always pleased her for an hour or two, but at the end of that time she always found it unworthy of the memory of the ‘Magus,’ as she now always called the dear deceased. No emblematic design could embody the abstract and confused ideas that floated through her mind. She was constantly falling into profound meditations, when, taking out of my hands the pencil she herself had placed in them with a pretence of making some slight alteration, she would make me design some entirely new subject of a quite opposite character. As you will easily imagine, most of these designs were quite impracticable, and even meaningless. If I varied from her suggestions, she became so uneasy and agitated that I found it best to comply strictly with them. Thus I accumulated portfolio after portfolio full of designs, fantastic enough to have crazed any one who should have undertaken to interpret them.
“When some hours had been spent in this way, she used to take me out to see the pieces in marble that she had ordered of all the statuaries in the country. She had the court and garden full of them, and as soon as they were done she was dissatisfied with them.
“Another fancy of hers, which I felt bound to gratify at whatever cost, was in respect of the material to be employed for this imaginary monument. She obtained specimens of all the varieties of marbles and of all known metals; and more models, both in sculpture and in casting, were executed than the house could contain. They were even piled upon the beds; and travellers used to take our house for a museum, and to come to it and ask the meaning of all the strange subjects represented there. Poor Sophia found pleasure in receiving these visitors, and in explaining her ideas to them; and so they departed, some pained and saddened, others laughing and shrugging their shoulders,—the brutes! Their sneers affected me like so many crimes.