“What are you thinking of doing?” he asked.
“First of all, we will go and see a little of the town, and then we might get a carriage and take a drive in the neighborhood.”
We breakfasted almost in silence, and then set out. I dragged Francesca from palace to palace, and she either looked at nothing or merely glanced carelessly at the various masterpieces. Paul followed us, growling all sorts of disagreeable things. Then we all three took a drive in silence into the country and returned to dinner.
The next day it was the same thing and the next day again; and on the third Paul said to me: “Look here, I am going to leave you; I am not going to stop here for three weeks watching you make love to this creature.”
I was perplexed and annoyed, for to my great surprise I had become singularly attached to Francesca. A man is but weak and foolish, carried away by the merest trifle, and a coward every time that his senses are excited or mastered. I clung to this unknown girl, silent and dissatisfied as she always was. I liked her somewhat ill-tempered face, the dissatisfied droop of her mouth, the weariness of her look; I liked her fatigued movements, the contemptuous way in which she let me kiss her, the very indifference of her caresses. A secret bond, that mysterious bond of physical love, which does not satisfy, bound me to her. I told Paul so, quite frankly. He treated me as if I were a fool, and then said:
“Very well, take her with you.”
But she obstinately refused to leave Genoa, without giving any reason. I besought, I reasoned, I promised, but all was of no avail, and so I stayed on.
Paul declared that he would go by himself, and went so far as to pack up his portmanteau; but he remained all the same.
Thus a fortnight passed. Francesca was always silent and irritable, lived beside me rather than with me, responded to all my requirements and all my propositions with her perpetual Che mi fa, or with her no less perpetual Mica.
My friend became more and more furious, but my only answer was, “You can go if you are tired of staying. I am not detaining you.”