The Miracles of Antichrist: A Novel

by Selma Lagerlöf

Now Don Ferrante wished to harness his old horses before the gala carriage and have his old shopman take the place of coachman.

When Donna Micaela told him that it could not be, Don Ferrante began to weep. What would people think of him if he did not show himself on the Corso in the afternoon? That was the last thing a man of position denied himself. How could anyone know that he was a nobleman, if he did not drive up and down the street in the carriage of the old Alagonas?

The happiest hour Don Ferrante had enjoyed since his illness was when he drove out for the first time. He sat erect and nodded and waved very graciously to every one he met. And the people of Diamante bowed, and took off their hats, so that they swept the street. Why should they not give Don Ferrante this pleasure?

Donna Micaela was with him, for Don Ferrante did not dare to drive alone. She had not wished to go, but Don Ferrante had wept, and reminded her that he had married her when she was despised and penniless. She ought not to be ungrateful; she ought not to forget what he had done for her, and ought to come with him. Why did she not wish to drive with him in his carriage? It was the finest old carriage in Sicily.

“Why will you not come with me?” said Don Ferrante. “Remember that I am the only one who loves you. Do you not see that not even your father loves you? You must not be ungrateful.”

In this way he had forced Donna Micaela to take her place in the gala carriage.

But it was not at all as she had expected. No one laughed. The women courtesied, and the men bowed as solemnly as if the carriage had been a hundred years younger. And Donna Micaela could not detect a smile on any face.

No one in all Diamante would have wished to laugh; for every one knew how Don Ferrante treated Donna Micaela. They knew how he loved her, and how he wept if she left him for a single minute. They knew, too, that he tormented her with jealousy, and that he trampled her hats to pieces, if they became her, and never gave her money for new dresses, because no other was to find her beautiful, and love her. But all the time he told her that she was so ugly that no one but he could bear to look at her face. And because every one in Diamante knew it all, no one laughed. Laugh at her, sitting and chatting with a sick man! They are pious Christians in Diamante, and not barbarians.

So the gala-carriage in its faded glory drove up and down the Corso in Diamante during the hour between five and six. And in Diamante it drove quite alone, for there were no other fine carriages there; but people knew that at that same time all the carriages in Rome drove to Monte Pincio, all those in Naples to the Via Nazionale, and all in Florence to the Cascine, and all in Palermo to La Favorita.