BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Luigi Pirandello, master of style, the humorist of a group of young Italian writers who are said to be inaugurating a renaissance in Italian literature, was born at Girgenti, Sicily, in 1867. He appeared first as a poet, pure in style, severe in inspiration, but later “found himself” in the writing of humorous tales. His humor, though at bottom sad and almost pessimistic, is not of the quiet sort. To him man appears as a creature more miserable than grotesque, eternally made sport of by the irony of fate. Such is the philosophy in his lugubriously fanciful “Mathias Pascal,” skeptical in spirit, in “Il Turno,” with its cruel pictures of Sicilian peasant life, and in “Signora Speranza,” one of the latest and most characteristic of his novelettes. For the purpose of this work the discursive passages have been here and there condensed and made more direct.
SIGNORA SPERANZA
BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Translated by Elise Lathrop. Copyright, 1907, by P. F. Collier & Son.
I
The family boarding-house of Signora Carolina Pentoni (Big Carolini, or Carolinona, as she was called, because of the excessive flesh which distressed her) was patronized by certain scatterbrains, droll fellows, who were the delight of the well-behaved who frequented the table, not so much because of the good cooking perhaps, but that they might be present at the gratuitous gaiety offered them during the meals.
One of these excellent, well-mannered people, without the least suspicion that he might be included among the so-called amusing types of the pension, had been for some time the butt of the scatterbrains, Biagio Speranza and Dario Scossi, who played all sorts of tricks on him; but he remained calm; so calm and obstinate that they were finally forced to let him alone. “Laughter is healthy. You gentlemen make me laugh, so I shall remain.”