But my friend continued:
"Between the two castles there was friendly intercourse. It was presumed that the Lord of Foscone would presently give his daughter in marriage to the Lord of Manzecca. Fate, however, determined that Fiammetta and Antonio di Manzecca, the younger brother, should fall in love with each other.
"Need I describe to you the fervor of that passion in the Italian springtime, at a period of our history when all the emotions were terrific in their force?
"At night, Antonio di Manzecca would slip away to the Castle of Foscone. She would be waiting for him on the platform outside her chamber, above the ramparts, overlooking the path across the hills. It chanced that by the aid of vines and fissures in the masonry he could climb the castle wall almost to that platform—almost near enough, indeed, to touch her finger-tips. Unhappily, there was nothing there to which she could attach a twisted sheet. So thus they made love—she bending down toward him, he clutching with toes and hands at the wall, her whispers making him dizzier than his perilous posture, her tears falling upon his lips through a space so little, yet greater than the distance between two stars.
"But almost everything is discovered. Antonio's meetings with Fiammetta became known to his elder brother.
"One evening Fiammetta, from the high platform, saw Antonio approaching while it was still twilight. All at once he was surrounded by servants of his own house, who had been waiting for him in ambush. Before he could move, half a dozen daggers sank into his body. Amid the thorns and nettles he sprawled lifeless, under the eyes of his beloved. As the assassins dragged his body away, there burst from the platform a prolonged peal of laughter.
"Fiammetta di Foscone had gone mad."
At that tragedy, at least, I was not surprised. The Italy of the Renaissance was full of such episodes—the murderous jealousy of brothers, the obedient cruelty of retainers, the wreckage of women's sanity by the fall of horrors much more ingeniously contrived than this. What froze my blood was the anticipation gradually shaping in my mind. I felt that this was the prelude to something monstrous, incredible, which I should be forced to believe.
"She had gone mad," my friend repeated, staring before him. "She had, in other words, lost contact with what we call reality. To her that state of madness had become reality, its delusions truth, and everything beyond those delusions misty, unreal, or non-existent."