and stir of soldiery: now it is poverty-stricken
and empty, naked and silent, looking down on the tawny, sullen swell of
the Tiber--the terrible Tiber, that has devoured so much gold, so much
treasure, so much beauty, and hidden so many dead and so many crimes,
and flows on mute and gloomy between its poisonous marshes. Of Tiber I
have always felt afraid.

Sant' Aloisa has always been a fief of the old counts Marchioni. One of
that race lived still, and owned the old grounds and the old walls,
though the fortunes of the family had long fallen into decay. Taddeo
Marchioni was scarcely above his own peasants in his manners and way of
life. He was ugly, avaricious, rustic, cruel. He was lord of the soil
indeed, but he lived miserably, and this beautiful woman had been his
wife seven years. At fifteen her father, a priest who passed as her
uncle, had wedded her to Taddeo Marchioni. She had dwelt here seven
mortal years, in this gloomy wood, by these yellow waters, amidst these
pestilential marshes. Her marriage had made her a countess, that was
all. For the rest, it had consigned her, living, to a tomb.

The lives of our Italian women are gay enough in the cities, but in the
country these women grow gray and pallid as the wings of the night-moth.
They have no love for Nature, for air, for the woods, for the fields:
flowers say nothing to them. They look neither at the blossoms nor the
stars. The only things which please them are a black mask and a murmur
of love, a hidden meeting, the noise of the streets, the bouquets of a
carnival. What should they do in the loneliness and wildness of the
broad and open country--our women, who only breathe at their ease in the
obscurity of their _palco_ or under the shelter of a domino?

The travellers who run over our land and see our women laughing with
wide-opened rose-red mouths upon their balconies at Berlingaccio or at
Pentolaccia can never understand the immense, the inconsolable,
desolation of dulness which weighs on the lives of these women in the
little towns of the provinces and the country-houses of the hills and
plains. They have the priest and the chapel; that is all.

In Italy we have no choice between the peasant-woman toiling in the
ploughed fields, and growing black with the scorch of the sun, and bowed
and aged with the burdens she bears, and the ladies who live between the
alcove and the confessional, only going forth from their chambers by
night as fireflies glist