cting some theft. He did not see me. He was entirely absorbed in
his vintage and in the rebukes he hurled at his peasants. I drew back
into the shadow, leaning against the column of the gateway, a huge wall
blackened with time and damp. The bell of the old clock-tower sounded
the nineteenth hour of the night. All at once the servant Marietta
muttered in my ear, "Go in: she wants to speak with you. Go in to the
tapestry-room on the other side of the house: you remember."

My blood bounded in my veins. I asked nothing better of Fate. I glided
along the old walls, leaving the central court and the master there
absorbed in his work, and I found with some difficulty the little
side-door by which I had entered the house before. I trembled from head
to foot, as in that hour. I felt myself all at once to be ugly, heavy,
stupid, a brute to frighten any woman--sweating from the labors of the
day, covered with dust, poor and frightful in my rough hempen shirt,
with my naked legs and my bare knees impregnated with the juice of the
grapes. And I dared to love this woman--I! Loved her, though she had
slain Phoebus.

My mind was all in confusion: I was no longer master of myself. I
scarcely drew breath; my head was giddy; I staggered as I went along
those endless galleries and passages, as I had done that day when
Phoebus had fallen on the sand of my arena. At last I reached--how I
knew not--the room of the _arazzi_, scarcely lighted by a lamp of bronze
that hung from the ceiling by a chain. In the twilight I saw the woman
with the fatal gaze, with the lips of rose, with the features of
Lucrezia, of Venus, the woman who in all ages has destroyed man.

Then I forgot that I was a laborer, a peasant, a juggler, a wrestler, a
vagabond--that I was clad in coarse linen of hemp--that I was dirty and
filthy and ignorant and coarse. I forgot myself: I only remembered my
love--my love immense as the sky, omnipotent as Deity. I fell on my
knees before her. I only cried with stifled voice, "I am yours! I am
yours!" I did not even ask her to be mine. I was her slave, her tool,
her servitor, her thing, to be cherished or rejected as she would. I
shivered, I sobbed. I had never known before, it seemed to me, what love
could be; and it made a madman of me.

All the while she said nothing: she let me kiss her gown, her feet, the
stone floor on which she stood. Suddenly and abruptly she said only,
"You are a droll creature: you love me, really--you?