Rites Of Passage Cultures Of Transition In The Fourteenth Century Nicola F Mcdonald

Rites Of Passage Cultures Of Transition In The
Fourteenth Century Nicola F Mcdonald download
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-cultures-of-
transition-in-the-fourteenth-century-nicola-f-mcdonald-2023300
Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.
Life Events And Rites Of Passage The Customs And Symbols Of Major
Lifecycle Milestones Including Cultural Secular And Religious
Traditions Observed In The United States Jeff Hill
https://ebookbell.com/product/life-events-and-rites-of-passage-the-
customs-and-symbols-of-major-lifecycle-milestones-including-cultural-
secular-and-religious-traditions-observed-in-the-united-states-jeff-
hill-1899350
Rites And Passages The Beginnings Of Modern Jewish Culture In France
16501860 Jay R Berkovitz
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-and-passages-the-beginnings-of-
modern-jewish-culture-in-france-16501860-jay-r-berkovitz-51967378
Rites And Passages The Beginnings Of Modern Jewish Culture In France
16501860 Jewish Culture And Contexts 1st Pbk Ed Jay R Berkovitz
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-and-passages-the-beginnings-of-
modern-jewish-culture-in-france-16501860-jewish-culture-and-
contexts-1st-pbk-ed-jay-r-berkovitz-2399426
Rites Of Passage A Civil Servant Remembers Hiralal Muljibhai Patel
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-a-civil-servant-
remembers-hiralal-muljibhai-patel-38074852

Rites Of Passage Witch Queen Book 2 Ad Starrling
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-witch-queen-book-2-ad-
starrling-44725304
Rites Of Passage At 100000 To 1000000 The Insiders Lifetime Guide To
Executive Jobchanging New Edition Lucht
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-
at-100000-to-1000000-the-insiders-lifetime-guide-to-executive-
jobchanging-new-edition-lucht-11882526
Rites Of Passage Border Corssisngs Imagined Homelands Indias East And
Bangladesh Sanjoy Hazarika
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-border-corssisngs-
imagined-homelands-indias-east-and-bangladesh-sanjoy-hazarika-47171662
Rites Of Passage Mike Brooks
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-mike-brooks-47639422
Rites Of Passage William Golding
https://ebookbell.com/product/rites-of-passage-william-
golding-55143404

RITES OF PASSAGE
Cultures of Transition in the
Fourteenth Century

Edited by
Nicola F. McDonald, W. M. Ormrod

RITES OF PASSAGE
CULTURES OF TRANSITION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
‘Rites of passage’ is a term and concept more used than considered. Here,
for the first time, its implications are applied and tested in the field of
medieval studies: medievalists from a range of disciplines consider the
various theoretical models – folklorist, anthropological, psychoanalytical –
that can be used to analyse cultures of transition in the history and
literature of fourteenth-century Europe. Ranging over a wide variety of
texts, from chronicles to romances, from priests’ manuals to courtesy
books, from state records to the writings of Chaucer, Gower and Froissart,
the contributors identify and analyse medieval attitudes to the process of
change in lifecycle, status, gender and power. A substantive introduction
by Miri Rubin draws together the ideas and materials discussed in the
book to illustrate the relevance and importance of anthropology to the
study of medieval culture.
N
ICOLAF. MCDONALDis Lecturer in Medieval Literature, W. M. ORMROD
Professor of Medieval History, University of York.
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page i

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS
York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval
Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the pro-
motion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have
a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief
that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major con-
stituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.
Editorial Board (2001–2004):
Professor W. M. Ormrod (Chair; Dept of History)
Professor P. P. A. Biller (Dept of History)
Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English & Related Literatures)
Dr J. Hawkes (Art History)
Dr M. O. Townend (Dept of English & Related Literature)
All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay
collections, should be addressed to: The Director, University of York, Centre for
Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York, YO1 7EP (E-mail: [email protected]).
Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page ii

RITES OF PASSAGE
CULTURES OF TRANSITION IN THE
FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Edited by
Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod
YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page iii

© Editors and Contributors 2004
The rights of Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod to be identified as the
editors of this work have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved.Except as permitted under current legislation
no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast,
transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner
First published 2004
A York Medieval Press publication
in association with The Boydell Press
an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9 Woodbridge Suffolk IP12 3DF UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mount Hope Avenue Rochester NY 14620 USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.co.uk
and with the
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York
ISBN 1 903153 15 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rites of passage : cultures of transition in the fourteen century / edited by
Nicola F. McDonald and W.M. Ormrod.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–903153–15–8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Civilization, Medieval – 14th century. I. McDonald, Nicola.
II. Ormrod, W. M., 1957–
CB365.R58 2004
392.1’5’0940902–dc22 2004004688
Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page iv

CONTENTS
List of Contributors vi
Preface vii
Introduction: Rites of Passage 1
Miri Rubin
Re-writing a Rite of Passage: The Peculiar Funeral of Edward II 13
Joel Burden
Coming to Kingship: Boy Kings and the Passage to Power in 31
Fourteenth-Century England
W. M. Ormrod
Boy/Man into Clerk/Priest: The Making of the Late Medieval Clergy 51
P. H. Cullum
Manners Maketh Man: Living, Dining and Becoming a Man in the 67
Later Middle Ages
Sharon Wells
Rites of Passage in French and English Romances 83
Helen Phillips
Becoming Woman in Chaucer: ‘On ne naît pas femme, on le meurt’ 109
Jane Gilbert
John Gower’s Fear of Flying: Transitional Masculinities in 131
the Confessio Amantis
Isabel Davis
‘Le moment de conclure’: Initiation as Retrospection in 153
Froissart’s Dits amoureux
Sarah Kay
Index 173
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page v

CONTRIBUTORS
Joel Burden University of Newcastle upon Tyne
P. H. Cullum University of Huddersfield
Isabel Davis University of York
Jane Gilbert University College, London
Sarah Kay University of Cambridge
Nicola F. McDonald University of York
W. M. Ormrod University of York
Helen Phillips Cardiff University
Miri Rubin Queen Mary, University of London
Sharon Wells University of York
vi
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page vi

PREFACE
‘Rites of Passage’ was the theme of the Second York Interdisciplinary
Conference on the Fourteenth Century, organized by Dr P.J.P. Goldberg (to
whom we owe the theme) and the editors of this volume and held at the
Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, in July 2001. This occasional
series of conferences is intended to draw together scholars working in differ-
ent disciplines in order to share information, ideas, methodologies and prob-
lems relating to the field of fourteenth-century studies. The event proved as
productive as its predecessor, and demonstrated once again the special value
of the interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches promoted by the
Centre for Medieval Studies at York.
All the contributors to this volume presented papers at the 2001 conference,
and most of the articles published here comprise revised versions of those
papers. We are especially grateful to all the delegates (including those who
gave papers not included here) for the intellectual stimulation of the confer-
ence and for the encouragement and commitment that has led to publication.
This is a fitting place to express our special thanks to Jeremy Goldberg for his
leadership within the conference and his guidance in publication planning,
Louise Harrison for administrative support, to Isabel Davis for assistance
with copy-editing, and to Caroline Palmer at Boydell & Brewer for her usual
enthusiasm and support.
Nicola McDonald
Mark Ormrod
vii
Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page vii

Rop-fm.qxd 6/22/04 11:08 AM Page viii

1
1
A. Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee (London,
1960), pp. 2–3; N. Belmont, Arnold Van Gennep: The Creator of French Ethnography,
trans. D. Coltman (Chicago, 1979), pp. 1–9. For a critique of the use of anthropo-
logical theories of ritual see P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts
and Social Scientific Theory(Princeton, NJ, 2001). Buc, is particularly critical of histo-
rians who are unaware of the intellectual roots and implications of categories devel-
oped in the social sciences and applied in their historical work.
2
Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, p. 13.
3
Ibid., p. 3.
4
Ibid., p. 9.
Introduction: Rites of Passage
Miri Rubin
The articles collected in this volume consider a varied and rich array of ritual-
ized events and actions in the lives of late medieval people. They do so by test-
ing the concept of rite de passage, which is now frequently used both in
academic discussion and in daily parlance. The term was created in 1907 or
1908 by Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957), the German-born and naturalized
Savoyard folklorist and linguist. Van Gennep saw the life of an individual in
any society as a series of passages ‘from one age to another or from one occu-
pation to another’.
1
The rites which attracted his attention were those ‘that
accompany transitions from one situation to another and from one cosmic or
social world to another’.
2
As a folklorist, Van Gennep was acquainted with the
variety of European and extra-European practices related to kinship and the
life-cycle. His intuition led him to believe that these might be fitted into cat-
egories, and that an underlying structure may be identified in life-cycle rituals:
Since the goal is the same, it follows of necessity that the ways of attaining
it should be at least analogous, if not identical in detail.
3
Van Gennep was eager to bring clarity to the study of these rituals of passage
and transition, to make them easy to understand. The anthropology of his day
recognized multiple overlapping characteristics of ritual: direct and indirect,
positive and negative, contagionist or dynamic, sympathetic or animistic.
4
To
these Van Gennep added a diachronic axis, the sense of unfolding: what we
might, these days, call narrative structure for a lifetime of change. Passage,
journey, transition are some of the spatial images central to an understanding
of rites de passageand to the method involved in applying the term – to the
past, the present or the future.
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 1

Miri Rubin
2
5
Ibid., p. 11. Tripartite schemes have been formative in European social thought, see
for example G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, trans. A. Goldhammer
(Chicago, 1980), esp. the introduction, pp. 1–9.
6
M. Bloch, ‘Religion and Ritual’, in The Social Science Encyclopedia , ed. A. Kuper and
J. Kuper, 2nd edn (London, 1996), pp. 732–6 (pp. 734–5).
7
For a study that sees greater male involvement in this sphere see U. Rublack,
‘Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body in Early Modern Germany’,Past and
Present150 (1996), 83–110.
8
S. Karrant-Nunn, ‘A Women’s Rite: Churching and the Reformation of Ritual’, in
Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia and
R. W. Scribner, Wolfenbuetteler Studien 78 (Wiesbaden, 1997), pp. 111–38 (pp. 128–30).
9
V. K. Duvvury, Play, Symbolism, and Ritual: A Study of Tamil Brahmin Women’s Rites of
Passage(New York, 1991), pp. 213–14.
10
Ibid., pp. 217–18.
11
R. Raphael, The Men from the Boys: Rites of Passage in Male America (Lincoln, NE,
1988), pp. 4–5.
Based on his study of a multitude of customs, artifacts and texts, Van
Gennep identified three crucial stages in the making of rites de passage: sepa-
ration, transition and incorporation.
5
This schema is so general as to include
procedures which last years, months, days or even just a few minutes; but
they all possess an element of marking and demarcation. Maurice Bloch has
described ritual as
a dramatic commentary on life, which represents it as a mixture of two ele-
ments, pure and impure. The task of ritual is to separate the two so that the
impure can be eliminated in order that the true – pure – can emerge.
6
Thus, where child-birth is seen as polluting, churching is a rite de passage
which allows women to return to a state of purity and re-enter society after
bearing a child. The mother experiences: separationsoon after conception, with
the reduction of sexual availability to her husband and entry into an increas-
ingly feminine sphere which offers advice and support;
7
transitionwithin the
birth space and in a feminine circle during labour; and finally aggregation,
through the process of churching and re-incorporation into the community.
8
Similar temporal variety of the liminal stage characterizes the rite de passageof
young Tamil Brahmin women in south India, of the Aiyar people, who experi-
enced it over years. During the transition into womanhood, knowledge about
sexuality and marriage was conveyed by a combination of song, dance and
jokes which led on to the stage of marriage, but only ended when the woman
delivered a son.
9
Once this occurred, the songs deemed appropriate were
devotional, thanksgiving chants for the safe delivery of the child.
10
The stage of separation can be associated with images of symbolic death,
particularly in rites of initiation like those experienced in the Poro Bush society
of Liberia. There a boy is thrown over the community’s perimeter wall, only to
be caught by a man on the other side, who throws a log to the ground in imita-
tion of the sound of a falling body. The boy was dead to the world and his kin,
led by wailing women, mourned his death.
11
The transitional period lasts
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 2

3
Introduction: Rites of Passage
12
T. A. Leemon, The Rites of Passage in a Student Culture: A Study in the Dynamics of
Transition(New York, 1972), pp. 8–10.
13
M. Rubin, ‘An English Anchorite: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of
Christine Carpenter’, in Pragmatic Utopias: Essays for Barrie Dobson, ed. R. Horrox and
S. Rees Jones (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 204–23. On historians’ use of anthropological
concepts see P. Burke, History and Social Theory(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 38–43;
M. Rubin, ‘What is Cultural History Now?’, in What is History Now?, ed.
D. Cannadine (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 80–94 (pp. 86–9).
14
N. B. Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England
(Philadelphia, PA, 2001), pp. 3–30.
15
The Ordinale and Customary of the Benedictine Nuns of Barking Abbey, ed. J. B. L. Tolhurst,
Henry Bradshaw Society 65–6 (London, 1927–8), II, 353–5.
16
‘The Northern Metrical Version of the Rule of St Benet’, in Three Middle-English
Versions of the Rule of St. Benet and Two Contemporary Rituals for the Ordination of
Nuns, ed. E. Kock, EETS OS 120 (London, 1902), pp. 48–118 (p. 108, ll. 2137–8).
between four and eight years and includes ceremonies of circumcision, scarifi-
cation and training in hunting. The last stage, that of incorporation, includes
cleansing, receipt of new clothes, the licence to marry and re-birth as a new per-
son with a new name.
12
Arunta youth in Australia lay on green boughs over an
open fire, and had their heads bitten unto bleeding to encourage hair-growth,
before re-birth as a man. One may similarly consider the veiling ceremony of a
medieval anchoress in these terms. In its images, two rites de passage– marriage
and death – merged. The postulant’s separation stage was a death to the world
through the requiem section of the mass. She was thus separated from her
maidenhood and prepared for emergence as the betrothed and then wedded
bride of Christ.
13
The messages conveyed by rites de passagediverge greatly according to the
underlying intent and mood of the institution surrounding them. This is a
point made clear in Joel Burden’s article in this volume, on the burial of
Edward II (1327). Context is shown to determine the meaning and political
impact of the ritual of royal burial. For the burial of a deposed king was vastly
different in shape, as well as in meaning, from that of a king who had died
peacefully in his bed. The display of regalia and the replacement of the muti-
lated body by an idealized mannequin aimed to mask the violence of the
king’s death and to support the new ruler, Edward III, the dead king’s son.
Nancy Bradley Warren’s study of late medieval English female monasticism
compares Franciscan and Benedictine veiling ceremonies.
14
The Benedictine
profession, as laid out in the Barking Ordinal, has the priest or prelate as
recipient ritual actor; the abbess only removes the postulant’s clothes, while
the priest blesses the habit and veil in a ritual role of father as well as sub-
stitute bridegroom.
15
Yet it is instructive that the English verse translation of
the Benedictine rule includes an invocation of Mary as the postulant takes
her vow:
Unto mary, cristes moder dere,
And to al halows of heuyn clere.
16
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 3

Miri Rubin
4
17
‘The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses Enclosid’, in A Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book and
Two Franciscan Rules, ed. R. W. Chambers and W. W. Seton, EETS OS 148 (London,
1914), pp. 81–119 (p. 83).
18
Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure, ed. J. Hogg, Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 6 (Salzburg, 1980), p. 98, ll. 16–19.
19
Ibid., p. 98, ll. 4–5.
20
The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. J. H. Blunt, EETS ES 19 (London, 1873), p. 238.
21
J. Holm and J. Bowker, ‘Introduction: Raising the Issues’, in Rites of Passage, ed.
J. Holm and J. Bowker (London, 1994), pp. 1–9 (pp. 3–4).
22
Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism, ed. K. M. Ashley (Bloomington,
IN, 1990); Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. C. W. Bynum,
S. Harrell and P. Richman (Boston, MA, 1986).
The Franciscan order had the entrant offer herself to Mary, Francis and
St Clare, through the hands of the abbess: ‘make þey pofessioun in hondes of
þe Abbesse bifore alle þe couent’.
17
The Brigittine script is even more explicit
about the agency of the abbess and the sisters, as well as of the postulant. It is
extensive, inasmuch as it begins with the ceremony of delivery into the
abbess’s hands:
And than that suster schal fal down to kysse the abbes fete, whiche in
nowyse sche schal suffer, but rather put down her ryght hande, that sche
may kesse that.
18
On the eighth day the postulant enters her name into the register of the house,
saying ‘I delyuer and betake Hour reuerent moderhode, thys wrytyng, writen
at myne instaunce in thys omen registre.’
19
In as much as she enters relation-
ships with the divine, these are experienced through the ‘wombe of mary’.
20
These variations in tone and gesture – priest/father and Mary/abbess –
underpin and express the differing styles of the convents. The Benedictine,
Franciscan and Brigittine orders each held differing assumptions about
female agency and the purpose of women in religious life, as well as quite
distinct patterns of power within the convent. These affected the shape of
their veiling rites de passage.
The stage of the rite de passagethat has probably attracted most attention
from scholars, is the period of transition, the liminalstage. Patricia Cullum’s
article in this collection, on the rituals of entry into clerical orders, demon-
strates that the transitional stage in clerical formation – entry into the minor
orders – could be extended or contracted according to a variety of personal cir-
cumstances. The liminal stage was treated with particular energy and imagin-
ation by the British anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner and their many
students.
21
Their approach to ritual emphasizes the social context and the
movement of participants between social categories. It has frequently been
invoked by medieval historians and students of religion. Medievalists have
contributed to a critique of its assumptions: scholars like Caroline Bynum, and
the contributors to the volume edited by Kathleen Ashley, Victor Turner and the
Construction of Cultural Criticism.
22
According to the Turners, it is during the
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 4

5
Introduction: Rites of Passage
23
V. Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY, 1967), p. 105.
24
H. P. M. Winchester, P. McGuirk and K. Everett, ‘Schoolies’ Week as Rite of Passage:
A Study of Celebration and Control’, in Embodied Geographies: Spaces, Bodies and Rites
of Passage, ed. E. Kenworthy Teather (London, 1999), pp. 59–77.
25
V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society(Ithaca, NY,
1974), pp. 231–71.
26
J. Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700’, Past and Present100 (1983),
29–61.
27
B. Geldof, Is That It? (London, 1986), p. 310.
liminal stage that those ideas, sentiments and facts that had been hitherto for
the neophyte bound up in habitual and conventional configurations, which are
accepted unthinkingly, are resolved into their constituents.
23
This suspended
state of journeying, full of self-awareness, was often characterized by ludic
elements; thus the carnivalesque and the liminal often converge. The carniva-
lesque and the licentious dominate the rite de passageexperienced by young
Australians after the completion of their equivalent to ‘A-level’ examinations:
in Queensland and Victoria whole beaches are turned during Schoolies’ Week
into a free zone of drink, sex, dance and drugs.
24
Tens of thousands leave home
towards the beaches for what seems to be a very long party.
During the liminal stage something is experienced through the disaggre-
gation of normal functions, expectations and procedures, through the shed-
ding of status, vocation and even gender, and entry into a state which Turner
named communitas. This is meant to be a state of spontaneity and joy, experi-
enced apart from institutional structures. The liminal, a state of betwixt and
between, between all times and places, allows some human essence to be
experienced, which is individual, but illuminated by the appreciation that it
can be shared and experienced by every human. This is communitas, reduction
of human sensation to essence.
25
Communitasis a concept that medievalists
have found most alluring, but it is none the less rather nebulous. John Bossy
attempted to use communitas in his exploration of the mass as a social institu-
tion.
26
In it a core element of ritual is isolated: the intense awareness of being
bound together in a community of shared experience, shared humanity. The
authors of a collection of essays on rites de passagebring the example of the
Live Aid Concert in 1986 and the words of Bob Geldof:
Everyone came on for the finale. There was tremendous feeling of oneness
on the stage [. . .] Now everyone was singing. [On the way home . . .]
people walked over to the car and hugged me [. . .] Some cried, ‘Oh Bob, oh
Bob’, not sneering, not uncontrollable, just something shared and under-
stood [. . .] I wasn’t sure what had happened in England, or everywhere
else, but ‘I knew’ cynicism and greed and selfishness had been eliminated
for a moment. It felt good. A lot of people rediscovered something in them-
selves.
27
This colourful description of behaviour out of the ordinary begs the question:
if this is communitas, how long does it last?
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 5

Miri Rubin
6
28
Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, p. 128; S. Lavie, K. Narayan and R. Rosaldo,
‘Introduction: Creativity in Anthropology’, in Creativity/Anthropology, ed. S. Lavie,
K. Narayan and R. Rosaldo (Ithaca, NY, 1993), pp. 1–8.
29
B. Myerhoff, ‘Rites of Passage: Process and Paradox’, in Celebration: Studies in
Festivities and Ritual, ed. V. Turner (Washington, DC, 1982), pp. 109–35 (pp. 111–13).
30
E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. E. Fields (New York,
1995), p. 38.
31
For the full discussion see ibid., pp. 21–44.
32
R. Firth, Tikopia Ritual and Belief(London, 1967), p. 437.
The Turners identified within Van Gennep’s schemas not only the rituals of
an individual life, but a template applicable to whole societies. They empha-
sized the danger of situations of liminality, as an individual or group inhabits
space between or apart from clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Sharon
Wells here shows the Arthurian court to have been suspended in a state of
enduring liminality, displayed in irresponsibility, ‘somewhat out-of-control,
moody’. Jane Gilbert deftly analyses in her contribution to this volume the
figure of the restless dead, Alceste in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Here is
a being who returns and revisits, and thus unsettles and overwhelms, retard-
ing ritual mourning and closure. In this state of indeterminacy – often experi-
enced as a crisis – individuals and groups are moved to extraordinary actions;
here creativity can emerge.
28
By concentrating on the liminal stage, the
Turners theorized a state – liminoid– which could be applied outside rites de
passage: to a pilgrimage, to leisure activities generally, to states of being, such
as an anchorite or a holy person. Isabel Davis’s article in this volume points
out, through the analysis of rites of entry into chivalry, the importance of
travel and itinerancy before the elevation into knighthood.
Why are rites de passage effective, if effective they are? Classical anthropol-
ogy, following Durkheim, has postulated the state of ritual as one of enhanced
being, of cognitive awareness, of sense perceptions induced by drugs, pain,
rhythm or through costume, gazing into mirrors, masks
29
– a state of hyper-
receptiveness. This ritual state was essential for the periodic inscription of
crucial knowledge of the ‘rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should
conduct himself with sacred things’.
30
Thus rituals serve to keep alive some-
thing that is beyond them, and which they represent, like religious belief.
31
Moving from ritual to rites de passage, Raymond Firth attempted to be more
precise about the social impact of initiation rituals:
[. . .] by bringing the person into formal and explicit relation with his kin-
dred, [it] confronts him with some of his basic social ties, re-affirms them
and thus makes patent to him his status against the days when he will have
to adopt them in earnest.
32
Rituals and daily reality are intricately linked. The anthropological thinker
who has most affected historians – Clifford Geertz, always passionate and
impassioning – shows ritual to be as ‘messy’ as daily life is. Geertz sees not a
unique territory for ritual, but continuity in perception and use of symbols
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 6

7
Introduction: Rites of Passage
33
C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), pp. 87–125 (p. 112).
34
On Bar Mitzvah see V. Crapanzano, ‘Rite of Return’, in Hermes’s Dilemma and Hamlet’s
Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation(Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 260–80
(pp. 261–2).
35
M. Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience(Cambridge, 1992), p. 6.
36
R. H. Hook, ‘Psychoanalysis as Context’, in Anthropology and Psychoanalysis: An
Encounter through Culture, ed. S. Heald and A. Deluz (London, 1994), pp. 225–38;
(pp. 230–1); S. Heald, ‘Every Man a Hero: Oedipal Themes in Gisu Circumcision’,
in Anthropology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Heald and Deluz, pp. 184–210.
between the ritual and the ‘mundane’, a distinction which he encourages us
to dispel:
In a ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused under the
agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turn out to be the same world.
33
The habitual understanding of rites de passagewhich couples biological devel-
opment and ritual moment – as in baptism, circumcision or churching –
forces a question: what do we make of rituals in which the biological moment
of change and the related ritual are separate in time?
34
Mark Ormrod’s article
focuses on a related problem: the dilemma posed by the king-making ritual
that emphasizes virility and adult leadership in cases when the king was a
mere infant. He analyses the efforts which were invested in late medieval
England by the political elite in the creation of reassuring devices and addi-
tional stages of ritual progress for the maturing infant-king, as in the case of
Henry VI, who was crowned at the age of nine months.
Inasmuch as ‘the mundane order’ is always one of conflict and competi-
tion – power inequality based on age, gender, ethnicity – ritual should also be
the arena for dramatisation of conflict. Whereas the critique of ethnographic
authority and the move towards more interpretative, reflective and less struc-
tural understandings of ritual in the last two decades has meant that schemas
such as rites de passage have become less commonly used, the very notion
that personality and subjectivity are constructed through public, social and
linguistic experiences is one which we still find to be attractive. It intersects
neatly with many of the assumptions of those studying the making of gender;
it offers occasion for the examination of the operation of power; and it also
invites psychoanalytic reading of ritual. Reg Hook’s analysis of the circumci-
sion rites of the Gisu of Uganda emphasizes not the power of the father,
which is relatively weak among the Gisu where property devolves through
mother and sisters, but that of the ancestors, of the elder men, over the boy.
Maurice Bloch developed the concept of ‘rebounding violence’, whereby
initiation rites turned ‘prey’ into ‘hunter’, as the weak and dependent, the
possibly resentful, were transformed so as to turn their violence against
animals, women and enemies.
35
The circumcision of adolescent Gisu is linked
to the channelling of feelings of bitterness, envy and hatred (lirima), into
martial aggression and perhaps even into sexual aggression in marriage.
36
Suzette Heald’s reading of the ritual emphasizes the separation of boys from
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 7

Miri Rubin
8
37
R. Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages(Cambridge,
2001), pp. 51–98.
38
Raphael, The Men from the Boys, p. 9.
39
For further insights into initiation see B. Lincoln, Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies
in Rituals of Women’s Initiation(Cambridge, MA, 1981); J. L. Brain, ‘Homage to
Neptune: Shipboard Initiation Rites’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
125 (1981), 128–33.
40
Raphael, The Men from the Boys, p. 13.
women, the construction of a fierce inter-generational incest taboo, and the
making into a tribal hero of every growing boy.
Separation from womenfolk is thus central to initiation rites de passage, and
it can be identified in the case of late medieval men en route to ordination.
Separation is realized in stages, following the series of steps from lower
orders – in which clerics can marry – to ordination to priesthood, which
requires men to be unmarried and sexually clean. But even in the lower
orders, men were separated from the female sphere of nurture, which is also
a vernacular sphere, and were introduced into Latin learning, male company
and the discourse of celibacy. All these changes are associated with pain. Rita
Copeland has demonstrated the link between Latin pedagogy, discipline and
pain. This is the price young men paid for entry into a world of power and
privilege which often involved policing and regulation of the very vernacular
sphere of childhood.
37
Pain is associated with coming of age in many rites de passage. Hazing and
genital mutilation of boys have been interpreted as punishment and deter-
rence against desire for the mother, as well as an expression of envy of
women: genital bleeding as mock menstruation; raised scars around the nip-
ples (among the Kwoma of New Guinea) as the drawing of a breast on the
young man’s chest.
38
Initiation rituals allow parents and ancestors to bear
heavily upon individuals – be it the young man, the teenage cleric or the pos-
tulant nun.
39
How does coercion affect our understanding of rites de passage? Ritual par-
ticipation might be secured through fear (the Poro Bush Society boys were
shown trays of fingers and toes cut off from errant members).
40
In tracing
coercion we may wish to draw distinctions between rites that are utterly
expected in a given society – say baptism, confession and communion for a
medieval Christian – and those that were chosen, say ordination, veiling,
entry into political office. But we are surely also aware that these ‘choices’
were often made before any experience of the life-style in question, as in the
case of celibacy and enclosure. As Mark Ormrod shows, there was a real
tension between the dynastic logic of succession and the expectation that the
ritual agent fit the ritual promise of coronation. In the case of succession of the
very young – as in the case of Henry VI – that tension demanded careful
management and political support for the ritual of coronation. But even in
less spectacular settings, can choices ever be taken freely within a ritual
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 8

9
Introduction: Rites of Passage
41
J. W. Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa(Princeton,
NJ, 1982), p. 565 and more generally pp. 565–73.
frame? How should the individual’s commitment to it and the nature of her
participation be situated within the ritual field: as a necessary component, as
a redundant one, or as an emergent one?
The notion of the emergent ritual actor is an interesting one and I am led
to think about it within the Jewish tradition. In orthodox Judaism, 613 rules
regulate all aspects of daily life. Of course most people do not adhere to all,
but the Jew is seen as emerging from ritualized practice. By setting intention
aside, by the sheer rhythms of ritualized life, the ritual is expected to make the
Jew, by forming good habits and thoughts. This is a process of continuous
emergence.
Emergence raises the issue of depth and length of ritual effect; in what sense
should we think of the effect of ritual as limited in time, as wearing off? James
W. Fernandez has addressed this question of ritual ‘evaporation’ in his study
of the Bwiti religion developed by the Fang people in Gabon. Their rites are
enacted in waterside chapels, embracing in syncretic manner native and
Christian ideas, natural and sympathetic magic. They are performed on week-
ends by migrant workers returning to wells and beaches for re-engagement
with communal life, with a cosmology equally reflected in space, food, clothes
and gender relations. Their experiences are what Fernandez calls synesthetic –
involving all the senses – and from them participants are expected to come
away strong and able to maintain a state of purity for another period of hard
work in an alien city. The rite offers balm against the pollution of work, com-
petition and quarrels:
Where there was failing sense of the past, cosmic and human origins have
been vividly revitalised. Where there was a decentering in Fang village
experience, a sense of peripherality, there has emerged a vital center of
activity, the Bwiti chapel.
41
Here Fernandez will have us perceive effect, but limited effect; as if the energy
of Bwitican only charge the bodies and minds for a while. As it wore off, the
preferred nurturing ethical community weakened, and so men and women
returned to the Bwiti chapel for more. The prominence of return and iteration
intersects fruitfully with Sarah Kay’s reflection on the moment de conclurein
Froissart’s romance writings. Memory of pain and the anticipation of death,
which are ever the stuff of ritual action, are shown also to produce poetic cre-
ative impulses.
These reflections on effect and on agency are meant to raise ambiguities
in our understanding of the degree of detachment or absorption, acceptance
or doubt, involvement or apathy, which ritual actors experience and know
within rites de passage. Those of us who work historically are attuned to
difference and variety, to the nuance of the specific, to the particular event
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 9

Miri Rubin
10
42
D. Handelman, Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 23–41.
43
C. Humphrey and J. A. Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual
Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship(Oxford, 1994).
44
Their observations and conclusions display several points of similarity with my
own study of Eucharistic rituals and symbols in the later Middle Ages, M. Rubin,
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture(Cambridge, 1991).
45
Ibid., p. 118.
46
D. La Capra, ‘Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre’, Journal of Modern
History60 (1988), 95–112. For similar thoughts see R. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion
in the Making of Humanity(Cambridge, 1999), who calls for a return to ‘acts’ in ritual,
to what was ‘going on’.
situated within wide grids of traditions and systems of meaning. We are par-
ticularly attuned, as the articles collected here show, to issues of gender differ-
ence, access to resources, to the determinants of freedom and health and
well-being. Theories of culture and most ways of apprehending rites de passage
and ritual more generally, fail to guide us towards historical observation which
is capable of incorporating variation. Don Handelman has suggested the use
of the term ‘ritual of transformation’ rather than ‘rite of passage’. In such rit-
ual seven characteristic traits should be considered, among them levels of coer-
cion and awareness affecting the participants.
42
While envisaging a wider field
of outcomes than Van Gennep did, and a less benign effect of ritual action than
Turner did, Handelman leaves historians with ample scope to explore further
the many meanings of symbols and the varying experiences which may be
inhabited within a single ritual.
Moments of agency and resistance, like those displayed in the voice of
Alceste, brought to us by Jane Gilbert, are accorded little space in the theories
of ritual. Thick ethnographic description often dwells on symbolic connec-
tions and distances itself from the full import of what is ‘going on’. A laud-
able exception to this is the impressive work of Caroline Humphrey and
James Laidlaw on the Jain rites of worship.
43
Their dense theoretical reflection
is based on ethnography experienced in west India, over a number of years,
among the Jain.
44
When Humphrey and Laidlaw observed the Jain ritual of
puja, they noticed that those who had not prepared properly for it (by wash-
ing, by changing clothes), and who were therefore barred from touching the
idol at the centre, none the less entered the temple, stood in front of the idol
offering it fruit, laying a flower, dropping some rice grains or bringing some
sandalwood powder.
45
They accommodated and created ritual forms, using
their bodies and mundane materials.
This attention to the body is full of ethical implications of interest to those
who apply ethnographic method to historical events. Dominick La Capra
may have been somewhat melodramatic in asking ‘What about the cat?’ in his
critique of Robert Darnton’s influential analysis of the ‘great cat massacre’,
but his comment spurs us to awareness of the bodies involved in ritual, and
especially in rites de passage.
46
In this volume Joel Burden never loses sight of
Rop-01.qxd 6/22/04 11:01 AM Page 10

Other documents randomly have
different content

still at Gerano. This being the case, she could freely speak of it to
her lawyer and describe the contents in any way she pleased, so as
to turn the existence of the document to her own advantage. In the
letters she had sent Laura and in the other two which she kept by
her for future use, she had been careful never to say anything
conclusive. Maria B. had indeed spoken of the transaction as being
ended, but that could be interpreted as the unfounded supposition
of a person not fully acquainted with the facts, and desirous of
making money out of them as far as possible. The hardest thing
would probably be to produce the woman who was supposed to
have written to Laura, in case she should be needed. Money well
bestowed, however, would do much towards stimulating the memory
of some indigent and unscrupulous person, and the part to be
played would, after all, be a small and insignificant one. On the
other hand, the weak point in the case would be that Adele, while
able to produce an unlimited number of her own letters to Ghisleri,
would not have a single line of his writing to show. She could,
indeed, fall back upon her own natural sense of caution, and declare
that she had destroyed all he had written, in the mistaken belief that
it would be safer to do so, and her lawyer could taunt his opponent
with his folly in not doing likewise; but that would, after all, be
rather a poor expedient. Or it might be pretended that Pietro had
invariably written to her in a feigned handwriting signing himself,
perhaps, with a single initial, as a precaution in case his letters
should fall into the wrong hands. In that case she could produce
whatever she chose. The best possible plan would be to extract one
or two short notes from him upon which an ambiguous construction
might be put by the lawyers. All this, Adele reflected, would need
considerable time, and several months must elapse before she could
expect to be ready. Her mind, too, worked spasmodically, and she
was subject to long fits of apathy and extreme depression in the
intervals between her short hours of abnormal activity. She knew
that this was the result of the morphia she took in such quantities,
and she resolved to make a great effort to cure herself of the fatal
habit, if it were not already too late.

As has been said more than once, Adele Savelli had possessed a
very determined will, and it had not yet been altogether destroyed.
Having once made up her mind to free herself if she could, she
made the attempt bravely and systematically. The result was that, in
the course of several months, she had reduced the amount of her
daily doses very considerably. The suffering was great, but the
object to be gained was great also, and she steeled herself to
endure all that a woman could. She was encouraged, also, by the
fact that her mind began to act more regularly and seemed more
reliable. Physically, she was growing very weak and was becoming
almost emaciated. Francesco Savelli watched her narrowly, and it
was his opinion that she could not last long. The Prince of Gerano
was very anxious about her all through the spring which followed the
events last described, and his wife, though she was far less fond of
Adele than in former times, could not but feel a sorrowful regret as
she saw the young life that had begun so brightly wearing itself
away before her eyes. But the Princess had consolations in another
direction. Laura Arden seemed to grow daily more lovely in her
mature beauty, and Herbert was growing out of his babyhood into a
sturdy little boy of phenomenal strength and of imperturbably good
temper. Laura was headstrong where Ghisleri was concerned, but in
all other respects she was herself still.
The first consequence of Adele's attempt to break the strong
friendship which united Laura and Pietro, was to draw them still
more closely together, and to make Laura, at least, more defiant of
the world's opinion than ever. As for Ghisleri, he almost forgot to ask
himself questions. The time to separate for the summer was drawing
near, and he knew, when he thought of it, what a different parting
this one would be from the one which had preceded it a year earlier.
But he tried to think of the present and not of the weary months of
solitude he looked forward to between June and November or
December. He remembered, in spite of himself, how he had more
than once enjoyed the lonely life, even refusing invitations to
pleasant places rather than lose a single week of an existence so full
of charm. But another interest had been growing, slowly, deep-

sown, spreading its roots in silence, and fastening itself about his
heart while he had not even suspected that it was there at all. Little
by little, without visible manifestation, the strong thing had drawn
more strength from his own life, mysteriously absorbing into itself
the springs of thought and the sources of emotion, unifying them
and assimilating them all into something which was a part, and was
soon to be the chief part, of his being. And now, above the
harrowed surface of that inner ground on which such fierce battles
had been fought throughout his years of storm, a soft shoot raised
its delicate head, not timidly, but quietly and unobtrusively, to meet
the warm sunshine of the happier days to come. He saw it, and
knew it, and held his peace, dreading it and yet loving it, for it was
love itself; but not knowing truly what the little blade would come to,
whether it was to bloom all at once into a bright and poisonous
flower of evil, bringing to him the death of all possible love for ever;
or whether it would grow up slowly, calm and fair, from leaf to shrub,
from shrub to sapling, from sapling at last to tree, straight, tall, and
strong, able to face tempest and storm without bending its lofty
head, rich to bear for him in the end the stately blossom and the
heavenly fruit of passionate true love.
For before the day of parting came Pietro Ghisleri knew that he
loved Laura Arden. Ever since that moment when she had quietly
given him Adele's letter and had told him that she would believe no
evil of him, he had begun to suspect that she was no longer what
she had been to him once and what she had remained so long, a
friend, kind, almost affectionate, for whom he would give all he had,
but only a friend after all. It was different now. The thought of
bidding Laura good-bye, even for a few months, sent a thrill of pain
through his heart which he had not expected to feel—the small,
sharp pain which tells a man the truth about a woman and himself
as nothing else can. The prospect of the lonely summer was dreary.
Ghisleri was surprised, and almost startled. During nearly two
years and a half he had honestly believed that he could never love
again, and if a sincere wish, formulated in the shape he
unconsciously chose, could be called a prayer, he earnestly prayed

that so long as he lived he might not feel what he had felt very
strongly twice, at least, since he had been a boy. But such a man
could hardly expect that such a wish, or prayer, could be granted or
heard, so long as he was spending many hours of each succeeding
week in the company of Laura Arden. In the full strength of
manhood, passionate, sensitive beneath a cold exterior, always
attracted by women, and almost always repelled by men, Pietro
Ghisleri could hardly expect that in one moment the capacity for
loving should be wholly rooted out and destroyed by something like
an act of will, and as the consequence of his being disappointed and
disgusted by his own fickleness. The new passion might turn out to
be greater or less than the two which had hitherto disturbed his
existence, but it could hardly be greater than the first. It would
necessarily be different from either, in that it would be hopeless from
the beginning, as he thought. For where he was very sincere, he
was rarely very confident in himself, if the stake was woman's love, a
fact more common with men who are at once sensitive and strong
than is generally known.
But his first impulse was not to go away and escape from the
temptation, as it would have been some time earlier. There was no
reason for doing that, as he had reflected before, when he had
considered the advisability of breaking off all intercourse with Laura
for the sake of silencing the world's idle chatter. He was perfectly
free to love her, and to tell her so, if he chose. No one could blame
him for wishing to marry her; at most he might be thought foolish
for desiring anything so very improbable as that she should accept
him. But he was quite indifferent to what any one might think of him
excepting Laura herself. One resolution only he made and did his
best to keep, and it was a good one. He made up his mind that he
would not make love to her, as he understood the meaning of the
term. Possibly, as he told himself with a little scorn, this was no
resolution at all, but only a way of expressing his conviction that he
was quite unable to do what he so magnanimously refused to
attempt. For his instinct told him that his love for Laura had already
taken a shape which differed wholly from all former passions, one

unfamiliar to him, one which would need a new expression if it
continued to be sincere. But that he doubted. He was quite ready to
admit that when Laura came back in the autumn, this early
beginning of love would have disappeared again, and that the old
strong friendship would be found in its place, solid, firmly based, and
unchanged, a permanent happiness and a constant satisfaction. He
was no longer a boy, to imagine that the first breath of love was the
forerunner of an all-destroying storm in which he must perish, or of
a clear, fair wind before which the ship of his life was to run her
straight course to the haven of death's peace. He had seen too
much fickleness in himself and in others to believe in any such thing;
but if he had anticipated either it would have been the tempest. On
the whole, he did the wisest thing he could. He changed nothing in
his manner towards Laura and he waited as calmly as he was able,
to see what the end would be. Once only before Laura went away
the conversation turned upon love, and oddly enough it was Laura
who brought up the subject.
She had been talking about little Herbert, as she often did,
planning out his future according to her own wishes and making it
happy in her own way, even to sketching the wife he was to win
some five and twenty years hence.
"I should like her to be very fair," she said. "Herbert will be dark,
as I am, and they say that contrasts attract each other most
permanently. But of course, though she must be beautiful, she must
have ever so many other good points besides. In the first place, she
must be capable of loving him with all her heart and soul. I suppose
that is really the hardest thing of all to find."
"The 'one-great-passion' sort of person, you mean, I fancy,"
observed Ghisleri, with a smile. "A rare bird—I agree with you."
"I doubt whether the individual exists," said Laura. "Except by
accident, or when the course of true love runs so very smoothly that
it would need superhuman ingenuity to fall off it."

"You are a constant revelation to me!" Ghisleri laughed, and
looked at her.
"What is there surprising about what I said? You are not a believer
in the universal stability of the human heart, are you?"
"Hardly that! But women very often are—at first. And then, when
they see that change is possible, they are apt to say that there is no
such thing as true love at all, whereas we know that there is."
"In other words, you think that I take the sensible view. After all,
what is the use of expecting humanity to be superhuman?"
"I always like the way in which you put things," said Ghisleri,
thoughtfully. "That is exactly it. Homo sum. I am neither angel, nor
ape, but man, and at present, I believe, no near relation of the
seraph or the monkey."
"And as a man, changeable. So am I, as a woman, I have no
doubt. Every one must be, and I do not think it is fair to respect
people who do not change at all because they never have the
chance."
"One cannot help it. Human nature instinctively places the man
who has only loved once above the man who has shown that he can
love often. It is connected with the idea of faith and loyalty."
"Often—that is too much. There comes the question of the limit.
How often can a man love sincerely?"
"Three times—not more," answered Ghisleri, with conviction.
"Why not two, or four? How can you lay down the law in that
way?"
"It is very simple. I think that no love is worth the name which
does not influence a man strongly for at least ten years. Any really
great passion will do that. But human life is short. Let a man fall in
love at twenty, and three periods of ten years each will bring him to
fifty. A man who falls in love after he is fifty is a rarity, and generally
an object of ridicule. That seems to me a logical demonstration, and

I do not see why it should not apply to a woman as well as to a
man."
"Yes, I think there is truth in that," said Laura. "At all events, it
looks true. Besides, there is something quite reasonable in the idea
that a man naturally has three stages, when he is twenty years old,
thirty, and forty. I should imagine that the middle stage, while he is
still developing, might be the shortest."
It was impossible for Ghisleri to imagine that Laura was referring
to his own life, but the remark was certainly very applicable to
himself, so far. Would the third stage be permanent, if he really
reached it? He was inclined to think that nothing about him had
much stability, for within the last two years he had come to accept
the fact as something which was part of his nature and from which
there was no escape, despise the weakness and hate it as he would.
It was a singular coincidence that since he had tormented himself
less he had become really less changeable.
A month later he parted from Laura, to all outward appearances
as quietly and calmly as in the previous year. If there were any
difference, it was in her manner rather than in his. She said almost
sadly that she was sorry the time had come, and that she looked
forward to the meeting in the autumn as to one of the pleasantest
things in the future. The words she spoke were almost
commonplace, though even if taken literally they conveyed more
than she had ever said before. But it was quite clear that she meant
more than she said.
When she was gone Ghisleri felt more lonely than he had for
years, and every interest seemed to have died out of his existence.
He tried to laugh at himself for turning into a boy again, but even
that diversion failed him. He could not even find the bitter words it
had once amused him, in a grim way, to put together. Then he left
Rome, weary of the sights and sounds of the streets, of the solitude
of his rooms, of the effort to show some intelligence when he was
obliged to talk with an acquaintance. He went to his own place in
Tuscany and passed his time in trying to improve the condition of

things. He knew something of practical architecture, and he rebuilt a
staircase, and restored the vaulting in a part of the little castle to
which he had never done anything before, and which had gone to
ruin during the last hundred years or more, since it had last been
inhabited. For he, his father, and his grandfather had been only sons,
and his mother having died when he was a mere boy, his father had
taken a dislike to Torre de' Ghisleri and had lived the remainder of
his short life in Florence. Hence the general dilapidation of the old
place which was not, however, without beauty. The occupation did
him good, and the sight of the old familiar faces of his tenants and
few retainers was pleasant, after facing the museum of society
masks during seven months and more. But he felt that even here he
could not stay any great length of time without a change, and as the
summer advanced his restlessness became extreme.
He came down to Rome for a week in August. The first person he
met in the street was Francesco Savelli, who stopped to speak with
him. Ghisleri never voluntarily stopped any one.
"How is Donna Adele?" he asked, after they had exchanged the
first greetings.
"Very nervous," answered Savelli, shaking his head with the air of
concern he thought it proper to affect whenever he spoke of his
wife's illness. "The nerves are something which no one can
understand. I can tell you a story, for instance, about something
which happened the other day—to be accurate, in June, when we
were at Gerano. Do you remember the oubliette between the guard-
room and the tower? Yes—my wife said she showed it to you. We
were all staying together—all the children, her father, and the
Princess and two or three friends. One morning she said she was
quite sure that if we took up that slab of stone and lowered a man
into the shaft, we should find a skeleton hanging there—Heaven
knows what she imagined! The Prince said he had looked into the
shaft scores of times when the trap-door still existed and there was
a bar across the passage to prevent any one from going near; that
he himself had ordered the stone to be put where it was and knew

all about the place. The only skeleton ever found in the castle had
been discovered walled up in the thickness of the north tower, with a
little window just opposite the face, so that the individual must have
died looking at the hills. Nobody knew anything about it. But my wife
insisted, and grew angry, and at last furious. It was of no use, of
course. You know the old gentleman—he can be perfectly rigid. He
answered that no one should touch the stone, that if she yielded to
such ideas once, she would soon wish to pull Gerano to pieces to
count the mice, and that if she could persuade my father to knock
holes in the walls at Castel Savello, that was the affair of the Savelli,
but that so long as he lived she should not make any experiments in
excavation under his roof. If you will believe me, she had a fit of
anger which brought on an attack of the nerves, and she never went
out of her room for three days in consequence. Do you wonder that
I am anxious?"
"Certainly not. It would be amazing if you were indifferent. The
story gives one the idea that she is subject to delusions. I am very
sorry she is no better. Pray remember me to her."
Thereupon Ghisleri passed on, inwardly wondering how long it
would be before Adele became quite mad. Two days later he
received a note from her. She had heard from her husband that he
was in Rome, she said, and wrote to ask a great favour of him. He
was doubtless aware of her father's passion for manuscripts, which
was well known in Rome. It was reported that a certain dealer had
bought Prince Montevarchi's library after the crash, and she very
much wished to buy a very interesting manuscript of which she had
often heard her father speak, and which contained an account of the
famous, or infamous, Isabella Montevarchi's life, written with her
own hand—a sort of confession, in fact. As she did not know the
exact title of the document, if it had any, she would call it a
confession, though, of course, in a strictly lay sense. Now, she
inquired, would Ghisleri, for old friendship's sake, try to obtain it for
her at a reasonable price? She knew, of course, that such an original
would be expensive, but she was prepared to discuss the terms if
not wholly beyond her means. She sent her note by the carrier, as

that was generally quicker than writing by the post, she said. Would
Ghisleri kindly answer by the same means? The man would call
again on the next day but one. That would perhaps give time to
make preliminary inquiries. With which observation, and with best
thanks in anticipation of the service he was about to render, Adele
called herself most sincerely his.
Ghisleri was not an extremely suspicious man, but he would have
given evidence of almost infantine simplicity if he had not seen that
there was something wrong about Adele's note. It was certainly very
well planned, and if Laura had never shown him the letters Adele
had sent her, it might very possibly have succeeded. On ascertaining
the price set by the dealer on the manuscript, he would probably
have written a few words, stating in a business-like way the sum for
which the so-called confession could be bought. In all likelihood, too,
he would have only dated his note by the day of the week, omitting
altogether the month and the year. He saw at a glance how easily a
communication of that kind might have taken such a shape as to be
very serviceable against him, and how hard it might have been to
show that he was writing about a genuine transaction concerning a
manuscript actually for sale. He determined to be very careful.
His first step was to find out the name of the dealer who had
bought the Montevarchi library. He next ascertained that what Adele
wanted was still unsold, and that he must therefore necessarily enter
into correspondence with her. After that he sought out a young
lawyer whom he had employed once or twice within the last few
years when he had needed legal advice in regard to some trifling
point, and laid the whole matter before him. This young man,
Ubaldini by name, had rapidly acquired a reputation as a criminal
lawyer, and had successfully defended some remarkable cases, but,
as he justly observed, acquitted prisoners of the classes in which
crimes are common, pay very little, and condemned criminals pay
nothing at all. He was therefore under the necessity of taking other
kinds of business as a means of support. The last murderer who had
escaped the law by Ubaldini's eloquence had sent him a bag of
beans and a cream cheese, which was all the family could afford in

the way of a fee, but upon which a barrister who had a taste for
variety could not subsist any length of time.
Ghisleri explained at considerable length the whole story, as far as
it has been told in these pages, and expressed the belief that Donna
Adele Savelli was intent upon ruining him for what, after all, seemed
very insufficient reasons.
"When a woman lives on morphia and the fear of discovery,
instead of food and drink, I would not give much for the soundness
of any of her reasons," said Ubaldini, with a laugh. "What shall we
do with the Princess? Shall we convict her of homicide, or bring an
action for defamation, which we are sure to win? I like this case. We
shall amuse ourselves."
"I do not wish to bring any accusation nor any action against
Donna Adele Savelli," answered Ghisleri. "All I wish to do is to
protect myself. Of course I should be curious to know what became
of that written confession of hers, if it ever existed. But at present I
wish you to have certified copies made of all my letters to her, and
to keep the originals of those she writes me. If she makes such
another attack on me as the last one, I will ask you, perhaps, to take
the matter up. In the mean time, I only desire to keep on the safe
side."
"In a case like this," said the lawyer, "it is far safer to attack than
to wait for the enemy. Be careful in what you write, at all events. It
would be wiser to show me the letters before you send them. One
never can tell at what point the error of omission or commission will
be made, upon which everything will depend. As a bit of general
advice, I should warn you always to date every sheet on which you
write anything, always to mention the name of the dealer when you
speak of him, and invariably to give in full the correct title by which
the manuscript is known. If you do that, and take good care that the
dealer knows you perfectly each time you see him, and remembers
your visits, it will not be easy to manage. But Donna Adele Savelli is
evidently a clever person, whether her reasons for hating you are
good or bad. That little trick of sending her own letters to the other

lady was masterly—absolutely diabolical. The reason she failed was
that she struck too high. She over-reached herself. She accused you
of too much. That shows that although her methods are clever her
judgment is insufficient. The same is true of this last attempt. By the
bye, have you ever mentioned me to her, so far as you can
recollect?"
"No, I believe not."
"Then avoid doing so, if you please. It is always better to keep the
opposite party in ignorance of one's lawyer's name until the last
minute."
"Very well."
As soon as Ghisleri was gone Ubaldini wrote a draft of a letter to
Adele, as follows:
"Excellency :—At the decease of a client of humble station a number
of papers have come under my notice and are now in my hands. One
of them, of some length, has evidently gone astray, for it is written by
your Excellency and apparently addressed to a member of the clergy,
besides containing, as one glance told me, matter of a private nature.
It is my wish to restore it immediately, and I therefore write to inquire
whether I may entrust it to the post-office, or whether I shall hand it
sealed to your Excellency's legal representative. I need not add the
assurance that so far as I am concerned the matter is a strict secret,
nor that I desire to restore the document as a duty of honour, and
could not consider for a moment the question of any remuneration.
"Deign, Excellency, to receive graciously the expression of
profoundest respect with which I write myself,
"Your Excellency's most humble, obedient servant,
"Rinaldo Ubaldini , Advocate."

CHAPTER XXV.
As Ghisleri had anticipated, Adele kept up a lively correspondence
with him for some time. All her letters were duly filed by Ubaldini,
who took certified copies of Pietro's replies, but did not mention
what he himself had done in the matter. Adele bargained sharply
until Ghisleri wrote to her as plainly as he well could that the
manuscript was not to be had for less than the sum he had
repeatedly named, and that he could do nothing more for her.
Thereupon she answered that she would consider the matter, and
did not write again. Pietro, after waiting several days, left Rome
again, and returned to Torre de' Ghisleri, glad to be relieved at last
from the irksome and dangerous task of writing concise and lawyer-
like communications about a subject which did not interest him at
all.
Meanwhile Adele had been through a series of emotions of which
Pietro knew nothing, and which very nearly drove her to increasing
her daily doses of morphia again. On receiving Ubaldini's very
respectful and straightforward letter, she had felt that she was saved
at last, though it definitely destroyed the illusion by which she had
so long persuaded herself that the confession was still in the
oubliette at Gerano. Without much hesitation she wrote to Ubaldini,
and laid a bank-note for five hundred francs in the folded sheet. She
begged him to send a special messenger with the sealed packet to
Castel Savello, and requested him, in spite of his protest, to accept
the enclosed sum to cover expenses.
During forty-eight hours she enjoyed to the full the anticipation of
at last getting back the letter which had cost her such terrible
anxiety at various times during the past two years and a half. Then
came Ubaldini's answer, though when she opened it she had no idea
that it was from him. He had made his clerk both write and sign the
fair copy of the first letter, which had been written on paper not
stamped with an address. He now wrote with his own hand upon the

paper he kept for business correspondence upon which, of course,
the address was printed. There was consequently not the slightest
resemblance between the two letters. But Adele was not prepared
for the contents. The first thing she noticed was her bank-note,
carefully pinned inside the sheet. Even the form of addressing her
was not the same, and the one now employed was the correct one,
the Savelli being one of the families in which the title of Prince and
Princess belongs indiscriminately to all the children, and
consequently to the wives of all the sons. The letter was as follows:
"Signora Principessa:—I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt
of a communication from your Excellency, in which you request me to
send a certain sealed packet to Castel Savello by a special messenger,
and enclosing a bank note for five hundred francs (Banca Romana S.
32/0945) which I return herewith. I take the occasion to say that I
know nothing whatever of the sealed packet referred to, and I beg to
suggest that your Excellency may have accidentally addressed the
letter to me instead of to some other person, perhaps in using a
directory. If, however, it was written in answer to one supposed to
have been indited to you by me, the letter must have been composed
and sent by some designing person in the hope of intercepting the
reply and gaining possession of the money, which I am glad to be
able to send back to its original owner. Believe me, Signora
Principessa,
"Your Excellency's most obedient,
"Rinaldo Ubaldini ."
The shock was almost more than Adele could bear, and the room
reeled with her as she comprehended what had happened, so far as
she was able to understand it all. The truth did not strike her,
however. What she believed was what the lawyer suggested, that
some person had played a trick on her, and had made use of
Ubaldini's name and address in the hope of getting the money he or
she naturally expected that she would send as compensation for
such an important service. The hardest to endure was the
disappointment of finding that she was not to have the confession
after all. The point proved was that, whether it were still in the

oubliette or had been found and carried off, there was in either case
at least one person at large who knew it existed, and who knew that
the contents would be greatly to her disadvantage if known. And if
one person knew it, she argued, all Rome might be acquainted with
the story, and probably was. But the comforting conviction that the
letter was still safe at Gerano did not return. There was a tone about
the first communication disclaimed by Ubaldini, which forced upon
her the belief that the writer knew everything, and could ruin her at
a moment's notice.
What Ubaldini gained was the certainty that the story which
Ghisleri described as current gossip was a fact, and a very serious
one. He had played detective instead of lawyer, and he had been
very successful. He knew also, that, as he had acted altogether in
the interests of his client, Ghisleri, and had returned Adele's money,
no objection could, strictly speaking, be made to the stratagem,
however it might be looked upon by gentlemen and men of the
world, like Ghisleri himself. But Ubaldini was a lawyer, and it was not
his business to consider what the fine world would think of his
doings. He filed Adele's letter with the copies of his own.
In the course of a few days, Adele, who was all the time carrying
on her correspondence with Pietro, gathered some hope from the
latter's answers. She had a suspicion that he might keep all the
notes he received from her, and after the first she was as careful
never to mention the manuscript except as "the confession," as he,
on his part, was always to write out its title in full. It struck her,
however, that a man playing such a part as she wished to have it
thought that he was playing, would naturally use some such means
for making his letters seem commonplace if they should fall into the
wrong hands, and it would be easy to persuade her friends that the
autobiographic writings of Isabella Montevarchi meant Adele Savelli's
confession, by common consent, though she herself had not taken
the trouble to use such a long title more than once. The thought
elated her, and comforted her in a measure for the disappointment
she had suffered, and which had shaken her nerves severely.

She now spent much time in going over the correspondence,
weighing each word in the attempt to establish its exact value if
regarded from the point of view of a systematic attempt to extort
money. With a relative coolness which would not have disgraced a
strong man, and which showed how far she had recovered control of
herself by diminishing the doses of morphia, she set to work to put
her case together on the supposition that she meant to lay it before
her husband, for instance, or any other intelligent person, with a
request for advice. And the case, as she put it, was better than
might have been expected, though it depended ultimately, for its
solidity, on the supposition that the confession could never be found.
In the first place, she intended to admit that she had been jealous
of Laura for years, and to own frankly that she had often said cruel
and spiteful things of her, and of Arden, just as everybody she knew
said spiteful things of somebody. She would even admit that she had
first set afloat the rumour that Lord Herbert was intemperate, and
that Laura had the evil eye. She could then point out that her
conduct had suddenly changed in deference to her father's wishes,
that there had been an open reconciliation, not very heartfelt on her
part at first, but made sincere by the remorse she felt after Arden's
death. For she meant to go even so far as to confess that Arden
might have caught the scarlet fever in her house, seeing that her
maid was only just recovering from it at the time. The woman's
illness had been kept strictly secret, and she had been, from the
first, taken to a distant part of the palace, so that Adele had not
believed there could be any danger. Even her husband had not
known what the maid's illness was, and poor Lucia had pleaded so
hard not to be sent to the hospital that Adele had yielded. But to
prove, she would say, how little fear of contagion she had, her own
children had not been sent into the country. The Palazzo Savelli was
big enough to have had a whole infirmary in one part of it,
completely isolated from all the rest. Nevertheless, she had always
felt that there was a possibility of Arden's last illness having been
taken at that dinner-party, and her secret remorse had caused her
the greatest suffering. Between that and a nervous disorder from

which she had little hope of ever recovering, she had fallen very ill,
and had gone to Gerano. While there, her conscience had so pricked
her in the matter of her past unkindness to her step-sister and to
Arden, that although she had been to confession at Easter, she
wrote a long letter to her confessor in Rome, going again over the
full details of the past winter. From that point she could tell the
truth, without even sparing Lucia, until she came to the discovery
that it was Ghisleri himself who had picked up the letter, or
confession, under the shaft of the oubliette. And here she would lay
great stress on Ghisleri's attachment to Laura, and consequent
dislike of herself. The well-known fact that Pietro had fought a
desperate duel merely because Campodonico said that Lady Herbert
Arden might have the evil eye, sufficiently showed to what lengths
he would go in her defence. Nothing more would really be needed.
But there was plenty more. All Rome knew that he had broken with
Maddalena dell' Armi for Laura's sake, and that he had exhibited the
most untiring devotion ever afterwards. Never, since the death of the
Princess Corleone, Adele would boldly assert, had he been faithful to
any one woman for such a length of time. That was a strong point.
The Princess of Gerano herself could testify to her own anxiety about
Laura since Ghisleri had been so much with her. Laura herself had
behaved in the most admirable manner ever since the reconciliation,
but Ghisleri, in constituting himself her champion, had become, so to
say, more royalist than the king, and more catholic than the pope.
His dislike, if not his positive hatred, for Adele was apparent at every
step in the story. He did not, it is true, speak of it to any one, but his
reticence was a well-known peculiarity of his character. It was when
he was alone in conversation with Adele that he showed what he
felt. But his manner was always courteous and rather formal. It was
by sarcastic hints that he conveyed his meaning. Nevertheless, Adele
had maintained the outward forms of friendly acquaintance, and
once, some six months after Arden's death, when matters had not
been so bad as they now were, she had asked him to stay a few
days at Gerano. Lucia could testify that he was there at the time
when the confession disappeared, and Lucia, who had attempted to
extort money for it, and would have succeeded if the document had

been forthcoming, had naturally been as interested as any one to
find it. Not until some time later had Adele suspected that it had
been picked up by Ghisleri. The thing, of course, had not any very
great value, but what woman, Adele would ask, could bear to think
that the most private outpourings of her soul to her spiritual director
were in the hands of a man who hated her, and who could, if he
pleased, circulate them and make them the talk of the town? When
Ghisleri, in the following winter, had begun to torment her
systematically by quoting little phrases and expressions which she
remembered to have written in the letter, she had at last boldly
taxed him with having it in his possession, and he, with the
unparalleled cynicism for which he was famous, had laughed at her
and owned the truth. Every one would allow that this was very like
him. She had threatened to complain to her husband, and he had
expressed the utmost indifference. He was a known duelist and a
dangerous adversary, and for her husband's sake she had held her
tongue, while Ghisleri continued to make her life miserable with his
witticisms. Then she had once asked him what he would consider an
equivalent for the letter. He had laughed again, and had said that he
would take a large sum of money in exchange for it, which, he
added, he would devote to building a small hospital in the village of
Torre de' Ghisleri, saying that it would be for the good of her soul to
found a charity of that kind. She would not undertake to say
whether he would have employed the money for that purpose or
not, if she had given it to him. Possibly he would. But she had not
been able to dispose of any such sum as he had then named. Under
her marriage contract she controlled only her pin-money, and her
father allowed her nothing out of the great fortune which would
some day be hers. She and Ghisleri had corresponded about the
matter in town, by notes sent backwards and forwards. She, on her
part, had at that time thought she was doing wisely in burning his,
but he had been less careful. He had, in fact, been so grossly
negligent as to leave five of them at one time in the pocket of one of
his coats. It was through his tailor to whom the coat had been sent
for some alteration or repair that two of these notes had come back
to Adele. A woman, apparently a seamstress, had come to her with

them one day, and had offered them to her for sale, together with a
card of Lady Herbert Arden's enclosed in an envelope addressed to
"Maria B." at the general post-office. On the card were written the
words: "For Maria B., with best thanks." The woman confessed that
she was in great distress, that she had found the letters in a coat
upon which she was working, had easily ascertained who Ghisleri
was, and what his relations towards Lady Herbert were, and had
appealed to the latter for help, offering the letters in exchange for
any charity, and actually sending three of them when she had only
received five francs. Lady Herbert had then sent her fifty francs
more with the card in question, but the poor woman thought that
very little. She bitterly repented not having brought them all at once
to Donna Adele. Of course they belonged to her, and Donna Adele
had a right to them all, without payment. But the woman was very
poor. Adele had unhesitatingly given her a hundred francs and had
kept the two notes and the card, which proved at least that even at
that time she had been corresponding with Ghisleri and protesting
her inability to pay the sum he demanded, and that Laura Arden was
aware of the correspondence, and had been willing for Ghisleri's
sake to pay money to obtain it. For a long time after this Adele had
made no further attempt, but had avoided finding herself alone in
conversation with Pietro, as many people had indeed noticed,
because she could not bear to be perpetually annoyed by his
reference to his power over her. Yet, out of fear lest some harm
should befall her husband, she had still held her peace. Early in the
preceding summer, shortly before leaving for her annual visit to
Gerano, Ghisleri had managed to be alone with her, and had not lost
the opportunity of inflicting another wound, which had revived all
her old desire to obtain possession of the lost letter. He had, indeed,
almost admitted that unless she would reconsider the matter he
would send it to one of her friends to read. The Montevarchi library
was then about to be sold, and many persons were talking of the
famous confession of Isabella Montevarchi. By way of safety, Adele,
in agreeing to think the whole thing over once more, had told him
that when writing she should speak of her own letter as though it
were this well-known manuscript. She had already some experience

of his carelessness in regard to notes. Against his own statement,
and against her own secret positive conviction, yet to give him one
chance, as it were, she had made one desperate effort to have the
oubliette opened and searched. Her father would remember how
angry she had been, and, indeed, she had lost her temper, being
always ill and nervous. He had positively refused. Then, in despair,
she had reopened negotiations with Ghisleri, whose demands,
though not so high as formerly, were still quite beyond her means.
As a matter of fact, the dealer had asked an exorbitant price for the
manuscript, being well aware of its historical importance, which was
little less than that attaching to the famous manuscript account of
the Cenci trial. Adele was in despair. She had no means of raising
such a sum as Ghisleri required, except by selling her jewels, which
she could not possibly do without exciting her husband's suspicions.
She was powerless. Had any woman ever been placed in such a
situation? Ghisleri's last letter distinctly stated that he could do
nothing more for her if she refused to buy the confession of Isabella
Montevarchi at the price he had last named. Those were his very
words. They meant that unless she paid, he would make use of the
letter he had. He even added, that in that case the manuscript
would probably before long be disposed of elsewhere, as though to
make his meaning clearer.
Her position was very strong, Adele thought, as she reached the
end of her statement as she first drew it up in her own mind. A
clever lawyer could doubtless make it even stronger, for he would
know how to take advantage of every point, and how to call
attention to the strongest and pass smoothly over the weaker links
in the chain. The real danger, and the only real danger, lay in the
possibility that the confession itself might be found and might be
produced, with all which she said it contained, and with the one
central black statement of which she made no mention in working
up the case. But who could produce it? If any one had it, that man
was Ghisleri, who had more than once gone very near the truth in
the hints he had thrown out. Say that he had it—suppose the
hypothesis a fact. Its being in his possession would be the most

ruining evidence of all. He would not dare to show it, for though it
might ruin her, it would be far worse ruin to him, for it would of itself
suffice to prove the truth of every word of her story, and he would
not only incur the full penalty of the law for a most abominable
attempt at levying blackmail, but his very memory would be blasted
for ever as that of the most dastardly and cowardly villain ever sent
to penal servitude. As for herself, she felt that she had not long to
live, and if worse came to worst, a little over-dose of morphia would
end it all. She would have had her triumph, and she would have
seen Laura's face by that time.
It did not occur to her to ask herself any question about the origin
of a hatred so implacable as to make the sacrifice of life itself seem
easy in the accomplishment of its end. She was not able to trace the
history of her jealousy backwards by a firm concentration of
memory, as she was able by the force of vivid imagination to
construct the vengeance she anticipated in the future. That the most
dire revenge should be contemplated, pursued, and ultimately
executed for the sake of a wrong wholly imaginary in the first
instance is not altogether novel in the history of humanity. There are
minds which under certain conditions cannot judge of the past as
they can of events present and to come. Adele's hatred of Laura
Arden amounted almost to a fixed idea. It had begun in very small
things. Its origin lay, perhaps, in the simple fact that Laura was
beautiful whereas Adele had been barely pretty at her best, and its
first great development had been the consequence of Francesco
Savelli's undisguised preference for the step-sister of his future wife.
All the young girl's jealousy and vain nature had been roused and
wounded by the slight, and as years had gone by and Savelli showed
no signs of forgetting his early attachment to Laura, the wound had
grown more sore and more angry until it had poisoned Adele's
character and heart to the very core. The worst deed she ever did
had not perhaps been the worst in intention. She had not been at all
sure that Arden would take the fever, and she had assuredly not
meant nor ever expected that he should die. Chance had put the
information into her hands at a moment when, through Laura, as it

seemed to her, she was suffering the most cruel humiliation she had
ever known. On that memorable evening when her father had forced
her to submit to his will, and when she was looking forward with
bitter loathing to what was very like a public reconciliation, she had
been left alone. In attempting to control herself and to regain some
outward calm, she had taken up a review and had forced herself to
read the first article upon which she opened, and which happened to
be a very dull one on the bacilli of various diseases. But one passage
had struck her forcibly—the plain account of a case which had
recently been observed, in which few medical terms occurred, and
which a child could have understood. The extreme simplicity of the
facts had startled her, and she had suddenly resolved that Laura and
Arden should have cause to remember the reconciliation which
would cost her vanity so dear. But she had no intention of doing
murder. In her heart she had hardly believed that any result would
follow, and remorse had taken hold of her almost at once,
simultaneously with the horrible fear of discovery which has more
than once driven men and women mad. But remorse is by no means
repentance. With it comes often what has been called the
impossibility of pardoning the person one has injured, and the
insane desire to wreak vengeance upon that person for the acute
sufferings endured in one's own conscience. Given the existence of
this desire in a very violent degree, and admitting the inevitable
disturbance of the faculties ensuing upon the long and vicious abuse
of such a poison as morphia, Adele's ultimate state becomes
comprehensible. She was, indeed, as Ghisleri had said to Laura,
hardly sane, and her incipient madness having originally resulted
from jealousy, the latter naturally remained the ruling influence in
her unsettled brain, and attained proportions hardly credible to those
who have not followed the steps by which the human intelligence
passes from sanity to madness.
And now that she had worked up her case against Ghisleri, as a
lawyer would express it, and had convinced herself that she could
tell a long and connected story in which almost every detail should
give colour to her principal assertion, she hesitated as to the course

she should pursue. It was not in her power to send for a lawyer and
to bring an action at law against Pietro, without her husband's
consent, and she knew how hard that would be to obtain. Francesco
Savelli was by no means a cowardly man, and would, if necessary,
have exposed his life in a duel with Ghisleri, not for his wife's sake,
but for the sake of the family honour. But he had the true Roman's
abhorrence of publicity and scandal, and would make great sacrifices
to avoid anything of the kind. Her own father might be willing to
take the matter up, but it was extremely hard to deceive him. She
knew, however, that if he were once persuaded of the justice of her
cause, he would go to any length in her defence and would prove an
implacable enemy to the man who, as he would suppose, had
injured her. The great difficulty lay in persuading him at the outset.
But for the unfortunate fact that he had already once detected her in
falsehood, the matter would have been far easier. It was true that
she meant to admit all he had then forced her to own, and much
more besides, in order to show how high a value Ghisleri set upon
the confession which contained a concise account of her doings. But
he would, in any case, be prejudiced against her from the first. One
thing was in her favour, she thought. The Princess of Gerano did not
like Ghisleri, and would in all likelihood be ready to believe evil of
him, and to influence her husband, good and just woman though
she was. There was one other person to whom Adele could apply—
Prince Savelli himself. She thought of him last and wondered why
she had not remembered him first. He was a man of singular energy,
courage, and coolness, whose chief fault was a tendency to
overestimate beyond all limits the importance of his family and the
glory of his ancient name. She knew that he was abnormally
sensitive on these points and that if she could rouse his ever ready
pride, he would hesitate at nothing in order to bring retribution upon
any one rash enough to insult or injure any member of his family.
And he lived a life of his own and cared little for the world. His
passion, strangely enough, was of a scientific kind. He was an
astronomer, had built himself an observatory on the top of the
massive old palace, and spent the greater part of his time there.
Such existences, in the very heart of society, are not unknown in

Rome. Prince Savelli had remained what he was by nature, a true
student, and was perfectly happy in his own way, caring very little
for the world and hardly ever showing himself in it. The Princess was
a placid person, extremely devout, but also extremely selfish. It was
from her that Francesco inherited his disposition and his yellow hair.
It struck Adele that if she could win her father-in-law's sympathy
and rouse him to action in her behalf, it would be far easier to
persuade her own father that she was in the right. Gerano had a
boundless respect for the elder Savelli's opinion, though if he had
known him better, he would have discovered that his judgment was
far too easily influenced where his exaggerated family pride was
concerned.
A long time passed before Adele finally made up her mind to the
great attempt. Ghisleri had already returned to Rome and Laura
Arden was expected in two or three weeks, according to news
received by her mother.
An incident, trivial in itself, at last decided her to act at once. She
and Francesco were dining with the Prince and Princess of Gerano as
they did regularly once a week. As a rule nobody was invited to
these family meetings, but on that particular evening Gianforte
Campodonico and Donna Christina had been asked. It was
convenient to have them when Laura was not there, and they were
much liked in Casa Gerano where, as has been said, Ghisleri was not
a favourite. There was, moreover, a distant relationship between the
families of Braccio and Campodonico of which, as they liked one
another, both were fond of speaking.
Adele looked very ill. By this time her complexion was of a pale
yellow, and she was thin to absolute emaciation. In spite of her
determined efforts to break the habit that was killing her, or perhaps
as a first consequence of them, she was liable to moments of
nervousness in which she could hardly control herself and in which
she did not seem to remember what had happened a few minutes
earlier. Her sufferings at such times were painful to see. She could
hardly keep her hands from moving about in a helpless fashion, and

her face was often slightly contorted. Very rarely, on fine days when
she had been driving, a little colour came into her ghastly cheeks. It
was easy to see that only her strong will supported her continually,
and that women more weakly organized would long ago have
succumbed to the effects of the poison.
When she felt that she was liable to a crisis of the nerves she was
careful to stay at home, but occasionally she was attacked
unawares, more or less violently, when she had believed herself well
enough to go out. When this happened she sat in silence while the
suffering lasted, and did her best to keep her unruly hands clasped
together. By a strong effort she sometimes succeeded in concealing
from others what she felt, but the exertion of her will made her
irritable to the last degree, if she was called upon to speak or forced
to try and join in the conversation.

CHAPTER XXVI.
The dinner passed off quietly and pleasantly enough until towards
the end, when the conversation turned upon the coming season, and
all began to speculate as to whether it would be gay or dull, as
people always do when they meet after the long separation in the
summer.
"There will be all the usual pleasant things," observed Francesco
Savelli, who loved society as much as his wife did. "Let me see.
There will be the evenings in Casa Frangipani, and they will give
their two balls as usual at the end. The Marchesa di San Giacinto will
do as she did last year—a dance and a ball alternately after the
fifteenth of January. Of course Casa Montevarchi does not exist any
more since the crash, but that is the only one. Then there are your
evenings," he continued, turning to the mistress of the house, "and
there are ours, of course, and I suppose Gouache and Donna
Faustina will give something at the studio. Have you seen her this
year, Adele?"
He looked across the table at his wife, and saw that she was
beginning to suffer from an unexpected attack. He knew the
symptoms well, and was aware that there was nothing to be done
but to leave her alone and take no notice of her. She merely nodded
in answer to his question, and he went on speaking.
"Gouache always does something original," he said. "Do you
remember that supper on Shrove Tuesday years ago? It was the
most successful thing of that season. By the bye, I saw Ghisleri
yesterday. He has come back."
It was rather tactless of him to drag Ghisleri's name into the
conversation in the presence of Campodonico. But the Princess of
Gerano was even more tactless than he.
"That wild Ghisleri!" she immediately exclaimed, as she always did
when Pietro was mentioned.

"Ghisleri is no worse than the rest of us, I am sure," said
Campodonico, anxious to show that he was not in the least annoyed.
"He has as many good qualities as most men, and perhaps a few
more."
"It is generous of you to say that," observed Donna Christina,
looking at her husband with loving admiration.
"I do not see that there is much generosity about it, my dear," he
answered warmly. "It would be very spiteful of me not to give him
his due, that is all. He is brave and honourable, and that is
something to say of any man. Besides, look at his friends—look at
the people who like him, beginning with most of you here. That is a
very good test of what a man is."
He looked straight at Adele Savelli as he spoke, for no special
reason except that he always looked straight at somebody when he
was speaking. He was hot-tempered, passionate, generous, and
truthful, and there was a great directness about everything he did
and said. But at that moment Adele was in great pain and was doing
her best to hide it. She fancied that Campodonico had noticed what
was the matter.
"Why do you look at me in that way?" she asked irritably, but with
a nervous attempt at a laugh.
"I do not know," answered Gianforte. "I suppose I expected you
to agree with me. I know Ghisleri is a friend of yours."
"How do you know that?" Adele's irritation increased rapidly.
"Have you any reason to suppose that I am particularly fond of him?
Have I ever done anything to show it?"
"Why are you so much annoyed?" asked Savelli, who generally felt
uncomfortable when his wife was in such moods, and feared that
she would say something to make herself and him ridiculous. "You
always liked him."
Adele's hand twitched and moved on the table against her will,
and she upset some salt. The little incident sufficed to make her lose

Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.
More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge
connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and
personal growth every day!
ebookbell.com

Rites Of Passage Cultures Of Transition In The Fourteenth Century Nicola F Mcdonald

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

Rites Of Passage Cultures Of Transition In The Fourteenth Century Nicola F Mcdonald

About This Presentation

Slide Content

Slide 1

Slide 2

Slide 3

Slide 5

Slide 6

Slide 7

Slide 8

Slide 9

Slide 10

Slide 11

Slide 12

Slide 13

Slide 14

Slide 15

Slide 16

Slide 17

Slide 18

Slide 19

Slide 20

Slide 21

Slide 22

Slide 23

Slide 24

Slide 25

Slide 26

Slide 27

Slide 28

Slide 29

Slide 30

Slide 31

Slide 32

Slide 33

Slide 34

Slide 35

Slide 36

Slide 37

Slide 38

Slide 39

Slide 40

Slide 41

Slide 42

Slide 43

Slide 44

Slide 45

Slide 46

Slide 47

Slide 48

Slide 49

Slide 50

Slide 51

Slide 52

Tags

Categories

Download

Quick Actions

Statistics

Related Slideshows

TLE-9-Prepare-Salad-and-Dressing.pptxkkk

LESSON 1 ABOUT MEDIA AND INFORMATION.pptx

GRADE-8-AQUACULTURE-WEEKQ1.pdfdfawgwyrsewru

Feelings PP Game FOR CHILDREN IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.pptx

Jeopardy_Figures_of_Speech_Template.pptx [Autosaved].pptx

Jeopardy_Figures_of_Speech.pptxvdsvdsvsdvsd