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Updated: May 6, 2025
She was remarkably handsome in her hot Venetian way, richly coloured, brown-eyed, crimson-lipped, bosomed like a goddess and shaped like a Caryatid. She half closed her eyes, half opened her lips, smiled and drowsed and waited. Olimpia was nearly always complaisant, had no reticences, no conscience, few brains. She was luxury itself, fond of the fire, fond of her bed, fond of her dinner.
But Olimpia slept long where she fell, and next morning decided to garner her rage. "Amor che a null' amato amar perdona." Bellaroba, who pleased the Countess, for the same reasons, no doubt, did not please the Count. It is possible to be too demure, and very little good to have domestic charm if you shut the door upon the amateur.
He made a charming little picture there seemed indeed posed for some such thing; he was charmingly pretty himself, but for all that, he had a tragic touch upon him, a droop of the lip, or the eyelid, perhaps. One could hardly say, yet never miss it. Even Olimpia noticed the shadow across him. As they touched "Look, look, Bellaroba," she whispered, and nudged her friend "that boy!
"For the Countess's sake I spare you to the Count, Captain Mosca; though what precisely your value may be to his Excellency I do not at present understand." Thereupon he turned to his poor Bellaroba, took her in his arms before them all, kissed her eyes dry of tears, and ended by drawing a rueful smile from her lips. The dining-room found him admirable throughout; but Olimpia got up, yawning.
The wind shivered the reeds again, then fainted down. "Castaneve," said the dry voice, "what say you? You declare that you are innocent. Will you hang the guilty and go free?" The drowning Olimpia threw up her hands to clutch at this plank in the sea-swirl. Free! O God! The word turned her. "Magnificence, I must, I must, I must!" She wailed, and fell a heap to the ground.
"For," as she said, "if words of man or woman could bring the rafters about our ears, or open a pit to send us lightly whither we all must go who have heard them, those words which Madam Olimpia spat about her must surely do it." So much she confessed to afterwards, but no more; for she stayed nothing more.
Coming out of the church into the sun again, they encountered the scrutiny of Olimpia. Captain Mosca, slapping his booted leg, was holding the horse. "Where have you two children been?" said Olimpia. "Mischief in a corner, eh? You have missed the sight of Duke Borso and a gilded company." "We have been saying our prayers to Madonna of the Greeks," said Bellaroba meekly.
The Professor was grasping a female figure by the shoulders, the Italian Coppola held her by the feet; and they were pulling and dragging each other backwards and forwards, fighting furiously to get possession of her. Nathanael recoiled with horror on recognising that the figure was Olimpia.
Olimpia followed after him, very much impressed with the thought that the sooner she could exchange Mosca for Mosca's master the better for her. In the rear of the procession stalked that gaping hero swearing rapidly under his breath to keep himself in some sort of countenance. Angioletto's assurance, and with it his luck, held out the evening.
He lost his little store of wit, sagged like a broken sunflower, and was finally pelted from the door by a storm of Venetian curses, in which all his ancestors, himself, and any descendants he might dare to have, were heavily involved. Bellaroba, trembling in her bed, heard him go with a sinking heart. "Olimpia will come and murder me now," she said to herself.
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