me, I will vanquish this evil fortune. If he seeks other consolation outside the house, I cannot complain of it. And you, I beg, do not ask me anything more, or force me to repeat what I have said to you, because this agitates me. I do all that is possible to create quiet around me, do not destroy it. To keep me alive, leave me in peace."
In this letter Beatrice paints herself as she thinks she is – that is to say, cold, indifferent, disdainful. But she is really fighting a hard fight with her nature, although it takes some time before she even knows it. She has not been able to remain really insensible to Marcello's noble, loving, lovable character; little by little her affection for him grows, until at last she falls into the abyss she has so nervously avoided, loving, suffering, being disquieted, anxious, and jealous. The genesis and development of this love, so slow to burn, so ardent when kindled, is told with care and minute analysis.
"Beatrice loved profoundly, loved as her mother may have loved. She had inherited from her the fervour, the intensity, the concentration of love; psychologically she was the daughter of Luisa Revertera. And she was this also physiologically. From her mother she had inherited a poor weak heart, injured in its fibres, almost monstrous, of irregular life. Thus the physical and psychic heart fought an internal battle, in which one or the other had to die."
Beatrice's malady shows itself, and she suffers cruelly; suffers in silence and solitude, however, for she will reveal her anguish to none. She also endures mental torture at her alienation from Marcello, which increases while her love grows. He is rarely at home now, and she knows whither he goes to find sympathy. Jealousy, love, pride, wage a fierce warfare in her breast. She knows the first advances must come from her who has repulsed him, but she cannot bring herself to the point. At last, however, when she fancies he is leaving for good, her love breaks down all obstacles, and for the first time she opens the partition door that divides their rooms and enters his study. It is a very touching and beautiful scene. The proud, lovely, suffering woman has clothed herself in her wedding-dress, for this is to be a new wedding-day to them. "It is I," she says to the astonished but delighted Marcello, as she stands in the doorway; "I, thy Beatrice, thy wife. I have on my white dress: I love thee." Then follow some brief months of bliss, a late honeymoon, during which Beatrice's malady increases, until at last she dies. Her happiness has hastened the progress of the disease.
'Fantasia ' is another such half-medical study. Lucia, who may be considered the heroine, and who supplies a study in névrose, is of the type of Dumas fils' women, – one of those overwrought, hysterical beings, fantastic, cold, heartless, sentimental, egotistic, that are – to our shame be it spoken –the peculiar outcome of modern civilisation. She is cousin-german also to Madame Bovary, and has all her religious ecstasies, her moral defects. Like Madame Bovary, she is also a great poseuse, and is at times a dupe to her own fancies – in short, a creature whom one is doubtful whether to consider as wholly responsible for her actions. The prologue of the tale takes place in a Neapolitan convent school, where are assembled the élite of the city's maidens, and where already is shown in embryo the character of the two heroines, Lucia and her friend Catarina
