The Intruder by Gabriele D'Annunzio

Author:Gabriele D'Annunzio [D'Annunzio, Gabriele]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Classics, Italian Literature, Fiction
ISBN: 9781974636198
Publisher: G. H. Richmond
Published: 1892-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIV.

In the violence of my multiple and contrary agitations, in the first tumult of pain, beneath the menace of imminent perils, I had not yet had the leisure to think of the Other. Moreover, from the very first, I had not conceived even the shadow of a doubt of my former suspicion. In my mind, the Other had immediately taken the form of Filippo Arborio, and from the first outburst of carnal jealousy that had seized me in the alcove, it was his abominable image which was coupled with that of Juliana in a series of horrible visions.

Even now, while Federico and I trotted toward the forest, along the banks of the tortuous river, contemplated so painfully on the afternoon of Holy Saturday, the Other trotted beside us. Between my brother and me interposed the image of Filippo Arborio, revived by my hate, animated by my hate with life so intense that, on regarding it with a sensation of reality, I felt a physical spasm, something similar to the savage quivering that I had more than once felt on the duelling field, at the signal of attack, when face to face with an adversary.

My brother's presence extraordinarily increased my uneasiness. Compared with Federico, that man's face, so thin, so nervous, so feminine, grew smaller, became impoverished, seemed contemptible and ignoble to me. Beneath the influence of the new ideal of virile strength and simplicity that my brother's example inspired in me, I not only hated, but I despised that complicated and equivocal being, who yet belonged to my own race, and who had several particularities in his cerebral constitution in common with me, to which his works of art bore witness. I pictured to myself a type of one of those literary men, affected by the saddest maladies of the mind, a libertine, cruelly curious, hardened by the habit of cold analysis of the warmest and most spontaneous passions of the soul, accustomed to consider every human creature as a subject of pure psychological speculation, incapable of love, incapable of a generous action, of an abnegation, of a sacrifice, hardened in falsehood, enervated by disgust, lascivious, cynical, cowardly.

Such was the man who had seduced Juliana, but who had certainly not loved her. Did not the very manner appear in the dedication written on the fly-leaf of The Secret, in that emphatic dedication, the only document known to me that bore on the relations between the romancer and my wife? To take by assault the "Ivory Tower," to corrupt a character whom public opinion declared to be incorruptible, to experiment with a method of seduction on so rare a subject, that was an enterprise, difficult but full of attraction, entirely worthy of the refined artist, the abstractor of physiological quintessence who had written The True Catholic and Angelica Doni.

The more I thought of it, the more the facts appeared to me in their ugliest crudity. Filippo Arborio had certainly made Juliana's acquaintance during one of those crises when the woman of

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