The Duchess at Prayer

The Duchess at Prayer

Librivox Audio

1901

Crucial Instances

Romance and History

Italy

Unnamed First Person Narrator, the Old Man, Duchess Violante, Duke Ercole II, the Chaplain, Nencia, The Old Man's Grandmother, Cavaliere Ascanio, Antonio

Tiepolo, Palladio, the Genoese Priest, Bernini, Elisabetta Sirani, The Duke and Duchess of Paliano

Italy, Como, Vicenza, Rome, River Brenta, Apennines, Monselice

Ducal Escutcheon, Loggia, Horticulture, Bituminous Saints, Stucco, Furbelow, Blackamoor, Pezzi Grossi, Piazza, Madrigals, Easter Chasuble, Michaelmas, Chaplain, Scullery, Simpleton, Rosary, Gay Sallies, Gazebo, Proprio

Dahlias, Lavender, Cypresses, Clove-Carnations, Lemon Trees, Lime Trees, Laurel Grove, Mulberries, Gilly Flowers, Sycamores

The Use of Places in "The Duchess at Prayer", The Motif of Escape in "The Duchess at Prayer", The Statue, Wharton and the Gothic, Wharton and Poe: "The Duchess at Prayer" and "The Cask of Amontillado"

Saint Sebastian, "All the Pagan Goddesses of Antiquity", Daphne, Saint Blandina of Lyons, Our Lady of Loreto

Language in "The Duchess at Prayer", Symbolism in "The Duchess at Prayer", Botanical Terms in "The Duchess at Prayer", "The Duchess at Prayer" and Balzac’s "La Grande Bretèche", "The Duchess at Prayer" in Context of Wharton's Life, On Myth and Religion in "The Duchess at Prayer", Remarks on the Story as a Whole

Because "The Duchess at Prayer" is divided into five parts, the plot summary shall also be divided according to these chapters. It is also to be noted that the page number for the book used to create the summary will be given as well, should the desire to cross check the references arise.

I

Part I is on page 1.

The story begins with a direct address to the reader. One is asked whether one has ever “questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which the buzz of secrets of the confessional?”[1] After which differences between some dwellings are compared to one another: some houses “declare the activities they shelter”[2] and are “the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface”[3] juxtaposed with “the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death.”[4]

Windows are likened to blind eyes and the door to a shut mouth, perhaps concealing either “sunshine and the scent of myrtles[5]” or “mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in the locks...”[6]

II

Part II spans pages two to five.

Wharton here introduces a first-person narrator who, through later use of male pronouns, may be presumed to be a man.

The narrator begins to set the scene by describing the August afternoon and the gardens, fountains, porticoes, grottoes and further beyond valleys and hills. He has just been led through the “shrouded rooms” of a villa and their “chill” is still upon him. He cleaves to the sunshine.

An old man, who is accompanying the narrator, says to him: “The Duchess’s apartments are beyond.”[7] Indicating that the tour he is apparently taking him on is not yet over.

The narrator describes the old man as “so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being”[8] with the only thing linking him to the present being “his small saurian eye”[9].

They have a brief conversation that establishes that nothing has changed in the apartments of the Duchess for two hundred years. No-one presently lives in the villa or close-by palace and they always remain closed. The current Duke himself lives in neither and does not visit. The old man assures both the narrator and the reader that it has been this way since he can remember.

The narrator looks out of the gardens, noting both the blinding sun and the opulence of plants as well as the ruins and maimed statues inhabiting them, before prompting the old man: “Let us go in.”[10]

The old man opens a heavy door behind which “the cold lurked like a knife”[11]. He announces that they have now entered the Duchess’s apartments.

The rooms are opulently decorated: “evanescent frescoes, [...] scagliola volutes [...], ebony cabinets [...], gilt consoles supporting Chinese monsters.”[12] Above the chimney-panel they encounter the first of two portraits: a likeness of Duke Ercole II. The painting features “a narrow-boned face, sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and cautious lidded, as though modeled by priestly hands [...]”[13]

After being reminded by the old man that the bedroom of the Duchess lies further beyond, they continue on. There, through the shuttered windows shafts of light fall onto the severe bedstead and the Christ on the cross between the curtains. Across the room, a lady seems to smile at them from the chimney-breast. As the old man open the shutters, light falls onto her face. It is the portrait of Duchess Violante, wife to Duke Ercole II: “Such a face it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow, and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo’s lenient goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth century dress!”[14]

The old man emphasizes the no-one has slept here since the Duchess herself. Drawing a key from his pocket, he moves to open a door at the far end of the room which leads to the Duchess’s balcony and, further along, the chapel.

The narrator follows the old man into the chapel, making note of both the glory and decay: “I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco. Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the artificial roses in the altar-vase were gray with dust and age, and under the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird’s nest clung. Before the altar stood a row of tattered arm-chairs [...]”[15]. At the sight of a figure kneeling near them, the narrator draws back, evidently startled.

The old man informs the narrator in a whisper that it is, in fact, the Duchess Violante, by Cavaliere Bernini. “It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her head lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned shrine. Her face was hidden and I [the first-person narrator] wondered whether it was grief of gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no living prayer joined her marble invocation.”[16] The narrator steps closer, obviously intrigued, to further examine Bernini’s sculpture of Violante. “The Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I [the first-person narrator] saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder [...]”[17] As the narrator steps further around the sculpture he finally looks into her face: “[...] it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human countenance...”[18]

The narrator inquires whether or not this is the same Violante as in the portrait they encountered only moments before. The old man confirms that they are indeed the same person. When pressed for details about why her face is contorted in this way and so dissimilar to the serene and beautiful portrait, he answers that the statue’s face changed after it was placed in the chapel. The narrator is bewildered by this statement but the old man mistakes his reaction for incredulity and defensively drops his confidential tone, stating that “This is a bad place to stay in – no one comes here. It’s too cold. But the gentlemen said, I must see everything!”[19] Inferring that the narrator has requested a tour of the place and all its rooms and features. The narrator’s interest is piqued and he doesn’t drop the subject, instead reaffirming that he indeed wishes to see everything and to hear everything as well. The narrator asks the old man from whom he heard the story and the old man exclaims: “One that saw it, by God!”[20], going on to explain that his grandmother was the Duchess’s serving girl. The narrator questions this, seeing as the Duke and Duchess lived 200 years ago. The old man defends his claims by stating that his grandmother was very old when he was born and that she told him the story when he was a little boy – told him the story on a bench by the fish-pond, which means that it must be true for it is still there today.

III

Part III is on page 6.

Similar to Chapter I, Wharton uses Chapter III to further set the scene. She dips the reader into an evocative paragraph through the eyes of the first-person narrator: “Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting secrets. The villa looked out across it, composed as a dead face, with the cypresses flanking it for candles...”[21]

IV

Part IV spans pages seven to eighteen and is the body of the story in form of a nested narrative.

The old man explains that his grandmother must have known the Duchess, for how else would she have known about the statue other than seeing it with her own eyes. He says it impacted her so that she did not smile until her first-born child was laid in her arms. He tells the fist-person narrator that his grandmother was the niece of the Duchess’s upper maid, Nencia, and that his grandmother married a man named Antonio, a steward’s son who used to carry the letters. In regards to the narrator’s skepticism, which keys the reader in to the fact that the old man’s sources may not be the most reliable, he ponders: “It’s possible, you think, that she may have heard from others what she afterwards fancied she had seen herself? How that is, it’s not for an unlettered man to say; though indeed I myself seem to have seen many things she told me. This is a strange place. No one comes here, nothing changes, and the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues in the garden...”[22]

Here begins the story within the story. The old man begins to recite the tale of Duchess Violante and Duke Ercole II to the unnamed first person narrator, and so, by proxy, the reader is immersed in the tale as well.

According to the old man, the events begin the summer after the Duke and Duchess return from the Brenta river in Italy after visiting the Duchess's father there. He quickly describes the lavish entertainments and luxuries Duchess Violante's father offered and how lively Venice was. He intones: “I know it all as if I’d been there, for Nencia, you see, my grandmother’s aunt, travelled with the Duchess [...]”[23] This further alerts the reader that this tale is very likely based on hearsay and pieced together information, making the old man’s narration less reliable still. The old man laments that he doesn’t know the whole story of what happened there, for Nencia was “mute as a fish where her lady was concerned”[24] and his grandmother could never get the information from her. He does, however, know what happened upon their return. The duke had the villa put in order, brought the Duchess there in the spring, and then left her there. He intones that his grandmother said the Duchess was “happy enough [...] and seemed no object for pity.”[25] Perhaps, he says, it was better than being shut up in Vicenza where “priests came and went as softly as cats prowling for birds, and the Duke forever closeted in his library [...]”[26]

From here, the old man launches into a description of both the Duke and the Duchess. “The Duke was a scholar [...]” “a silent man stepping quietly, with his eyes down, as though he’d just come from confession [...]”[27]. The Duke is a man who flinches out of the way of the Duchess’s dogs and reacts to her laughter "as if you’d drawn a diamond across a window-pane. ”[28] The Duchess he describes as always laughing. Violante was “all for music, play-acting and young company.”[29] Here, the reader may gather that the Duke and Duchess are of rather different temperaments and are possibly at odds with each other.

When the Duchess came to the villa, the old man says, she busied herself with laying out gardens, designing grottoes and planning fun surprises in the gardens, remarking that “she had a pretty taste in such matters”[30], though she quickly tired of these activities. She had no-one to talk to save her maids and the chaplain, whom the old man describes as “a clumsy man deep in his books”[31]. So, she invited all manner of people to pass the time, “strolling players from Vicenza, mountebanks and fortune-tellers from the market-place, travelling doctors and astrologers, and all manner of trained animals.”[32]

The old man goes on to say that everyone around the Duchess was very pleased when Cavaliere Ascanio, the Duke’s attractive cousin, was taken in at the vineyard across the valley by the Duke after being banished to Vicenza after a bout of misadventures. “He was a young man, beautiful as Saint Sebastian, a rare musician [...] He had a good word for everybody, too [...]” describes the old man and concludes “[...] every soul about the place welcomed the sight of him.”[33]

The Duchess, in the old man’s estimation, also welcomed the new company: “youth will have youth, and laughter turns to laughter; and the two matched each other like the candlesticks on an altar.”[34] The old man admits that “you could no more keep them apart than the bees and lavender” and that they were then always together, spending time and amusing themselves; the Duchess playing pranks and laughing and dressing up in outlandish outfits, the Cavaliere Ascanio teaching the villa staff to sing and planning out other entertainments. He also, “as became a poet, paragoned her in his song to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity, and doubtless these were finer to look at than mere woman [...]”[35] It becomes quite clear that Ascanio and Violante were infatuated with one another.

Towards the end of summer, however, the mood changed; they cloistered themselves away into the gazebo at the end of the gardens, away from the others. The Duchess grew quiet and would listen to only sad music. Around this time, the Duke returned for one of his bi-annual visits to found them together; the Duchess “wearing that day the Venetian habit, which uncovered the shoulders in a way the Duke always scowled at, and her curls loose and powdered with gold.”[36]

At the Duke's behest, the three of them - the Duke, the Duchess and Cavaliere Ascanio - drank hot chocolate in the gazebo together. “[...] what happened there no one knew, except that the Duke, on taking leave, gave his cousin a seat in his carriage; but the Cavaliere never returned.”[37]

Winter came. To the surprise of the maids, the old man says, the Duchess did not fall into a depression but rather remained cheerful and calm, so much so that her upper maid Nencia became cross with her for “her giving no more thought to the poor young man who, all this time, was eating his heart out in the house across the valley.”[38] The Duchess did, however, lay aside her more extravagant and provocative gowns and wear a veil over her head; by estimation of Nencia, however, this made her look even more lovely and caused the Duke even greater displeasure.

The Duke, during this time, visited the villa more often, the old man informs the first person narrator, and though he always found the Duchess “engaged in some innocent pursuit”[39], he always “went away with a sour look and a word to the chaplain.”[40]

Here the old man begins a digression into a situation that transpired between the Duchess and the chaplain. The chaplain had approached the Duchess about a large sum of money which he needed to pay for a chest of books brought to him by a foreign peddler[41] and entreated her to pay for them. The Duchess, who could abide books, laughed at him and told him that she is currently seeking to pay for a necklace, a statue of Daphne and a parrot; she carelessly stated: “I’ve no money for trifles”[42] The chaplain colored at the affront and began to back away as the Duchess tosses out the advice to “[...] pray to Saint Blandina to open the Duke’s pocket”[43] The chaplain answered quietly that he had already prayed to her to gain the Duke’s understanding. The Duchess, oblivious to the gravity of the situation and the affront she had given, waved him out of the room in favor of calling Nencia to fetch the gardener about some flowers.

The old man now offers the first-person narrator some interesting information. For generations, a sacred relic, the thighbone of the Saint Blandina, has rested in a stone coffin in the crypt by the villa. And now, he says, as the Duchess found herself without company again, “it was observed that she affected a fervent devotion to this relic; praying often at the chapel and even causing the stone slab that covered the entrance of the crypt to be replaced by a wooden one, that she might descend and kneel by the coffin.”[44] With this, she set a example of devotion for the entire household and although the chaplain should have been pleased, he was not.

Nencia, the old man here adds, “always had it in mind that her grace had made a mistake in refusing the request of the chaplain’s; but she said nothing, for to talk reason to the Duchess was of no more use than praying for rain in a drought.”[45]

Winter came early that year according to the old man. The Duchess kept to her room during the season and spent her time embroidering and reading books of devotion, a thing she had not previously done, and praying at the chapel often. The chaplain only visited the chapel when absolutely necessary and “galloped through the mass like a man with witches after him.”[46] He spent the rest of his time cloistered away with his books, avoiding the cold.

The old man here addresses the first-person narrator, and in doing so also speaks directly to the reader. He states that he has gone slowly, told the story at a slow pace, “for fear of what’s coming.”[47]

When the Duke stopped coming to Vicenza, the old man continues, the Duchess has no one to talk to but her servants. Yet, according to his grandmother, she was relatively unperturbed, keeping her “colors and her spirits.”[48] She spent most of her time in the chapel, where a fire was kept burning in a brazier all day now. The old man’s grandmother said it was a mercy that the Duchess could find such comfort in a dead saint, having been denied her 'natural pleasures' and having few people to speak to. His grandmother seldom saw the Duchess that winter. The old man says she increasingly kept to herself and chose to only have Nencia around, whom she also dismissed when she went to pray. "[...] her devotion had that mark of true piety, that she wished it not to be observed; so that Nencia had strict orders, on the chaplain’s approach, to warn her mistress if she happened to be in prayer."[49]

As spring followed winter, the old man’s grandmother stumbled upon an interesting situation. She’d spent time with Antonio instead of doing her duties and was trying to sneak back inside when she saw light in Nencia’s room. For fear of being discovered, the grandmother took a different route to the house; one that led her past the chapel. “[...] she heard a crash close behind her, as though someone had dropped from a window of the chapel. The young fool’s heart turned over, but she looked round as she ran, and there, sure enough, was a man scuttling across the terrace; and as he doubled the corner of the house my grandmother swore she caught the whisk of the chaplain’s skirts.”[50] The old man ponders here: “Now that was a strange thing, certainly; for why should the chaplain be getting out of the chapel window when he might have passed through the door? For you may have noticed, sir, there’s a door leads from the chapel into the saloon on the ground floor; the only other way out being through the Duchess’s tribune.”[51]

When the grandmother meets with Antonio again, she relays her nightly adventure. Antonio, to her surprise, laughs and says: “You little simpleton, he wasn’t getting out of the window, he was trying to look in”[52] and offers no more comment on the situation.

On an afternoon in May, the Duchess withdrew to her chambers after a walk with Nencia. She dressed herself royally and ordered sumptuous food, seemingly in a very good mood. She called for her rosary before she sat down to dine, stating that the fair weather had almost made her forget her prayers. The servants were thereupon ordered from the room and the Duchess made her way to the chapel.

The old man’s grandmother was then faced with a peculiar sight: the Duke’s approaching carriage, carrying what seemed to be a shrouded kneeling figure. So surprised was she that she called out only when the carriage was almost at the doors, evidently taking a while process what was happening. Nencia, upon seeing it, paled and ran to the chapel. They collided with the chaplain, who asked many questions and stalled them before they could cry out for the Duchess. Moments later, the Duchess appeared with her rosary, a shawl about her shoulders, looking ethereally beautiful. The Duke and his procession had now reached the villa.

The Duke and Duchess greeted each other. The Duchess remarked that she had not expected him, whereupon the Duke Ercole stated: “Had you expected me, Madam [...] your appearance could scarcely have been more fitted to the occasion. Few ladies of your youth and beauty array themselves to venerate a saint as they would to welcome a lover.”[53] The Duchess began to speak in her defense when she was startled by the loud scraping noise of something heavy being dragged across the floor. The Duke explained:

“That [...] is a tribute to your extraordinary piety. I have heard with a peculiar satisfaction of your devotion to the blessed relics in this chapel, and to commemorate the zeal which neither the rigors of winter nor the sultriness of summer could abate I have ordered a sculptured image of you, marvellously executed by the Cavaliere Bernini, to be placed before the altar over the entrance of the crypt.”[54]

The color drained from the Duchess's face yet she tried to retain a pleasant manner, endeavoring to play off the Duke's attempt to honor her piety with such a gift. The Duke, the old man recounts, was unfazed. The men carrying the statue now unveiled it: white marble. At this moment however, the Duchess herself stood even whiter. The Duke explained that he had commissioned Bernini to model the sculpture after the example of a portrait of the Duchess Violante painted by Elisabetta Sirani some six months prior. Confronted with this information, the Duchess was taken aback, realizing that the Duke must have planned this for quite some time. He mistook her horror for modesty, commending her humble piety.

The old man elaborates that the Duchess attempted to use her modesty as an excuse to have the statue placed elsewhere; not over the entrance of the crypt but perhaps in a remote part of the chapel. This the Duke would not allow. To hide away such a masterpiece would be an affront, even though the Duchess quickly demurred that she wanted to hide her likeness, not the artistry. The Duke did not concede. The Duchess made a second attempt, this time asking for the sculpture to the placed to the left of the altar where it could look up at the Duke’s tribune. The Duke however rebutted this request as well, saying he planned to also have a statue of himself made and if they were to place her statue on the left, she could not have a wife’s rightful position to his right. The Duke insisted on placing the sculpture above the entrance to the crypt. “I have a more particular purpose in placing your image over the entrance to the crypt; for not only would I thereby mark your special devotion to the blessed saint who rests there, but, by sealing up the opening in the pavement, would assure the perpetual preservation of that holy martyr’s bones, which hitherto have been too thoughtlessly exposed to sacrilegious attempts.”[55]

The Duchess inquired what attempts he means as no one can enter the chapel without her leave, to which the Duke responded that “a night malefactor might break in through a window, Madam, and your Excellency not know it.”[56]

The Duchess, close to tears now by the old man's account, asked why the Duke would deny her the pleasure and consolation of visiting the relics. The Duke responded that by placing her statue over them, she could keep guard over them forever.

The men now moved to place the statue but the Duchess jumped in front of them, barring the way to the crypt. She pleaded with the Duke to place the statue tomorrow so she may pray by the relics one last time. The Duke agreed, suggesting that they go down now, together, into the crypt. The Duchess refused his suggestion, stating firmly that her prolonged isolation had instilled the habit of solitary prayer in her and that she fears for the Duke’s ague due to the damp air in the crypt. The Duke latched on to this, casually saying that it will be all the better for the crypt to be sealed up so that the Duchess may also not be exposed to the damp air any longer either. At this, the Duchess broke down.

“Oh [...] you are cruel sir, to deprive me of access to the sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude to which your Excellency's duties have condemned me; and if prayer and meditation give me any authority to pronounce on such matters, suffer me to warn you, sir, that I fear the blessed Saint Blandina will punish us for thus abandoning her venerable remains!”[57]

This gave the Duke pause for he was a pious man. The old man says his grandmother, at this moment, thought she saw the Duke exchange a glance with the chaplain. After a moment, the chaplain voiced a solution: that indeed the saint may be honored greater and more conspicuously by moving the relics from the crypt to the altar. The Duke, seemingly delighted, decided to do this at one.

The Duchess however did not agree. She would not have the Duke’s consent at the price of the chaplain’s interposed solicitation. Through the wording the old man uses, the reader may glean that she is at her wits' end. The Duke ordered the statue placed, regardless.

The Duchess Violante now sat down on a proffered chair “straight as an arrow, her hands locked, her head high, her eyes on the Duke while the statue was dragged into its place […]”[58] After it had been placed, she asked Nencia to see Antonio, but was interrupted by the Duke who demanded to sup with her; not later, but now, and in her chambers. The Duchess asked for time to prepare herself; the Duke retorted that he would be waiting for her in her cabinet. “At this, said my grandmother, the Duchess gave one look, as the souls in hell may have looked when the gates closed on our Lord”[59] but left for her chamber.

What happened in the chamber, the old man says, his grandmother did not see or hear herself, but was told second-hand by a pantry-lad who waited on the Duke and Duchess that night. This is, in a sense, a second nested narration; and if not fully, a further hint that the narration comes to the reader not second hand, but across multiple long-ago accounts.

The Duchess hurriedly “dressed herself with extraordinary splendor”[60], moments before the servants’ preparations for dinner were complete and the Duke entered.

To pantry boy it seemed the Duke and Duchess sat down together in good humor, joking and laughing and exchanging stories. The Duke said this evening made up for the ones he spent away from her; and that he did not “remember to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank chocolate in the gazebo with my [his, the Duke’s] cousin Ascanio.”[61] He then enquired about his cousin’s health. The Duchess stated that she has had no news of Ascanio since his departure and offered the Duke more food. The Duke accepted and claimed his enjoyment could only be more complete were his cousin Ascanio with them. The Duchess asked if he were tiring of her company and the Duke contradicted: ”Ascanio is a capital fellow, but to my mind his chief merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.”[62] He had his cup and the Duchess’s filled and exclaimed a toast to Ascanio: “Here’s to the cousin [...] who has the good taste to stay away when he’s not wanted. I drink to his very long life - and you, Madam?”[63]

“And I to his happy death”[64] cried the Duchess, expression changed, voice wild, lifting her glass. The empty goblet dropped from her fingers and she fell, face first, to the floor.

The Duke called her servants, shouting that the Duchess Violante had swooned. The Duchess was carried to bed, where she “suffered horribly all night, Nencia said, twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping her.”[65] The Duke stayed by her side and eventually called the chaplain, but the Duchess’s mouth was closed in a way that did not permit the body of Christ to be passed into her. She died.

To his relatives, the Duke communicated that the Duchess had expired after “partaking too freely of spiced wine and an omelet of carp’s roe, at a supper she had prepared in honor of his return.”[66] The following year, he brought home a new wife birthed him five sons and a daughter.

V

Part V is located on page 19.

The scene has changed for the old man and the narrator. The sky is now a steel gray, a wind has picked up and the hills beyond are the stormy purple hue of thunder clouds.

The first-person narrator enquires after the statue. The old man says his grandmother, after the ordeal and the Duchess’s death, wished to say a prayer for her departed mistress: “She crept to the chapel and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you know – and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned cold, but something, she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking out, and she turned and ran from the place.”[67]

The Duke locked up the chapel door after this, says the old man, and forbade anyone from setting foot inside. So the place was never opened until the Duke’s passing some ten years later, and only then did others behold the horror of Duchess Violante’s statue that his grandmother had beheld.

The first-person narrator asks whether the crypt below has ever been opened.

“’Heaven forbid, sir,’ cried the old man, crossing himself. ‘Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?’”[68]

[1] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[2] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[3] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[4] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[5] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[6] Wharton 1901, p. 1

[7] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[8] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[9] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[10] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[11] Wharton 1901, p. 2

[12] Wharton 1901, p. 3

[13] Wharton 1901, p. 3

[14] Wharton 1901, p. 3

[15] Wharton 1901, p. 4

[16] Wharton 1901, p. 4

[17] Wharton 1901, p. 4

[18] Wharton 1901, p. 4

[19] Wharton 1901, p. 5

[20] Wharton 1901, p. 5

[21] Wharton 1901, p. 6

[22] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[23] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[24] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[25] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[26] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[27] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[28] Wharton 1901, p. 7

[29] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[30] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[31] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[32] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[33] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[34] Wharton 1901, p. 8

[35] Wharton 1901, p. 9

[36] Wharton 1901, p. 9

[37] Wharton 1901, p. 9

[38] Wharton 1901, p. 9

[39] Wharton 1901, p. 9/10

[40] Wharton 1901, p. 10

[41] Wharton 1901, p. 10

[42] Wharton 1901, p. 10

[43] Wharton 1901, p. 10

[44] Wharton 1901, p. 10

[45] Wharton 1901, p. 11

[46] Wharton 1901, p. 11

[47] Wharton 1901, p. 11

[48] Wharton 1901, p. 11

[49] Wharton 1901, p. 11

[50] Wharton 1901, p. 11/12

[51] Wharton 1901, p. 12

[52] Wharton 1901, p. 12

[53] Wharton 1901, p. 13

[54] Wharton 1901, p. 13

[55] Wharton 1901, p. 14

[56] Wharton 1901, p. 14

[57] Wharton 1901, p. 15

[58] Wharton 1901, p. 16

[59] Wharton 1901, p. 16

[60] Wharton 1901, p. 16

[61] Wharton 1901, p. 17

[62] Wharton 1901, p. 17

[63] Wharton 1901, p. 17

[64] Wharton 1901, p. 17

[65] Wharton 1901, p. 17

[66] Wharton 1901, p. 18

[67] Wharton 1901, p. 19

[68] Wharton 1901, p. 19

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