By morning Doctor Olivo had seen her. He felt the pulse, took the heat with the back of his hand, and said what no friar ever says: "It is a fever, and if frenzy comes, it will be the fever's, not the devil's."
My master bowed to the physician; his mother did not. She murmured of charms and maledictions.
He answered, with a firmness unusual in him, that no monk was to be sent for.
All that day Bettina raved.
Sense and nonsense fell together from her lips—broken Latin, scraps of hymn, and kitchen talk. Toward evening the flame climbed; by dawn it scorched.
On the fourth day the truth declared itself in the oldest of characters: the small-pox flowered.
The two Feltrini and our conqueror Cordiani were bundled away at once, for they were virgin soil; I stayed, having paid that toll in Venicia before.
By the sixth day she was oversown. Not an inch escaped.
The lids sealed; the nose withdrew; the cheeks swelled until the face was no longer a face, only a mask of pain.
She lay without movement, her breath thin and regular as a clock's last ticks.
When we tried to moisten her mouth, only a thread of honey would pass.
Her mother never left her. She prayed in a cracked whisper and wiped the sweat away from her forehead.
I moved my table into the sickroom and set my books upon it; the household called me a saint for this gesture.
The unfortunate girl had become dreadful to look upon, and much fear was held for her eyes if her life were spared.
The smell of her perspiration was almost unbearable, yet I kept my watch.
On the ninth day the vicar came. He traced the cross upon a forehead that no longer resembled the girl who had laughed at friars and made sport of demons.
After administering extreme unction, he murmured, "Now she is in God's hands," and withdrew.
After he left, the mother drew her son aside.
"Tell me," she whispered, "if a demon sits in her, can he still force her into mad acts? And if she dies"—here she crossed herself so violently the beads cracked—"where does he go? Surely he will not remain in such a loathsome body. Can he drag her soul with him when he departs?"
My doctor—good, pious, and averse to thought—answered with a cloud of pieties rather than sense.
He spoke of permissions and bounds, of souls secure yet in peril, of spirits constrained yet free.
I watched her as she listened.
The more he explained, the wider her eyes grew, his answers only perplexed the poor woman more.
I confess I nearly laughed; but the room smelled of death, and jest is timid before that altar.
Evening gathered. Somewhere in the house a chair scraped, and the sound felt insolent.
I thought then—without malice, I hope—how swiftly the world strips us of our pretenses.
Bettina had been an actress of convulsions; the pox required no acting. The devil, so importunate last week, had the delicacy to withdraw before a rival who needs no witnesses.
During the tenth and eleventh days, Bettina was so bad that we thought every moment likely to be her last.
The disease had reached its worst period; the smell was unbearable; I alone would not leave her, so sorely did I pity her.
The heart of man is an unfathomable abyss; for, incredible as it seems, it was in that fearful state that Bettina inspired me with the fondness I later showed her after her recovery.
On the thirteenth day the fever broke. The rattle in her throat softened into sleep, and by morning she began to itch—a torment no remedy could have allayed as effectually as these powerful words which I kept constantly pouring into her ear:
"Bettina, you are getting better; but if you dare to scratch yourself, you will become such a fright that nobody will ever love you."
All the physicians in the universe might be challenged to prescribe a more potent remedy against itching for a girl who, aware that she has been pretty, finds herself exposed to the loss of her beauty through her own fault, if she scratches herself.
When her eyes opened again, they were no longer feverish but alive and grateful. They moved her back to her room.
By Easter, she smiled again. Her laughter breathed life into the house.
I carried three scars from her illness—pitted along my cheek and temple.
In her eyes, they were a proof of my constant care and great devotedness, and she felt that I indeed deserved her whole love.
She truly loved me, and I returned her love, although I never plucked a flower which fate and prejudice kept in store for a husband.
But what a contemptible husband!
Two years later she married a shoemaker, by name Pigozzo—a base, arrant knave who beggared and ill-treated her to such an extent that her brother had to take her home and to provide for her.
Fifteen years afterwards, having been appointed arch-priest at Saint-George de la Vallee, he took her there with him.
When I went to pay him a visit eighteen years ago, I found Bettina old, ill, and dying. She breathed her last in my arms in 1776, twenty-four hours after my arrival.
I will speak of her death in good time.
After Bettina's recovery, word reached us that my mother had come back from St. Petersburg. The Empress—whose laughter, like everything imperial, required a protocol—had dismissed the Italian comedians for indecency, or for boredom, which at court is a graver sin.
The troupe was scattering homeward, and my mother travelled with Carlin Bertinazzi, the harlequin, who would die in Parisia in 1783, still, I believe, on familiar terms with mirth.
She sent a note from her inn at Padua. Doctor Gozzi, all stiff propriety and clean cuffs, took me to pay our respects.
I remember the room better than the talk: candlelight catching on glass and the tired fragrance of musk and fur
We dined.
She kissed me once, then twice, with that brisk tenderness of women too accustomed to departures.
Before we parted, she presented the doctor with a splendid fur; to me she gave a lynx skin "for Bettina—she always liked soft things."
Six months later she summoned me to Venicia.
She wished to see me before leaving for Dresden, where she had engaged herself for life in the service of the Elector of Saxony, Augustus III, who was also King of Poland.
She took my brother Jean with her—he was eight—and he wept stoutly as the trunks were closed and the door sounded their farewell.
I thought him very foolish, for there was nothing very tragic in that departure.
He is the only one in the family who was wholly indebted to our mother for his fortune, although he was not her favorite child.
I spent another year in Padua, studying law, in which I took the degree of Doctor at sixteen. My thesis was on the civil law—De testamentis—and in canon law: Whether Covenantians may build new synagogues.
My inclination was for medicine. It had the intimacy that tempts the curious and the stage on which performance can pass for genius.
No one consulted my taste.
Friends and patrons, who loved me in the abstract, decided that fortune smiled only on the advocate—worse still, on the ecclesiastical advocate.
I felt an invincible repugnance for the profession.
Had they allowed me to follow my whim, I would have been a physician—a profession in which quackery is of still greater avail than in the legal business.
As things unfolded, I became neither. I never consulted lawyers for my legal business, nor physicians when I was ill.
Lawsuits and their pettifoggers ruin more families than they save, and those who perish in the hands of physicians far outnumber those who recover.
This is a strong evidence in my opinion, that mankind would be much less miserable without either lawyers or doctors.