play some sixteenth-century
dance music, and then Clementi's famous Toccata and two or three
Caprices of Scarlatti's, and, after that, I had to sing certain songs
from Schumann's _Frauenliebe_--what contrasts!

'Francesca has lost much of her old gaiety, she is not as she used to be
in the first days of my stay here. She is often silent and preoccupied,
and when she does laugh or make fun, her gaiety seems to me very forced.
I said to her once. "Is something worrying you?"

'"Why?" she answered with assumed surprise.

'"Because you seem to me a little out of spirits lately."

'"Out of spirits? oh, no, you are quite mistaken," she answered, and she
laughed, but with an involuntary note of bitterness. This troubles me
and causes me a vague sense of uneasiness.

'We are going to Vicomile to-morrow afternoon.

'He asked me--"Would it tire you too much to come on horseback? In that
way we could cut right through the pine wood!"

'So we are going to ride and Francesca will join us. The others,
including Delfina, will come in the mail-coach.

'What a strange state of mind I am in this evening! I feel a kind of
dull and angry bitterness at the bottom of my heart, without knowing
why--am impatient with myself, my life, the whole world--my nervous
irritation rises, at times, to such a pitch, that I am seized with an
insane desire to scream aloud, to dig my nails into my flesh, to bruise
my fingers against the wall--any physical suffering would be better than
this intolerable mental discomfort, this unbearable wretchedness. I feel
as if I had a burning knot in my bosom, that my throat were closed by a
sob I dared not give vent to--I am icy cold and burning hot by turns
and, from time to time, a sudden pang darts through me, an irrational
terror that I can neither shake off nor control. Thoughts and images
flash suddenly across my brain, coming from I know not what ignoble
depths of my soul.

'_October 3rd._--How weak and miserable is the human soul, how utterly
defenceless against the attacks of all that is least noble and least
pure in us, and that slumbers in the obscurity of our unconscious life,
in those unexplored abysses where dark dreams are born of hidden
sensations!

'A dream can poison a whole soul, a single involuntary thought is
sufficient to corrupt and break down the force of will.

'We are just starting for Vicomile. Delfina is in raptures.

'It is the festival of Our Lady of the Rosary. Courage, my he