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All rights reserved
PROLOGUE
“Una cosa naturale vista in un grande specchio.”
Leonardo da Vinci.
With these mortal eyes I beheld within a brief space of time three peerless souls unfold and blossom, and then wither away and perish one by one: the most beautiful, most passionate, and most miserable souls ever embodied in the latest descendants of a haughty race.
From the scenes where their desolation, their pride, and their grace wandered every day, clear and terrible thoughts came to me, such as the most ancient ruins of illustrious cities had never suggested. In hopes of unravelling the mystery of their strange ascendency, I used to explore the depths of the vast ancestral mirrors, where, often unnoticed by themselves, their three figures were reflected bathed in a pallor like that which heralds dissolution after death; and I gazed long and earnestly at the old, worn-out things which they touched with their chilled or fevered hands, using the same gestures perhaps as had been used by other hands long since crumbled into dust.
Was it thus, indeed, that I knew them in thetedious monotony of daily life, or are they only creations of my yearning desire and perplexity?
It was thus, indeed, that I knew them in the tedious monotony of daily life, and yet they are also creations of my yearning desire and perplexity.
That fragment of the web of my life, unconsciously woven by them, is of such priceless value to me, that I would fain embalm it in the strongest of spices to prevent it from becoming faded or destroyed in me by Time.
Therefore I now try the power of art.
Ah! but what magic could impart the coherency of tangible and durable matter to that spiritual texture which the three prisoners wove in the barren monotony of their days, and embroidered little by little with images of the noblest and most heart-rending things in which human passion has ever been hopelessly reflected?
Unlike the three ancient sisters, because victims rather than daughters of necessity, they seemed nevertheless, as they wove the richest zone of my life, to be preparing the destiny of him who was to come. Together they toiled, scarcely ever accompanying their labour with a song, but less rarely shedding visible tears—tears in which the essence of their unexhausted, cloistered souls was sublimated.
And because from the first hour that I knew them a dark cloud had overhung them, a cruel decree had struck them to the heart, and left them discouraged and gasping, and ready to die—all their attitudesand gestures and lightest words seemed to me heavy with a meaning of which they, in their profound unconsciousness, were ignorant.
Bending and breaking as they were beneath the weight of their own maturity, like autumn trees overladen with bounteous fruit, they were unable either to sound the depth of their misery or to give voice to it. Their anguished lips revealed to me only a small portion of their secrets. But I could understand the ineffable things spoken by the blood flowing in the veins of their beautiful bare hands.