FASHION AND DEATH.
Fashion.Madam Death! Madam Death!
Death.Wait till my time comes, and I’ll come without your calling.
F.Madam Death!
D.Go!—and the Devil go with you! I shall come fast enough when you don’t want me.
F.As if I were not immortal!
D.Immortal? Past is already the thousandth year since the days of the immortals were ended.
F.Why, madam, you are talking in the manner of Petrarch, as though you were a lyric poet of the sixteenth—or the nineteenth century.
D.I am very fond of Petrarch’s rhymes,because there is myTriumphamong them, and the rest of them are nearly all about me too. But, anyway, get out of my sight at once.
F.Come—for the love you bear to the seven deadly sins, stop a little, and look at me.
D.I am looking at you.
F.Don’t you know me?
D.You ought to know that my sight is not good, and that I cannot use spectacles, because the English do not make any that would serve me—and even though they made them, I have no nose to put them on.
F.I am Fashion, your sister.
D.My sister?
F.Yes—don’t you remember that we are both daughters of Decadence?
D.What should I remember, whose business it is to destroy all memory?
F.But I do, and I know that we are both equally busy, continually undoing and changing the things of this world, although you set about this task in one way, and I in another.
D.If you are not talking to your own thoughts, or to some person whom you have inside your throat, do raise your voice a little, and pronounce your words more clearly; for if you go on mumbling between your teeth with that thin cobweb of a voice of yours, I shall take till to-morrow to hear you. My hearing, as you know, is no better than my sight.
F.Although it is not exactly usual,—and in France people do not speak in order to be heard,—yet, as we are sisters, and can drop ceremony between ourselves, I will speak as you wish. I say that the nature and custom of both of us is continually to ruin the world; but you, from the beginning, have thrown yourself on the person and the blood, whereas I mostly content myself with beards, hair, clothes, furniture, palaces, and such-like. It is true that I have not failed to carry on certain games which may well becompared to yours—as, for instance, piercing holes in ears, lips, or noses,—burning the flesh of men with red-hot irons, with which I make them mark themselves for the sake of beauty,—forming the heads of babies by means of bandages and other contrivances, so that all the people in a country may have heads of the same shape, as I have done in Africa and in America,—laming people with narrow shoes,—choking the breath out of them, and making their eyes start out of their heads with the tightness of their stays,—and a hundred other things of the same kind. Not only so, but, generally speaking, I persuade and force all people of any position to bear unending fatigue and discomfort, every day of their lives—oftentimes pain and torture; and some of them will even die gloriously for the love they bear to me. I say nothing of the headaches, chills, colds of every kind,—daily, tertian, and quartan fevers, which men get through obeying me,—submitting to shiver with cold and be suffocated with heat, as I please,—to cover their bodies with woollen stuff, and their chests with linen, and do everything in the way I tell them, even though it be to their own hurt.
D.Well,—I am quite willing to believe that you are my sister, and, if you wish to have it so, I will consider it more certain than death—and you need not prove it out of the parish register. But if I stand still in this way, I turn faint; yet, if you have courage to run alongside of me, take care not to kill yourself, as I go at a great pace. If you can run you can tell me all you have to say as we go along; if not, I must leave you with a salutation, and promise you, in consideration of our relationship, to leave you all my property when I die.
F.If we had to run a race together, I don’t know which of us would win; for if you run, I do more than gallop. And as for standing still in one place,—if in turns you faint, it kills me. So then, let us run together, and, as you say, speak of our affairs as we go.
D.Let it be so. Since, then, you are my sister, it would be the right thing if you could help me somehow or other in my business.
F.I have already done so, more than you think. In the first place, though I am continually destroying or changing all other customs, I have never in any place induced people to leave off dying; and for this reason, you see, the practice has universally remained in force from the beginning of the world up to the present day.
D.It is a mighty miracle that you should not have done what you cannot do.
F.What I cannot do? You do not seem to know the power of fashion.
D.Well, well—it will be time to talk about this when the fashion of not dying has come in. But meanwhile, I should like you, as a good sister, to help me to obtain the contrary result more easily and quickly than I have hitherto done.
F.I have already told you of some of my work which is very profitable to you. But that is a trifle in comparison with what I am going to tell you. For your sake I have gradually—especially in the later times—caused people to disuse and forget the exercises which are beneficial to health, and brought in other customs which weaken the body and shorten life. Besides which, I have introduced into the world such rules and customs, that life itself, as well for the body as the soul, is rather dead than alive, so that this century may truly be called the Age of Death.... Besides, whereas formerly you used to be hated and abused, nowadays, thanks to me, things have reached such a pass, that whoever has any intellect at all values and praises you, preferring you above life, and turns his eyes to you as to his greatest hope. Finally, seeing that many had made their boast of living after death in the memories of their fellow-men, ... I have abolished this habit of seeking after immortality, and of conferring it in case there shouldbe any who deserved it.... These things, which are neither few nor small, I have, up to now, accomplished for the love of you, wishing to increase your state and power on earth, as has, in fact, been the case. I am disposed to do as much as this, and more, every day, and it was with this intention I set out to seek you; and I think it would be well that, for the future, we should remain together. Thus we could lay our plans better than formerly, and also carry them out more effectually.
D.You speak truly; and I am quite willing we should do so.
Giacomo Leopardi.
Giacomo Leopardi.
Giacomo Leopardi.
Giacomo Leopardi.