The Sleeping Beauty, of infantile mind and facial pulchritude, formerly a servant, yielded to the advances of a notary, the nephew of a senile, implacable shrew, whose miserly savings he and his sister hoped to inherit. After a few secure trips on the sliding-board of sensual indulgence, the Sleeping Beauty shot to the bottom of the pit and became the travelling harlot of a caravan which went from one country fair to another. The more frequently she yielded the body the greater became her spiritual detachment, until finally she lived in a world of unreality. Becoming pregnant, the spiritual flame gradually lighted up in her, and finally blazed under the ardent fanning of a new type of Lothario, Nero of the Sulphur Mines, half knight, half jail-bird, but withal a romantic and seductive figure. His flair for her was wholly spiritual. Not only did he encourage her to renounce her life, but he insisted that she return to the house of the notary. They go there and she charges him with her interesting condition, even though three years have elapsed. Water doesn't flow in the brook of the valley if there is no spring higher up. The aunt who has sought in vain the opportunity to crush the cringing hypocrite whose outward life had seemingly been one of virtue and rigorous conventionalism, sees it now. She compels him to marry the Sleeping Beauty. He becomes the butt of the taunts and derisions of the community, juvenile and adult, especially after the child is born. The strain is too much for him and he hangs himself when he realizes that the dying aunt has left her money to the child of another and to the church. From the moment the Sleeping Beauty felt a new life within her a spiritual torch was lit in her soul, which illuminated the abyss into which she had fallen to such purpose that she found her way out, with the helping hand which Nero held out to her. Continuing to burn during her gestation and delivery, it conditioned her spiritual resurrection and the moral rehabilitation of Nero. The impression left in the mind of the reader is that they live together happily forever after, the summum bonum of earthly existence, because of the happiness that flows from it and because it insures eternal repose in Paradise. Although the play was received with groans and howls and shrieks of depreciation when it was first given in Rome, nevertheless some of the eternal verities are accentuated and carried home by Nero of the Mines and by the Sleeping Beauty.