The Miracles of Antichrist: A NovelLagerlöf, Selma
General
The Miracles of Antichrist: A Novel
Lagerlöf, Selma
Sicily (Italy) -- Fiction; Socialism -- Fiction
Everything moved round her; industries and trades grew up about her.
Those who could do nothing else dug in the earth for coins and pottery
to offer her. Photographers moved to the town and began to work for her.
Coral merchants and hawkers of tortoise-shell grew out of the earth about
her. The priests of Santa Agnese dug up the old Dionysius theatre, that
lay hidden behind their church, for her sake; and every one who owned a
ruined villa unearthed in the darkness of the cellar remains of mosaic
floors and invited her by big posters to come and see.
There had been foreigners before in Diamante, but they had come and
gone, and no one had enjoyed such power. There was soon not a man in the
town who did not put all his trust in the English signorina. She even
succeeded in putting a little life into Ugo Favara. You know Ugo Favara,
the advocate, who was to have been a great man, but had reverses and came
home quite broken. She employed him to take care of her affairs. She
needed him, and she took him.
There has never been a woman in Diamante who has done so much business
as she. She spread out like green-weed in the spring. One day no one
knows that there is any, and the next it is a great clump. Soon it was
impossible to go anywhere in Diamante without coming on her traces. She
bought country houses and town houses; she bought almond-groves and
lava-streams. The best places on Etna to see the view were hers as well
as the thirsting earth on the plain. And in town she began to build two
big palaces. She was to live in them and rule her kingdom.
We shall never see a woman like her again. She was not content with
all that. She wished also to fight the fight with poverty, O signore,
with Sicilian poverty! How much she gave out each day, and how much she
gave away on feast-days! Wagons, drawn by two pairs of oxen, went down
to Catania and came back piled up with all sorts of clothing. She was
determined that they should have whole clothes in the town where she
reigned.
But listen to what happened to her; how the struggle with poverty ended
and what became of the kingdom and the palace.
She gave a banquet for the poor people of Diamante, and after the banquet
an entertainment in the Grecian theatre. It was what an old emperor might
have done. But who has ever before heard of a woman doing such a thing?
She invited all the poor people. There were the two blind women from the
hotel-door, and old Assunta from the Cathedral steps. There was the man
from the post-house, who had his chin bound up in a red cloth on account
of cancer of the face; and there was the idiot who opens the iron doors
of the Grecian theatre. All the donkey-boys were there, and the handless
brothers, who exploded a bomb in their childhood and lost their fingers;
and the man with the wooden leg, and the old chair-maker who had grown
too old to work, both were there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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