"I had never entered the Palmarosa palace. It is not open to strangers or to inquisitive natives, like most of the ancient abodes of our patricians. The princess has lived in retirement there, hidden from the world, so to speak, ever since her father's death, receiving very few visitors, going out only at night, and that very rarely. I had to watch for an opportunity to see her near at hand, for I was determined to see her with the eyes which I had for her alone thenceforth. I had never desired before that time to see her features, and she had shown them so seldom in ten years that the people of the suburb had forgotten them. When she rode out the shades were lowered, and when she went to church her head was completely enveloped in her black mantilla. Indeed, it was commonly said among us that she had once been very beautiful, but that she had had a scrofulous eruption on her face which made her so frightful that she preferred not to show herself. "All this was simply vague rumor, for my father and other mechanics whom she employed laughed at these stories, and declared that she was the same as always. But my youthful brain was affected, none the less, by these contradictory reports, and my desire to see that woman was blended with an indefinable dread which prepared me by slow degrees for the madness of falling in love with her. "One fact in particular added to my ardent longing. My father, who went often to the palace, as a simple journeyman, to assist the master upholsterer to hang and drape curtains and the like, refused to take me there with him, although I was accustomed to go everywhere else with him. He had often put me off with excuses which I accepted without examining them; but when my longing to find my way into that sanctuary became overpowering, he was compelled to admit that the princess did not like to see young people in her house, and that the master upholsterer carefully excluded them when he went there with his workmen. This extraordinary restriction served only to inflame my desire. One morning I resolutely took my hammer and my apron and entered the Palmarosa palace, carrying a prie-Dieu covered with velvet, which my father had just finished in his employer's workshop. I knew that it was made for Signora Agatha; I consulted nobody, but took possession of it and started.