DONNA MATILDA. But perhaps she knows, if she has begged so hard for you! HENRY IV. (_looks at her and says_): And you love your daughter? (_Brief pause. He turns to the doctor with laughing accents_). Ah, Monsignor, it's strange how little I think of my wife! It may be a sin, but I swear to you that I hardly feel her at all in my heart. What is stranger is that her own mother scarcely feels her in her heart. Confess, my Lady, that she amounts to very little for you. (_Turning to Doctor_): She talks to me of that other woman, insistently, insistently, I don't know why!... LANDOLPH (_humbly_). Maybe, Majesty, it is to disabuse you of some ideas you have had about the Marchioness of Tuscany. (_Then, dismayed at having allowed himself this observation, adds_): I mean just now, of course.... HENRY IV. You too maintain that she has been friendly to me? LANDOLPH. Yes, at the moment, Majesty. DONNA MATILDA. Exactly! Exactly!... HENRY IV. I understand. That is to say, you don't believe I love her. I see! I see! Nobody's ever believed it, nobody's ever thought it. Better so, then! But enough, enough! (_Turns to the doctor with changed expression_): Monsignor, you see? The reasons the Pope has had for revoking the excommunication have got nothing at all to do with the reasons for which he excommunicated me originally. Tell Pope Gregory we shall meet again at Brixen. And you, Madame, should you chance to meet your daughter in the courtyard of the castle of your friend the Marchioness, ask her to visit me. We shall see if I succeed in keeping her close beside me as wife and Empress. Many women have presented themselves here already assuring me that they were she. But they all, even while they told me they came from Susa--I don't know why--began to laugh! And then in the bedroom.... Well a man is a man, and a woman is a woman. Undressed, we don't bother much about who we are. And one's dress is like a phantom that hovers, always near one. Oh, Monsignor, phantoms in general are nothing more than trifling disorders of the spirit: images we cannot contain within the bounds of sleep. They reveal themselves even when we are awake, and they frighten us. I ... ah ... I am always afraid when, at night time, I see disordered images before me. Sometimes I am even afraid of my own blood pulsing loudly in my arteries in the silence of night, like the sound of a distant step in a lonely corridor!... But, forgive me! I have kept you standing too long already. I thank you, my Lady, I thank you, Monsignor. (_Donna Matilda and the Doctor go off bowing. As soon as they have gone, Henry IV. suddenly changes his tone_). Buffoons, buffoons! One can play any tune on them! And that other fellow ... Pietro Damiani!...