I hastened into the sea to refresh myself with a bath, and then back into my locanda, in order to see no more of what passed. I was horror-struck at what I had heard and seen, and a shuddering came over me in this wild solitude. I took out my Dante; I felt as if I must read some of his wild phantasies in the _Inferno_, where the pitch-devils thrust the doomed souls down with harpoons as often as they rise for a mouthful of air. My locanda lay in the narrow and gloomy street of the Jesuits. An hour had elapsed, when a confused hum, and the trample of horses' feet brought me to the window--they were leading Bracciamozzo past, accompanied by the monks called the Brothers of Death, in their hooded capotes, that leave nothing of the face free but the eyes, which gleam spectrally out through the openings left for them--veritable demon-shapes, muttering in low hollow tones to themselves, horrible, as if they had sprung from Dante's Hell into reality. The bandit walked with a firm step between two priests, one of whom held a crucifix before him. He was a young man of middle size, with beautiful bronze features and raven-black curly hair, his face pale, and the pallor heightened by a fine moustache. His left arm was bound behind his back, the other was broken off near the shoulder. His eye, fiery no doubt as a tiger's, when the murderous lust for blood tingled through his veins, was still and calm. He seemed to be murmuring prayers. His pace was steady, and his bearing upright. Gendarmes rode at the head of the procession with drawn swords; behind the bandit, the Brothers of Death walked in pairs; the black coffin came last of all--a cross and a death's-head rudely painted on it in white. It was borne by four Brothers of Mercy. Slowly the procession moved along the street of the Jesuits, followed by the murmuring crowd; and thus they led the vampire with the broken wing to the scaffold. My eyes have never lighted on a scene more horrible, seldom on one whose slightest details have so daguerreotyped themselves in my memory. I was told afterwards that the bandit died without flinching, and that his last words were: "I pray God and the world for forgiveness, for I acknowledge that I have done much evil."