Seven corpses were exposed to public view, in the square before the Convent of Oletta. No burial was to be allowed them. The French commandant had issued an order that no one should dare to remove any of the bodies from the scaffold for interment, under pain of death. Blank dismay fell upon the village of Oletta. Every heart was chilled with horror. Not a human being stirred abroad; the fires upon the hearths were extinguished--no voice was heard but the voice of weeping. The people remained in their houses, but their thoughts turned continually to the square before the convent, where the seven corpses lay upon the scaffold. The first night came. Maria Gentili Montalti was sitting on her bed in her chamber. She was not weeping; she sat with her head hanging on her breast, her hands in her lap, her eyes closed. Sometimes a profound sob shook her frame. It seemed to her as if a voice called, through the stillness of the night, O Marì! The dead, many a time in the stillness of the night, call the name of those whom they have loved. Whoever answers, must die. O Bernardo! cried Maria--for she wished to die. Bernardo lay before the convent on the scaffold; he was the seventh and youngest of the dead. He was Maria's lover, and their marriage was fixed for the following month. Now he lay dead upon the scaffold. Maria Gentili stood silent in the dark chamber, she listened towards the side where the convent lay, and her soul held converse with a spirit. Bernardo seemed to implore of her a Christian burial. But whoever removed a corpse from the scaffold and buried it, was to be punished by death. Maria was resolved to bury her beloved and then die. She softly opened the door of her chamber in order to leave the house. She passed through the room in which her aged parents slept. She went to their bedside and listened to their breathing. Then her heart began to quail, for she was the only child of her parents, and their sole support, and when she thought how her death by the hand of the public executioner would bow her father and mother down into the grave, her soul shrank back in great pain, and she turned, and made a step towards her chamber. At that moment she again heard the voice of her dead lover wail: O Marì! O Marì! I loved thee so well, and now thou forsakest me. In my mangled body lies the heart that died still loving thee--bury me in the Church of St. Francis, in the grave of my fathers, O Marì! Maria opened the door of the house and passed out into the night. With uncertain footsteps she gained the square of the convent. The night was gloomy. Sometimes the storm came and swept the clouds away, so that the moon shone down. When its beams fell upon the convent, it was as if the light of heaven refused to look upon what it there saw, and the moon wrapped itself again in the black veil of clouds. For before the convent a row of seven corpses lay on the red scaffold, and the seventh was the corpse of a youth.