ABSTRACT

Italy may be considered as the very focus and parent of superstitious credulity. The materials which Hector had furnished, after all the interrogations of the donzella, were slight compared with the superstructure which was presently erected on them. My grotto was said to be the appropriated haunt where a thousand devils held their infernal sabbath. The terrified imagination of the rustics, listening with a temper horribly distracted between curiosity and alarm, created to itself fictitious howlings and shrieks, and saw pale and sulphureous flames dancing upon the surface of the stream. Poor Hector was early the victim of their cruel and untamed ignorance; they believed that the peculiarity of his complexion rendered him a singularly agreeable intercessor between me and my infernal familiars. The colour of Charon was similar to that of my confidential attendant; and he, like Hector, fell under the calumnious misconstructions of the affrighted villagers. Conspicuously noble, affectionate and useful as he was, the jaundiced eye of superstition metamorphosed him into a devil. The storms of thunder and lightning to which the climate in which I resided is particularly subject acquired new terror from the ill fame which now pursued the name of Monsieur Boismorand. At those times the shapeless form of monsters vomiting smoke and flames were visible to the neighbourhood, sometimes scudding along the blue tops of the distant hills, and at others, with audaciousness incredible, brushing even at the elbow of the almost lifeless clowns and dairy-maids, and then suddenly dissolving into air, their place no longer marked but by the noisome and deadly stench they left behind. All the misfortunes of the district were imputed to me, the mortality of cattle, the convulsions and death of children, and the pale and lingering decay of persons recently advanced to an age of puberty. Innocent and blameless was my conduct to all around us; often was I forward and eager for the relief of / the poor and afflicted; never was I the author of the slightest inconvenience or prejudice to any. Yet nothing merely human could be hated in the degree in which I was hated; few were daring and intrepid enough to repeat the very name I bore; and, when it was inadvertently pronounced, it produced through the whole extent of the astonished circle an involuntary and supernatural shudder.