My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
Theres a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We e from tries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think youve e to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South is the starved brain; it gasps: "Luxury! more luxury!" But then the snow es, you ot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flog against the windowpao mock my fathers expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devils picture books. The dles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious icism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more a more draughts of the firewater they call "grappa", rids himself of the last scraps of my iance. When we left Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, fields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast.
Everyone who es to this city must play a hand with the grande seigneur; few e. They did not warn us at Milan, or, if they did, we did not uand them -- my limping Italian, the bewildering dialect of the region. Indeed, I myself spoke up in favour of this remote, provincial place, out of fashion two hundred years, because, oh irony, it boasted no o. I did not know that the price of a stay in its Decembral solitude was a game with Milord.
The hour was late. The chill damp of this place creeps into the stones, into your bones, into the spongy pith of the lungs; it insiself with a shiver into our parlour, where Milord came to play in the privacy essential to him. Who could refuse the invitation his valet brought to our lodging? Not my profligate father, certainly; the mirror above the table gave me back his frenzy, my impassivity, the withering dles, the emptying bottles, the coloured tide of the cards as they rose and fell, the still mask that cealed all the features of The Beast but for the yellow eyes that strayed, now and then, from his unfurled hand towards myself.
"La Bestia!" said our landlady, gingerly fingering an envelope with his huge crest of a tiger rampant on it, something of fear, something of wonder in her face. And I could not ask her why they called the master of the place, La Bestia -- was it to do with the heraldic signature -- because her tongue was so thied by the phlegmy, bronchitic speech of the region I scarcely mao make out a thing she said except, when she saw me: "Che bella!"
Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on Christmas Day -- her "Christmas rose," my English nurse called me. The peasants said: "The living image of her mother," crossing themselves out of respect for the dead. My mother did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gam