Summary
A magistrate’s gavel falls like the crack of doom in 19th-century Hungary, sentencing an idealistic lawyer to the scaffold for a murder he did not commit; the condemned man’s unblinking stare becomes a silent indictment of a society that prefers parchment justice to human truth. While fetid prison walls close in, the real killer—a patrician with blood on his cufflinks—waltzes through candle-lit ballrooms, his conscience smothered beneath powdered wigs and inherited privilege. The condemned’s young wife, a translucent wraith in mourning black, drifts between courthouse corridors and plague-ridden back-alleys, clutching a last-letter scrawled in charcoal tears. A monk who once traded sermons for silver pieces now haunts the Danube’s fog, desperate to barter redemption for evidence; in his wake, a chorus of washerwomen, street urchins, and broken bureaucrats murmur fragments of testimony that the court refuses to hear. As winter’s first snowflakes settle on the iron gibbet, the city’s clocks strike thirteen—time itself convulsing to expose the rot beneath imperial marble. In the final reel, the scaffold becomes a mirror: every spectator sees his own face beneath the black hood, and the hangman’s rope, once braided from certainty, frays into a thousand strands of doubt.
