The Sorrows of Love

Summary

Amid the cypress shadows of an Umbrian convent, Sister Beatrice—a porcelain-boned anchorite whose days are measured in whispered psalms—becomes the secret repository of Contessa Angelica de Vecchio’s scalding memories: a brother’s iron wrath, a lover’s republican fire, the metallic taste of banishment. When Angelica’s pulse flutters out like a moth against candle-glass, Beatrice awakens to the atrocity of her own self-burial, doffs her wimple as though shedding a second, suffocating skin, and strides into the olive-lit piazzas where carbonari pamphlets swirl like maddened starlings. She weds Guido Perli, the movement’s velvet-voiced demagogue, hoping to baptize his dagger-edged dogma with mercy; instead she watches love mutate into a blood-oath against Prince Candoni. In the crimson dawn of an aborted uprising she commits the ultimate apostasy—warning the tyrant—triggering a ballet of bayonets that leaves both Carlo (the lost paramour) and Guido expiring on wet cobbles. A final benediction, whispered through a haze of gunpowder, absolves her treachery; Beatrice, now a widow twice over, retraces her steps to the cloister, carrying the stink of cordite and the echo of a kiss that once promised paradise.

Synopsis

In Italy, Sister Beatrice becomes the confidante of the Contessa Angelica de Vecchio, whose brother, Prince Candoni, has placed her in a convent for having an affair with Carlo Parodi, a young radical. Angelica soon dies, and Beatrice, suddenly aware that she needlessly has shut herself off from the real world, leaves the convent and joins a group of revolutionaries. She marries Guido Perli, one of the leaders, and tries to temper his radical fervor with some religious tolerance. Finally, however, he calls on the people to rise against Candoni, and a horrified Beatrice alerts the prince. Candoni sends out his guards, and during the fighting, both Carlo and Guido are killed. Before he dies, however, Guido forgives his wife for betraying him to the prince, after which a remorseful Beatrice returns to the convent.