TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Arceuil Before long, a gentle breeze would waft through the dungeon: a breath of fresh air that briefly intruded in the sad, stale air of his dwelling. Seized for a moment from the property of the poet, awoken from his precious sonnets, freed from the formal weight of sophisticated verses, divested of eternal fame—the ghost appears just before the twelfth hour. The bell in the distance cannot refute her shadow that takes form on the wall, coming from the deepest darkness: obsession and spellboundness. The words that once contained that ether have been forgotten so that the female spirit might push its way through the fickle bounds separating life and death. Itwasavision that had beenunable tocomesimplybecause, a little while earlier, he had passed over the pages of Abbé’s Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque , which ignited his imagination, although the longing would then oppress his heart even more; a vision that had been unable to come simply because its historical trace was firmly impressed into the ancestral line he belonged to, into the branching family tree adorned with twelve golden rays; a vision unable to come purely from the subconscious of the martyr left to rot in high towers with small windows that afforded only a hint of the sky; a vision unable to come simply by invoking her name, Laure, which was forever tied to a radiant April day that would again and again be crafted in writing, so that it could no longer be known what really happened at the church facade, among all those reports of proud and aboveall eloquent laureates. Just after the shades decided to retire into the background, the figure announced itself to him with frightening sincerity, with truly primordial clarity, while midnight was at the height of its cataleptic magic. 89