Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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196 THE MIR A CLES OF ANTICHRIST
She was determined that they should have whole
clothes in the town where she reigned.
But listen to what happened to her; how the
struggle with poverty ended and what became of the
kingdom and the palace.
She gave a banquet for the poor people of
Diamante, and after the banquet an entertainment in
the Grecian theatre. It was what an old emperor
might have done. But who has ever before heard of
a woman doing such a thing?
She invited all the poor people. There were the
two blind women from the hotel-door, and old Assunta
from the Cathedral steps. There was the man from
the post-house, who had his chin bound up in a red
cloth on account of cancer of the face; and there was
the idiot who opens the iron doors of the Grecian
theatre. All the donkey-boys were there, and the
handless brothers, who exploded a bomb in their
childhood and lost their fingers; and the man with
the wooden leg, and the old chair-maker who had
grown too old to work, both were there.
It was strange to see them creep out of their
holes, all the poor in Diamante. The old women
who sit and spin with distaffs in the dark alleys were
there, and the organ-grinder, who has an instrument
as big as a church-organ, a wandering young
man-dolinist from Naples with a body full of all possible
deviltries. All those with diseased eyes and all the
decrepit; those without a roof over their heads;
those who used to collect sorrel by the roadside for
dinner; the stone-cutter, who earned one lira a day
and had six children to provide for, — they had all
been invited and were present at the feast.
It was poverty marshalling its troops for the Eng-
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