It is a tale without a "purpose"
and without any particular "moral," in the present appalling
acceptation, of those simple words. If it has interested or pleased
those who have read it, the writer is glad; if it has not, he can find
some consolation in having made two young people unutterably blissful
in his own imagination, whereas he manifestly had it in his power to
bring them to awful grief; and when one cannot make living men and
women happy in real life, it is a harmless satisfaction to do it in a
novel. If this one shows anything worth learning about the world, it
is that a gifted man of strong character and honourable life may do a
foolish and generous thing whereby he may become in a few days the
helpless toy of fate. He who has never repented of a good impulse
which has brought great trouble to other people, must be indeed a
selfish soul.
As for the strange circumstances I have described, I do not think any
of them impossible, and many of them are founded upon well-known
facts. I have myself seen, within not many years, a construction like
the dry well in the Palazzo Conti, which was discovered in the
foundations of a Roman palace, and had been used as an oubliette.
There were skeletons in it and fragments of weapons of the sixteenth
century and evec of the seventeenth. There was also a communication
between the cellars of the palace and the Tiber.
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