At the Church of the Baptist they shouted to him, “Save your life!” and he answered, “Run for your life from sin!”; at the Old Market they shouted to him, “Live, live!” and he replied, “Save yourselves from hell”; at the New Market they yelled, “Repent, repent,” and he replied, “Repent of your usury.” And on reaching Santa Croce, he saw the monks of his order on the steps, and he reproached them because they did not follow the Rule of Saint Francis. And some of them shrugged, but others pulled their cowls over their faces to cover them, in shame.
And going toward the Justice Gate, many said to him, “Recant! Recant! Don’t insist on dying,” and he said, “Christ died for us.” And they said, “But you are not Christ, you must not die for us!” And he said, “But I want to die for Him.” At the Field of justice, one said to him he should do as a certain monk, his superior, had done, abjuring; but Michael answered that he would not abjure, and I saw many in the crowd, agree and urge Michael to be strong: so I and many others realized those were his followers, and we moved away from them.
Finally we were outside the city and before us the pyre appeared, the “hut,” as they called it there, because the wood was arranged in the form of a hut, and there a circle of armed horsemen formed, to keep people from coming too close. And there they bound Brother Michael to the stake. And again I heard someone shout to him, “But what is it you’re dying for?” And he answered; “For a truth that dwells in me, which I can proclaim only by death.” They set fire to the wood. And Brother Michael, who had chanted the “Credo,” afterward chanted the “Te Deum.” He sang perhaps eight verses of it, then he bent over as if he had to sneeze, and fell to the ground, because his bonds had burned away. He was already dead: before the body is completely burned it has already died from the great heat, which makes the heart explode, and from the smoke that fills the chest.
Then the hut burned entirely, like a torch, and there was a great glow, and if it had not been for the poor charred body of Michael, still glimpsed among the glowing coals, I would have said I was standing before the burning bush. And I was close enough to have a view (I recalled as I climbed the steps of the library) that made some words rise spontaneously to my lips, about ecstatic rapture; I had read them in the books of Saint Hildegard: “The flame consists of a splendid clarity, of an unusual vigor, and of an igneous ardor, but possesses the splendid clarity that it may illuminate and the igneous ardor that it may burn.”
I remembered some words of Ubertino about love. The image of Michael on the pyre became confused with that of Dolcino, and that of Dolcino with that of the beautiful Margaret. I felt again the restlessness that had seized me in church.
I tried not to think about it and headed straight for the labyrinth.
This was the first time I entered it alone; the long shadows cast by the lamp on the floor terrified me as much as had the visions the previous night. At every moment I feared I would find myself before another mirror, because the magic of mirrors is such that even when you know they are mirrors they still upset you.
On the other hand, I did not try to orient myself, or to avoid the room with the perfumes that induce visions. I proceeded as if in the grip of a fever, nor did I know where I wanted to go. In fact, I did not move far from my starting point, because a short time later I found myself again in the heptagonal room by which I had entered. Here, on a table, some books were laid out that I did not seem to have seen the night before. I guessed they were works that Malachi had withdrawn from the scriptorium and had not yet replaced on their proper shelves. I could not comprehend how far I was from the perfume room, because I felt dazed, which could be the effect of some effluvium that reached even that spot, or else of the things I had been pondering until then. I opened a richly illuminated volume that, by its style, seemed to me to come from the monasteries of Ultima Thule.
On a page where the holy Gospel of the apostle Mark began, I was struck by the image of a lion. I was certain it was a lion, even though I had never seen one in the flesh, and the artist had reproduced its features faithfully, inspired perhaps by the sight of the lions of Hibernia, land of monstrous creatures, and I was convinced that this animal, as for that matter the Physiologus says, concentrates in itself all the characteristics of the things at once most horrible and most regal. So that image suggested to me both the image of the Enemy and that of Christ our Lord, nor did I know by what symbolic key I was to read it, and I was trembling all over, out of fear and also because of the wind coming through the fissures in the walls.
The lion I saw had a mouth bristling with teeth, and a finely armored head like a serpent’s; the immense body was supported by four paws with sharp, fierce claws, and its coat resembled one of those rugs that later I saw brought from the Orient, with red and emerald scales on which were drawn, yellow as the plague, horrible and sturdy armatures of bone. Also yellow was the tail, which twisted from the rump to the head, ending in a final scroll of black and white tufts.
I was already quite awed by the lion (and more than once I had looked around as if I expected to see an animal of that description suddenly appear) when I decided to look at other pages and my eye fell, at the opening of the Gospel of Matthew, on the image of a man. I do not know why, but it frightened me more than the lion: the face was a man’s, but this man was sheathed in a kind of stiff chasuble that covered him to his feet, and this chasuble, or cuirass, was encrusted with red and yellow semiprecious stones. The head, which emerged enigmatically from a castle of rubies and topazes, seemed (how blasphemous terror made me!) that of the mysterious murderer whose impalpable trail we were following. And then I realized why I linked the animal and the armored man so closely with the labyrinth: both illustrations, like all in that book, emerged from a pattern of interlocking labyrinths, whose lines of onyx and emerald, threads of chrysoprase, ribbons of beryl seemed all to refer to the tangle of rooms and corridors where I was. My eye became lost, on the page, along gleaming paths, as my feet were becoming lost in the troublous succession of the rooms of the library, and seeing my own wandering depicted on those parchments filled me with uneasiness and convinced me that each of those books was telling, through mysterious cachinnations, my present story. “De to fabula narratur,” I said to myself, and I wondered if those pages did not already contain the story of future events in store for me.
I opened another book, and this seemed of the Hispanic school. The colors were violent, the reds suggested blood or fire. It was the book of Revelation of the apostle, and once again, as the night before, I happened upon the page of the mulier amicta sole. But it was not the same book; the illumination was different. Here the artist had dwelled at greater length on the woman’s form. I compared her face, her bosom, her curving thighs with the statue of the Virgin I had seen with Ubertino. The line was different, but this mulier also seemed very beautiful to me. I thought I should not dwell on these notions, and I turned several more pages. I found another woman, but this time it was the whore of Babylon. I was not so much struck by her form as by the thought that she, too, was a woman like the other, and yet this one was the vessel of every vice, whereas the other was the receptacle of every virtue. But the forms were womanly in both cases, and at a certain point I could no longer understand what distinguished them. Again I felt an inner agitation; the image of the Virgin in the church became superimposed on that of the beautiful Margaret. “I am damned!” I said to myself. Or, “I am mad.” And I decided I should leave the library.