it all? While I am forcing myself to write about bells, and Christmas
festivities, and cattle-fairs, one idea goes on like a bell within me:
Medea, Medea! Have I really seen her, or am I mad?

Two hours later.--That Church of San Giovanni Decollato--so my landlord
informs me--has not been made use of within the memory of man. Could it
have been all a hallucination or a dream--perhaps a dream dreamed that
night? I have been out again to look at that church. There it is, at
the bifurcation of the two steep lanes, with its bas-relief of the
Baptist's head over the door. The door does look as if it had not been
opened for years. I can see the cobwebs in the windowpanes; it does
look as if, as Sor Asdrubale says, only rats and spiders congregated
within it. And yet--and yet; I have so clear a remembrance, so distinct
a consciousness of it all. There was a picture of the daughter of
Herodias dancing, upon the altar; I remember her white turban with a
scarlet tuft of feathers, and Herod's blue caftan; I remember the shape
of the central chandelier; it swung round slowly, and one of the wax
lights had got bent almost in two by the heat and draught.

Things, all these, which I may have seen elsewhere, stored unawares in
my brain, and which may have come out, somehow, in a dream; I have
heard physiologists allude to such things. I will go again: if the
church be shut, why then it must have been a dream, a vision, the
result of over-excitement. I must leave at once for Rome and see
doctors, for I am afraid of going mad. If, on the other hand--pshaw!
there _is no other hand_ in such a case. Yet if there were--why
then, I should really have seen Medea; I might see her again; speak to
her. The mere thought sets my blood in a whirl, not with horror, but
with... I know not what to call it. The feeling terrifies me, but it is
delicious. Idiot! There is some little coil of my brain, the twentieth