What obligation do you have to love me unwillingly?"

"Where are you taking me?"

"To the man who is waiting for you."

Upon entering a house, I was thinking at that moment, we have to content ourselves with the chair that the host can offer us, and not ponder whether, to suit our taste and size, we would have fashioned a more stylish or larger one from the tree used to make it. For Mirina the chairs in my house were too tall. When she sat, her legs dangled, and she wanted to feel the ground under her feet.

But I promised to tell you only what I did. Fine, let's overlook this brief sample of madness. But how much quicker it would have been to fire a shot... Goodness knows!

I was holding her hand and talking to her as we walked out in the open. I don't remember exactly what I said to her, but I know that, at a certain moment, she freed her wrist from my hand, and fled racing, racing through the trees as if she had been swept away by the wind. I was perplexed and surprised by her sudden flight. I had thought she was following me so submissively. I called out like a blind man:

"Mirina! Mirina!"

She had disappeared in the darkness among the trees. For a long time I wandered about looking for her, but to no avail. At daybreak I continued to look for her until I had not a single doubt that she had gone on her own to take refuge where I had wanted to bring her without resorting to any violence.

I looked at the sky, veiled with scattered bands which were like the remaining traces of the great flight of clouds I saw the night before, and I felt dazed amidst a new, unexpected silence, getting the vague impression that something was now lacking in the land about me. Ah yes, that's it: the wind. The wind had subsided. The trees were immobile in the damp, squalid light of that dawn.

What fatigue in that stupified immobility! I, too, was exhausted, and so I sat down on the ground. I looked at the leaves on the trees nearby, and I felt that if a breath of air had come to move them at that moment, they would have perhaps experienced the same feeling of sorrow that I would have felt if someone had come to tug at my hand.

It suddenly occurred to me that the dead woman was alone in the little villa, and that her relatives had perhaps awakened and were asking about me and my wife. I jumped to my feet and away I ran.

I consider it useless to describe to sane people what happened next. Those fine relatives rose up against my words, my explanations. They proclaimed me mad. What is more, while everyone was shouting, that fat, dwarfish cousin with the round glasses took courage from the general excitement to scream into my face with clenched fists:

"Imbecile!"

She was right, poor thing.

They hastened to transport the dead woman to the church in the next village, and left me alone.

Two years later, I see myself again traveling. Vardi deserted Mirina, and she, rescued from poverty, vice, and desperation, now lives at the home of a relative. However, she is in the grips of a horrible illness and is about to die from it. With my forgiving and peaceful spirit I had hoped and dreamt of comforting her remaining days by bringing her back to our countryside. I go to see her in that squalid room and say to her:

"Do you understand me now?"

"No!" she answers, withdrawing her hand as I am about to caress it, and looking at me odiously.

She, too, was right, poor thing.

4. The School of Wisdom

As everyone knows, to exercise any profession well, we need ample resources which can allow us to hold out for the best opportunities without having to seize the first ones, like dogs fighting over a bone, which is the fate of the person who finds himself in financial troubles and, to make ends meet today, is constrained to make his tomorrow, himself, and his profession, wretched.

Now this goes for the thief's profession as well.

A poor thief who has to live from hand to mouth usually ends up badly. Instead, a thief who is not in such dire straits and has the ability and knowledge to await the proper time and to prepare himself well, will attain the highest and most revered positions, with the praise and satisfaction of everyone.

Therefore, please, let's not be so generous as to call those who have stolen from me, wise men.

All those who exercised their profession on my considerable wealth do not deserve the praise of sane people. They could have robbed courteously, comfortably, and with caution and foresight, and thus could have created an honorable and quite respected position for themselves. Instead, without really needing to at all, they flocked to plunder, and naturally, they plundered badly. Having reduced me to poverty in just a few years, they deprived themselves of the means by which they could live comfortably at my expense. In fact, soon thereafter, they began to have a great number of problems they didn't have before.