The young Don Juan might give princely banquets, the palace might echo with clamorous mirth, horses pawed the ground in the courtyards, pages quarreled and flung dice upon the stairs, but Bartolommeo ate his seven ounces of bread daily and drank water.  A fowl was occasionally dressed for him, simply that the black poodle, his faithful companion, might have the bones.  Bartolommeo never complained of the noise.  If the huntsmen’s horns and baying dogs disturbed his sleep during his illness, he only said, “Ah!  Don Juan has come back again.”  Never on earth has there been a father so little exacting and so indulgent; and, in consequence, young Belvidero, accustomed to treat his father unceremoniously, had all the faults of a spoiled child.  He treated old Bartolommeo as a wilful courtesan treats an elderly adorer; buying indemnity for insolence with a smile, selling good-humor, submitting to be loved.

Don Juan, beholding scene after scene of his younger years, saw that it would be a difficult task to find his father’s indulgence at fault.  Some new-born remorse stirred the depths of his heart; he felt almost ready to forgive this father now about to die for having lived so long.  He had an accession of filial piety, like a thief’s return in thought to honesty at the prospect of a million adroitly stolen.

Before long Don Juan had crossed the lofty, chilly suite of rooms in which his father lived; the penetrating influences of the damp close air, the mustiness diffused by old tapestries and presses thickly covered with dust had passed into him, and now he stood in the old man’s antiquated room, in the repulsive presence of the deathbed, beside a dying fire.  A flickering lamp on a Gothic table sent broad uncertain shafts of light, fainter or brighter, across the bed, so that the dying man’s face seemed to wear a different look at every moment.  The bitter wind whistled through the crannies of the ill-fitting casements; there was a smothered sound of snow lashing the windows.  The harsh contrast of these sights and sounds with the scenes which Don Juan had just quitted was so sudden that he could not help shuddering.  He turned cold as he came towards the bed; the lamp flared in a sudden vehement gust of wind and lighted up his father’s face; the features were wasted and distorted; the skin that cleaved to their bony outlines had taken wan livid hues, all the more ghastly by force of contrast with the white pillows on which he lay.  The muscles about the toothless mouth had contracted with pain and drawn apart the lips; the moans that issued between them with appalling energy found an accompaniment in the howling of the storm without.