door, through which he went out backward, uttering this single mournful, lamentable, distressing cry—“Edmond Dantès!” Then, with sighs that were hardly human, he dragged himself as far as the porchway of the house, across the courtyard like a drunken man, and fell into the arms of his manservant. “Do you repent?” asked a deep, solemn voice, which caused Danglars’s hair to stand on end. His feeble eyes endeavored to distinguish objects, and behind the bandit he saw a man wrapped in a cloak, half hidden by the shadow of a stone column. “Of what must I repent?” stammered Danglars. “Of the evil you have done,” said the voice.

“Oh, yes; I repent, I repent!” exclaimed Danglars. And he struck his breast with his emaciated fist. “Then I forgive you,” said the man, dropping his cloak and advancing to the light. “The Count of Monte Cristo!” said Danglars, more pale from terror than he had been just before from hunger and misery. “You are mistaken: I am not the Count of Monte Cristo.” “Then who are you?” “I am he whom you sold, betrayed, dishonored; I am he upon whom you trampled that you might raise yourself to fortune; I am he whose father you condemned to die of hunger; I am he whom you also condemned to starvation; and who yet forgives you, because he too hopes to be forgiven: I am Edmond Dantès!” Then he burst into a frightening laugh and began to dance before the body. He had gone mad.1

Oh, the delights of anagnorisis and the false stranger! Nor have they been rejected by Achille Campanile, who employed them, though with surreal good sense, at the beginning of his novel Se la luna mi porta fortuna (1928):

Anyone, on that gray morning of the 16 December 19— . . . , furtively entering, and at their own risk and peril, the bedroom where the opening scene of our story takes place, would have been exceedingly surprised to find a young man with curly hair and pale cheeks, pacing nervously backward and forward; a young man whom no one would have recognized as Doctor Falcuccio, first of all because he was not Doctor Falcuccio, and, in the second place, because he bore not the slightest resemblance to Doctor Falcuccio. We observe, in passing, that the surprise of anyone furtively entering that room to which we refer is wholly unjustified. That man was in his own home and had every right to pace about in whatever way he pleased. (From Opere: Romanzi e racconti, 1924–1933)

[Published in the Almanacco del bibliofilo—Biblio nostalgia: Divagazioni sentimentali sulle letture degli anni più verdi, edited by Mario Scognamiglio (Milan: Rovello, 2008).]

The end