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 and your immorality and shamelessness! Your princely name you have dragged through the mire, your wings you have given up for a panther’s skin and a grape-wreath, and know not yet what repentance is. If you had been wise and become a spider, you would have served Emeralda, and there would have been no need to go down to the Under-world!”

But Psyche was no longer afraid. She had come to kiss her father’s coffin; she left her jewelled tears in the treasure, which the spiders watched over, and ascended the hundreds of steps and came on to the terrace of the battlements.

There as a child she had wandered and gazed, a child with wings, and innocent, her soul full of dreams. Now she wandered again along the ramparts and battlements high as a man; the doves fluttered about her, the swans looked up at her. . . . and full of dejection for former innocence and youth, she wept and wept: no longer a brook, but topazes, rubies, tears of sin, that, rattling down, frightened the doves and the swans, which, indignant, thought that she was pelting them with stones. The doves flew away, and the swans, offended, turned their backs on her. Then she sat