The Marble Faun

Donatello tells Kenyon that his relatives have all died and that he is the last of the noblemen of Monte Beni. Donatello and Kenyon enjoy glasses of Sunshine, a wine specially produced at the estate for centuries. Kenyon praises the wine for its youthful and restorative qualities. Tomaso, a butler, explains that the method of making Sunshine is a secret and that it has never been sold.

When Kenyon asks Donatello to let him sculpt a bust of him, Donatello replies, “[I]t troubles me to be looked at steadfastly” (167). Kenyon mentions Miriam, and Donatello trembles with “a ghastly emotion” (168). He asks about her, and Kenyon says that when he left Rome she was gone from her studio. Kenyon retires for the night in a guest room at the house.

From Tomaso Kenyon learns about Donatello’s family lineage, which extends back to ancient and mythical times. According to legend, the founder of the family was an arcadian “sylvan creature” who married a mortal woman. The couple’s descendants proved to be “pleasant and kindly” but “capable of savage fierceness” while demonstrating an “unsought harmony with nature” (171).

As the last member of this family, Donatello no longer enjoys the “healthy life of animal spirits” that his earliest ancestors enjoyed (176). Although there is music and merrymaking at the estate, Donatello takes little part in this and tends to “sit and brood” in his tower (177).

As Donatello and Kenyon look at a marble nymph in a fountain near the estate, Donatello tells a family story connected with it. One of his ancestors fell in love with a water nymph, but one day he tried to wash off a bloodstain in the fountain and the nymph disappeared. When he saw the nymph again, she had a bloodstain on her brow.

Donatello has a sudden fit of grief, sobbing and weeping; he exclaims that “all nature shrinks from [him]” and that “[he] live[s] in the midst of a curse” (183). However, he soon recovers and Kenyon admires his newfound emotional control.

Ascending a narrow staircase, Donatello gives Kenyon a tour of the tower surmounting his house, now occupied by owls. In a room at the top of the tower they contemplate a macabre sculpture of a human skull; then they enjoy the broad vista of the Tuscan countryside, from which they attempt to draw allegorical lessons. Noticing a worm on a shrub growing from the pavement, Donatello throws it off the battlements.

After throwing a piece of limestone down from the tower, Kenyon jokes about having an irresistible temptation to fling himself down as well. This horrifies Donatello, and he paints a frightening verbal picture of a man tumbling to his death. When Kenyon worries that Donatello may actually try to jump off the tower, Donatello assures him that he is too cowardly to do that. Kenyon senses that Donatello bears a terrible psychological burden and wishes that he would share the secret with him.

Night falls, and the two men hear a woman’s sad voice singing in German from below the tower. Donatello says of the voice that “the anguish of which it spoke abides with [him]” (198).

Kenyon labors at making a sculpture bust of Donatello that expresses the sitter’s complex personality. When he momentarily gives the face a “distorted and violent look” (200), Donatello tells him to leave it that way to remind him of his sin. Kenyon ignores Donatello’s request and erases the fierce expression from the bust, telling him that he should not dwell on morbid feelings. The bust now bears a “higher and sweeter expression” than before (201)—one far nobler than that of the Faun of Praxiteles.

As the two men observe wine being pressed during the annual vintage, both reflect on their private sorrows—Donatello the murder, and Kenyon his unrequited yearning for Hilda. After Kenyon returns from a walk, Tomaso tells him that “the signorina” wants to speak with him.

Kenyon finds Miriam waiting for him in the saloon. She tells him that she is sick at heart because she is “an object of horror in Donatello’s sight” (206). Kenyon says that Miriam’s singing the previous night alerted Donatello to her presence on the estate; Donatello still loves her but thinks he must avoid her as penance (though for what, Kenyon doesn’t say).

Kenyon suggests a plan to reconcile Miriam and Donatello. He will take Donatello on a “ramble” through the countryside so as to draw him out of his morbid introspection and back to the healing effects of nature. Then Miriam, traveling the same route, will happen upon them as if by accident. Miriam makes Kenyon promise to bring Donatello to meet her under the statue of Pope Julius III in Perugia.

Finally, Miriam says Hilda was right in breaking off their friendship; she forgives Hilda for her “severity” and wishes Kenyon success in winning Hilda’s “virgin heart.”