Richard nonetheless orders the carriage to the San Carlo, where he takes his rented box alone. Fever and shame have unsettled his perception: the tiers of the horseshoe become a vast honeycomb, the aristocratic occupants bright-hued larvae, the densely packed parterre an angry multitude of working bees whose corporate judgment he awaits as a cleansing force. He studies an opposite box where a woman of ivory and gold and a young man of dissolute aspect seem essential to the approaching event. Morabita’s voice rings through the house, and he hails it as prelude to catastrophe and deliverance.
At the close of the first act, Helen enters in her crocus-yellow brocade, with Paul Destournelle at her shoulder. Under the guise of an operatic interlude, she confronts Richard, accusing him of having seduced and then abandoned her. Destournelle, eyeing Richard’s crippled body, refuses him the dignity of a duel; a man of sensibility, he says, cannot meet an “abortion” with sword or pistol. He strikes Richard across the face with metal-buttoned gloves. Richard lunges at him but falls heavily, his forehead striking the lower step. Destournelle bends to examine him with a goatlike laugh, gives him a contemptuous kick, and asks Helen if she is sufficiently avenged. She replies that a little affair of honor dating from her childhood has at last been adjusted, thanks him, and departs. Richard loses consciousness. Darkness, silence, and rest follow — and with them the opening of Book VI, “The New Heaven and The New Earth,” signaling the turn from torment toward whatever reconciliation the new sequence may bring.
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