Lelia destroys her letter to Donna Fedele

Lelia destroys her letter to Donna Fedele after a night of agitation and repeated revisions. The letter was meant to forbid further discussion of Massimo Alberti, but as Lelia tries to make the refusal sound final without seeming merely resentful, she cannot bring herself to send it. At the Riderella, she tears the finished note into pieces and scatters them in the water; the act ends not in a delivered message but in her decision not to go to Donna Fedele’s home. The episode turns a private struggle over wording into a physical choice, while leaving the feeling behind it unresolved.

The Night of Hesitation

The action follows a night in which Lelia has shut herself in her room. A servant keeps watch outside and hears her moving about, tearing papers, and sobbing; later, a window opens. At dawn, Lelia asks to be let out for air. She goes beneath the chestnut trees and lies in the dewy grass, carrying a letter she has written but has not yet decided to send. The physical stillness of the morning contrasts with the unsettled decision she has brought outdoors.

The possibility of writing in blood briefly occurs to her. At thirteen, Lelia had loved a potted geranium so intensely that she pricked her breast to feed it with her blood; now she considers repeating the gesture for Donna Fedele, but refrains because she fears it would make her friend smile. The remembered episode gives the present impulse a measure of her habitual intensity, while her restraint shows her imagining how the gesture might appear to someone else.

The letter concerns Massimo. Lelia has been turning over a phrase that would tell Donna Fedele never to speak of him again, and she has repeatedly changed and discarded drafts. One version presents the prohibition as resentment at something Massimo wrote. Lelia has taken an almost artistic satisfaction in that formulation, but then doubts it: resentment might make her refusal seem temporary rather than firm. The problem is not simply what she wishes to say, but how to prevent the wording from disclosing uncertainty.

Rewriting the Refusal

Back inside, Lelia continues revising. She concludes that calling Massimo a great person will not do; removing the praise alone will not solve the problem either. She wants a different tone, one that does not look like resentment or contempt. After tearing up another draft, she writes to Donna Fedele as a friend. The finished note asks her not to speak of Massimo, either directly or indirectly; allows that Lelia may esteem him, while making clear that he inspires an invincible aversion; and apologizes for having been unkind the previous day, attributing that conduct to the same feeling.

The completed letter appears to Lelia clear, well judged, and beyond correction. She thinks that once the words have gone, everything will be over for good. Yet the certainty lasts only as a judgment about the written text: the prospect of sending it leaves her physically and mentally spent. She lies on her bed, unable to find either the strength or the clarity to decide anew. After sleeping for an hour, she wakes disoriented, then remembers the open note on her desk. The pain returns, and she again suspects the letter may need to be rewritten.

She tries to reread it in the garden, where she hopes her nerves will settle. At the seat beneath the walnut trees, the cool wind, moving grass, and steady sound of the Riderella gradually quiet her. The note slips from her hands, but she does not immediately retrieve it. When she finally picks it up, she begins tearing it slowly from one corner. Her awareness of the act comes on gradually: the grass still moves and the water still runs as before, even as she destroys a message she had treated as final.

Destruction and Immediate Decision

Once the letter is torn, Lelia’s heart begins to beat hard. The narration compares the force of that response to the imagined closeness of an embrace and a kiss. She jumps up, agitated, and carries the fragments to the Riderella. Watching the current until every piece disappears, she seems to treat the vanished scraps as witnesses to an act whose secret meaning might disappear with them. The river does not settle what she feels; it removes the written evidence of what she had tried to decide.

A further thought follows: instead of writing to Donna Fedele to forbid discussion of Massimo, Lelia can simply avoid going to see her. She accepts that alternative with relief. The decision is immediate and practical, but it does not amount to a settled account of her feelings. The episode has shown how a seemingly categorical refusal can be drafted, judged inadequate, revised, and then physically annulled before it reaches its intended reader.

Significance of the Unsent Letter

The letter’s destruction marks a change in Lelia’s course of action rather than the resolution of the emotional conflict. She moves from composing a rule for her friend to choosing silence and distance: the message will not be delivered, and for the moment she will not make the visit. Because the final note had already seemed clear and irreversible to her, tearing it up makes the reversal especially visible. What disappears is not only a piece of paper but the controlled form in which she had tried to make her refusal legible.

The scene also links bodily impulse, language, and landscape without making them interchangeable. Lelia considers blood as a means of giving the letter extraordinary force, then declines; she composes words, finds them inadequate, and finally gives the decision a physical form by tearing and scattering them. The grass and water continue undisturbed around her, while her response to the completed destruction is intense. The contrast keeps the action from reading as a simple victory of resolve: Lelia has chosen not to send the letter, but the force of her reaction shows that the choice has not made Massimo emotionally absent.