shallow and aimless. As the Prince receives the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, he considers the joys (sensual, spiritual, political and animal — in particular, the loving and playful Bendicò) and the sorrows (political, sexual and familial) that he has experienced, concluding that of the 73 years he has been alive, he has only fully lived three of them. In his last moments, as his family gathers around, he sees a young woman appear — beautiful, exquisitely dressed, sensitive, and smiling lovingly. The narrator describes her in terms identical to those in which it describes a beautiful woman glimpsed at the train station on the way back to Palermo — in other words, death was present in his life even then. As the woman helps him to his feet, he sees her face, and to him she appears 'lovelier than she ever had when glimpsed in stellar space'. "Relics." May 1910 This chapter begins with a reference to 'the old Salina ladies', three elderly sisters whose right to have private Masses in their home is being investigated by representatives of the Archdiocese of Palermo, due to the fact that the ladies have certain relics in their home that, according to rumor, may not be authentic. Eventually, the narrator reveals that the ladies are the three daughters of the Prince — the authoritarian Concetta, the blunt-spoken Carolina and the paralyzed Caterina. As the priests enter the chapel, they are surprised to see a sensuously painted 'Madonna' hanging behind the altar, and walls lined with relics. After the priests depart, Concetta retires to her bedroom, where she keeps several locked boxes of decaying mementos of her past, including the skin of her father's dog Bendicò, which had been made into a rug and which is now completely moth-eaten. There, because she is the most pragmatic of the three sisters, she foresees what is about to happen — the confiscation of the relics and the painting, the re-consecration of the chapel, the inevitable spreading of stories of the Salinas' humiliation, and the equally inevitable destruction of what is left of the family's reputation and prestige. Her thoughts are interrupted by a footman announcing the arrival of Princess Angelica Falconeri. The well-preserved Angelica, widowed after Tancredi's death a few years before, meets Concetta in the sitting room. She chattily tells Concetta of her plans for celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Garibaldi invasion. Angelica also