The Leopard

by

Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra Character Analysis

– The Prince of Salina is the head of an ancient noble lineage in 19th-century Sicily. His armorial symbol is the leopard, and he is frequently described as “leonine,” fierce, dignified, and aloof. The Prince is 45 years old at the start of the novel and is married to Princess Maria Stella, with whom he has seven children. The Prince has a temper and occasionally rages at people around him. The son of a German princess, he has an authoritarian and morally rigid streak and is more inclined to abstract thought than to pragmatism. His main hobby, for instance, is astronomy; he has even discovered two small planets. The Prince also prefers other solitary pursuits like hunting. Both these hobbies—focused on the stars and the ancient Sicilian wilderness, respectively—allow the Prince to maintain the illusion that his world is stable. The Prince is perceptive: he knows the noble class is falling into decline even before the Revolution comes to Sicily, but he feels powerless to act on or to change his circumstances. The Prince is also a philanderer and cannot resist the charms of any beautiful woman, regardless of age or class—and regardless of his own married status. The Prince loves his nephew and ward, Tancredi, (whom he rescued from orphanhood and poverty) even more than he loves his own children. Though Tancredi is an eager partisan of Garibaldi’s revolution, the Prince remains convinced that nothing is going to change in Sicily. After arranging Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica, daughter of Don Calogero Sedàra (the socially ascendant mayor of Donnafugata), the Prince begins to change his mind. Nevertheless, he declines a position in the new Italian Senate, believing that he is too trapped in Sicily’s past to be of use in shaping its future. When the Prince dies in his seventies, he looks back on his life and believes that he can only add up a year or two of real happiness. He also realizes that the Salina family legacy is dying with him—his descendants are blending into the Italian middle class. The Prince welcomes the oblivion of death, having sensed its approach, alongside the decades-long death of the noble class.

Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra Quotes in The Leopard

The The Leopard quotes below are all either spoken by Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra or refer to Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Survival and Decline Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. Introduction to the Prince Quotes

The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke […] the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

Suddenly he was swept by a gust of tenderness toward himself. “I’m just a poor, weak creature,” he thought as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. “I’m weak and without support. Stella! Oh well, the Lord knows how much I’ve loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she’s too bossy, as well as too old […] seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?” Now, whipped by this odd anguish, he was almost shouting, “Is it right? I ask you all […] Why, she’s the real sinner!”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?”

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri (speaker), Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings: the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. […] He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, putting a few thousand ducats in your pockets meanwhile. […] For all will be the same. Just as it is now: except for an imperceptible shifting about of classes.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Don Ciccio Ferrara, Russo
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:

Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs. The comets would be appearing as usual, punctual to the minute, in sight of whoever was observing them […] their appearance at the time foreseen was a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. Donnafugata Quotes

At the bottom of the steps the authorities took their leave, and the Princess […] invited the Mayor, the Archpriest, and the notary to dine that same evening. […] And [the Prince] added, turning to the others, “And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.” For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Don Calogero Sedàra , Princess Maria Stella, Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

No laugh […] came from the Prince, on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about the landing at Marsala. That had been an event not only foreseen but also distant and invisible. Now, with his sensibility to presages and symbols, he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Calogero Sedàra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:

The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only really genuine, the only really decent beings,” thought he, in his worldly formulae. “Who worries about dowries for the Pleiades, a political career for Sirius, matrimonial joy for Vega?”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3. The Troubles of Don Fabrizio Quotes

[T]he scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily […] Don Fabrizio and Tumeo […] saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea, moving myrtles and broom, spreading a smell of thyme. […] Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Ciccio Tumeo
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:

Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “noes” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided. Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, “Do what I say or you’ll catch it!” Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the IOUs; your will is identical with mine.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Ciccio Tumeo
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

Don Calogero’s heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realized in all its details […] [Don Calogero] was accompanied through two of the drawing rooms, embraced again, and began descending the stairs as the Prince, towering above him, watched this little conglomeration of astuteness, ill-cut clothes, money, and ignorance who was now to become almost a part of the family getting smaller and smaller.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Calogero Sedàra
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Love at Donnafugata Quotes

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:

“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:

I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realized by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:

Chevalley thought, “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always,’ of course, a century, two centuries…and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us. Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo (speaker)
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Father Pirrone Pays a Visit Quotes

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Father Pirrone, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra, ‘Ncilina, Santino Pirrone, Turi Pirrone
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6. A Ball Quotes

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7. Death of a Prince Quotes

It was useless to try to avoid the thought, but the last of the Salinas was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families […] the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp […] He had said that the Salinas would always remain the Salinas. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi […] had won after all.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Giuseppe Garibaldi, Fabrizietto Salina
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. Relics Quotes

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina, Angelica Sedàra, Senator Tassoni
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:

As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Concetta Salina, Bendicò
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:
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Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra Quotes in The Leopard

The The Leopard quotes below are all either spoken by Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra or refer to Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Cultural Survival and Decline Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1. Introduction to the Prince Quotes

The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke […] the major gods and goddesses, the Princes among gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:

Suddenly he was swept by a gust of tenderness toward himself. “I’m just a poor, weak creature,” he thought as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. “I’m weak and without support. Stella! Oh well, the Lord knows how much I’ve loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she’s too bossy, as well as too old […] seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?” Now, whipped by this odd anguish, he was almost shouting, “Is it right? I ask you all […] Why, she’s the real sinner!”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:

The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?”

Related Characters: Tancredi Falconeri (speaker), Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings: the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be playacting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. […] He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, putting a few thousand ducats in your pockets meanwhile. […] For all will be the same. Just as it is now: except for an imperceptible shifting about of classes.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Don Ciccio Ferrara, Russo
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:

Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs. The comets would be appearing as usual, punctual to the minute, in sight of whoever was observing them […] their appearance at the time foreseen was a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 40
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2. Donnafugata Quotes

At the bottom of the steps the authorities took their leave, and the Princess […] invited the Mayor, the Archpriest, and the notary to dine that same evening. […] And [the Prince] added, turning to the others, “And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.” For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself, for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation; and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Don Calogero Sedàra , Princess Maria Stella, Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

No laugh […] came from the Prince, on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about the landing at Marsala. That had been an event not only foreseen but also distant and invisible. Now, with his sensibility to presages and symbols, he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Calogero Sedàra , Giuseppe Garibaldi
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:

The soul of the Prince reached out toward them, toward the intangible, the unattainable, which gave joy without laying claim to anything in return; as many other times, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a notebook for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only really genuine, the only really decent beings,” thought he, in his worldly formulae. “Who worries about dowries for the Pleiades, a political career for Sirius, matrimonial joy for Vega?”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3. The Troubles of Don Fabrizio Quotes

[T]he scrub clinging to the slopes was still in the very same state of scented tangle in which it had been found by Phoenicians, Dorians, and Ionians when they disembarked in Sicily […] Don Fabrizio and Tumeo […] saw the same objects, their clothes were soaked with just as sticky a sweat, the same indifferent breeze blew steadily from the sea, moving myrtles and broom, spreading a smell of thyme. […] Reduced to these basic elements, its face washed clear of worries, life took on a tolerable aspect.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Ciccio Tumeo
Related Symbols: Stars
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:

Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “noes” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided. Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, “Do what I say or you’ll catch it!” Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: “But you signed it yourself, didn’t you? Can’t you see? It’s quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the IOUs; your will is identical with mine.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Ciccio Tumeo
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:

Don Calogero’s heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realized in all its details […] [Don Calogero] was accompanied through two of the drawing rooms, embraced again, and began descending the stairs as the Prince, towering above him, watched this little conglomeration of astuteness, ill-cut clothes, money, and ignorance who was now to become almost a part of the family getting smaller and smaller.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Don Calogero Sedàra
Page Number: 131
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4. Love at Donnafugata Quotes

Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight […] that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield[.]

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:

“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction, who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn’t understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 179
Explanation and Analysis:

I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realized by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:

Chevalley thought, “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed: “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always,’ of course, a century, two centuries…and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us. Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Aimone Chevalley di Monterzuolo (speaker)
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5. Father Pirrone Pays a Visit Quotes

Two days later Father Pirrone left to return to Palermo. As he was jolted along he went over impressions that were not entirely pleasant; that brutish love affair come to fruition in St. Martin’s summer, that wretched half almond grove reacquired by means of calculated courtship, seemed to him the rustic poverty-stricken equivalent of other events recently witnessed. Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both around his little finger all the same.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Father Pirrone, Don Calogero Sedàra , Angelica Sedàra, ‘Ncilina, Santino Pirrone, Turi Pirrone
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6. A Ball Quotes

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Angelica Sedàra, Princess Maria Stella
Page Number: 225
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7. Death of a Prince Quotes

It was useless to try to avoid the thought, but the last of the Salinas was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families […] the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp […] He had said that the Salinas would always remain the Salinas. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi […] had won after all.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra (speaker), Giuseppe Garibaldi, Fabrizietto Salina
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 248
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8. Relics Quotes

Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these secondhand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride[.]

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Tancredi Falconeri, Concetta Salina, Angelica Sedàra, Senator Tassoni
Page Number: 273
Explanation and Analysis:

As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.

Related Characters: Prince Don Fabrizio Corbèra , Concetta Salina, Bendicò
Related Symbols: Leopards
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis: