Valperga Volume 3 (of 3) or, The life and adventures of Castruccio, prince of Lucca — Reading Companion

The Witch’s Forest as a Threshold Space

The witch, Mandragola, is introduced as a figure of extreme age and physical decrepitude: “bent nearly double,” with “red eyes, the only part about her that appeared to have life.” Her dwelling is a hybrid structure—part natural, part built—that blurs the boundary between human habitation and wild landscape. Shelley emphasizes the forest’s antiquity: the trees are “hollow and decaying,” yet new sprouts arise around them. This cyclical imagery of death and renewal frames the witch’s role as a mediator between life and death, hope and damnation. When Beatrice visits the witch, the setting becomes a stage for a ritualistic pact: the witch demands an oath “by all that you hold sacred,” and Beatrice, already weakened, sinks to the ground. The forest thus functions as a threshold where rational boundaries dissolve, and characters confront forces they cannot control.

Beatrice’s Silences and Physical Wasting

Beatrice’s psychological deterioration is rendered through bodily symptoms and withdrawal from speech. After her encounter with the witch, she returns to Lucca with “glazed eyes and pale cheeks,” her rosary thrown aside, her prayers forgotten. Shelley describes her sitting for hours with “her eye fixed upon the earth, her parted lips pale, her hands closed with convulsive strength.” This physical cataloging of despair—fixed gaze, parted lips, clenched hands—conveys a mind consumed by doubt and fear. Euthanasia, returning from Florence, finds her friend “far worse both in body and mind,” and notes that silence and reserve are more alarming than wildness. For five days Beatrice does not speak and hardly eats. The narrative traces a movement from prophetic speech to muteness, from religious devotion to obsessive love, as Beatrice’s reason becomes “disturbed by doubt and fear.”

Movement Between Private Grief and Political Conspiracy

The volume alternates between intimate scenes of Beatrice’s suffering and the broader political plot involving Castruccio’s military campaigns and a conspiracy against him. Chapter VIII marks a pivot: “Castruccio’s Progress in Arms.—He brings Devastation to the Gates of Florence.—A Conspiracy formed against him.” This shift from the witch’s cave to the battlefield is abrupt, yet both spheres are linked by themes of betrayal and the pursuit of power. Euthanasia, who has been caring for Beatrice, becomes entangled in the conspiracy, and the narrative follows her from Florence to Lucca, where she meets with the informer Tripalda. The juxtaposition of Beatrice’s internal collapse and Euthanasia’s political risk suggests that the personal and the political are not separate but mutually reinforcing. The conspiracy chapters are leaner in description, driven by action and dialogue, contrasting with the dense, atmospheric prose of the witch episodes.

Recurring Images of Water, Oaths, and the Moon

Shelley threads specific images through the volume to create cohesion. Water appears in multiple contexts: the witch offers Beatrice a bowl of water, which Beatrice suspects is poisoned, but the witch drinks it to prove it is “pure water from the spring.” Later, Euthanasia sails for Sicily and is lost at sea—water becomes both a test of trust and a medium of disappearance. Oaths are another recurring element: Beatrice swears secrecy with her hands between the witch’s “dry and skinny palms,” and the vow binds her to a course she cannot escape. The moon’s phases structure the witch’s timeline: “The moon is now on the wane: when she fills again, I will send Bindo.” This lunar rhythm imposes a supernatural order on human events, contrasting with the chaotic emotions of the characters. These images—water, oaths, the moon—anchor the narrative’s symbolic architecture without needing explicit interpretation.

Readers attentive to setting will notice how Shelley uses landscape to externalize psychological states: the witch’s forest is not merely a backdrop but an active participant in the plot. The volume’s structure, oscillating between intimate suffering and large-scale conflict, rewards attention to transitions—how a scene in a prison or a cottage leads to a council of war. The recurring motifs of water, oaths, and the moon provide a subtle connective tissue that binds the disparate episodes into a coherent whole.