Chapter 7 Summary

This chapter is set almost twenty three years later, in July of 1885

"Death of a Prince" This poetically written chapter begins with the statement that for years, the Prince had felt he was dying, "as if the vital fluid ... life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him ... as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass." Narration describes how a last minute visit to a doctor tired him so much that it was decided he should not go back to the villa outside Palermo but stay in a hotel in Palermo itself. As he's settled into the hotel, the Prince recalls the fates of several of his family members - Tancredi's political success, and the deaths of Father Pirrone from old...