I may say, indeed, to the very extreme of verity, that Messer Folco of
the Portinari was an excellent man. I will never say that he had not his
faults, for he had them, being mortal. He was, it may be, natived with
something of a domineering disposition. Feeling himself worthy to
command, he liked, perhaps as often as not, to assert that worthiness.
It is very certain that what Messer Guido said of him was true, and that
with regard to his own family he was indeed the Roman father, one whose
word must be law absolute and unquestionable for all his children. Yet
withal a just man whose judgments seldom erred in harshness. Although
not acrimonious, he was inclined to be choleric, and he was punctilious
to a degree that would never have suited my humor on all matters that
concerned what he regarded as the sober conduct of life. Enough of this.
Let us turn to the good man's patent virtues.
Though his steadfast adhesion to his own party had earned him many
enemies among those of the opposing faction, he was never so hot and
desperate a politician as the most of his compatriots. There was in him
something of the ancient humor and the ancient sweetness of them that
wrote and taught with Cicero, and though he thought as highly as any
Roman of them all of the honor and glory of the commonweal, he was so
much of a philosopher as to believe that honor and glory to be earned,
at least as much, by the welfare in mind and body of the citizens as by
the triumph of one party over another party. He was alive with all the
delicate and sensible charities, was forever scheming and planning to
lessen distress and lighten sorrows, and if he could have had his way
there would never have been a sick man or a poor man within the walls of
Florence. Toward this end, indeed, he employed the major portion of his
considerable wealth with more zeal, and yet at the same time with more
prudence, than any other benefactor in the city. Vacant spaces of land,
whose title-deeds lay to his credit, were now busy with men laying brick
upon brick for this building that was to be a little temple of learning,
and that building that was to be a hospital for the hurts and the
sufferings of troubled men, and this other that was in time to be a
church and sanctuary for the spirit as its fellow-edifices were
sanctuaries for the body and the mind.
Messer Folco also gave largely in charities, both public and private,
and yet, for all his sweetness of generosity he was so shrewd a man
that none ever came to him twice with a lying tale or tempted his
beneficence with false credentials. He would say, and, indeed, I have
heard him say it, though he spoke not to me indeed, for I was never one
of those that he would have chosen for intimate conversation--he would
say that charity, to be of any service in the world, should be as stern
and swerveless a judge as ever Minos was. Like all good Florentines, he
loved the liberal arts, and no little share of his money went in the
encouragement of painters and musicians, and the gravers of bronze and
the workers of marble, and those whose splendid pleasure it was to shape
buildings that should be worthy of the city.
As the top and crown of all these commendabilities, he had a very
liberal and hospitable spirit, loving to entertain, not indeed
ostentatiously, but still with so much of restrained magnificence as
became so wealthy and so honorable a man. It was in the service of this
spirit that Messer Folco, some good while after that lovers' meeting
which had been so strangely brought about, and which was to have so
strange an issue, made up his mind to give a great entertainment to all
his friends and lovers in the city. Because it might be said of him that
every man that knew him was his friend, and that many that knew him not
loved him for his good deeds and the clarity of his good name, it came
about that the most part of Florence that were of Messer Folco's station
were bidden to come and make merry at the Palace of the Portinari. Among
the number, to his great satisfaction, was your poor servant who tells
you this tale.
The Palace of the Portinari was a great and stately building, with great
and stately rooms inside it, stretching one out of another in what
seemed to be an endless succession of ordered richness, and behind the
great and stately house and within the great and stately walls that
girdled it lay such a garden as no other man in Florence owned, a garden
so well ordained after a plan so well conceived that though it was
spacious indeed, it seemed ten times more spacious than it really was
from the cunning and ingenuity with which its lawns and arbors, its
boscages and pergolas, its hedges and trees, its alleys and avenues were
adapted to lead the admiring wanderer on and on, and make him believe
that he should never come to the end of his tether.
This garden was, for the most part, dedicated to the service of Monna
Beatrice and her girl friends in the daytime. In the evening Messer
Folco would often walk there with grave and learned elders like himself,
and stir the sweet air with changing old-time philosophies, while Monna
Beatrice and her maidens sang or danced or luted or played ball. Messer
Folco was a man that cherished the domesticities, and had no desire to
see his home distorted into a house of call where all had a right to
take him by the hand, and he held that the family life flourished best,
like certain plants, in seclusion. But as there is a time for all
things, so Messer Folco found a time for opening his doors to his
friends and acquaintances, and giving them the freedom of his sweet
garden, and bidding them eat and drink and dance and make merry to the
top of their desires, always, of course, under the control of such
decorum as was due to the noble life.
It was to celebrate the laying of the foundation-stone of his hospital
that Messer Folco gave the entertainment of which I have just spoken and
whose eventful consequences I have yet to relate. It must, of course, be
clearly understood that I was not, and, indeed, could not be, always a
witness of the events recorded or a hearer of the words set down in my
narrative. But while it was my happy or sad fortune to witness many of
these events and to hear many of these words, it was also my privilege,
knowing, as I did, those that played their part in my tale, and those
that knew them well and loved them well, to gain so close a knowledge of
the deeds I did not witness and the words I did not hear as to make me
as creditable in the recording them as any historian of old time that
puts long speeches into the mouths of statesmen he never saw, and
repeats the harangues of embattled generals on fields where he never
fought. And so to come back to Messer Folco and his house and his garden
and his friends and the festival he gave them.