It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid
jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza
heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not
have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of
a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to
himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a
cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid
April--something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his
mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and
words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.
What a lovely vision she had made!--"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a
gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about
"Amor, che ha la mia virtù tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly
will)." Then should come _amore_, and of course _cuore_, and _disiò_,
and _anch' io_! This was very new; it was also very strange what a
fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had
called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say
that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was
making a goddess in his own image; poetry--Santa Cecilia! he was a
poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker
Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were
cold his heart was on fire.
What happened was this, so far as I am informed. At the north angle of
the church of San Giovanni fuori Civitas there is a narrow lane, so dark
that at very noon no sunlight comes in but upon blue bars of dust
slant-wise overhead. This lay upon Cino's daily beat from his lodgings
to the Podestà;[1] and here it was that he met Selvaggia Vergiolesi.
She was one of three young girls walking hand in hand up the alley on
their way from early mass, the tallest where all were tall, and, as it
seemed to him when he dreamed of it, astonishingly beautiful. Though
they were very young, they were ladies of rank; their heads were high
and crowned, their gowns of figured brocade; they had chains round their
necks, and each a jewel on her forehead; by chains also swung their
little mass-books in silver covers. Cino knew them well enough by sight.
Their names were Selvaggia di Filippo Vergiolesi, Guglielmotta
Aspramonte, Nicoletta della Torre. So at least he had always believed;
but now, but now! A beam of gold dust shot down upon the central head.
This was Aglaia, fairest of the three Graces; and the other two were
Euphrosyne and Thaleia, her handmaids. Thus it struck Cino, heart and
head, at this sublime moment of his drab-coloured life.
Selvaggia's hair was brown, gold-shot of its own virtue. In and out of
it was threaded a fine gold chain; behind, it was of course plaited in a
long twist, plaited and bound up in cloth of gold till it looked as hard
as a bull's tail. Her dress was all of formal brocade, green and white,
to her feet. It was cut square at the neck; and from that square her
throat, dazzlingly white, shot up as stiff as a stalk which should find
in her face its delicate flower. She was not very rosy, save about the
lips; her eyes were grey, inclined to be green, the lashes black. As for
her shape, sumptuous as her dress was, stiff and straight and severe, I
ask you to believe that she had grace to fill it with life, to move at
ease in it, to press it into soft and rounded lines. Her linked
companions also were beauties of their day--that sleek and sleepy
Nicoletta, that ruddy Guglielmotta; but they seemed to cower in their
rigid clothes, and they were as nothing to Cino.
The lane was so narrow that only three could pass abreast; it was
abreast these three were coming, as Cino saw. On a sudden his heart
began to knock at his ribs; that was when the light fell aslant upon the
maid. He could no more have taken his eyes off Selvaggia than he could
have climbed up the dusty wall to avoid her. Lo, here is one stronger
than I! At the next moment the three young rogues were about him, their
knitted hands a fence,--but the eyes of Selvaggia! Terrible twin-fires,
he thought, such as men light in the desert to scare the beasts away
while they sleep, or (as he afterwards improved it for his need) like
the flaming sword of the Archangel, which declared and yet forbade Eden
to Adam and his wife.
Selvaggia, in truth, though she had fourteen years behind her, was a
romp when no one was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no
mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown. To embarrass this
demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a
great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would
have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked
Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this
time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading her as if
she were a portent. She endured very well what she took to be the
vacancy of confusion in a shy recluse.
"Well, Messer Cino, what will you do?" said she, bubbling with mischief.
"Oh, Madonna, can you ask?" he replied, and clasped his hands.
"But you see that I do ask."
"I would stop here all the day if I might," said Messer Cino, with a
look by no means vacant. Whereupon she let him through that minute and
ran away blushing. More than once or twice she encountered him there,
but she never tried to pen him back again.
Little Monna Selvaggia learned that you cannot always put out the fire
which you have kindled. The fire set blazing by those lit green swords
of hers was in the heart of an Assessor of Civil Causes, a brazier with
only too good a draught. For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a
roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like
the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers
always came. You sonnetteered upon the battlefield, in the pulpit, on
the Bench, at the Bar. Throughout the moil of his day's work at the
Podestà those clinging long words, in themselves inspiration, _disìo,
piacere, vaghezza, gentilezza, diletto, affetto,_ beautiful twins that
go ever embraced, wailed in poor Cino's ears, and insensibly shaped
themselves coherent. He thought they were like mirrors, so placed that
each gave a look of Selvaggia. Before the end of the day he had the
whole of her in a sonnet which, if it were as good as it was
comfortable, should needs (he thought) be excellent. The thrill which
marked achievement sent the blood to his head; this time he gloried in
cold feet. He wrote his sonnet out fair upon vellum in a hand no scribe
at the Papal Court could have bettered, rolled it, tied it with green
and white silk (her colours, colours of the hawthorn hedge!), and went
out into the streets at the falling-in of the day to deliver it.
The Palazzo Vergiolesi lay over by the church of San Francesco al Prato,
just where the Via San Prospero debouches into that green place. Like
all Tuscan palaces it was more fortress than house, a dark square box of
masonry with a machicollated lid; and separate from it, but appurtenant,
had a most grim tower with a slit or two halfway up for all its windows.
Here, under the great escutcheon of the Vergiolesi, Cino delivered his
missive. The porter took it with a bow so gracious that the poet was
bold to ask whether the Lady Selvaggia was actually within.
"Yes, surely, Messere," said the man, "and moreover in the kitchen with
the cookmaids. For there is a cake-making on hand, and she is never far
away from that business."
Cino was ravished by this instance of divine humiliation; so might
Apollo have bowed in the house of Admetus, so Israel have kept sheep for
Rachel's sake. He walked away in most exalted mood, his feet no longer
cold. This was a great day for him, when he could see a new heaven and a
new earth.
"Now I too have been in Arcady!" he thought to himself, with tears in
his eyes. "I will send a copy of my sonnet to Dante Alighieri by a sure
hand. He should be at Bologna by this." And he did.
Madonna Selvaggia, her sleeves rolled up, a great bib all about her
pretty person, and her mouth in a fine mess of sugar and crumbs,
received her tribute sitting on the long kitchen-table. It should have
touched, it might have tickled, but it simply confused her. The maids
peeped over her shoulder as she read, in ecstasy that Madonna should
have a lover and a poet of her own. Selvaggia filched another handful of
sugar and crumbs, and twiddled her sonnet while she wondered what on
earth she should do with it. Her fine brows met each other over the
puzzle, so clearly case for a confidence. Gianbattista, her youngest
brother, was her bosom friend; but he was away, she knew, riding to Pisa
with their father. Next to him ranked Nicoletta; she would be at mass
to-morrow--that would do. Meantime the cook produced a most triumphal
cake hot and hot, and the transports of poor Messer Cino were forgotten.
Dante's reply to his copy was so characteristic that I must anticipate a
little to speak of it. He confined himself almost entirely to
technicalities, strongly objecting to the sestett with its three rhymes
in the middle, upon which Cino had prided himself in no small degree.
The only thing he seemed to care for was the tenth line, "A dolce morte
sotto dolce inganno," which you may render, if you like, "To a sweet
death under so sweet deceit"; but he said there were too many "o's" in
it. "As to the subject of your poem," he wrote in a postscript, "love is
a thing of so terrible a nature that not lightly is it to be entered,
since it cannot be lightly left; and, seeing the latter affair is much
out of a man's power, he should be wary with the former, wherein at
present he would appear to have some discretion, though not very much."
This was chilly comfort; but by the time it reached him Cino was beyond
the assault of chills.
Equally interesting should it be to record the conversation of Monna
Selvaggia with her discreet friend Nicoletta; yet I cannot record
everything. Nicoletta had a lover of her own, a most proper poet, who
had got far beyond the mere accidence of the science where Cino was
fumbling now; you might say that he was at theory. Nicoletta, moreover,
was sixteen years old, a marriageable age, an age indeed at which not to
have a lover would have been a disgrace. She had had sonnets and
_canzoni_ addressed to her since she was twelve; but then she had two
elder sisters and only one brother--a monk! This made a vast difference.
The upshot was that when Cino met the two ladies at the charmed spot of
yesterday's encounter he uncovered before them and stood with folded
hands, as if at his prayers. Consequently he missed the very pretty air
of consciousness with which Selvaggia passed him by, the heightened
colour of her, the lowered eyes and restless fingers, Also he missed
Nicoletta's demure shot askance, demure but critical, as became an
expert. A sonnet and a bunch of red anemones went to the Palazzo
Vergiolesi that evening; thenceforth it rained sonnets till poor little
Selvaggia ran near losing her five wits. It rained sonnets, I say, until
the Cancellieri brought out the black Guelphs in a swarm. Then it rained
blood, and the Vergiolesi fled one cloudy night to Pitecchio, their
stronghold in the Apennine. For Messer Cino, it behoved him also to
advise seriously about his position. To sonnetteer is very well, but a
lover, to say nothing of a jurisconsult, must live; he cannot have his
throat cut if there is a way out.
There was a very simple way out, which he took. He went down to Lucca in
the plain and married his Margherita degli Ughi. With her Guelph
connections he felt himself safer. He bestowed his wife in the keeping
of her people for the time, bought himself a horse, and rode up to
Pitecchio among the green maize, the olive-yards, and sprouting vines to
claim asylum from Filippo, and to see once more the beautiful young
Selvaggia.