These strange facts would never have been placed on record, nor would
this exciting chapter of an eventful life have been written, except for
two reasons: first, because the discovery I made has been declared to be
of considerable importance to scientists, bibliophiles, and the world at
large; and, secondly, because it is my dear wife's wish that in order to
clear her in the eyes of both friends and foes nothing should be
concealed, misrepresented, or withheld.
It was, indeed, a memorable day when I halted before the white, almost
windowless house of the prior of San Sisto and knocked twice at its
plain, green-painted door. The sun-blanched, time-mellowed city of
Florence lay silent, glaring, and deserted in the blazing noon of a July
day. The Florentines had fled to the mountains for air. The
persiennes, or sun-shutters, were everywhere closed, the shops shut, the
people slumbering, and the silence only broken by the heat-song of the
chirping cicale in the scorched trees at the end of the Lung Arno.
Like many another Tuscan town, it stood with long rows of high,
frescoed, and sculptured palaces facing the brown river, its magnificent
Duomo and campanile, its quaint fourteenth-century streets, and its
medieval Ponte Vecchio all forming a grim, imposing relic of long-past
glory. In many places its aspect was little changed since the old
quattrocento days, when it was the centre of all the arts and the
powerful rival of Venice and Genoa, although its trade has decayed and
its power departed. The Lion and Lily of Florence upon a flag is no
longer feared, as it once was, even by the bloodthirsty corsairs, and
the rich Florentine brocades, velvets, and finely tempered arms are no
longer in requisition in the markets of the world.
Save for the influx of scrambling tourists, it is one of the dead towns
of Europe. Modern trade passes it by unnoticed; its very name would be
forgotten were it not for those marvellous works of art in its galleries
and in its very streets.
I had always loved the quaint old city, ever since a boy, when my
father, a retired English naval officer, lived in that ancient house
with the brown frescoes in the via di Pinti in the days before the
shrieking steam trams ran to Prato or the splendid Palazzo Riccardi had
been desecrated by the Government. At fourteen I left those quaint,
quiet streets, with their cool loggias and silent, moss-grown
courtyards, for the whirl of Paris, and subsequently lived and worked in
London. Then, after an absence of nearly twenty years, I found myself
living again in my beloved Tuscany by the Mediterranean, at Leghorn,
forty miles distant from the medieval city of my childhood. Was it,
therefore, surprising that the mood often seized me to go and revisit
the old places I had known as a boy? I found them all unchanged--
indeed, nothing changes in "Firenza la Bella" save the fortunes of her
ruined nobility and the increase of garish hotels for the accommodation
of the foreigner.
I was something of an antiquary, and through many years had been
collecting medieval manuscripts on vellum, ancient chapters, diplomas,
notarial deeds, and such-like documents, none being of later date than
the fifteenth century. To decipher the work of the old scribes is, I
admit, a dry-as-dust occupation; nevertheless, it is a work that grows
on one, and the palaeographist is an enthusiast always. In one's
hobbies one should always join advantage to amusement, and seek to
gather profit with pleasure.
My collection of musty-smelling parchments and rolls of folded vellum
documents, with their formidable seals of wax or lead; of heavy vellum
books bound in oaken boards and brass bosses, or tiny illuminated books
of hours, so minutely written that a microscope was almost necessary to
read them, appeal to very few people. Most of my friends regarded them
as so many old and undecipherable books and rolls, without interest and
without value. They wondered that, being continually occupied at my
desk writing novels, I should take up such an essentially dry study.
Yet it was this love of collecting that first brought me into contact
with Francesco Graniani, a queer little old hunchback, who was a kind of
itinerant dealer in antiques. Unshaven, very shabby, and not
particularly clean, he dressed always in the same faded drab suit, and,
summer or winter, wore the same battered, sun-browned straw hat through
all the years I knew him.
Often this strange, rather tragic figure would meet me in the sun-baked
streets of Leghorn, raise his battered hat respectfully, and, taking me
aside, produce mysteriously from his pocket a parchment charter with its
seal, some leaves from a medieval psalter, or perhaps an illuminated
codex, or a book of hours with painted miniatures. Where le obtained
such gems I have never to this day discovered. None knew who the old
fellow was, or where he lived; he was a complete mystery.
One morning while crossing the great square I encountered him, and he
informed me in his strange, mysterious manner of the existence of a very
rare and interesting manuscript in the possession of the prior of the
ancient church of San Sisto, at Florence.
"If the signore goes to Firenze, Father Landini will no doubt allow him
to have sight of the parchment book," he said. "Tell him that Francesco
Graniani wishes it."
"But what is the character of the manuscript?"