I BEGAN the Bible from the commencement, reading and reflecting on it so
devoutly, and finding in it such deep treasures of delight, that, if I
had been able, I should have done naught else but study it. However,
light was wanting; and the thought of all my troubles kept recurring and
gnawing at me in the darkness, until I often made my mind up to put an
end somehow to my own life. They did not allow me a knife, however, and
so it was no easy matter to commit suicide. Once, notwithstanding, I
took and propped a wooden pole I found there, in position like a trap. I
meant to make it topple over on my head, and it would certainly have
dashed my brains out; but when I had arranged the whole machine, and was
approaching to put it in motion, just at the moment of my setting my
hand to it, I was seized by an invisible power and flung four cubits
from the spot, in such a terror that I lay half dead. Like that I
remained from dawn until the nineteenth hour, when they brought my food.
The jailers must have visited my cell several times without my taking
notice of them; for when at last I heard them, Captain Sandrino Monaldi
[1] had entered, and I heard him saying: “Ah, unhappy man! behold the
end to which so rare a genius has come!” Roused by these words, I opened
my eyes, and caught sight of priests with long gowns on their backs, who
were saying: “Oh, you told us he was dead!” Bozza replied: “Dead I found
him, and therefore I told you so.” Then they lifted me from where I lay,
and after shaking up the mattress, which was now as soppy as a dish of
maccaroni, they flung it outside the dungeon. The castellan, when these
things were reported to him, sent me another mattress. Thereafter, when
I searched my memory to find what could have diverted me from that
design of suicide, I came to the conclusion that it must have been some
power divine and my good guardian angel.
Note 1. A Florentine, banished in 1530 for having been in arms against
the Medici.