CHAPTER II. Breakfast for Love
CHAPTER III. The Barber’s Shop
CHAPTER IV. First Impressions
CHAPTER V. The Blind Scholar and his Daughter
CHAPTER VI. Dawning Hopes
CHAPTER VII. A Learned Squabble
CHAPTER VIII. A Face in the Crowd
CHAPTER IX. A Man’s Ransom
CHAPTER X. Under the Plane-Tree
CHAPTER XI. Tito’s Dilemma
CHAPTER XII. The Prize is nearly Grasped
CHAPTER XIII. The Shadow of Nemesis
CHAPTER XIV. The Peasants’ Fair
CHAPTER XV. The Dying Message
CHAPTER XVI. A Florentine Joke
CHAPTER XVII. Under the Loggia
CHAPTER XVIII. The Portrait
CHAPTER XIX. The Old Man’s Hope
CHAPTER XX. The Day of the Betrothal
CHAPTER XXI. Florence expects a Guest
CHAPTER XXII. The Prisoners
CHAPTER XXIII. After-Thoughts
CHAPTER XXIV. Inside the Duomo
CHAPTER XXV. Outside the Duomo
CHAPTER XXVI. The Garment of Fear
CHAPTER XXVII. The Young Wife
CHAPTER XXVIII. The Painted Record
CHAPTER XXIX. A Moment of Triumph
CHAPTER XXX. The Avenger’s Secret
CHAPTER XXXI. Fruit is Seed
CHAPTER XXXII. A Revelation
CHAPTER XXXIII. Baldassarre makes an Acquaintance
CHAPTER XXXIV. No Place for Repentance
CHAPTER XXXV. What Florence was thinking of
CHAPTER XXXVI. Ariadne discrowns herself
CHAPTER XXXVII. The Tabernacle Unlocked
CHAPTER XXXVIII. The Black Marks become Magical
CHAPTER XXXIX. A Supper in the Rucellai Gardens
CHAPTER XL. An Arresting Voice
CHAPTER XLI. Coming Back
CHAPTER XLII. Romola in her Place
CHAPTER XLIII. The Unseen Madonna
CHAPTER XLIV. The Visible Madonna
CHAPTER XLV. At the Barber’s Shop
CHAPTER XLVI. By a Street Lamp
CHAPTER XLVII. Check
CHAPTER XLVIII. Counter-Check
CHAPTER XLIX. The Pyramid of Vanities
CHAPTER L. Tessa Abroad and at Home
CHAPTER LI. Monna Brigida’s Conversion
CHAPTER LII. A Prophetess
CHAPTER LIII. On San Miniato
CHAPTER LIV. The Evening and the Morning
CHAPTER LV. Waiting
CHAPTER LVI. The Other Wife
CHAPTER LVII. Why Tito was Safe
CHAPTER LVIII. A Final Understanding
CHAPTER LIX. Pleading
CHAPTER LX. The Scaffold
CHAPTER LXI. Drifting Away
CHAPTER LXII. The Benediction
CHAPTER LXIII. Ripening Schemes
CHAPTER LXIV. The Prophet in his Cell
CHAPTER LXV. The Trial by Fire
CHAPTER LXVI. A Masque of the Furies
CHAPTER LXVII. Waiting by the River
CHAPTER LXVIII. Romola’s waking
CHAPTER LXIX. Homeward
CHAPTER LXX. Meeting Again
CHAPTER LXXI. The Confession
CHAPTER LXXII. The Last Silence
Epilogue.
PROEM.
More than three centuries and a half ago, in the mid spring-time of
1492, we are sure that the angel of the dawn, as he travelled with
broad slow wing from the Levant to the Pillars of Hercules, and from
the summits of the Caucasus across all the snowy Alpine ridges to the
dark nakedness of the Western isles, saw nearly the same outline of
firm land and unstable sea—saw the same great mountain shadows on the
same valleys as he has seen to-day—saw olive mounts, and pine forests,
and the broad plains green with young corn or rain-freshened grass—saw
the domes and spires of cities rising by the river-sides or mingled
with the sedge-like masts on the many-curved sea-coast, in the same
spots where they rise to-day. And as the faint light of his course
pierced into the dwellings of men, it fell, as now, on the rosy warmth
of nestling children; on the haggard waking of sorrow and sickness; on
the hasty uprising of the hard-handed labourer; and on the late sleep
of the night-student, who had been questioning the stars or the sages,
or his own soul, for that hidden knowledge which would break through
the barrier of man’s brief life, and show its dark path, that seemed to
bend no whither, to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and
glory. The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have
hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and
flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great
loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the
dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which
never alters in the main headings of its history—hunger and labour,
seed-time and harvest, love and death.
Even if, instead of following the dim daybreak, our imagination pauses
on a certain historical spot and awaits the fuller morning, we may see
a world-famous city, which has hardly changed its outline since the
days of Columbus, seeming to stand as an almost unviolated symbol,
amidst the flux of human things, to remind us that we still resemble
the men of the past more than we differ from them, as the great
mechanical principles on which those domes and towers were raised must
make a likeness in human building that will be broader and deeper than
all possible change. And doubtless, if the spirit of a Florentine
citizen, whose eyes were closed for the last time while Columbus was
still waiting and arguing for the three poor vessels with which he was
to set sail from the port of Palos, could return from the shades and
pause where our thought is pausing, he would believe that there must
still be fellowship and understanding for him among the inheritors of
his birthplace.
Let us suppose that such a Shade has been permitted to revisit the
glimpses of the golden morning, and is standing once more on the famous
hill of San Miniato, which overlooks Florence from the south.
The Spirit is clothed in his habit as he lived: the folds of his
well-lined black silk garment or _lucco_ hang in grave unbroken lines
from neck to ankle; his plain cloth cap, with its _becchetto_, or long
hanging strip of drapery, to serve as a scarf in case of need,
surmounts a penetrating face, not, perhaps, very handsome, but with a
firm, well-cut mouth, kept distinctly human by a close-shaven lip and
chin. It is a face charged with memories of a keen and various life
passed below there on the banks of the gleaming river; and as he looks
at the scene before him, the sense of familiarity is so much stronger
than the perception of change, that he thinks it might be possible to
descend once more amongst the streets, and take up that busy life where
he left it. For it is not only the mountains and the westward-bending
river that he recognises; not only the dark sides of Mount Morello
opposite to him, and the long valley of the Arno that seems to stretch
its grey low-tufted luxuriance to the far-off ridges of Carrara; and
the steep height of Fiesole, with its crown of monastic walls and
cypresses; and all the green and grey slopes sprinkled with villas
which he can name as he looks at them. He sees other familiar objects
much closer to his daily walks. For though he misses the seventy or
more towers that once surmounted the walls, and encircled the city as
with a regal diadem, his eyes will not dwell on that blank; they are
drawn irresistibly to the unique tower springing, like a tall
flower-stem drawn towards the sun, from the square turreted mass of the
Old Palace in the very heart of the city—the tower that looks none the
worse for the four centuries that have passed since he used to walk
under it. The great dome, too, greatest in the world, which, in his
early boyhood, had been only a daring thought in the mind of a small,
quick-eyed man—there it raises its large curves still, eclipsing the
hills. And the well-known bell-towers—Giotto’s, with its distant hint
of rich colour, and the graceful-spired Badia, and the rest—he looked
at them all from the shoulder of his nurse.
“Surely,” he thinks, “Florence can still ring her bells with the solemn
hammer-sound that used to beat on the hearts of her citizens and strike
out the fire there. And here, on the right, stands the long dark mass
of Santa Croce, where we buried our famous dead, laying the laurel on
their cold brows and fanning them with the breath of praise and of
banners. But Santa Croce had no spire then: we Florentines were too
full of great building projects to carry them all out in stone and
marble; we had our frescoes and our shrines to pay for, not to speak of
rapacious condottieri, bribed royalty, and purchased territories, and
our façades and spires must needs wait. But what architect can the
Frati Minori (the Franciscans) have employed to build that spire for
them? If it had been built in my day, Filippo Brunelleschi or
Michelozzo would have devised something of another fashion than
that—something worthy to crown the church of Arnolfo.”
At this the Spirit, with a sigh, lets his eyes travel on to the city
walls, and now he dwells on the change there with wonder at these
modern times. Why have five out of the eleven convenient gates been
closed? And why, above all, should the towers have been levelled that
were once a glory and defence? Is the world become so peaceful, then,
and do Florentines dwell in such harmony, that there are no longer
conspiracies to bring ambitious exiles home again with armed bands at
their back? These are difficult questions: it is easier and pleasanter
to recognise the old than to account for the new. And there flows Arno,
with its bridges just where they used to be—the Ponte Vecchio, least
like other bridges in the world, laden with the same quaint shops where
our Spirit remembers lingering a little on his way perhaps to look at
the progress of that great palace which Messer Luca Pitti had set
a-building with huge stones got from the Hill of Bogoli (now Boboli)
close behind, or perhaps to transact a little business with the
cloth-dressers in Oltrarno. The exorbitant line of the Pitti roof is
hidden from San Miniato; but the yearning of the old Florentine is not
to see Messer Luca’s too ambitious palace which he built unto himself;
it is to be down among those narrow streets and busy humming Piazze
where he inherited the eager life of his fathers. Is not the anxious
voting with black and white beans still going on down there? Who are
the Priori in these months, eating soberly-regulated official dinners
in the Palazzo Vecchio, with removes of tripe and boiled partridges,
seasoned by practical jokes against the ill-fated butt among those
potent signors? Are not the significant banners still hung from the
windows—still distributed with decent pomp under Orcagna’s Loggia every
two months?
Life had its zest for the old Florentine when he, too, trod the marble
steps and shared in those dignities. His politics had an area as wide
as his trade, which stretched from Syria to Britain, but they had also
the passionate intensity, and the detailed practical interest, which
could belong only to a narrow scene of corporate action; only to the
members of a community shut in close by the hills and by walls of six
miles’ circuit, where men knew each other as they passed in the street,
set their eyes every day on the memorials of their commonwealth, and
were conscious of having not simply the right to vote, but the chance
of being voted for. He loved his honours and his gains, the business of
his counting-house, of his guild, of the public council-chamber; he
loved his enmities too, and fingered the white bean which was to keep a
hated name out of the _borsa_ with more complacency than if it had been
a golden florin. He loved to strengthen his family by a good alliance,
and went home with a triumphant light in his eyes after concluding a
satisfactory marriage for his son or daughter under his favourite
loggia in the evening cool; he loved his game at chess under that same
loggia, and his biting jest, and even his coarse joke, as not beneath
the dignity of a man eligible for the highest magistracy. He had gained
an insight into all sorts of affairs at home and abroad: he had been of
the “Ten” who managed the war department, of the “Eight” who attended
to home discipline, of the Priori or Signori who were the heads of the
executive government; he had even risen to the supreme office of
Gonfaloniere; he had made one in embassies to the Pope and to the
Venetians; and he had been commissary to the hired army of the
Republic, directing the inglorious bloodless battles in which no man
died of brave breast wounds—_virtuosi colpi_—but only of casual falls
and tramplings. And in this way he had learned to distrust men without
bitterness; looking on life mainly as a game of skill, but not dead to
traditions of heroism and clean-handed honour. For the human soul is
hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory
opinions with much impartiality. It was his pride besides, that he was
duly tinctured with the learning of his age, and judged not altogether
with the vulgar, but in harmony with the ancients: he, too, in his
prime, had been eager for the most correct manuscripts, and had paid
many florins for antique vases and for disinterred busts of the ancient
immortals—some, perhaps, _truncis naribus_, wanting as to the nose, but
not the less authentic; and in his old age he had made haste to look at
the first sheets of that fine Homer which was among the early glories
of the Florentine press. But he had not, for all that, neglected to
hang up a waxen image or double of himself under the protection of the
Madonna Annunziata, or to do penance for his sins in large gifts to the
shrines of saints whose lives had not been modelled on the study of the
classics; he had not even neglected making liberal bequests towards
buildings for the Frati, against whom he had levelled many a jest.
For the Unseen Powers were mighty. Who knew—who was sure—that there was
_any_ name given to them behind which there was no angry force to be
appeased, no intercessory pity to be won? Were not gems medicinal,
though they only pressed the finger? Were not all things charged with
occult virtues? Lucretius might be right—he was an ancient, and a great
poet; Luigi Pulci, too, who was suspected of not believing anything
from the roof upward (_dal tetto in su_), had very much the air of
being right over the supper-table, when the wine and jests were
circulating fast, though he was only a poet in the vulgar tongue. There
were even learned personages who maintained that Aristotle, wisest of
men (unless, indeed, Plato were wiser?) was a thoroughly irreligious
philosopher; and a liberal scholar must entertain all speculations. But
the negatives might, after all, prove false; nay, seemed manifestly
false, as the circling hours swept past him, and turned round with
graver faces. For had not the world become Christian? Had he not been
baptised in San Giovanni, where the dome is awful with symbols of
coming judgment, and where the altar bears a crucified Image disturbing
to perfect complacency in one’s self and the world? Our resuscitated
Spirit was not a pagan philosopher, nor a philosophising pagan poet,
but a man of the fifteenth century, inheriting its strange web of
belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of
pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted
out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination towards a
self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human
conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was rilling the air
with strange prophecies and presentiments.
He had smiled, perhaps, and shaken his head dubiously, as he heard
simple folk talk of a Pope Angelico, who was to come by-and-by and
bring in a new order of things, to purify the Church from simony, and
the lives of the clergy from scandal—a state of affairs too different
from what existed under Innocent the Eighth for a shrewd merchant and
politician to regard the prospect as worthy of entering into his
calculations. But he felt the evils of the time, nevertheless; for he
was a man of public spirit, and public spirit can never be wholly
immoral, since its essence is care for a common good. That very
Quaresima or Lent of 1492 in which he died, still in his erect old age,
he had listened in San Lorenzo, not without a mixture of satisfaction,
to the preaching of a Dominican Friar, named Girolamo Savonarola, who
denounced with a rare boldness the worldliness and vicious habits of
the clergy, and insisted on the duty of Christian men not to live for
their own ease when wrong was triumphing in high places, and not to
spend their wealth in outward pomp even in the churches, when their
fellow-citizens were suffering from want and sickness. The Frate
carried his doctrine rather too far for elderly ears; yet it was a
memorable thing to see a preacher move his audience to such a pitch
that the women even took off their ornaments, and delivered them up to
be sold for the benefit of the needy.
“He was a noteworthy man, that Prior of San Marco,” thinks our Spirit;
“somewhat arrogant and extreme, perhaps, especially in his
denunciations of speedy vengeance. Ah, _Iddio non paga il Sabatol_
(‘God does not pay on a Saturday’)—the wages of men’s sins often linger
in their payment, and I myself saw much established wickedness of
long-standing prosperity. But a Frate Predicatore who wanted to move
the people—how could he be moderate? He might have been a little less
defiant and curt, though, to Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose family had been
the very makers of San Marco: was that quarrel ever made up? And our
Lorenzo himself, with the dim outward eyes and the subtle inward
vision, did he get over that illness at Careggi? It was but a sad,
uneasy-looking face that he would carry out of the world which had
given him so much, and there were strong suspicions that his handsome
son would play the part of Rehoboam. How has it all turned out? Which
party is likely to be banished and have its houses sacked just now? Is
there any successor of the incomparable Lorenzo, to whom the great Turk
is so gracious as to send over presents of rare animals, rare relics,
rare manuscripts, or fugitive enemies, suited to the tastes of a
Christian Magnifico who is at once lettered and devout—and also
slightly vindictive? And what famous scholar is dictating the Latin
letters of the Republic—what fiery philosopher is lecturing on Dante in
the Duomo, and going home to write bitter invectives against the father
and mother of the bad critic who may have found fault with his
classical spelling? Are our wiser heads leaning towards alliance with
the Pope and the Regno (The name given to Naples by way of distinction
among the Italian States), or are they rather inclining their ears to
the orators of France and of Milan?
“There is knowledge of these things to be had in the streets below, on
the beloved _marmi_ in front of the churches, and under the sheltering
Loggie, where surely our citizens have still their gossip and debates,
their bitter and merry jests as of old. For are not the well-remembered
buildings all there? The changes have not been so great in those
uncounted years. I will go down and hear—I will tread the familiar
pavement, and hear once again the speech of Florentines.”
Go not down, good Spirit! for the changes are great and the speech of
Florentines would sound as a riddle in your ears. Or, if you go, mingle
with no politicians on the _marmi_, or elsewhere; ask no questions
about trade in the Calimara; confuse yourself with no inquiries into
scholarship, official or monastic. Only look at the sunlight and
shadows on the grand walls that were built solidly, and have endured in
their grandeur; look at the faces of the little children, making
another sunlight amid the shadows of age; look, if you will, into the
churches, and hear the same chants, see the same images as of old—the
images of willing anguish for a great end, of beneficent love and
ascending glory; see upturned living faces, and lips moving to the old
prayers for help. These things have not changed. The sunlight and
shadows bring their old beauty and waken the old heart-strains at
morning, noon, and eventide; the little children are still the symbol
of the eternal marriage between love and duty; and men still yearn for
the reign of peace and righteousness—still own _that_ life to be the
highest which is a conscious voluntary sacrifice. For the Pope Angelico
is not come yet.
CHAPTER I.
The Shipwrecked Stranger.
The Loggia de’ Cerchi stood in the heart of old Florence, within a
labyrinth of narrow streets behind the Badia, now rarely threaded by
the stranger, unless in a dubious search for a certain severely simple
doorplace, bearing this inscription:
Qui Nacque Il Divino Poeta.
To the ear of Dante, the same streets rang with the shout and clash of
fierce battle between rival families; but in the fifteenth century,
they were only noisy with the unhistorical quarrels and broad jests of
woolcarders in the cloth-producing quarters of San Martino and Garbo.
Under this loggia, in the early morning of the 9th of April 1492, two
men had their eyes fixed on each other: one was stooping slightly, and
looking downward with the scrutiny of curiosity; the other, lying on
the pavement, was looking upward with the startled gaze of a
suddenly-awakened dreamer.
The standing figure was the first to speak. He was a grey-haired,
broad-shouldered man, of the type which, in Tuscan phrase, is moulded
with the fist and polished with the pickaxe; but the self-important
gravity which had written itself out in the deep lines about his brow
and mouth seemed intended to correct any contemptuous inferences from
the hasty workmanship which Nature had bestowed on his exterior. He had
deposited a large well-filled bag, made of skins, on the pavement, and
before him hung a pedlar’s basket, garnished partly with small
woman’s-ware, such as thread and pins, and partly with fragments of
glass, which had probably been taken in exchange for those commodities.
“Young man,” he said, pointing to a ring on the finger of the reclining
figure, “when your chin has got a stiffer crop on it, you’ll know
better than to take your nap in street-corners with a ring like that on
your forefinger. By the holy ’vangels! if it had been anybody but me
standing over you two minutes ago—but Bratti Ferravecchi is not the man
to steal. The cat couldn’t eat her mouse if she didn’t catch it alive,
and Bratti couldn’t relish gain if it had no taste of a bargain. Why,
young man, one San Giovanni, three years ago, the Saint sent a dead
body in my way—a blind beggar, with his cap well-lined with pieces—but,
if you’ll believe me, my stomach turned against the money I’d never
bargained for, till it came into my head that San Giovanni owed me the
pieces for what I spend yearly at the Festa; besides, I buried the body
and paid for a mass—and so I saw it was a fair bargain. But how comes a
young man like you, with the face of Messer San Michele, to be sleeping
on a stone bed with the wind for a curtain?”
The deep guttural sounds of the speaker were scarcely intelligible to
the newly-waked, bewildered listener, but he understood the action of
pointing to his ring: he looked down at it, and, with a half-automatic
obedience to the warning, took it off and thrust it within his doublet,
rising at the same time and stretching himself.
“Your tunic and hose match ill with that jewel, young man,” said
Bratti, deliberately. “Anybody might say the saints had sent _you_ a
dead body; but if you took the jewels, I hope you buried him—and you
can afford a mass or two for him into the bargain.”
Something like a painful thrill appeared to dart through the frame of
the listener, and arrest the careless stretching of his arms and chest.
For an instant he turned on Bratti with a sharp frown; but he
immediately recovered an air of indifference, took off the red
Levantine cap which hung like a great purse over his left ear, pushed
back his long dark-brown curls, and glancing at his dress, said,
smilingly—
“You speak truth, friend: my garments are as weather-stained as an old
sail, and they are not old either, only, like an old sail, they have
had a sprinkling of the sea as well as the rain. The fact is, I’m a
stranger in Florence, and when I came in footsore last night I
preferred flinging myself in a corner of this hospitable porch to
hunting any longer for a chance hostelry, which might turn out to be a
nest of blood-suckers of more sorts than one.”
“A stranger, in good sooth,” said Bratti, “for the words come all
melting out of your throat, so that a Christian and a Florentine can’t
tell a hook from a hanger. But you’re not from Genoa? More likely from
Venice, by the cut of your clothes?”
“At this present moment,” said the stranger, smiling, “it is of less
importance where I come from than where I can go to for a mouthful of
breakfast. This city of yours turns a grim look on me just here: can
you show me the way to a more lively quarter, where I can get a meal
and a lodging?”
“That I can,” said Bratti, “and it is your good fortune, young man,
that I have happened to be walking in from Rovezzano this morning, and
turned out of my way to Mercato Vecchio to say an Ave at the Badia.
That, I say, is your good fortune. But it remains to be seen what is my
profit in the matter. Nothing for nothing, young man. If I show you the
way to Mercato Vecchio, you’ll swear by your patron saint to let me
have the bidding for that stained suit of yours, when you set up a
better—as doubtless you will.”
“Agreed, by San Niccolò,” said the other, laughing. “But now let us set
off to this said Mercato, for I feel the want of a better lining to
this doublet of mine which you are coveting.”
“Coveting? Nay,” said Bratti, heaving his bag on his back and setting
out. But he broke off in his reply, and burst out in loud, harsh tones,
not unlike the creaking and grating of a cart-wheel: “_Chi
abbaratta_—_baratta_—_b’ratta_—_chi abbaratta cenci e vetri_—_b’ratta
ferri vecchi_?” (“Who wants to exchange rags, broken glass, or old
iron?”)
“It’s worth but little,” he said presently, relapsing into his
conversational tone. “Hose and altogether, your clothes are worth but
little. Still, if you’ve a mind to set yourself up with a lute worth
more than any new one, or with a sword that’s been worn by a Ridolfi,
or with a paternoster of the best mode, I could let you have a great
bargain, by making an allowance for the clothes; for, simple as I stand
here, I’ve got the best-furnished shop in the Ferravecchi, and it’s
close by the Mercato. The Virgin be praised! it’s not a pumpkin I carry
on my shoulders. But I don’t stay caged in my shop all day: I’ve got a
wife and a raven to stay at home and mind the stock. _Chi
abbaratta_—_baratta_—_b’ratta_? ... And now, young man, where do you
come from, and what’s your business in Florence?”
“I thought you liked nothing that came to you without a bargain,” said
the stranger. “You’ve offered me nothing yet in exchange for that
information.”
“Well, well; a Florentine doesn’t mind bidding a fair price for news:
it stays the stomach a little though he may win no hose by it. If I
take you to the prettiest damsel in the Mercato to get a cup of
milk—that will be a fair bargain.”
“Nay; I can find her myself, if she be really in the Mercato; for
pretty heads are apt to look forth of doors and windows. No, no.
Besides, a sharp trader, like you, ought to know that he who bids for
nuts and news, may chance to find them hollow.”
“Ah! young man,” said Bratti, with a sideway glance of some admiration,
“you were not born of a Sunday—the salt-shops were open when you came
into the world. You’re not a Hebrew, eh?—come from Spain or Naples, eh?
Let me tell you the Frati Minori are trying to make Florence as hot as
Spain for those dogs of hell that want to get all the profit of usury
to themselves and leave none for Christians; and when you walk the
Calimara with a piece of yellow cloth in your cap, it will spoil your
beauty more than a sword-cut across that smooth olive cheek of
yours.—_Abbaratta, baratta_—_chi abbaratta_?—I tell you, young man,
grey cloth is against yellow cloth; and there’s as much grey cloth in
Florence as would make a gown and cowl for the Duomo, and there’s not
so much yellow cloth as would make hose for Saint Christopher—blessed
be his name, and send me a sight of him this day!—_Abbaratta, baratta,
b’ratta_—_chi abbaratta_?”
“All that is very amusing information you are parting with for
nothing,” said the stranger, rather scornfully; “but it happens not to
concern me. I am no Hebrew.”
“See, now!” said Bratti, triumphantly; “I’ve made a good bargain with
mere words. I’ve made you tell me something, young man, though you’re
as hard to hold as a lamprey. San Giovanni be praised! a blind
Florentine is a match for two one-eyed men. But here we are in the
Mercato.”
They had now emerged from the narrow streets into a broad piazza, known
to the elder Florentine writers as the Mercato Vecchio, or the Old
Market. This piazza, though it had been the scene of a provision-market
from time immemorial, and may, perhaps, says fond imagination, be the
very spot to which the Fesulean ancestors of the Florentines descended
from their high fastness to traffic with the rustic population of the
valley, had not been shunned as a place of residence by Florentine
wealth. In the early decades of the fifteenth century, which was now
near its end, the Medici and other powerful families of the _popolani
grassi_, or commercial nobility, had their houses there, not perhaps
finding their ears much offended by the loud roar of mingled dialects,
or their eyes much shocked by the butchers’ stalls, which the old poet
Antonio Pucci accounts a chief glory, or _dignita_, of a market that,
in his esteem, eclipsed the markets of all the earth beside. But the
glory of mutton and veal (well attested to be the flesh of the right
animals; for were not the skins, with the heads attached, duly
displayed, according to the decree of the Signoria?) was just now
wanting to the Mercato, the time of Lent not being yet over. The proud
corporation, or “Art,” of butchers was in abeyance, and it was the
great harvest-time of the market-gardeners, the cheesemongers, the
vendors of macaroni, corn, eggs, milk, and dried fruits: a change which
was apt to make the women’s voices predominant in the chorus. But in
all seasons there was the experimental ringing of pots and pans, the
chinking of the money-changers, the tempting offers of cheapness at the
old-clothes stalls, the challenges of the dicers, the vaunting of new
linens and woollens, of excellent wooden-ware, kettles, and
frying-pans; there was the choking of the narrow inlets with mules and
carts, together with much uncomplimentary remonstrance in terms
remarkably identical with the insults in use by the gentler sex of the
present day, under the same imbrowning and heating circumstances.
Ladies and gentlemen, who came to market, looked on at a larger amount
of amateur fighting than could easily be seen in these later times, and
beheld more revolting rags, beggary, and rascaldom, than modern
householders could well picture to themselves. As the day wore on, the
hideous drama of the gaming-house might be seen here by any chance
open-air spectator—the quivering eagerness, the blank despair, the
sobs, the blasphemy, and the blows:—
“E vedesi chi perde con gran soffi,
E bestemmiar colla mano alia mascella,
E ricever e dar di molti ingoffi.”
But still there was the relief of prettier sights: there were
brood-rabbits, not less innocent and astonished than those of our own
period; there were doves and singing-birds to be bought as presents for
the children; there were even kittens for sale, and here and there a
handsome _gattuccio_, or “Tom,” with the highest character for mousing;
and, better than all, there were young, softly-rounded cheeks and
bright eyes, freshened by the start from the far-off castello (walled
village) at daybreak, not to speak of older faces with the unfading
charm of honest goodwill in them, such as are never quite wanting in
scenes of human industry. And high on a pillar in the centre of the
place—a venerable pillar, fetched from the church of San Giovanni—stood
Donatello’s stone statue of Plenty, with a fountain near it, where,
says old Pucci, the good wives of the market freshened their utensils,
and their throats also; not because they were unable to buy wine, but
because they wished to save the money for their husbands.
But on this particular morning a sudden change seemed to have come over
the face of the market. The _deschi_, or stalls, were indeed partly
dressed with their various commodities, and already there were
purchasers assembled, on the alert to secure the finest, freshest
vegetables and the most unexceptionable butter. But when Bratti and his
companion entered the piazza, it appeared that some common
preoccupation had for the moment distracted the attention both of
buyers and sellers from their proper business. Most of the traders had
turned their backs on their goods, and had joined the knots of talkers
who were concentrating themselves at different points in the piazza. A
vendor of old-clothes, in the act of hanging out a pair of long hose,
had distractedly hung them round his neck in his eagerness to join the
nearest group; an oratorical cheesemonger, with a piece of cheese in
one hand and a knife in the other, was incautiously making notes of his
emphatic pauses on that excellent specimen of _marzolino_; and elderly
market-women, with their egg-baskets in a dangerously oblique position,
contributed a wailing fugue of invocation.
In this general distraction, the Florentine boys, who were never
wanting in any street scene, and were of an especially mischievous
sort—as who should say, very sour crabs indeed—saw a great opportunity.
Some made a rush at the nuts and dried figs, others preferred the
farinaceous delicacies at the cooked provision stalls—delicacies to
which certain four-footed dogs also, who had learned to take kindly to
Lenten fare, applied a discriminating nostril, and then disappeared
with much rapidity under the nearest shelter; while the mules, not
without some kicking and plunging among impeding baskets, were
stretching their muzzles towards the aromatic green-meat.
“Diavolo!” said Bratti, as he and his companion came, quite unnoticed,
upon the noisy scene; “the Mercato is gone as mad as if the most Holy
Father had excommunicated us again. I must know what this is. But never
fear: it seems a thousand years to you till you see the pretty Tessa,
and get your cup of milk; but keep hold of me, and I’ll hold to my
bargain. Remember, I’m to have the first bid for your suit, specially
for the hose, which, with all their stains, are the best _panno di
garbo_—as good as ruined, though, with mud and weather stains.”
“Ola, Monna Trecca,” Bratti proceeded, turning towards an old woman on
the outside of the nearest group, who for the moment had suspended her
wail to listen, and shouting close in her ear: “Here are the mules
upsetting all your bunches of parsley: is the world coming to an end,
then?”
“Monna Trecca” (equivalent to “Dame Greengrocer”) turned round at this
unexpected trumpeting in her right ear, with a half-fierce,
half-bewildered look, first at the speaker, then at her disarranged
commodities, and then at the speaker again.
“A bad Easter and a bad year to you, and may you die by the sword!” she
burst out, rushing towards her stall, but directing this first volley
of her wrath against Bratti, who, without heeding the malediction,
quietly slipped into her place, within hearing of the narrative which
had been absorbing her attention; making a sign at the same time to the
younger stranger to keep near him.
“I tell you I saw it myself,” said a fat man, with a bunch of
newly-purchased leeks in his hand. “I was in Santa Maria Novella, and
saw it myself. The woman started up and threw out her arms, and cried
out and said she saw a big bull with fiery horns coming down on the
church to crush it. I saw it myself.”
“Saw what, Goro?” said a man of slim figure, whose eye twinkled rather
roguishly. He wore a close jerkin, a skull-cap lodged carelessly over
his left ear as if it had fallen there by chance, a delicate linen
apron tucked up on one side, and a razor stuck in his belt. “Saw the
bull, or only the woman?”
“Why, the woman, to be sure; but it’s all one, _mi pare_: it doesn’t
alter the meaning—_va_!” answered the fat man, with some contempt.
“Meaning? no, no; that’s clear enough,” said several voices at once,
and then followed a confusion of tongues, in which “Lights shooting
over San Lorenzo for three nights together”—“Thunder in the clear
starlight”—“Lantern of the Duomo struck with the sword of Saint
Michael”—“_Palle_” (Arms of the Medici)—“All smashed”—“Lions tearing
each other to pieces”—“Ah! and they might well”—“_Boto_[1] _caduto in
Santissima Nunziata_!”—“Died like the best of Christians”—“God will
have pardoned him”—were often-repeated phrases, which shot across each
other like storm-driven hailstones, each speaker feeling rather the
necessity of utterance than of finding a listener. Perhaps the only
silent members of the group were Bratti, who, as a new-comer, was busy
in mentally piecing together the flying fragments of information; the
man of the razor; and a thin-lipped, eager-looking personage in
spectacles, wearing a pen-and-ink case at his belt.
[1] A votive image of Lorenzo, in wax, hung up in the Church of the
Annunziata, supposed to have fallen at the time of his death. _Boto_
is popular Tuscan for _Voto_.
“_Ebbene_, Nello,” said Bratti, skirting the group till he was within
hearing of the barber. “It appears the Magnifico is dead—rest his
soul!—and the price of wax will rise?”
“Even as you say,” answered Nello; and then added, with an air of extra
gravity, but with marvellous rapidity, “and his waxen image in the
Nunziata fell at the same moment, they say; or at some other time,
whenever it pleases the Frati Serviti, who know best. And several cows
and women have had still-born calves this Quaresima; and for the bad
eggs that have been broken since the Carnival, nobody has counted them.
Ah! a great man—a great politician—a greater poet than Dante. And yet
the cupola didn’t fall, only the lantern. _Che miracolo_!”
A sharp and lengthened “Pst!” was suddenly heard darting across the
pelting storm of gutturals. It came from the pale man in spectacles,
and had the effect he intended; for the noise ceased, and all eyes in
the group were fixed on him with a look of expectation.
“’Tis well said you Florentines are blind,” he began, in an incisive
high voice. “It appears to me, you need nothing but a diet of hay to
make cattle of you. What! do you think the death of Lorenzo is the
scourge God has prepared for Florence? Go! you are sparrows chattering
praise over the dead hawk. What! a man who was trying to slip a noose
over every neck in the Republic that he might tighten it at his
pleasure! You like that; you like to have the election of your
magistrates turned into closet-work, and no man to use the rights of a
citizen unless he is a Medicean. That is what is meant by qualification
now: _netto di specchio_[2] no longer means that a man pays his dues to
the Republic: it means that he’ll wink at robbery of the people’s
money—at robbery of their daughters’ dowries; that he’ll play the
chamberer and the philosopher by turns—listen to bawdy songs at the
Carnival and cry ‘Bellissimi!’—and listen to sacred lauds and cry again
‘Bellissimi!’ But this is what you love: you grumble and raise a riot
over your _quattrini bianchi_” (white farthings); “but you take no
notice when the public treasury has got a hole in the bottom for the
gold to run into Lorenzo’s drains. You like to pay for footmen to walk
before and behind one of your citizens, that he may be affable and
condescending to you. ‘See, what a tall Pisan we keep,’ say you, ‘to
march before him with the drawn sword flashing in our eyes!—and yet
Lorenzo smiles at us. What goodness!’ And you think the death of a man,
who would soon have saddled and bridled you as the Sforza has saddled
and bridled Milan—you think his death is the scourge God is warning you
of by portents. I tell you there is another sort of scourge in the
air.”
[2] The phrase used to express the absence of disqualification—i.e.,
the not being entered as a debtor in the public book—_specchio_.
“Nay, nay, Ser Cioni, keep astride your politics, and never mount your
prophecy; politics is the better horse,” said Nello. “But if you talk
of portents, what portent can be greater than a pious notary? Balaam’s
ass was nothing to it.”
“Ay, but a notary out of work, with his inkbottle dry,” said another
bystander, very much out at elbows. “Better don a cowl at once, Ser
Cioni: everybody will believe in your fasting.”
The notary turned and left the group with a look of indignant contempt,
disclosing, as he did so, the sallow but mild face of a short man who
had been standing behind him, and whose bent shoulders told of some
sedentary occupation.
“By San Giovanni, though,” said the fat purchaser of leeks, with the
air of a person rather shaken in his theories, “I am not sure there
isn’t some truth in what Ser Cioni says. For I know I have good reason
to find fault with the _quattrini bianchi_ myself. Grumble, did he say?
Suffocation! I should think we do grumble; and, let anybody say the
word, I’ll turn out into the piazza with the readiest, sooner than have
our money altered in our hands as if the magistracy were so many
necromancers. And it’s true Lorenzo might have hindered such work if he
would—and for the bull with the flaming horns, why, as Ser Cioni says,
there may be many meanings to it, for the matter of that; it may have
more to do with the taxes than we think. For when God above sends a
sign, it’s not to be supposed he’d have only one meaning.”
“Spoken like an oracle, Goro!” said the barber. “Why, when we poor
mortals can pack two or three meanings into one sentence, it were mere
blasphemy not to believe that your miraculous bull means everything
that any man in Florence likes it to mean.”
“Thou art pleased to scoff, Nello,” said the sallow, round-shouldered
man, no longer eclipsed by the notary, “but it is not the less true
that every revelation, whether by visions, dreams, portents, or the
written word, has many meanings, which it is given to the illuminated
only to unfold.”
“Assuredly,” answered Nello. “Haven’t I been to hear the Frate in San
Lorenzo? But then, I’ve been to hear Fra Menico in the Duomo too; and
according to him, your Fra Girolamo, with his visions and
interpretations, is running after the wind of Mongibello, and those who
follow him are like to have the fate of certain swine that ran headlong
into the sea—or some hotter place. With San Domenico roaring _è vero_
in one ear, and San Francisco screaming _è falso_ in the other, what is
a poor barber to do—unless he were illuminated? But it’s plain our Goro
here is beginning to be illuminated for he already sees that the bull
with the flaming horns means first himself, and secondly all the other
aggrieved taxpayers of Florence, who are determined to gore the
magistracy on the first opportunity.”
“Goro is a fool!” said a bass voice, with a note that dropped like the
sound of a great bell in the midst of much tinkling. “Let him carry
home his leeks and shake his flanks over his wool-beating. He’ll mend
matters more that way than by showing his tun-shaped body in the
piazza, as if everybody might measure his grievances by the size of his
paunch. The burdens that harm him most are his heavy carcass and his
idleness.”
The speaker had joined the group only in time to hear the conclusion of
Nello’s speech, but he was one of those figures for whom all the world
instinctively makes way, as it would for a battering-ram. He was not
much above the middle height, but the impression of enormous force
which was conveyed by his capacious chest and brawny arms bared to the
shoulder, was deepened by the keen sense and quiet resolution expressed
in his glance and in every furrow of his cheek and brow. He had often
been an unconscious model to Domenico Ghirlandajo, when that great
painter was making the walls of the churches reflect the life of
Florence, and translating pale aerial traditions into the deep colour
and strong lines of the faces he knew. The naturally dark tint of his
skin was additionally bronzed by the same powdery deposit that gave a
polished black surface to his leathern apron: a deposit which habit had
probably made a necessary condition of perfect ease, for it was not
washed off with punctilious regularity.
Goro turned his fat cheek and glassy eye on the frank speaker with a
look of deprecation rather than of resentment.
“Why, Niccolò,” he said, in an injured tone, “I’ve heard you sing to
another tune than that, often enough, when you’ve been laying down the
law at San Gallo on a festa. I’ve heard you say yourself, that a man
wasn’t a mill-wheel, to be on the grind, grind, as long as he was
driven, and then stick in his place without stirring when the water was
low. And you’re as fond of your vote as any man in Florence—ay, and
I’ve heard you say, if Lorenzo—”
“Yes, yes,” said Niccolò. “Don’t you be bringing up my speeches again
after you’ve swallowed them, and handing them about as if they were
none the worse. I vote and I speak when there’s any use in it: if
there’s hot metal on the anvil, I lose no time before I strike; but I
don’t spend good hours in tinkling on cold iron, or in standing on the
pavement as thou dost, Goro, with snout upward, like a pig under an
oak-tree. And as for Lorenzo—dead and gone before his time—he was a man
who had an eye for curious iron-work; and if anybody says he wanted to
make himself a tyrant, I say, ‘_Sia_; I’ll not deny which way the wind
blows when every man can see the weathercock.’ But that only means that
Lorenzo was a crested hawk, and there are plenty of hawks without
crests whose claws and beaks are as good for tearing. Though if there
was any chance of a real reform, so that Marzocco (the stone Lion,
emblem of the Republic) might shake his mane and roar again, instead of
dipping his head to lick the feet of anybody that will mount and ride
him, I’d strike a good blow for it.”
“And that reform is not far off, Niccolò,” said the sallow, mild-faced
man, seizing his opportunity like a missionary among the too
light-minded heathens; “for a time of tribulation is coming, and the
scourge is at hand. And when the Church is purged of cardinals and
prelates who traffic in her inheritance that their hands may be full to
pay the price of blood and to satisfy their own lusts, the State will
be purged too—and Florence will be purged of men who love to see
avarice and lechery under the red hat and the mitre because it gives
them the screen of a more hellish vice than their own.”
“Ay, as Goro’s broad body would be a screen for my narrow person in
case of missiles,” said Nello; “but if that excellent screen happened
to fall, I were stifled under it, surely enough. That is no bad image
of thine, Nanni—or, rather, of the Frate’s; for I fancy there is no
room in the small cup of thy understanding for any other liquor than
what he pours into it.”
“And it were well for thee, Nello,” replied Nanni, “if thou couldst
empty thyself of thy scoffs and thy jests, and take in that liquor too.
The warning is ringing in the ears of all men: and it’s no new story;
for the Abbot Joachim prophesied of the coming time three hundred years
ago, and now Fra Girolamo has got the message afresh. He has seen it in
a vision, even as the prophets of old: he has seen the sword hanging
from the sky.”
“Ay, and thou wilt see it thyself, Nanni, if thou wilt stare upward
long enough,” said Niccolò; “for that pitiable tailor’s work of thine
makes thy noddle so overhang thy legs, that thy eyeballs can see nought
above the stitching-board but the roof of thy own skull.”
The honest tailor bore the jest without bitterness, bent on convincing
his hearers of his doctrine rather than of his dignity. But Niccolò
gave him no opportunity for replying; for he turned away to the pursuit
of his market business, probably considering further dialogue as a
tinkling on cold iron.
“_Ebbene_” said the man with the hose round his neck, who had lately
migrated from another knot of talkers, “they are safest who cross
themselves and jest at nobody. Do you know that the Magnifico sent for
the Frate at the last, and couldn’t die without his blessing?”
“Was it so—in truth?” said several voices. “Yes, yes—God will have
pardoned him.”
“He died like the best of Christians.”
“Never took his eyes from the holy crucifix.”
“And the Frate will have given him his blessing?”
“Well, I know no more,” said he of the hosen, “only Guccio there met a
footman going back to Careggi, and he told him the Frate had been sent
for yesternight, after the Magnifico had confessed and had the holy
sacraments.”
“It’s likely enough the Frate will tell the people something about it
in his sermon this morning; is it not true, Nanni?” said Goro. “What do
you think?”
But Nanni had already turned his back on Goro, and the group was
rapidly thinning; some being stirred by the impulse to go and hear “new
things” from the Frate (“new things” were the nectar of Florentines);
others by the sense that it was time to attend to their private
business. In this general movement, Bratti got close to the barber, and
said—
“Nello, you’ve a ready tongue of your own, and are used to worming
secrets out of people when you’ve once got them well lathered. I picked
up a stranger this morning as I was coming in from Rovezzano, and I can
spell him out no better than I can the letters on that scarf I bought
from the French cavalier. It isn’t my wits are at fault,—I want no man
to help me tell peas from paternosters,—but when you come to foreign
fashions, a fool may happen to know more than a wise man.”
“Ay, thou hast the wisdom of Midas, who could turn rags and rusty nails
into gold, even as thou dost,” said Nello, “and he had also something
of the ass about him. But where is thy bird of strange plumage?”
Bratti was looking round, with an air of disappointment.
“Diavolo!” he said, with some vexation. “The bird’s flown. It’s true he
was hungry, and I forgot him. But we shall find him in the Mercato,
within scent of bread and savours, I’ll answer for him.”
“Let us make the round of the Mercato, then,” said Nello.
“It isn’t his feathers that puzzle me,” continued Bratti, as they
pushed their way together. “There isn’t much in the way of cut and
cloth on this side the Holy Sepulchre that can puzzle a Florentine.”
“Or frighten him either,” said Nello, “after he has seen an Englander
or a German.”
“No, no,” said Bratti, cordially; “one may never lose sight of the
Cupola and yet know the world, I hope. Besides, this stranger’s clothes
are good Italian merchandise, and the hose he wears were dyed in
Ognissanti before ever they were dyed with salt water, as he says. But
the riddle about him is—”
Here Bratti’s explanation was interrupted by some jostling as they
reached one of the entrances of the piazza, and before he could resume
it they had caught sight of the enigmatical object they were in search
of.