A Face in the Crowd.
It is easy to northern people to rise early on Midsummer morning, to
see the dew on the grassy edge of the dusty pathway, to notice the
fresh shoots among the darker green of the oak and fir in the coppice,
and to look over the gate at the shorn meadow, without recollecting
that it is the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist.
Not so to the Florentine—still less to the Florentine of the fifteenth
century: to him on that particular morning the brightness of the
eastern sun on the Arno had something special in it; the ringing of the
bells was articulate, and declared it to be the great summer festival
of Florence, the day of San Giovanni.
San Giovanni had been the patron saint of Florence for at least eight
hundred years—ever since the time when the Lombard Queen Theodolinda
had commanded her subjects to do him peculiar honour; nay, says old
Villani, to the best of his knowledge, ever since the days of
Constantino the Great and Pope Sylvester, when the Florentines deposed
their idol Mars, whom they were nevertheless careful not to treat with
contumely; for while they consecrated their beautiful and noble temple
to the honour of God and of the “Beato Messere Santo Giovanni,” they
placed old Mars respectfully on a high tower near the River Arno,
finding in certain ancient memorials that he had been elected as their
tutelar deity under such astral influences that if he were broken, or
otherwise treated with indignity, the city would suffer great damage
and mutation. But in the fifteenth century that discreet regard to the
feelings of the Man-destroyer had long vanished: the god of the spear
and shield had ceased to frown by the side of the Arno, and the
defences of the Republic were held to lie in its craft and its coffers.
For spear and shield could be hired by gold florins, and on the gold
florins there had always been the image of San Giovanni.
Much good had come to Florence since the dim time of struggle between
the old patron and the new: some quarrelling and bloodshed, doubtless,
between Guelf and Ghibelline, between Black and White, between orthodox
sons of the Church and heretic Paterini; some floods, famine, and
pestilence; but still much wealth and glory. Florence had achieved
conquests over walled cities once mightier than itself, and especially
over hated Pisa, whose marble buildings were too high and beautiful,
whose masts were too much honoured on Greek and Italian coasts. The
name of Florence had been growing prouder and prouder in all the courts
of Europe, nay, in Africa itself, on the strength of purest gold
coinage, finest dyes and textures, pre-eminent scholarship and poetic
genius, and wits of the most serviceable sort for statesmanship and
banking: it was a name so omnipresent that a Pope with a turn for
epigram had called Florentines “the fifth element.” And for this high
destiny, though it might partly depend on the stars and Madonna dell’
Impruneta, and certainly depended on other higher Powers less often
named, the praise was greatly due to San Giovanni, whose image was on
the fair gold florins.
Therefore it was fitting that the day of San Giovanni—that ancient
Church festival already venerable in the days of Saint Augustine—should
be a day of peculiar rejoicing to Florence, and should be ushered in by
a vigil duly kept in strict old Florentine fashion, with much dancing,
with much street jesting, and perhaps with not a little stone-throwing
and window-breaking, but emphatically with certain street sights such
as could only be provided by a city which held in its service a clever
Cecca, engineer and architect, valuable alike in sieges and in shows.
By the help of Cecca, the very saints, surrounded with their
almond-shaped glory, and floating on clouds with their joyous
companionship of winged cherubs, even as they may be seen to this day
in the pictures of Perugino, seemed, on the eve of San Giovanni, to
have brought their piece of the heavens down into the narrow streets,
and to pass slowly through them; and, more wonderful still, saints of
gigantic size, with attendant angels, might be seen, not seated, but
moving in a slow mysterious manner along the streets, like a procession
of colossal figures come down from the high domes and tribunes of the
churches. The clouds were made of good woven stuff, the saints and
cherubs were unglorified mortals supported by firm bars, and those
mysterious giants were really men of very steady brain, balancing
themselves on stilts, and enlarged, like Greek tragedians, by huge
masks and stuffed shoulders; but he was a miserably unimaginative
Florentine who thought only of that—nay, somewhat impious, for in the
images of sacred things was there not some of the virtue of sacred
things themselves? And if, after that, there came a company of merry
black demons well armed with claws and thongs, and other implements of
sport, ready to perform impromptu farces of bastinadoing and
clothes-tearing, why, that was the demons’ way of keeping a vigil, and
they, too, might have descended from the domes and the tribunes. The
Tuscan mind slipped from the devout to the burlesque, as readily as
water round an angle; and the saints had already had their turn, had
gone their way, and made their due pause before the gates of San
Giovanni, to do him honour on the eve of his _festa_. And on the
morrow, the great day thus ushered in, it was fitting that the
tributary symbols paid to Florence by all its dependent cities,
districts, and villages, whether conquered, protected, or of immemorial
possession, should be offered at the shrine of San Giovanni in the old
octagonal church, once the cathedral and now the baptistery, where
every Florentine had had the sign of the Cross made with the anointing
chrism on his brow; that all the city, from the white-haired man to the
stripling, and from the matron to the lisping child, should be clothed
in its best to do honour to the great day, and see the great sight; and
that again, when the sun was sloping and the streets were cool, there
should be the glorious race or Corso, when the unsaddled horses,
clothed in rich trappings, should run right across the city, from the
Porta al Prato on the north-west, through the Mercato Vecchio, to the
Porta Santa Croce on the south-east, where the richest of _Palii_, or
velvet and brocade banners with silk linings and fringe of gold, such
as became a city that half-clothed the well-dressed world, were mounted
on a triumphal car awaiting the winner or winner’s owner.
And thereafter followed more dancing; nay, through the whole day, says
an old chronicler at the beginning of that century, there were weddings
and the grandest gatherings, with so much piping, music and song, with
balls and feasts and gladness and ornament, that this earth might have
been mistaken for Paradise!
In this year of 1492, it was, perhaps, a little less easy to make that
mistake. Lorenzo the magnificent and subtle was dead, and an arrogant,
incautious Piero was come in his room, an evil change for Florence,
unless, indeed, the wise horse prefers the bad rider, as more easily
thrown from the saddle, and already the regrets for Lorenzo were
getting less predominant over the murmured desire for government on a
broader basis, in which corruption might be arrested, and there might
be that free play for everybody’s jealousy and ambition, which made the
ideal liberty of the good old quarrelsome, struggling times, when
Florence raised her great buildings, reared her own soldiers, drove out
would-be tyrants at the sword’s point, and was proud to keep faith at
her own loss. Lorenzo was dead, Pope Innocent was dying, and a
troublesome Neapolitan succession, with an intriguing, ambitious Milan,
might set Italy by the ears before long: the times were likely to be
difficult. Still, there was all the more reason that the Republic
should keep its religious festivals.
And Midsummer morning, in this year 1492, was not less bright than
usual. It was betimes in the morning that the symbolic offerings to be
carried in grand procession were all assembled at their starting-point
in the Piazza della Signoria—that famous piazza, where stood then, and
stand now, the massive turreted Palace of the People, called the
Palazzo Vecchio, and the spacious Loggia, built by Orcagna—the scene of
all grand State ceremonial. The sky made the fairest blue tent, and
under it the bells swung so vigorously that every evil spirit with
sense enough to be formidable, must long since have taken his flight;
windows and terraced roofs were alive with human faces; sombre stone
houses were bright with hanging draperies; the boldly soaring palace
tower, the yet older square tower of the Bargello, and the spire of the
neighbouring Badia, seemed to keep watch above; and below, on the broad
polygonal flags of the piazza, was the glorious show of banners, and
horses with rich trappings, and gigantic _ceri_, or tapers, that were
fitly called towers—strangely aggrandised descendants of those torches
by whose faint light the Church worshipped in the Catacombs. Betimes in
the morning all processions had need to move under the Midsummer sky of
Florence, where the shelter of the narrow streets must every now and
then be exchanged for the glare of wide spaces; and the sun would be
high up in the heavens before the long pomp had ended its pilgrimage in
the Piazza di San Giovanni.
But here, where the procession was to pause, the magnificent city, with
its ingenious Cecca, had provided another tent than the sky; for the
whole of the Piazza del Duomo, from the octagonal baptistery in the
centre to the façade of the cathedral and the walls of the houses on
the other sides of the quadrangle, was covered, at the height of forty
feet or more, with blue drapery, adorned with well-stitched yellow
lilies and the familiar coats of arms, while sheaves of many-coloured
banners drooped at fit angles under this superincumbent blue—a gorgeous
rainbow-lit shelter to the waiting spectators who leaned from the
windows, and made a narrow border on the pavement, and wished for the
coming of the show.
One of these spectators was Tito Melema. Bright, in the midst of
brightness, he sat at the window of the room above Nello’s shop, his
right elbow resting on the red drapery hanging from the window-sill,
and his head supported in a backward position by the right-hand, which
pressed the curls against his ear. His face wore that bland liveliness,
as far removed from excitability as from heaviness or gloom, which
marks the companion popular alike amongst men and women—the companion
who is never obtrusive or noisy from uneasy vanity or excessive animal
spirits, and whose brow is never contracted by resentment or
indignation. He showed no other change from the two months and more
that had passed since his first appearance in the weather-stained tunic
and hose, than that added radiance of good fortune, which is like the
just perceptible perfecting of a flower after it has drunk a morning’s
sunbeams. Close behind him, ensconced in the narrow angle between his
chair and the window-frame, stood the slim figure of Nello in holiday
suit, and at his left the younger Cennini—Pietro, the erudite corrector
of proof-sheets, not Domenico the practical. Tito was looking
alternately down on the scene below, and upward at the varied knot of
gazers and talkers immediately around him, some of whom had come in
after witnessing the commencement of the procession in the Piazza della
Signoria. Piero di Cosimo was raising a laugh among them by his
grimaces and anathemas at the noise of the bells, against which no kind
of ear-stuffing was a sufficient barricade, since the more he stuffed
his ears the more he felt the vibration of his skull; and declaring
that he would bury himself in the most solitary spot of the Valdarno on
a _festa_, if he were not condemned, as a painter, to lie in wait for
the secrets of colour that were sometimes to be caught from the
floating of banners and the chance grouping of the multitude.
Tito had just turned his laughing face away from the whimsical painter
to look down at the small drama going on among the checkered border of
spectators, when at the angle of the marble steps in front of the
Duomo, nearly opposite Nello’s shop, he saw a man’s face upturned
towards him, and fixing on him a gaze that seemed to have more meaning
in it than the ordinary passing observation of a stranger. It was a
face with tonsured head, that rose above the black mantle and white
tunic of a Dominican friar—a very common sight in Florence; but the
glance had something peculiar in it for Tito. There was a faint
suggestion in it, certainly not of an unpleasant kind. Yet what
pleasant association had he ever had with monks? None. The glance and
the suggestion hardly took longer than a flash of lightning.
“Nello!” said Tito, hastily, but immediately added, in a tone of
disappointment, “Ah, he has turned round. It was that tall, thin friar
who is going up the steps. I wanted you to tell me if you knew aught of
him?”
“One of the Frati Predicatori,” said Nello, carelessly; “you don’t
expect me to know the private history of the crows.”
“I seem to remember something about his face,” said Tito. “It is an
uncommon face.”
“What? you thought it might be our Fra Girolamo? Too tall; and he never
shows himself in that chance way.”
“Besides, that loud-barking ‘hound of the Lord’[1] is not in Florence
just now,” said Francesco Cei, the popular poet; “he has taken Piero
de’ Medici’s hint, to carry his railing prophecies on a journey for a
while.”
[1] A play on the name of the Dominicans (_Domini Canes_) which was
accepted by themselves, and which is pictorially represented in a
fresco painted for them by Simone Memmi.
“The Frate neither rails nor prophesies against any man,” said a
middle-aged personage seated at the other corner of the window; “he
only prophesies against vice. If you think that an attack on your
poems, Francesco, it is not the Frate’s fault.”
“Ah, he’s gone into the Duomo now,” said Tito, who had watched the
figure eagerly. “No, I was not under that mistake, Nello. Your Fra
Girolamo has a high nose and a large under-lip. I saw him once—he is
not handsome; but this man...”
“Truce to your descriptions!” said Cennini. “Hark! see! Here come the
horsemen and the banners. That standard,” he continued, laying his hand
familiarly on Tito’s shoulder,—“that carried on the horse with white
trappings—that with the red eagle holding the green dragon between his
talons, and the red lily over the eagle—is the Gonfalon of the Guelf
party, and those cavaliers close round it are the chief officers of the
Guelf party. That is one of our proudest banners, grumble as we may; it
means the triumph of the Guelfs, which means the triumph of Florentine
will, which means triumph of the popolani.”
“Nay, go on, Cennini,” said the middle-aged man, seated at the window,
“which means triumph of the fat popolani over the lean, which again
means triumph of the fattest popolano over those who are less fat.”
“Cronaca, you are becoming sententious,” said the printer; “Fra
Girolamo’s preaching will spoil you, and make you take life by the
wrong handle. Trust me, your cornices will lose half their beauty if
you begin to mingle bitterness with them; that is the _maniera Tedesca_
which you used to declaim against when you came from Rome. The next
palace you build we shall see you trying to put the Frate’s doctrine
into stone.”
“That is a goodly show of cavaliers,” said Tito, who had learned by
this time the best way to please Florentines; “but are there not
strangers among them? I see foreign costumes.”
“Assuredly,” said Cennini; “you see there the Orators from France,
Milan, and Venice, and behind them are English and German nobles; for
it is customary that all foreign visitors of distinction pay their
tribute to San Giovanni in the train of that gonfalon. For my part, I
think our Florentine cavaliers sit their horses as well as any of those
cut-and-thrust northerners, whose wits lie in their heels and saddles;
and for yon Venetian, I fancy he would feel himself more at ease on the
back of a dolphin. We ought to know something of horsemanship, for we
excel all Italy in the sports of the Giostra, and the money we spend on
them. But you will see a finer show of our chief men by-and-by, Melema;
my brother himself will be among the officers of the Zecca.”
“The banners are the better sight,” said Piero di Cosimo, forgetting
the noise in his delight at the winding stream of colour as the
tributary standards advanced round the piazza. “The Florentine men are
so-so; they make but a sorry show at this distance with their patch of
sallow flesh-tint above the black garments; but those banners with
their velvet, and satin, and minever, and brocade, and their endless
play of delicate light and shadow!—_Va_! your human talk and doings are
a tame jest; the only passionate life is in form and colour.”
“Ay, Piero, if Satanasso could paint, thou wouldst sell thy soul to
learn his secrets,” said Nello. “But there is little likelihood of it,
seeing the blessed angels themselves are such poor hands at
chiaroscuro, if one may judge from their _capo-d’opera_, the Madonna
Nunziata.”
“There go the banners of Pisa and Arezzo,” said Cennini. “Ay, Messer
Pisano, it is no use for you to look sullen; you may as well carry your
banner to our San Giovanni with a good grace. ‘Pisans false,
Florentines blind’—the second half of that proverb will hold no longer.
There come the ensigns of our subject towns and signories, Melema; they
will all be suspended in San Giovanni until this day next year, when
they will give place to new ones.”
“They are a fair sight,” said Tito; “and San Giovanni will surely be as
well satisfied with that produce of Italian looms as Minerva with her
peplos, especially as he contents himself with so little drapery. But
my eyes are less delighted with those whirling towers, which would soon
make me fall from the window in sympathetic vertigo.”
The “towers” of which Tito spoke were a part of the procession esteemed
very glorious by the Florentine populace; and being perhaps chiefly a
kind of hyperbole for the all-efficacious wax taper, were also called
_ceri_. But inasmuch as hyperbole is impracticable in a real and
literal fashion, these gigantic _ceri_, some of them so large as to be
of necessity carried on wheels, were not solid but hollow, and had
their surface made not solely of wax, but of wood and pasteboard,
gilded, carved, and painted, as real sacred tapers often are, with
successive circles of figures—warriors on horseback, foot-soldiers with
lance and shield, dancing maidens, animals, trees and fruits, and in
fine, says the old chronicler, “all things that could delight the eye
and the heart;” the hollowness having the further advantage that men
could stand inside these hyperbolic tapers and whirl them continually,
so as to produce a phantasmagoric effect, which, considering the towers
were numerous, must have been calculated to produce dizziness on a
truly magnificent scale.
“_Pestilenza_!” said Piero di Cosimo, moving from the window, “those
whirling circles one above the other are worse than the jangling of all
the bells. Let me know when the last taper has passed.”
“Nay, you will surely like to be called when the contadini come
carrying their torches,” said Nello; “you would not miss the
country-folk of the Mugello and the Casentino, of whom your favourite
Leonardo would make a hundred grotesque sketches.”
“No,” said Piero, resolutely, “I will see nothing till the car of the
Zecca comes. I have seen clowns enough holding tapers aslant, both with
and without cowls, to last me for my life.”
“Here it comes, then, Piero—the car of the Zecca,” called out Nello,
after an interval during which towers and tapers in a descending scale
of size had been making their slow transit.
“_Fediddio_!” exclaimed Francesco Cei, “that is a well-tanned San
Giovanni! some sturdy Romagnole beggar-man, I’ll warrant. Our Signoria
plays the host to all the Jewish and Christian scum that every other
city shuts its gates against, and lets them fatten on us like Saint
Anthony’s swine.”
The car of the Zecca or Mint, which had just rolled into sight, was
originally an immense wooden tower or _cero_ adorned after the same
fashion as the other tributary _ceri_, mounted on a splendid car, and
drawn by two mouse-coloured oxen, whose mild heads looked out from rich
trappings bearing the arms of the Zecca. But the latter half of the
century was getting rather ashamed of the towers with their circular or
spiral paintings, which had delighted the eyes and the hearts of the
other half, so that they had become a contemptuous proverb, and any
ill-painted figure looking, as will sometimes happen to figures in the
best ages of art, as if it had been boned for a pie, was called a
_fantoccio da cero_, a tower-puppet; consequently improved taste, with
Cecca to help it, had devised for the magnificent Zecca a triumphal car
like a pyramidal catafalque, with ingenious wheels warranted to turn
all corners easily. Round the base were living figures of saints and
angels arrayed in sculpturesque fashion; and on the summit, at the
height of thirty feet, well bound to an iron rod and holding an iron
cross also firmly infixed, stood a living representative of Saint John
the Baptist, with arms and legs bare, a garment of tiger-skins about
his body, and a golden nimbus fastened on his head—as the Precursor was
wont to appear in the cloisters and churches, not having yet revealed
himself to painters as the brown and sturdy boy who made one of the
Holy Family. For where could the image of the patron saint be more
fitly placed than on the symbol of the Zecca? Was not the royal
prerogative of coining money the surest token that a city had won its
independence? and by the blessing of San Giovanni this “beautiful
sheepfold” of his had shown that token earliest among the Italian
cities. Nevertheless, the annual function of representing the patron
saint was not among the high prizes of public life; it was paid for
with something like ten shillings, a cake weighing fourteen pounds, two
bottles of wine, and a handsome supply of light eatables; the money
being furnished by the magnificent Zecca, and the payment in kind being
by peculiar “privilege” presented in a basket suspended on a pole from
an upper window of a private house, whereupon the eidolon of the
austere saint at once invigorated himself with a reasonable share of
the sweets and wine, threw the remnants to the crowd, and embraced the
mighty cake securely with his right arm through the remainder of his
passage. This was the attitude in which the mimic San Giovanni
presented himself as the tall car jerked and vibrated on its slow way
round the piazza to the northern gate of the Baptistery.
“There go the Masters of the Zecca, and there is my brother—you see
him, Melema?” cried Cennini, with an agreeable stirring of pride at
showing a stranger what was too familiar to be remarkable to
fellow-citizens. “Behind come the members of the Corporation of
Calimara,[2] the dealers in foreign cloth, to which we have given our
Florentine finish; men of ripe years, you see, who were matriculated
before you were born; and then comes the famous Art of Money-changers.”
[2] “Arte di Calimara,” “arte” being, in this use of it, equivalent to
corporation.
“Many of them matriculated also to the noble art of usury before you
were born,” interrupted Francesco Cei, “as you may discern by a certain
fitful glare of the eye and sharp curve of the nose which manifest
their descent from the ancient Harpies, whose portraits you saw
supporting the arms of the Zecca. Shaking off old prejudices now, such
a procession as that of some four hundred passably ugly men carrying
their tapers in open daylight, Diogenes-fashion, as if they were
looking for a lost quattrino, would make a merry spectacle for the
Feast of Fools.”
“Blaspheme not against the usages of our city,” said Pietro Cennini,
much offended. “There are new wits who think they see things more truly
because they stand on their heads to look at them, like tumblers and
mountebanks, instead of keeping the attitude of rational men. Doubtless
it makes little difference to Maestro Vaiano’s monkeys whether they see
our Donatello’s statue of Judith with their heads or their tails
uppermost.”
“Your solemnity will allow some quarter to playful fancy, I hope,” said
Cei, with a shrug, “else what becomes of the ancients, whose example
you scholars are bound to revere, Messer Pietro? Life was never
anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.”
“Keep your jest then till your end of the pole is uppermost,” said
Cennini, still angry, “and that is not when the great bond of our
Republic is expressing itself in ancient symbols, without which the
vulgar would be conscious of nothing beyond their own petty wants of
back and stomach, and never rise to the sense of community in religion
and law. There has been no great people without processions, and the
man who thinks himself too wise to be moved by them to anything but
contempt, is like the puddle that was proud of standing alone while the
river rushed by.”
No one said anything after this indignant burst of Cennini’s till he
himself spoke again.
“Hark! the trumpets of the Signoria: now comes the last stage of the
show, Melema. That is our Gonfaloniere in the middle, in the starred
mantle, with the sword carried before him. Twenty years ago we used to
see our foreign Podesta, who was our judge in civil causes, walking on
his right-hand; but our Republic has been over-doctored by clever
_Medici_. That is the Proposto (Spokesman or Moderator) of the Priori
on the left; then come the other seven Priori; then all the other
magistracies and officials of our Republic. You see your patron the
Segretario?”
“There is Messer Bernardo del Nero also,” said Tito; “his visage is a
fine and venerable one, though it has worn rather a petrifying look
towards me.”
“Ah,” said Nello, “he is the dragon that guards the remnant of old
Bardo’s gold, which, I fancy, is chiefly that virgin gold that falls
about the fair Romola’s head and shoulders; eh, my Apollino?” he added,
patting Tito’s head.
Tito had the youthful grace of blushing, but he had also the adroit and
ready speech that prevents a blush from looking like embarrassment. He
replied at once—
“And a very Pactolus it is—a stream with golden ripples. If I were an
alchemist—”
He was saved from the need for further speech by the sudden fortissimo
of drums and trumpets and fifes, bursting into the breadth of the
piazza in a grand storm of sound—a roar, a blast, and a whistling, well
befitting a city famous for its musical instruments, and reducing the
members of the closest group to a state of deaf isolation.
During this interval Nello observed Tito’s fingers moving in
recognition of some one in the crowd below, but not seeing the
direction of his glance he failed to detect the object of this
greeting—the sweet round blue-eyed face under a white hood—immediately
lost in the narrow border of heads, where there was a continual eclipse
of round contadina cheeks by the harsh-lined features or bent shoulders
of an old spadesman, and where profiles turned as sharply from north to
south as weathercocks under a shifting wind.
But when it was felt that the show was ended—when the twelve prisoners
released in honour of the day, and the very _barberi_ or race-horses,
with the arms of their owners embroidered on their cloths, had followed
up the Signoria, and been duly consecrated to San Giovanni, and every
one was moving from the window—Nello, whose Florentine curiosity was of
that lively canine sort which thinks no trifle too despicable for
investigation, put his hand on Tito’s shoulder and said—
“What acquaintance was that you were making signals to, eh, _giovane
mio_?”
“Some little contadina who probably mistook me for an acquaintance, for
she had honoured me with a greeting.”
“Or who wished to begin an acquaintance,” said Nello. “But you are
bound for the Via de’ Bardi and the feast of the Muses: there is no
counting on you for a frolic, else we might have gone in search of
adventures together in the crowd, and had some pleasant fooling in
honour of San Giovanni. But your high fortune has come on you too soon:
I don’t mean the professor’s mantle—_that_ is roomy enough to hide a
few stolen chickens, but— Messer Endymion minded his manners after that
singular good fortune of his; and what says our Luigi Pulci?
“‘Da quel giorno in qua ch’amor m’accese
Per lei son fatto e gentile e cortese.’”
“Nello, _amico mio_, thou hast an intolerable trick of making life
stale by forestalling it with thy talk,” said Tito, shrugging his
shoulders, with a look of patient resignation, which was his nearest
approach to anger: “not to mention that such ill-founded babbling would
be held a great offence by that same goddess whose humble worshipper
you are always professing yourself.”
“I will be mute,” said Nello, laying his finger on his lips, with a
responding shrug. “But it is only under our four eyes that I talk any
folly about her.”
“Pardon! you were on the verge of it just now in the hearing of others.
If you want to ruin me in the minds of Bardo and his daughter—”
“Enough, enough!” said Nello. “I am an absurd old barber. It all comes
from that abstinence of mine, in not making bad verses in my youth: for
want of letting my folly run out that way when I was eighteen, it runs
out at my tongue’s end now I am at the unseemly age of fifty. But Nello
has not got his head muffled for all that; he can see a buffalo in the
snow. _Addio, giovane mio_.”