Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection
things, wiser?
_Scaliger._ I do not know whether it would materially.
_Montaigne._ I should be an egregious fool then to care about it. Our
disputes on controverted points have filled the country with
missionaries and cut-throats. Both parties have shown a disposition to
turn this comfortable old house of mine into a fortress. If I had
inclined to either, the other would have done it. Come walk about it
with me; after a ride, you can do nothing better to take off fatigue.
_Scaliger._ A most spacious kitchen!
_Montaigne._ Look up!
_Scaliger._ You have twenty or more flitches of bacon hanging there.
_Montaigne._ And if I had been a doctor or a captain, I should have
had a cobweb and predestination in the place of them. Your soldiers of
the _religion_ on the one side, and of the _good old faith_ on the
other, would not have left unto me safe and sound even that good old
woman there.
_Scaliger._ Oh, yes! they would, I hope.
_Old Woman._ Why dost giggle, Mat? What should he know about the
business? He speaks mighty bad French, and is as spiteful as the
devil. Praised be God, we have a kind master, who thinks about us, and
feels for us.
_Scaliger._ Upon my word, M. de Montaigne, this gallery is an
interesting one.
_Montaigne._ I can show you nothing but my house and my dairy. We have
no chase in the month of May, you know--unless you would like to bait
the badger in the stable. This is rare sport in rainy days.
_Scaliger._ Are you in earnest, M. de Montaigne?
_Montaigne._ No, no, no, I cannot afford to worry him outright: only a
little for pastime--a morning's merriment for the dogs and wenches.
_Scaliger._ You really are then of so happy a temperament that, at
your time of life, you can be amused by baiting a badger!
_Montaigne._ Why not? Your father, a wiser and graver and older man
than I am, was amused by baiting a professor or critic. I have not a
dog in the kennel that would treat the badger worse than brave Julius
treated Cardan and Erasmus, and some dozens more. We are all childish,
old as well as young; and our very last tooth would fain stick, M. de
l'Escale, in some tender place of a neighbour. Boys laugh at a person
who falls in the dirt; men laugh rather when they make him fall, and
most when the dirt is of their own laying.
Is not the gallery rather cold, after the kitchen? We must go through
it to get into the court where I keep my tame rabbits; the stable is
hard by: come along, come along.
_Scaliger._ Permit me to look a little at those banners. Some of them
are old indeed.
_Montaigne._ Upon my word, I blush to think I never took notice how
they are tattered. I have no fewer than three women in the house, and
in a summer's evening, only two hours long, the worst of these rags
might have been darned across.
_Scaliger._ You would not have done it surely!
_Montaigne._ I am not over-thrifty; the women might have been better
employed. It is as well as it is then; ay?
_Scaliger._ I think so.
_Montaigne._ So be it.
_Scaliger._ They remind me of my own family, we being descended from
the great Cane della Scala, Prince of Verona, and from the House of
Hapsburg, as you must have heard from my father.
_Montaigne._ What signifies it to the world whether the great Cane was
tied to his grandmother or not? As for the House of Hapsburg, if you
could put together as many such houses as would make up a city larger
than Cairo, they would not be worth his study, or a sheet of paper on
the table of it.
BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA
_Boccaccio._ Remaining among us, I doubt not that you would soon
receive the same distinctions in your native country as others have
conferred upon you: indeed, in confidence I may promise it. For
greatly are the Florentines ashamed that the most elegant of their
writers and the most independent of their citizens lives in exile, by
the injustice he had suffered in the detriment done to his property,
through the intemperate administration of their laws.
_Petrarca._ Let them recall me soon and honourably: then perhaps I may
assist them to remove their ignominy, which I carry about with me
wherever I go, and which is pointed out by my exotic laurel.
_Boccaccio._ There is, and ever will be, in all countries and under
all governments, an ostracism for their greatest men.
_Petrarca._ At present we will talk no more about it. To-morrow I
pursue my journey towards Padua, where I am expected; where some few
value and esteem me, honest and learned and ingenious men; although
neither those Transpadane regions, nor whatever extends beyond them,
have yet produced an equal to Boccaccio.
_Boccaccio._ Then, in the name of friendship, do not go thither!--form
such rather from your fellow-citizens. I love my equals heartily; and
shall love them the better when I see them raised up here, from our
own mother earth, by you.
_Petrarca._ Let us continue our walk.
_Boccaccio._ If you have been delighted (and you say you have been) at
seeing again, after so long an absence, the house and garden wherein I
have placed the relaters of my stories, as reported in the _Decameron_,
come a little way farther up the ascent, and we will pass through the
vineyard on the west of the villa. You will see presently another on
the right, lying in its warm little garden close to the roadside, the
scene lately of somewhat that would have looked well, as illustration,
in the midst of your Latin reflections. It shows us that people the
most serious and determined may act at last contrariwise to the line
of conduct they have laid down.
_Petrarca._ Relate it to me, Messer Giovanni; for you are able to give
reality the merits and charms of fiction, just as easily as you give
fiction the semblance, the stature, and the movement of reality.
_Boccaccio._ I must here forgo such powers, if in good truth I possess
them.
_Petrarca._ This long green alley, defended by box and cypresses, is
very pleasant. The smell of box, although not sweet, is more agreeable
to me than many that are: I cannot say from what resuscitation of
early and tender feeling. The cypress, too, seems to strengthen the
nerves of the brain. Indeed, I delight in the odour of most trees and
plants.
Will not that dog hurt us?--he comes closer.
_Boccaccio._ Dog! thou hast the colours of a magpie and the tongue of
one; prithee be quiet: art thou not ashamed?
_Petrarca._ Verily he trots off, comforting his angry belly with his
plenteous tail, flattened and bestrewn under it. He looks back, going
on, and puffs out his upper lip without a bark.
_Boccaccio._ These creatures are more accessible to temperate and just
rebuke than the creatures of our species, usually angry with less
reason, and from no sense, as dogs are, of duty. Look into that white
arcade! Surely it was white the other day; and now I perceive it is
still so: the setting sun tinges it with yellow.
_Petrarca._ The house has nothing of either the rustic or the
magnificent about it; nothing quite regular, nothing much varied. If
there is anything at all affecting, as I fear there is, in the story
you are about to tell me, I could wish the edifice itself bore
externally some little of the interesting that I might hereafter turn
my mind toward it, looking out of the catastrophe, though not away
from it. But I do not even find the peculiar and uncostly decoration
of our Tuscan villas: the central turret, round which the kite
perpetually circles in search of pigeons or smaller prey, borne
onward, like the Flemish skater, by effortless will in motionless
progression. The view of Fiesole must be lovely from that window; but
I fancy to myself it loses the cascade under the single high arch of
the Mugnone.
_Boccaccio._ I think so. In this villa--come rather farther off: the
inhabitants of it may hear us, if they should happen to be in the
arbour, as most people are at the present hour of day--in this villa,
Messer Francesco, lives Monna Tita Monalda, who tenderly loved Amadeo
degli Oricellari. She, however, was reserved and coy; and Father
Pietro de' Pucci, an enemy to the family of Amadeo, told her nevermore
to think of him, for that, just before he knew her, he had thrown his
arm round the neck of Nunciata Righi, his mother's maid, calling her
most immodestly a sweet creature, and of a whiteness that marble would
split with envy at.
Monna Tita trembled and turned pale. 'Father, is the girl really so
very fair?' said she anxiously.
'Madonna,' replied the father, 'after confession she is not much
amiss: white she is, with a certain tint of pink not belonging to her,
but coming over her as through the wing of an angel pleased at the
holy function; and her breath is such, the very ear smells it: poor,
innocent, sinful soul! Hei! The wretch, Amadeo, would have endangered
her salvation.'
'She must be a wicked girl to let him,' said Monna Tita. 'A young man
of good parentage and education would not dare to do such a thing of
his own accord. I will see him no more, however. But it was before he
knew me: and it may not be true. I cannot think any young woman would
let a young man do so, even in the last hour before Lent. Now in what
month was it supposed to be?'
'Supposed to be!' cried the father indignantly: 'in June; I say in
June.'
'Oh! that now is quite impossible: for on the second of July,
forty-one days from this, and at this very hour of it, he swore to me
eternal love and constancy. I will inquire of him whether it is true:
I will charge him with it.'
She did. Amadeo confessed his fault, and, thinking it a venial one,
would have taken and kissed her hand as he asked forgiveness.
_Petrarca._ Children! children! I will go into the house, and if their
relatives, as I suppose, have approved of the marriage, I will
endeavour to persuade the young lady that a fault like this, on the
repentance of her lover, is not unpardonable. But first, is Amadeo a
young man of loose habits?
_Boccaccio._ Less than our others: in fact, I never heard of any
deviation, excepting this.
_Petrarca._ Come, then, with me.
_Boccaccio._ Wait a little.
_Petrarca._ I hope the modest Tita, after a trial, will not be too
severe with him.
_Boccaccio._ Severity is far from her nature; but, such is her purity
and innocence, she shed many and bitter tears at his confession, and
declared her unalterable determination of taking the veil among the
nuns of Fiesole. Amadeo fell at her feet, and wept upon them. She
pushed him from her gently, and told him she would still love him if
he would follow her example, leave the world, and become a friar of
San Marco. Amadeo was speechless; and, if he had not been so, he never
would have made a promise he intended to violate. She retired from
him. After a time he arose, less wounded than benumbed by the sharp
uncovered stones in the garden-walk; and, as a man who fears to fall
from a precipice goes farther from it than is necessary, so did Amadeo
shun the quarter where the gate is, and, oppressed by his agony and
despair, throw his arms across the sundial and rest his brow upon it,
hot as it must have been on a cloudless day in August. When the
evening was about to close, he was aroused by the cries of rooks
overhead; they flew towards Florence, and beyond; he, too, went back
into the city.
Tita fell sick from her inquietude. Every morning ere sunrise did
Amadeo return; but could hear only from the labourers in the field
that Monna Tita was ill, because she had promised to take the veil and
had not taken it, knowing, as she must do, that the heavenly
bridegroom is a bridegroom never to be trifled with, let the spouse be
young and beautiful as she may be. Amadeo had often conversed with the
peasant of the farm, who much pitied so worthy and loving a gentleman;