Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Cheer up, young lover! Your wedding day is coming, and you will soon be happy with your bride.”

  “You know very well,” said Buondelmonte, “that this marriage was a thing I could not get out of.”

  “Oh, indeed!” cried Monna Gualdrada. “As if you did not care for a pretty wife i” And then it was, we may suppose, that she hinted those things she is said to have insinuated against Reparata’s looks and her fitness otherwise for a gentleman like Buondelmonte. “If I had known you were in such haste to marry — but God’s will be done! We cannot have things as we like in this world!” And Machiavelli says that the thing Monna Gualdrada had set her heart on was Buondelmonte’s marriage with her daughter, but either through carelessness, or because she thought it would do any time, she had not mentioned it to any one.” She added, probably with an affected carelessness, that the Donati were of rather better lineage than the Amidei, though she did not know whether he would have thought her Beatrice as pretty as Reparata. Then suddenly she brought him face to face with the girl, radiantly beautiful, the most beautiful in Florence. “This is the wife I was keeping for you,” said Monna Gualdrada; and she must have known her ground well, for she let the poor young man understand that her daughter had long been secretly in love with him. Malespini tells us that Buondelmonte was tempted by a diabolical spirit to break faith at this sight; the devil accounted for a great many things then to which we should not now, perhaps, assign so black an origin. “And I would very willingly marry her,” he faltered, “if I were not bound by that solemn promise to the Amidei;” and Monna Gualdrada now plied the weak soul with such arguments and reasons, in such wise as women can use them, that he yielded, and giving his hand to Beatrice, he did not rest till they were married. Then the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and the Fifanti, and others who were outraged in their cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult to Reparata, assembled in the church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to take counsel again for vengeance. Some were of opinion that Buondelmonte should be cudgelled, and thus publicly put to shame; others that he should be wounded and disfigured in the face; but Mosca Lamberti rose and said: “There is no need of all these words. If you strike him or disfigure him, get your graves ready to hide in. Cosa fatta capo ha!” With which saying he advised them to make an end of Buondelmonte altogether. His words had the acceptance that they would now have in a Kentucky family council, and they agreed to kill Buondelmonte when he should come to fetch home his bride. On Easter morning, in the year 1215, they were waiting for him in the house of the Amidei, at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio; and when they saw him come riding, richly dressed in white, on a white palfrey, over the bridge, and “fancying,” says Machiavelli, “that such a wrong as breaking an engagement could be so easily forgotten,” they sallied out to the statue of Mars which used to be there. As Buondelmonte reached the group, — it must have been, for all his courage, with a face as white as his mantle, — Schiatta degli Uberti struck him on the head with a stick, so that he dropped stunned from his palfrey. Then Oddo di Arrigo, whom he had stabbed, and Mosca Lamberti, who had pronounced his sentence, and Lambertaccio Amidei, “and one of the Gangolandi,” ran and cut his throat There arose a terrible tumult in the city, and the girl whose fatal beauty had wrought this horror, governing herself against her woman’s weakness with supernatural strength, mounted the funeral car beside her lover’s body, and taking his head into her lap, with his blood soaking her bridal robes, was drawn through the city everywhere, crying for vengeance.

  From that hour, they tell us, the factions that had long tormented Florence took new names, and those who had sided with the Buondelmonti and the Donati for the Pope against the Emperor became Guelphs, while the partisans of the Amidei and the Empire became Ghibellines, and began that succession of reciprocal banishments which kept a good fourth of the citizens in exile for three hundred years.

  XII

  WHAT impresses one in this and the other old Florentine stories is the circumstantial minuteness with which they are told, and their report has an air of simple truth very different from the literary factitiousness which one is tempted to in following them. After six centuries the passions are as living, the characters as distinct, as if the thing happened yesterday. Each of the persons stands out a very man or woman, in that clear, strong light of the early day which they move through. From the first the Florentines were able to hit each other off with an accuracy which comes of the southern habit of living much together in public, and one cannot question these lineaments. Buondelmonte, Mosca Lamberti, Monna Gualdrada, and even that “one of the Gangolandi,” how they possess the imagination! Their palaces still rise there in the grim, narrow streets, and seem no older in that fine Florentine air than houses of fifty years ago elsewhere. They were long since set apart, of course, to other uses. The chief palace of the Buondelmonti is occupied by an insurance company; there is a little shop for the sale of fruit and vegetables niched into the grand Gothic portal of the tower, and one is pushed in among the pears and endives by the carts which take up the whole street from wall to wall in passing. The Lamberti palace was confiscated by the Guelph party, and was long used by the Art of Silk for its guild meetings. Now it is a fire-engine house, where a polite young lieutenant left his architectural drawings to show us some frescos of Giotto lately uncovered there over an old doorway.

  Over a portal outside the arms of the guild were beautifully carved by Donatello, as you may still see; and in a lofty angle of the palace the exquisite loggia of the family shows its columns and balustrade against the blue sky.

  I say blue sky for the sake of the colour, and because that is expected of one in mentioning the Florentine sky, but, as a matter of fact, I do not believe it was blue half a dozen days during the winter of 1882-83. The prevailing weather was gray, and down in the passages about the bases of these mediaeval structures the sun never struck, and the point of the mediæval nose must always have been very cold from the end of November till the beginning of April.

  The tradition of an older life continues into the present everywhere; only in Italy it is a little more evident, and one realizes in the discomfort of the poor, who have succeeded to these dark and humid streets, the discomfort of the rich who once inhabited them, and whose cast-off manners have been left there. Monna Gualdrada would not now call out to Buondelmonte riding under her window, and make him come in and see her beautiful daughter; but a woman of the class which now peoples the old Donati houses might do it.

  I walked through the Borgo Santi Apostoli for the last time late in March, and wandered round in the winter, still lingering in that wonderful old nest of palaces, before I came out into the cheerful bustle of Por San Maria, the street which projects the glitter of its jewellers’ shops quite across the Ponte Vecchio. One of these, on the left corner, just before you reach the bridge, is said to occupy the site of the loggia of the Amidei; and if you are young and strong, you may still see them waiting there for Buondelmonte. But my eyes are not very good any more, and I saw only the amiable modern Florentine crowd, swollen by a vast number of English and American tourists, who at this season begin to come up from Rome. There are a good many antiquarian and bric-a-brac shops in Por San Maria; but the towers which the vanished families used to fight from have been torn down, so that there is comparatively little danger from a chance bolt there.

  XIII

  ONE of the furious Ghibelline houses of this quarter were the Gherardini, who are said to have become the Fitzgeralds of Ireland, whither they went in their exile, and where they enjoyed their fighting privileges long after those of their friends and acquaintances remaining in Florence had been cut off. The city annals would no doubt tell us what end the Amidei and the Lamberti made; from the Uberti came the great Farinati, who, in exile with the other Ghibellines, refused with magnificent disdain to join them in the destruction of Florence. But the history of the Buondelmonti has become part of the history of the world. One branch of the family migrated from Tuscany to Co
rsica, where they changed their name to Buonaparte, and from them came the great Napoleon. As to that “one of the Gangolandi,” he teases me into vain conjecture, lurking in the covert of his family name, an elusive personality which I wish some poet would divine for us. The Donati afterward made a marriage which brought them into as lasting remembrance as the Buondelmonti; and one visits their palaces for the sake of Dante rather than Napoleon. They enclose, with the Alighieri house in which the poet was born, ‘the little Piazza Donati, which you reach by going up the Corso to the Borgo degli Albizzi, and over against them on that street the house of the Portinari stood, where Beatrice lived, and where it must have been that she first appeared to the rapt boy who was to be the world’s Dante, “clothed in a most noble colour, a modest and becoming crimson, garlanded and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age.” The palace of the Salviati — in which Cosimo I. was born, and in which his father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, taught the child courage by flinging him from an upper window into the arms of a servitor below — has long occupied the site of the older edifice; and the Piazza Donati, whatever dignity it may once have had, is now nothing better than a shabby court. The back windows of the tall houses surrounding it look into it when not looking into one another, and see there a butcher’s shop, a smithy, a wagon-maker’s, and an inn for peasants with stabling. On a day when I was there, a wash stretched fluttering across the rear of Dante’s house, and the banner of a green vine trailed from a loftier balcony. From one of the Donati casements an old woman in a purple knit jacket was watching a man repainting an omnibus in front of the wagon-shop; a great number of canaries sang in cages all round the piazza; a wrinkled peasant with a faded green cotton umbrella under his arm gave the place an effect of rustic sojourn; and a diligence that two playful stable-boys were long in hitching up drove jingling out, with its horses in brass-studded head-stalls, past where I stood under the fine old arches of the gateway. I had nothing to object to all this, nor do I suppose that this last state of his old neighbourhood much vexes the poet now. It was eminently picturesque, with a sort of simple cheerfulness of aspect, the walls of the houses in the little piazza being of different shades of buff, with window-shutters in light green opening back upon them from those casements where the shrieking canaries hung. The place had that tone which characterizes so many city perspectives in Italy, and especially Florence — which makes the long stretch of Via Borgognissanti so smiling, and bathes the sweep of Lungarno in a sunny glow wholly independent of the state of the weather. As you stroll along one of these light-yellow avenues you say to yourself, “Ah, this is Florence!” And then suddenly you plunge into the gray-brown gloom of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with lofty palaces climbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning upon the street below with fronts of stone, rude or sculptured, but always stern and cold; and then that, too, seems the only Florence. They are in fact equally Florentine; but I suppose one expresses the stormy yet poetic life of the old commonwealth, and the other the serene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese régime.

  I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza Donati, into which I had eddied from the austerity of Borgo degli Albizzi. It really belongs to a much remoter period than the older-looking street — to the Florence that lingers architecturally yet in certain narrow avenues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the vista is broken by innumerable pent-roofs, balconies, and cornices; and a throng of operatic figures in slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improbably bent on any realistic business, that they seem to be masquerading there in the mysterious fumes of the cook-shops. Yet I should be loath, for no very tangible reason, to have Piazza Donati like one of these avenues or in any wise different from what it is; certainly I should not like to have the back of Dante’s house smartened up like the front, which looks into the Piazza San Martino. I do not complain that the restoration is bad; it is even very good, for all that I know; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a general feeling that the past ought to be allowed to tumble down in peace, though I have no doubt that whenever this happened I should be one of the first to cry out against the barbarous indifference that suffered it. I dare say that in a few hundred years, when the fact of the restoration is forgotten, the nineteenth-century mediævalism of Dante’s house will be acceptable to the most fastidious tourist. I tried to get into the house, which is open to the public at certain hours on certain days, but I always came at ten on Saturday, when I ought to have come at two on Monday, or the like; and so at last I had to content myself with the interior of the little church of San Martino, where Dante was married, half a stone’s-cast from where he was born. The church was closed, and I asked a cobbler, who had brought his work to the threshold of his shop hard by, for the sake of the light, where the sacristan lived. He answered me unintelligibly, without leaving off for a moment his furious hammering at the shoe in his lap. He must have been asked that question a great many times, and I do not know that I should have taken any more trouble in his place; but a woman in a fruit-stall next door had pity on me, knowing doubtless that I was interested in San Martino on account of the wedding, and sent me to No 1. But No 1 was a house so improbably genteel that I had not the courage to ring; and I asked the grocer alongside for a better direction. He did not know how to give it, but he sent me to the local apothecary, who in turn sent me to another number. Here another shoemaker, friendlier or idler than the first, left off gossiping with some friends of his, and showed me the right door at last in the rear of the church. My pull at the bell shot the sacristan’s head out of the fourth-story window in the old way that always delighted me, and f perceived even at that distance that he was a man perpetually fired with zeal for his church by the curiosity of strangers. I could certainly see the church, yes; he would come down instantly and open it from the inside if I would do him the grace to close his own door from the outside, I complied willingly, and in another moment I stood within the little temple, where, upon the whole, for the sake of the emotion that divine genius, majestic sorrow, and immortal fame can accumulate within one’s average commonplaceness, it is as well to stand as any other spot on earth. It is a very little place, with one-third of the space divided from the rest by an iron-tipped wooden screen. Behind this is the simple altar, and here Dante Alighieri and Gemma Donati were married. In whatever state the walls were then, they are now plainly whitewashed. though in one of the lunettes forming a sort of frieze half round the top was a fresco said to represent the espousals of the poet. The church was continually visited, the sacristan told me, by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, Germans, Spaniards, even Americans, but especially Russians, the most impassioned of all for it. One of this nation, one Russian eminent even among his impassioned race, spent several hours in looking at that picture, taking his stand at the foot of the stairs by which the sacristan descended from his lodging into the church. He showed me the very spot; I do not know why, unless he took me for another Russian, and thought my pride in a compatriot so impassioned might have some effect upon the fee I was to give him. He was a credulous sacristan, and I cannot find any evidence in Miss Horner’s faithful and trusty “Walks in Florence” that there is a fresco in that church representing the espousals of Dante. The paintings in the lunettes are by a pupil of Masaccio’s, and deal with the good works of the twelve good men of San Martino, who, ever since 1441, have had charge of a fund for the relief of such shamefaced poor as were unwilling to ask alms. Prince Strozzi and other patricians of Florence are at present among these Good Men, so the sacristan said; and there is an iron contribution-box at the church door, with an inscription promising any giver indulgence, successively guaranteed by four popes, of twenty-four hundred years; which seemed really to make it worth one’s while.

  XIV

  IN visiting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at the small compass in which the chief facts of Dante’s young life, suitably to the home-keeping character of the time and race, occurred. There he was born, there he was bred, and there he was
married to Gemma Donati after Beatrice Portinari died. Beatrice’s father lived just across the way from the Donati houses, and the Donati houses adjoined the house where Dante grew up with his widowed mother. He saw Beatrice in her father’s house, and he must often have been in the house of Manetto de’ Donati as a child. As a youth he no doubt made love to Gemma at her casement; and here they must have dwelt after they were married, and she began to lead him a restless and unhappy life, being a fretful and foolish woman, by the accounts.