Imaginary Conversations and Poems Part 7

_Scaliger._ M. de Montaigne, have you ever studied the doctrine of predestination?

_Montaigne._ I should not understand it, if I had; and I would not break through an old fence merely to get into a cavern. I would not give a fig or a fig-leaf to know the truth of it, as far as any man can teach it me. Would it make me honester or happier, or, in other 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 s.p.a.cious 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 G.o.d, 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.s 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 t.i.ta 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 t.i.ta 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 t.i.ta. '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.