I
In an obscure outskirt of Milan, near the Porta Vercellina, the Customs House, and the canal called the Acqua Cantarana, stood an old house, very solitary, and remarkable for the smoke which day and night ascended in large spirals from an immense, winding, and blackened chimney. Here dwelt Monna Sidonia, the wise woman. The upper floor she hired to Messer Galeotto Sacrobosco, an alchemist; and in the lower she lived herself with Cassandra, his niece, the young daughter of Luigi Sacrobosco, a celebrated traveller, who had traversed Greece, the islands of the Archipelago, Syria, Asia Minor, and Egypt, in the quest for specimens of ancient art. He possessed himself of all that came to hand: a Greek marble, or a trifle of amber, a sham inscription from the tomb of Homer, a new tragedy by Euripides, or a peroration by Demosthenes. Some thought him a great man, but others dubbed him an impostor; and not a few believed him crazy. His imagination was so enthralled by pagan recollections that though to the last a good Catholic, he prayed to the Olympian Hermes, and regarded Wednesday (Mercoledi) his day, as one singularly propitious for mercantile ventures. No toil, no privations, daunted him in his enterprises. On one occasion, having already put out ten leagues to sea, he returned to copy an inscription of which accident had informed him. Having lost his collection in a shipwreck, his hair turned white with grief. If asked why he so plagued himself and spent his days in such sore labour, he always replied:—
'I desire to raise the dead.'
In the little town of Mistra, near the ruins of Lacedæmon, he met a maiden of extraordinary beauty, resembling the statues of Artemis. She was the daughter of a poor and drunken village deacon; Luigi married her and took her to Italy with a new copy of the Iliad, the fragments of a Hecate, and the shreds of an earthenware amphora.
To the pair was born a daughter, whom they called Cassandra, Luigi being at that time impassioned for Æschylean tragedy. The wife died, and the father was off on his wanderings, so the child was left to the care of Demetrius Chalcondylas, a learned Greek from Constantinople who had been brought to Milan by the Sforzas. This old man of seventy, a double-faced, cunning, and secretive person, pretended a vast zeal for the Catholic Church; in his heart, however, like Cardinal Bessarione, and most of the immigrant Greeks, he was a disciple of the last of the masters of the ancient wisdom, Gemistus Pletho, the Replete with Learning, the neoplatonist who had died forty years before at Mistra, where Luigi had become enamoured of his Artemis. This man had been affirmed by his disciples to be a re-incarnation of the illustrious Plato himself; the theologians, on the contrary, maintained that he had revived the anti-Christian heresies of Julian the Apostate, and that he was to be fought not by argument and controversy, but by the Inquisition and the stake. Chiefly they accused him on account of certain words uttered to his disciples three years before his death. He had said: 'But a few years after I shall have died, one sole Truth shall reign over all peoples and nations, and men shall unite in the single faith' (unam eandemque religionem universum orbem esse suscepturam). Being questioned whether he meant the faith of Christ or of Mahomet, he answered: 'Neither the one nor yet the other, but a faith which in naught shall differ from the ancient paganism' (neutram, inquit, sed a gentilitate non differentem).
Cassandra was bred by Chalcondylas in strict though feigned Christian piety. Overhearing, however, much neoplatonic talk, and not understanding its philosophical subtleties, the maid wove for herself a fantastic dream of the coming Resurrection of the Gods. On her breast she wore a talisman against fever, a present from her father; it was a gem representing Dionysus as a naked youth, with thyrsus and vine-branch, a rearing panther trying to lick the grapes in his hand. Sometimes, when quite alone, she would hold her amethyst up to the sun and gaze into its purple depths until her head swam, and she saw the god in a vision, living, and ever young and adorable.
Messer Luigi ruined himself at last in his quest for treasures, and died miserably of a putrid fever in a shepherd's hut beside the ruins of a Phœnician temple, which he had himself discovered. Soon after, Galeotto, his brother, who also had wandered for many years in pursuit, not of antiquities but of the philosopher's stone, came to Milan, established himself in the little house by the Vercellina gate, and took his niece to live with him.
She still, however, frequented the house of Chalcondylas, and thither came Giovanni Boltraffio to execute some copying for Messer Giorgio Merula.
Encountering Cassandra again, Giovanni remembered the talk he had overheard between her and Zoroastro about the poisoned tree, and he shuddered. Many told him the maiden was a sorceress, but her charm was not to be resisted, and almost every evening when his work was done he sought her in the lonely cottage by the Vercellina gate. They sat on a hillock together above the dark and silently swift waters of the canal, not far from the sluice gates near the convent of St. Radegonda. A scarce visible path, tangled with elder-bushes, wormwood, and nettles, led to the little hillock; no one ever passed that way, and there the two met and loitered and talked long together.