PETRARCH AND LAURA.
A. D. 1325.
Petrarch was born at Arezzo in 1304. His father Petracco sent his son at an early age to study law at Bologna, but an irresistible passion for poetry, which soon shewed itself, led him to neglect more profitable studies for the works of the poets and philosophers of antiquity. At 22 years of age Francesco di Petracco (for such was his name) had lost both father and mother, and was left without the means of subsistence. He took up his abode with his brother Gherardo at Avignon, the last residence of his father, and instead of striving to increase their very small income by entering upon some lucrative profession, Francesco spent his whole time in reading Virgil, Cicero, Horace, and tutti quanti.
One morning early, as Petrarca (the name he had now adopted, probably out of vanity) entered the church of the nuns of Santa Clara, he was struck, say his biographers, by the dazzling beauty of a young girl, by the sweet expression of her face, the grace of her form, and the tastefulness of her costume.
Her eyes were blue, say some; they were black, say others; and the reader will see presently that this is not the only point on which opinions differed. This beauty was Laura, or Loretta de Noves, or de Sade, or Desbaux; for there is great uncertainty even regarding her name. Petrarca, we are told, took her for his ideal. He may really have been in love with her, or he may only have conformed to the fashion of those days, when poets were in the habit of selecting some imaginary object for their devotion and adoring it in a poetical sense. Thus was it with Cavalcanti, Montemagno and Cino da Pistoja, whose Mandetta, Lauretta, and Selvaggia were only poetical fictions and so was it in fact with Dante himself, whose Beatrice was a child who died at nine years of age. Thomas Keightley, in his Tales and Popular Fictions, and other English authors, adopt the latter sceptical opinion. “I confess,” says Keightley, “that I am not indisposed to regard the Beatrice of Dante, the Laura of Petrarca, the Fiammetta of Boccacio, and all those ladies with significant names, who were all first seen in passion week, and whose lovers all survived them, as being more the creatures of air and of romance than of real flesh and blood.”
Petrarca, at the time we speak of, was twenty-three years of age; and, after composing a great number of sonnets to his lady-love, he left Avignon, went to Paris, and travelled through France, Flanders, Brabant and Germany. It has been remarked as a strange coincidence, that during his absence he wrote only four letters to Avignon, and but one to Laura. Ginguené, in his Literary History of Italy, has collected from the works of Petrarca a few stray sentences on his mistress, but the poet gives no particulars of her life, and, neither in his Italian nor in his Latin compositions, does he speak of the family of his beloved, although she is almost the sole subject of his songs.
It is not then to be wondered at if his later biographers are left in the dark about Laura, notwithstanding that contemporary authors must have been acquainted both with the lover and with his mistress.
Baldelli, a very partial commentator on Petrarca, is obliged to confess that the poet was by no means faithful to his divinity; but that another, whom he loved after a less ideal fashion, presented him with a daughter, who afterwards became the consolation of his old age. “Francesco nei passati falli ricadde, e dal suo commercio con femina impura ebbe una figlia appellata Francesca che fu poscia tenera compagna e fedel sostegno di sua vecchiezza. La madre fu rapita da morte dopo la nascita di Francesca, con grand dolore di Petrarca.”
The Abbé de Sade, in his learned researches upon Laura, shows, that besides this daughter, the poet had a son named Giovanno. This young man was legitimatised by Pope Clement VI. in 1348; and in the papal brief he is mentioned as the son of unmarried parents: De soluto et solutâ.
Baldelli believes that both children were by the same mother. Francesco Petrarca, who is characterised by Voltaire as a genius eminent for his constant repetition of the same thing, died in 1374, aged seventy.
Nearly a century after his death, in 1471, an anonymous author, in a Vita di Francesco Petrarca, pretended that Pope Urbanus V., with whom the poet was an especial favourite, wished to give him Laura in marriage, but that Petrarca declined, saying that the fountain from which he drew his amorous inspiration for the composition of his sonnets, would fail him entirely were he to be united to the object of this love: “E quantunque gli volse essere data per donna, ad instanza di Papa Urbano quinto, il quale lui singularmente amava, concedendogli di tener colla donna i beneficii insieme, nol volse mai consentire, dicendo che il frutto che prendea dell’ amore, a scrivere, di poi che la cosa amata consequito avesse, tutto si perderia.”
Notwithstanding the improbability of this confession, seeing that Pope Urbanus did not mount the pontifical throne until after the death of Laura, we may still infer from it that in the first years of the 15th century a very exalted opinion was not entertained of the sincerity of Petrarca’s passion. The mention of all these circumstances, no doubt instigated Tomasini, who was the most devoted of Petrarch’s biographers, and who looked upon the poet almost as a saint, to adduce a reason for his remaining unmarried to the end of his life. “He believed,” says he, “that marriage would extinguish his love.” “Censebat nempè isto nexu amoris puritatem obfuscatam iri, neque cultum animi ita fore constantem, juxta illud Tibulli: Semper in absentes felicior æstus amantis.”
In 1539 Squarciafico and Nicolò Franco attacked with much humour the morals and the life of Laura’s adorer. Ercole Giannini followed in the same vein; and the circumstances we have already mentioned tend to prove, that although Petrarca may have been a great poet, a great politician, a savant, and a prolific writer, there is more than one reason for believing that he was not altogether the Platonic lover some have represented him to be.
With regard to Laura all is doubt, obscurity, and hypothesis. The traces left of her were so faint, even in the century in which she lived, that Baldelli says that doubts were even entertained of her existence. “Tanto s’oscurò la sua memoria, che nei due secoli in cui l’Italia negli enti allegorici e di ragione, andava smarrita, alcuni dubitarono della esistenza di lui.” (See Petrarca e sue opere.)
The Abbé de Sade, in his memoirs on the life of this poet, says also, that in Italy the beautiful Laura was supposed to be an allegorical personage.
The endeavours made by Alexandre Vellutello and others to establish her existence, led to no positive results; for in the certificated of birth from the years 1307 to 1324, the name of Laura, although frequently met with, can never in any one instance be applied to Petrarca’s mistress.
Vellutello tries to make her out the daughter of Henri Chiabau, a seigneur of Cabrières, Monsieur de Bimard in his Mémoires, pretends that her father was Raybau de Raimond; the Abbé Castaing, of Avignon, published in 1819 a new view, and maintained that Petrarca’s divinity was a certain Laura Des Beaux, and that his devotion to her was purely Platonic. The Abbé de Sade tries to prove that she was the daughter of Audibert de Noves.
Some assert that Laura never married, and died a virgin: according to others she was married at fourteen years of age to Hugues de Sade, a nobleman hard to please and given to jealousy, and that she bore him eleven children, nine of whom survived their mother.
If, on the one hand, Laura has been considered a myth, many writers, on the other hand, say that she was far from insensible to the passion of Petrarca. Her reputation is lightly treated in a manuscript written by Luigi Peruzsi, of which Mr. Bruce-Whyte has made use in his Histoire des Langues Romanes. This view of her character gave rise to a very interesting article in a newspaper of Vaucluse entitled: “L’Écho de Vaucluse,” of the 11th September 1842. We can nowhere find any authentic testimony nor any decisive evidence wherewith to dissipate doubts or to confirm assertions on this subject.
There are three portraits of Laura extant all of which differ materially in features and in costume. In 1339, Simon of Sienna, who was employed to decorate the episcopal palace at Avignon, is said to have painted Laura’s portrait, and to have presented it to Petrarca, with whom he was intimate.
Richard de Sade brought another portrait from Avignon to Rome, and gave it to Cardinal Barberini. It has no resemblance whatever to the first. The third is in a manuscript at Florence.
Marsand in a special dissertation on these portraits, rejects the two first and only admits the latter, engraved by the celebrated Morghen. Here again we are met by doubt and obscurity.
In the French Imperial Library, there are two manuscripts of the 15th century containing a Latin treatise by Petrarca: De contemptu Mundi, which apparently affirms that Laura was the mother of several children, as above stated. In this treatise we read that she gradually approaches her end, and that her lovely form has suffered much from her frequent confinements: “Morbis ac crebris partubus exhaustum, multum pristini vigoris amisit corpus illud egregium.”
In the work of Olivier Vitalis, published in Paris in 1842, which contains researches into almost every opinion concerning Laura and Petrarca, that of her marriage is rejected: “Des couches fréquentes,” says the author, “des chagrins domestiques peuvent convenir et s’appliquer à la Laure de De Sade, mais non à la Laure célébrée par Pétrarque, qui mourut dans le célibat.”
Several Italian authors declare on the other hand that the objection against Laura’s celibacy is made by Petrarch himself, who, in his Latin Dialogue with St. Augustin, frequently makes use of the word mulier, in speaking of her. The dictionary of Vanieri, and others, tell us that: “Fæmina propriè sexum significat, mulier quæ virgo non est.”
Unfortunately, our poet, in all matters appertaining to his mistress, has intentionally, or by chance, only very vaguely mentioned, by allusions, or by figures of speech, dates or circumstances bearing reference to her. Besides the striking difference that exists on many points in the manuscripts which have served as foundations for the various editions of Petrarca, it must be confessed that nowhere have primary and incontrovertible facts been produced on which to ground a true and faithful biography of Laura.
It is stated that an allusion to Laura’s death, and burial at Avignon, is to be found in a manuscript Virgil which belonged to Petrarca, and which is preserved in the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana at Milan; but learned critics, among whom we may name Alexander Tassoni, one of the most reliable authors of Italy, A. Vellutello, and others, consider this note as very apocryphal, and even as a forgery: for the writing has never been proved to be that of the poet, and moreover this memorandum is in open contradiction with the sonnets of Petrarca written on the spot where the lovers first met.
It was not until towards the beginning of the 16th century that the desire sprang up among the Italians to know who the Laura really was, that had been the theme of song for twenty years. Alexander Vellutello made two journeys to Avignon for the express purpose of collecting information regarding her, and from that time innumerable discussions arose from all quarters. Tomasini, Maria Suarez, G. Ferrari, F. Orsino, Muratori, &c., on the one side, and Vellutello, Gesualdo, Tassoni, le Bastie, &c. on the other. But they were all staggered by a remark made by Giacomo Colonna, Bishop of Lombez, with whom Petrarca lived for some time, and who consequently must have known him intimately. The bishop writes: “Your Laura is only a phantom of your imagination on whom you exercise your muse. Un nome imaginario di Laura per avere un oggetto di cui ragionare.”
Amid such a multiplicity of conflicting opinions where can reliance be placed!
In 1529, one hundred and eighty years after the death of Laura, a pretended discovery of her tomb was made at Avignon; but Olivier Vitalis[31] proves the utter fallacy of this discovery, and shows the absurdity of the explanation given in support of it. This tomb is almost universally acknowledged to have been devoid, both inside and out, of any trace of the name of the defunct, or any date of her decease. The tomb itself was destroyed in the French revolution, and at the present day no vestige of it remains.
We see then that this enigmatical Laura has made far more noise in the world during the last four or five centuries, than she ever did in her own time. Perhaps contemporary writers were well aware, as some have asserted, that Petrarch’s sonnets were mere poetical fictions as far as Laura was concerned. Had it been otherwise, more would surely have transpired about her during her lifetime. But on the contrary, her existence is even now thought to be so problematical, that the author of the article on Laura, in Didot’s Biographie Générale, refrains from giving an opinion on the question.