CXVIII
I BEGAN the Bible from the commencement, reading and reflecting on it so devoutly, and finding in it such deep treasures of delight, that, if I had been able, I should have done naught else but study it. However, light was wanting; and the thought of all my troubles kept recurring and gnawing at me in the darkness, until I often made my mind up to put an end somehow to my own life. They did not allow me a knife, however, and so it was no easy matter to commit suicide. Once, notwithstanding, I took and propped a wooden pole I found there, in position like a trap. I meant to make it topple over on my head, and it would certainly have dashed my brains out; but when I had arranged the whole machine, and was approaching to put it in motion, just at the moment of my setting my hand to it, I was seized by an invisible power and flung four cubits from the spot, in such a terror that I lay half dead. Like that I remained from dawn until the nineteenth hour, when they brought my food. The jailers must have visited my cell several times without my taking notice of them; for when at last I heard them, Captain Sandrino Monaldi [1] had entered, and I heard him saying: “Ah, unhappy man! behold the end to which so rare a genius has come!” Roused by these words, I opened my eyes, and caught sight of priests with long gowns on their backs, who were saying: “Oh, you told us he was dead!” Bozza replied: “Dead I found him, and therefore I told you so.” Then they lifted me from where I lay, and after shaking up the mattress, which was now as soppy as a dish of maccaroni, they flung it outside the dungeon. The castellan, when these things were reported to him, sent me another mattress. Thereafter, when I searched my memory to find what could have diverted me from that design of suicide, I came to the conclusion that it must have been some power divine and my good guardian angel.
Note 1. A Florentine, banished in 1530 for having been in arms against the Medici.
CXIX
DURING the following night there appeared to me in dreams a marvellous being in the form of a most lovely youth, who cried, as though he wanted to reprove me: “Knowest thou who lent thee that body, which thou wouldst have spoiled before its time?” I seemed to answer that I recognized all things pertaining to me as gifts from the God of nature. “So, then,” he said, “thou hast contempt for His handiwork, through this thy will to spoil it? Commit thyself unto His guidance, and lose not hope in His great goodness!” Much more he added, in words of marvellous efficacy, the thousandth part of which I cannot now remember.
I began to consider that the angel of my vision spoke the truth. So I cast my eyes around the prison, and saw some scraps of rotten brick, with the fragments of which, rubbing one against the other, I composed a paste. Then, creeping on all fours, as I was compelled to go, I crawled up to an angle of my dungeon door, and gnawed a splinter from it with my teeth. Having achieved this feat, I waited till the light came on my prison; that was from the hour of twenty and a half to twenty-one and a half. When it arrived, I began to write, the best I could, on some blank pages in my Bible, and rebuked the regents of my intellectual self for being too impatient to endure this life; they replied to my body with excuses drawn from all that they had suffered; and the body gave them hope of better fortune. To this effect, then, by way of dialogue, I wrote as follows:-
'Benvenuto in the body.
'Afflicted regents of my soul!
Ah, cruel ye! have ye such hate of life?
'The Spirits of his soul.
'If Heaven against you roll,
Who stands for us? who saves us in the strife?
Let us, O let us go toward better life!