And truly when the time came all Florence was much amazed to see the great Virgil going into the Church of Santa Maria with the beautiful girl with the golden hair and bearing her babe in his arms. So the building was speedily filled with people waiting eagerly to witness some strange sight.

And they were not disappointed. For when the bride in all her beauty and the bridegroom in all his glory came to the altar and paused, ere the priest spoke Virgil stepped forward, and presenting the girl with golden locks, said:

“This is she whom thou art to wed, having sworn to make her thy wife, and this is thy child.”

Then the infant, who had never before in his life uttered a word, exclaimed, in loud, sweet tones:

“Thou’rt my father, I’m thy son;
Other father I have none.”

Then there was a great scene, the bride being as one mad, and all the people crying, “Evviva, Virgilio! If the Signore Cosino [114] does not wed the girl with golden hair, he shall not escape us!” Which he did indeed, and that not so unwillingly, for the sight of the girl and the authority of Virgil, the cries of the people, his own conscience, and the marvellous occurrence of the babe’s speaking, all reconciled him to it.

So the wedding was carried out forthwith, and every soul in Florence who could make music went with his instrument that night and serenaded the newly-married pair.

And the mother was not a little astonished when she saw her son, who had gone forth with one bride, return with another. However, she was soon persuaded by Virgil that it was all for the best, and found in time that she had a perfect daughter-in-law.

I had rejected this story as not worth translating, since it presents so few traditional features, when it occurred to me that it indeed very clearly and rather curiously sets forth Virgil as a benevolent man and a sympathizer with suffering without regard to rank or class. This Christian kindness was associated with his name all through the Middle Ages in literature, and it is wonderful how the form of it has been preserved unto these our times among the people.

There is a tale told by one Surius, “In Vita S. Anselmi,” cited by Kornmann in his work “De Miraculis Vivorum” in 1614, which bears on this which I have told. A certain dame in Rome not only had a child, ex incestu, but magnified her sin by swearing the child on the Pope, Sergius. The question being referred to Saint Anselm, he asked the babe, which had never spoken, whether his papa was the Pope. To which the infant answered, “Certainly not,” adding that Sergius “nihil cum Venere commercium habere”—Anselmus, as is evident, being resolved to make a clean sweep of the whole affair and whitewash the Holy Father to the utmost while he was about it. Salverté would, like a sinner, have said that Anselm was perhaps a ventriloquist—es kann sein!