CANTO XXIII.
Sixth Ledge: the Gluttonous.—Forese Donati.—Nella.—Rebuke of the women of Florence.
While I was fixing my eyes upon the green leafage, just as he who wastes his life following the little bird is wont to do, my more than Father said to me, “Son, come on now, for the time that is assigned to us must be parcelled out more usefully.” I turned my face, and no less quickly my step after the Sages, who were speaking so that they made the going of no cost to me; and ho! a lament and song were heard, “Labia mea, Domine,”[1] in such fashion that it gave birth to delight and pain. “O sweet Father, what is that which I hear?” I began, and he, “Shades which go, perhaps loosing the knot of their debt.”
[1] “Lord, open thou my lips.”—Psalm li. 15.
Even as do pilgrims rapt in thought, who, overtaking on the road unknown folk, turn themselves to them, and stay not; so behind us, moving more quickly, coming up and passing by, a crowd of souls, silent and devout, gazed at us. Each was dark and hollow in the eyes, pallid in the face, and so wasted that the skin took its shape from the bones. I do not think that Erisichthon[1] was so dried up to utter rind by hunger, when he had most fear of it. I said to myself in thought, “Behold the people who lost Jerusalem, when Mary struck her beak into her son.”[2] The sockets of their eyes seemed rings without gems. Whoso in the face of men reads OMO,[3] would surely there have recognized the M. Who would believe that the scent of an apple, begetting longing, and that of a water, could have such mastery, if he knew not how?
[1] Punished for sacrilege by Ceres with insatiable hunger, so that at last he turned his teeth upon himself. See Ovid, Metam.,viii. 738 sqq.
[2] The story of this wretched woman is told by Josephus in his narrative of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus: De Bello Jud., vi. 3.
[3] Finding in each eye an O, and an M in the lines of the brows and nose, making the word for “man.”
I was now wondering what so famished them, the cause of their meagreness and of their wretched husk not yet being manifest, and lo! from the depths of its head, a shade turned his eyes on me, and looked fixedly, then cried out loudly, “What grace to me is this!” Never should I have recognized him by his face; but in his voice that was disclosed to me which his aspect in itself had suppressed.[1] This spark rekindled in me all my knowledge of the altered visage, and I recognized the face of Forese.[2]
[1] His voice revealed who he was, which his actual aspect concealed.