[27.] “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!”—Lamentations of Jeremiah, i. I.
[28.] Beatrice Portinari will thus be found to have died during the first hour of the 9th of June, 1290. And from what Dante says at the commencement of this work, (viz., that she was younger than himself by eight or nine months,) it may also be gathered that her age, at the time of her death, was twenty-four years and three months. The “perfect number” mentioned in the present passage is the number ten.
[29.] Thus according to some texts. The majority, however, add the words, “And therefore was I in thought:” but the shorter speech is perhaps the more forcible and pathetic.
[30.] Boccaccio tells us that Dante was married to Gemma Donati about a year after the death of Beatrice. Can Gemma then be “the lady of the window,” his love for whom Dante so contemns? Such a passing conjecture (when considered together with the interpretation of this passage in Dante’s later work, the Convito) would of course imply an admission of what I believe to lie at the heart of all true Dantesque commentary; that is, the existence always of the actual events even where the allegorical superstructure has been raised by Dante himself.
[31.] The Veronica (Vera icon, or true image); that is, the napkin with which a woman was said to have wiped our Saviour’s face on His way to the cross, and which miraculously retained its likeness. Dante makes mention of it also in the Commedia (Parad. xxxi. 103" (Paradiso, Canto 31, line 103))., where he says:—
“Qual è colui che forse di Croazia
Viene a veder la Veronica nostra,
Che per l’antica fama non si sazia
Ma dice nel pensier fin che si mostra:
Signor mio Gesù Cristo, Iddio verace,