Messer Unico, feeling his reputation at stake, sprang to his feet, passed his hand through his hair, threw back his head, and raised his eyes to heaven.
'Hush! hush!' murmured the ladies. 'Messer Unico composes! If your Excellency would move a little further she would hear better!'
Madonna Ermellina took a lute and ran her fingers over the strings; thus softly accompanied, the poet, in a voice guttural and majestic as that of a ventriloquist, declaimed his lines. They were to the effect that Love, moved by a lover to shoot at the heart of a fair one, had, owing to the bandage over his eyes, shot awry, and wounded not the heart but the nose of the unfortunate lady.
The audience applauded.
'Most beautiful! Stupendous! Unsurpassable! What conceits! What facility! Not like our Bellincioni who melts away under the exertion of putting a sonnet together! Truly, when he raised his eyes I felt the very wind of his inspiration making me wellnigh afraid!'
One lady offered him wine, another cooling tablets of mint; another placed him in an armchair and fanned him. He drooped and languished and blinked his eyes like a gorged cat in the afternoon sunshine.
Then he produced another sonnet in praise of the Duchess, which told how the snow, put to shame by the whiteness of her skin, had in vengeance turned itself to ice, and caused her to slip and wellnigh to fall upon the courtyard pavement.
Then he celebrated a lady who had lost a front tooth; 'twas the device of Love, who, dwelling in her mouth, required a loophole for the shooting of his arrows.
'But this man is a genius!' cried the ladies; 'his name will go down to posterity linked with that of Dante!'
'Nay, higher than Dante's. Where in the verses of Dante will you find these subtleties of our Unique one?'