V
THE APOTHEOSIS
In the boyhood of Dante, Florence, the Flower City, was a place of much beauty, of perfect calm, of almost perfect equality, of pleasurable and polished life. There a brigade, the Brigata Amorosa, formed of a thousand people, had a lord who was a Lord of Love. During one of their recurrent festivals an entertainment was held at the home of Folco Portinari. To such entertainments Boccaccio said that children frequently accompanied their parents. To this particular entertainment, Dante, then a lad of nine, came with his father. He found there a number of boys and girls, among whom was Folco’s daughter, Beatrice, a child with delicate features whose speech and attitude were perhaps superserious for her age.
Dante looked at her. “At that moment,” he afterward, wrote, “I may truly say that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of my heart, trembled in such wise that the least pulses of my being shook.... So noble was her manner, that assuredly one might repeat of her the words of Homer: ‘She seemed born not of mortal but of God.’”
Years passed during which often he encountered her, without, however, a word being interchanged. Subsequently, at a festival, she recognized him and bowed—“so virtuously,” he said, “that I thought myself lifted to the limits of beatitude.”
Another interval ensued. Again she met him. Dante was then twenty, Beatrice nineteen. On this occasion she omitted to bow. The omission affected him profoundly. It was even inspirational. He began to write, “so well” said Boccaccio “that he effaced the fame of poets that had been and menaced that of those to be.”
In promenading his young glory he again encountered Beatrice, this time in a house where a betrothal was being celebrated. On entering he was so emotionalized that he had to lean against a wall. The women who were present divined the reason. Beatrice was there. The situation amused them. They laughed. Beatrice also laughed.[54] Whether or not it was her betrothal that was being fêted is uncertain. It may have been. Shortly she became the wife of Simon dei Bardi, gentiluomo.
Dante more profoundly affected than ever cursed the day on which they met:
Io maledico il di ch’io vidi imprima
La luce de’ vostri occhi traditori.
To the melody of the imprecation, Petrarch, in honor of Laura, added a variant: