From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each lucid with the name of One.
The One was Laura. Petrarch, young, good-looking, already aureoled, saw her first at matins in a church at Avignon. She too was young. Married, a woman of position, of probable beauty, she was dark-eyed, fair-haired, pensive, serene. With spells as gossamer as those of the Monna Bice, at once she imparadised his heart. Precipitately he presented it to her. She refused it.
Hughes de Sade, her husband, was a perfectly unsympathetic person, jealous without reason, notoriously hard. Yet his excuse, if he had one, may have resided in local conditions. Avignon stately and luxurious, was, Petrarch declared, the gully of every vice. “There is here,” he said, “nothing holy, nothing just, nothing human. Decency and modesty are unknown.”[55]
Yet he found them there. Laura represented both. In the profligacy of the Papal city she at least was pure. She would have none of Petrarch, or, more exactly, so little that hardly can it be said to count. Rebuffed he departed. She beckoned him back, rebuffed him again and, alternately, for twenty-one years, rebuffed and beckoned, preserving his love without according her own, giving him an infrequent smile, now and then a nod from a window, on one memorable occasion as much as the touch of her hand. Once only, and that at their last interview her eyes looked longly in his. That was all.
To be near her he purchased at Vaucluse an estate so gloomy that his servants forsook him and where, such women as he saw, it mortified him to look at. The expression is his own. Day after day he stood before her gates, which he never entered, fully repaid, if among the orange trees there, he but caught sight of her. On one occasion he met her by accident, on another he was fortunate enough to be able to restore a glove which she had dropped, again in a reunion where were assembled the ladies of Avignon, a foreign prince marched up to the woman whom Petrarch’s verses had made famous and kissed her on the eyes. It was a prince’s privilege. Petrarch related the occurrence in a sonnet. It was incidents of this character that form the bundle of poetry that immortalized them both.
Sometimes he rebelled. He went away, travelled, studied, worked. Whatever he did, where-ever he were, always, in haunting constancy, she was before him. Always her presence inhabited his eyes. He tried to vanquish the love of woman in the love of God. In the struggle it was he who was defeated. Even age, even death could not aid him. Laura ultimately had nine children. She was growing old, certainly she was worn. To Petrarch always she was in the first festival of her beauty.
Blessed be the day and the month and the year,
And the season, the hour, the minute,
And the fair land and the spot itself where
Her beautiful eyes subjected my spirit.
It was that which he had ever before him. It was that which made him what he was, the foremost personality of his day. It was that which distinguished him from other poets. Unlike anybody, every one wanted to resemble him. It was love that did it. Dante told of love with an intensity that was divine. Petrarch wrote with a comprehensiveness that was human. There have been thousands of poets and but one Dante, myriads of lovers and but one Petrarch. Whether Laura deserved his devotion must be a matter of opinion. This alone is obvious. She made his life a combat which antiquity would not have understood, which chivalry would not have appreciated and which Dante did not experience. In antiquity love had for form but the senses. That form chivalry draped with graces and Dante dematerialized. In Petrarch, love was both of the flesh and of the spirit in addition to being sincere. That was a great step. With him for the first time there entered into history an honest man ardently in love with an honest woman. To the superficial she has seemed but a coquette and he merely sentimental. He were perhaps better regarded as creative, the founder of the real love which is the love of the heart, the “amour éternel en un moment conçu.”
The quality of Laura’s love, whether she loved him or whether she did not, whether for that matter she was capable of loving at all, whether on the other hand while loving him wholly she, like the woman in the sonnet of Arvers who inspired the “amour éternel” preferred to remain “piously faithful to the austere devoir,” is immaterial and unimportant. Another man would have abandoned her completely or carried her violently away. Petrarch, too sincere for treason and too poetic for vulgarity, unfit in consequence for either enterprise, became obsessed with a love that developed into a delicate malady, a disease that sent him from his studies, tormenting him into an incessant struggle with the most terrible of all combatants—one’s self. The malady had its compensations. It made him the source of modern lyricism and the most conspicuous figure of his day. In Milan when he appeared every head was uncovered. On the Pô, a battle was interrupted that he might pass. At Venice his seat was at the right of the doge. Rome’s ghost revived in beauty for him and put a laurel on his brow. It was his verse that induced these tributes. The verse was inspired by love.
To Dante, love was what it had been to Plato, a mysterious initiation into the secrets of the material world. To Petrarch it was a rebellion against those very things. In Dante it was sublimated, in Petrarch it was distilled. Laura stood at the parting of the roads, midway between the symbolism of the Divina Commedia and the freedom of the Decamerone.