"It seems that Paolina used to visit almost every day the Temple of Isis, where, with continual oblations and sacred offerings, she worshipped and honoured the god Anubis with the greatest devotion; which, when the young man knew of it, love showed him a way, and he thought and imagined in his heart an unheard-of evil. Telling himself then that the priests and ministers of Anubis would be able to assist and favour his desires, he went to them, and after many prayers and many rich gifts opened to them the matter. And it happened as he wished. For when Paolina next came to the temple the most venerable high priest himself, in a quiet and humble voice, told her that the god Anubis had appeared to him in the night and had bidden him say to her that he, Anubis himself, was well pleased and delighted with her devotion, and that in that temple where she worshipped him he would, for her good and repose of heart, speak with her in the darkness of night. Now when Paolina heard this from so venerable a priest, judging that this had come to her though her devotion and holiness, she rejoiced without measure at the words, and returning home told all to her husband, who, like a fool, believing all to be true, consented that she should spend the following night in the temple. And so it befell at nightfall Paolina came to the preordained place, and after solemn ceremonies and holy prayers alone she entered the rich bed to await Anubis, the god of her devotion. And when she had fallen asleep, came, introduced by the priests, Mundo, covered with the vestments and ornaments of Anubis and full of the most ardent desire; then with a soft voice, taking her in his arms, he awakened her.[546] And Mundo, in the voice of Anubis, seeing her afraid and confused at first waking, bade her be of good heart, saying that he was Anubis whom she had for so long venerated and worshipped, and that he was come from heaven because of her prayers and devotions that he might lie with her, and of her have a son a god like to himself. Which, when Paolina heard, before all else she asked if it were the custom of the supernal powers to mix themselves with mortals; to whom Mundo answered, even so, and gave the example of Jove, who had descended from heaven and passed through the roof where Danäe lay, into her lap, from which intercourse Perseus, now in heaven, was born. And hearing this Paolina most joyfully consented. Then Mundo, all naked, entered into the bed of Anubis, and so won the desired embraces and kisses and pleasures; and when it was dawn he left her, saying that she had that night conceived a son. And when it was day Paolina arose, and, carried by the priests, returned to her house, believing everything and recounting all to her foolish husband, who received his wife joyfully with the greatest honour, thinking that she would be the mother of a god. Nor would either have doubted this but for the want of caution on the part of the too ardent Mundo. For it seemed to him that Paolina had returned his embraces with the greatest readiness and delight, and thinking therefore that he had conquered her modesty and hoping to enjoy her again, he went to her one day in the temple, and coming close to her whispered, 'Blessed art thou who hast conceived of the god Anubis.' But the result was quite other than he had expected. For stupefied beyond measure, Paolina, bringing all things to her remembrance that had befallen on that night, understood the fraud, and altogether broken-hearted told her husband, opening all her thoughts; and he went immediately in the greatest sorrow and distress to Tiberius Cæsar. And Cæsar ordered that all the priests should be slain with grievous torments, and that Mundo should be sent into exile; and as for the simple and deceived Paolina, she became the laughing-stock of the Roman people."
Such is one of the stories of the De Claris Mulieribus. But though it be one of the best tales there, and indeed we may compare it with a famous story in the Decameron,[547] it is by no means characteristic of the whole book, which has its more serious side, for Boccaccio uses his facts, his supposed facts, often enough to admonish his contemporaries, and therefore to some extent the work may be said to have had a moral purpose.
Yet after all, what chiefly interests us in an inferior piece of work is the view of woman we find there. And strangely enough, in this book so full of mere foolishness and unhappy scolding we find a purer and more splendid praise of woman than anywhere else in his work. "A woman," he tells us, "can remain pure in the midst of corruptions and every horror and vice as a ray of sunlight remains pure even when it falls on a filthy puddle." Yes, they can do so, and that he admits it, is at least something, but if we may judge from this book it was by no means his opinion that commonly they do. For he is always pointing in scorn at the women of his time. He tells of the death of Seneca's wife, who killed herself that she might not survive her husband, in order that he may preach to the widows of his day, who do not hesitate, we learn, to remarry, "not twice nor thrice, but five or six times." Again, he tells the story of Dido more according to the legends that had grown up around it than according to the Æneid, in order that it may be an example "above all among Christians" to those widows who take a third or fourth husband.[548] Having been betrayed by a widow, he is as personally suspicious of and vindictive against them as the elder Mr. Weller.
Nor is he sparing in his abuse of women in general. They can only keep a secret of which they are ignorant, he tells us. And like many men who have lived disorderly, he puts an extraordinary, a false, value on chastity. For after recommending all parents to bring up their daughters chastely, which is sane and right, he bids women guard their chastity even to the death, adding that they should prefer a certain death to an uncertain dishonour.[549] And after giving more than one example to bear this out, he cites the women of the Cimbri, who, when their husbands fled, besought the Romans to let them enter the house of the Vestals, and when this was denied them killed themselves after murdering their children. Nor does he ever cease to deplore the luxury and coquetry of women, blaming the Roman Senate when, in honour of Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, who had saved the Republic, it allowed matrons to wear earrings. For luxury, says he, is the ruin of women, and so of men also, for the world belongs to men, but men to women.
Again and again he returns to the attitude he assumed in the Decameron,[550] but without its gaiety. Man is the more perfect and the firmer and stronger: how then can a woman do else but yield to her lover? If there are exceptions it is because some women partake of the nature of man, Sulpicia, for instance, who was, he says, "rather a man than a woman," and indeed some women have a man's soul in a woman's body. Nor does he omit any sort or kind of temperament. He shows us the courageous woman in Sofonisba, the voluptuous in Cleopatra, the chaste in Gualdrada, the simple in Paolina, the proud in Zenobia, the resigned in Costanza, the wise in Proba, the intriguer in Poppea, the generous in Sempronia.[551] He writes three hundred lives, and in every one we find the same sentiments of passionate interest, suspicion, distrust. If it were possible to gather from this vast depository the type of woman Boccaccio himself preferred, we should find, I think, that she was by no means the intelligent, learned, energetic, independent, and strong-willed woman that negatively, as it were, he praises, for to him she would seem not a woman but a kind of man. No, he remains to worship the beautiful, subtle, credulous, and distracting creature that he had found in that Fiammetta who had betrayed him,—in two minds during a single heart's beat, cruel and sensual too, eager to love and without responsibility, afraid of the dark, but ready to do anything in things to her mind; in fact, the abused heroine of all his books. But while he adores her, he makes fun of her, he scorns her, he curses her, he hates her, yet in a moment she will be in his arms.
It was to one such he thought to dedicate this book of Famous Ladies,[552] to that Queen Giovanna of Naples, the granddaughter of King Robert the Wise, who had been the father of his own Fiammetta. But in the last chapter of the book, which is a long panegyric in her honour, he praises her not as a woman but as a great and powerful king. We do not know, alas! what he really thought of her, for eager Guelf and Angevine as he always was, he would be the last to tell us the truth, if it were evil, about this unhappy lady, and here at least his work is so full of praise that there is no room for judgment. If he had once spoken evil of her[553] he has here made amends, but in such a way that we are in no way enlightened and remain as always at the mercy of the chroniclers.[554]
If we needed any evidence other than the works themselves that these compilations in Latin worried and bored Boccaccio, we should find it in the De Casibus Virorum, a vast work in nine books, which was taken up and put aside in disgust not less than three times, and at last only completed by the continual urgings of Petrarch, who, not understanding the disgust of the creative artist for this kind of book-making, was reduced to reply to the protests of Boccaccio that "man was born for labour."[555] The De Casibus Virorum is certainly a more considerable work than the De Claris Mulieribus, but it is without the occasional liveliness of the earlier work, as we see it, for instance, in the story of Paolina, and is in fact merely an enormous compilation, as I have said, made directly under the influence of Petrarch, who, in imitation of the ancients, was always willing to discourse concerning the instability of Fortune. It was a theme which suited his peculiar genius, and in the De Viris Illustribus and the De Remediis Utriusque Fortunæ we see him at his best in this manner.[556] But for Boccaccio such moralising became a mere drudgery, a mere heaping together of what he had read but not digested. Eager to follow in Petrarch's footsteps, however, he took up the same theme as the subject of an historical work, in which he sets out to show the misfortunes of famous men. Beginning with Adam and Eve—for he admits a few women—he passes in review with an enormous languor that makes the book one of the most wearying in all literature the personages of fable and legend and history, treating all alike, down to his own time. Sometimes he is merely dull, sometimes absurd, sometimes theatrical, but always lifeless in these accounts of the tragic ends of "Famous Men" or of their fall from power. He is never simple, nor does he take his work simply; by every trick he had used in his creative work he tries in vain to give this book some sort of life. He sees his characters in vision, then, in imitation of Petrarch, he interrupts the narrative to preach, to set down tedious moral sentiments—that bad habit of his old age—or philosophical conclusions, or to lose himself in long digressions upon a thousand and one subjects—on riches, on fortune, on happiness, on rhetoric, on the lamentable condition of Rome, on the sadness (acedia) of writers, of which Petrarch had cured him, or again in defence of poetry, never choosing a subject, however, that had not been already treated by Petrarch, except it be woman, whom he again attacks, more soberly perhaps, but infinitely more tediously, warning us against her wiles in the manner of a very minor prophet. As long as he is a mere historian, a mere compiler, a mere scholar, he remains almost unreadable, but as soon as he returns to life, to what he has seen with his own eyes, even in this uncouth jargon, this Church Latin, he becomes an artist, a man of letters, and we find then without surprise that one of the last episodes he recounts, the history of Filippa la Catanese was, even in the seventeenth century, still read apparently with the greatest delight, for very many editions were published of this fragment of his book, of which I have already spoken.[557]
THE TORTURE OF REGULUS
A woodcut from Lydgate's "Falles of Princes of John Bochas." (London, 1494.)