Sì grande, ch' io desio di dir piangendo
Che sia cagion di tanto mio martiro:
Ma poi, temendo non aggiugner pene
Alle mie noie, tanto mi difendo,
Ch' io passo in compagnia d' alcun sospiro."[199]
But fate was not content, as he himself says,[200] with this single blow. Till now he had wanted for nothing; he had had a home of his own, and had been able to go to court when, and as, he would, and to enter fully into the life of the gay city. Now suddenly poverty stared him in the face. His father, from whom all that was stable and good in his life hitherto had proceeded, was ruined.[201] But even in his fall he remembered his son, and though Giovanni was now twenty-five years of age, he maintained him, at considerable inconvenience doubtless, from 1st November, 1338, to 1st November, 1339, by buying for him the produce of a podere near Capua, "i beni della chiesa di S. Lorenzo dell' Arcivescovato di Capua," which cost him twenty-six florins.[202] Della Torre thinks that the wretched youth was compelled to visit the place (possibly this was his fateful journey) and to deal with a fattore di campagna and the wily contadini of whom Alberti has so much to tell us a century later. With them he would have to take account of the grain, the grapes, the olives, the swine, and so forth, while trying to write romances and to save his love from utter disaster.
As though the ills he suffered were not enough, it was at this time he lost a friend and protector from whom he expected very much. Niccolò Acciaiuoli, whom he had known since 1331, left Naples on 10th October, 1338, and two years later Boccaccio writes to him on his return from the Morea: "Nicola, if any trust can be placed in the miserable, I swear to you by my suffering soul that the departure of Trojan Æneas was not a deeper sorrow to the Carthaginian Dido than was yours to me: not without reason, though you knew it not: nor did Penelope long for the return of Ulysses more than I longed for yours."[203]
And then all his companions forsook him owing to his change of fortune; one by one they fell away. He who had consorted with nobles and loved a king's daughter was left alone; not in his own dwelling, but outside the city now, "sub Monte Falerno apud busta Maronis," as he dates his letters: close then to the tomb of Virgil. Was it now, at the lowest ebb of his fortunes, in all this tempest of ill, that he turned to the verse of the Mantuan who has healed so many wounds that the Church may not touch; and so, dreaming beside his sepulchre at Posilippo, remembering the wasted life, the irrecoverable years, made that vow which posterity has so well remembered, sworn as it was on Virgil's grave, to give himself to letters, to follow his art for ever?
Henceforth his life belongs to literature. "Every cloud," says the proverb, "has a silver lining," and the miseries of youth, though not the least bitter, differ, in this at least, from those of old age, that one has time to profit by them. So it was with Giovanni. The tempest which had destroyed so much that he valued most highly was in some sort his salvation. To love is good, they had told him, to write verses even better; but to ruin oneself for love——! What madness! Yet it was just that he had done, and like many others who have practised his art, he found in ruin the highway of the world.
Driven by poverty outside the city, deprived alike of its pleasures and the excitement and distractions of his love, he had nothing left but his art, and for the first time in his life he seems to have set himself to study and to practise it with all his might. Deserted by his companions, he reminded himself that he was a poet and that solitude was his friend. He seems to have read much, studying in the shadow of Virgil's tomb the works of that poet[204] and the writings of the ever-delightful Apuleius, while in the letter to Calmeta we find—and this is most interesting in regard to his own work—that he was already reading the Thebais of Statius.[205] Helpers, too, of a sort he had, among them Dionigi Roberti da Borgo Sansepolcro,[206] who, as Della Torre thinks, made him write to Petrarch, a thing Boccaccio no doubt had long wished, but hesitated, to do. The first extant communication between them, however, dates from 1349.