After all, it is the experience of all who have been poor for a season.
There follows the triumph of Love, in which he sees all the fortunate and unfortunate lovers famous in poetry from the mythology of Greece to Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristram and Iseult; and among these he sees Fiammetta.
So we pass to the triumph of Fortune, in which we learn the stories of Thebes, of Troy, of Carthage, of Alexander, of Pompey, of Niobe, and we are told of the inconstancy of terrestrial things.[283] And thus disillusioned, the poet makes the firm resolve to follow his guide in spite of every temptation. Yet almost at once a certain beautiful garden destroys his resolve. For he enters there and finds a marvellous fountain of marble, and a company of fair women who are presented to him under mysterious pseudonyms.[284] Among these are the bella Lombarda, the Lia of the Ameto, and finally the lady who writes her name in letters of gold in the heart of the poet.[285] And this lady he chooses for his sun, with the approval of his guide, who seems to have forgotten, as he has certainly done, the resolves so lately taken. However, the guide now discreetly leaves him in a somewhat compromising position; and it is thus Fiammetta who leads him into the abandoned road of virtue.[286]
These Trionfi were written before the Trionfi of Petrarch, and their true source is to be found not in any of Petrarch's work, but in the Divine Comedy and in the sources Dante used.[287] Boccaccio has evidently studied the great poem very closely. He imitates it not only in motives and symbols and words, but, as we have seen, in the form of his verse, and to some extent in the construction of his poem, which consists of fifty capitoli, each composed of twenty-nine terzine and a verse of chiusa, that is of eighty-eight verses in each.
The first edition was published in Milan in 1521 with an Apologia contro ai detrattori della poesia del Boccaccio by Girolamo Claricio of Imola. No translation has ever been made.[288]
We turn now to the Fiammetta,[289] which must have been the last of the works directly concerned with his passion for Maria d'Aquino. Crescini[290] thinks it was written in 1343, but others[291] assure us that it is later work.[292] Crescini's argument is, however, so formidable that we shall do better to accept his conclusions and to consider the Fiammetta as a work of this first Florentine period. Though concerned with the same subject, his love, the allegory is worth noting, for while in all the other books concerned with Fiammetta he assures us he was betrayed by her, here he asserts that Panfilo (himself) betrayed Fiammetta! Moreover, he warns us that here he speaks the truth,[293] but in fact it is only here he is a liar. It is impossible to believe that every one had not penetrated his various disguises, and he must have known that this was, and would be, so. Wishing, then, both to revenge and to vindicate himself—for his "betrayal" still hurt him keenly—and guessing that Fiammetta would read the book, he tells us that it was he who left her, not she him. The book then is very amusing for us who are behind the scenes, as it was, doubtless, for many of those who read it in his day.
The action is very simple, the story being told by Fiammetta as though it were an autobiography. It begins with a dream in which Fiammetta is warned that great unhappiness is in store for her. She knows Panfilo,[294] and suddenly there arises between them an eager love. Warned of the danger they run in entertaining so impetuous a passion, they yet take no heed; till quite as suddenly as it had begun, their love is broken. Panfilo must go away, it seems, being recalled to Florence by his old father. In vain Fiammetta tries to detain him; she can only obtain from him a promise that he will return to Naples in four months. The ingenious lying in that!
All alone she passes her days and nights in weeping. The four months pass and Panfilo does not come back to her. One day she hears from a merchant that he has taken a wife in Florence. This news increases her agony, and she asks aid of Venus. Then her husband, seeing her to be ill, but unaware of the cause of her sufferings, takes her to Baia; but no distraction helps her, and Baia only reminds her of the bygone days she spent there with Panfilo. At last she hears from a faithful servant come from Florence that Panfilo has not taken a wife, that the young woman in his house is the new wife of his old father; but it seems though he be unmarried he is in love with another lady, which is even worse. New jealousy and lamentations of Fiammetta. She refuses to be comforted and thinks only of death and suicide, and even tries to throw herself from her window, but is prevented. Finally the return of Panfilo is announced. Fiammetta thanks Venus and adorns herself again. She waits; but Panfilo does not come, and at last she is reduced to comforting herself by thinking of all those who suffer from love even as she. The work closes with a sort of epilogue.
As a work of art the Fiammetta is the best thing Boccaccio has yet achieved. The psychology is fine, subtle, and full of insight, but not so dramatic nor so simple and profound as that in the Filostrato. He shows again that he understands a woman's innermost nature, her continual doubts of herself, her gift of introspection. The torment of soul that a deserted woman suffers, the helpless fury of jealousy, are studied and explained with marvellous knowledge and coolness. The husband, who, ignorant of all, is so sorry for his wife's unhappiness, and seeks to console and comfort her, really lives and is the fine prototype of a lot of base work done later in which the cruel absurdity of the situation and the ridiculous figure he cuts who plays his part in it are insisted on. In fact, in the Fiammetta we find many of the finest features of the Decameron. It is the first novel of psychology ever written in Europe.