"Ah, my Lady! I cannot leave Florence!"
"What! You cannot? Do you then repent of your kindness? Will you break your promise to me?"
"Ah, my Lady! You know that I am a wife. My husband is far distant; now how can I, consistently with my duty, go away without his consent? How leave a country which he does not wish to leave? If he were to return, and, finding me gone, his love for me should be changed to hatred, should he say: 'Since she is gone, I shall take no more trouble about her;' were I to become a wanderer over the world without him, should he doubt the great love I feel for him, and the faith that I have always kept to him, and despise me—Ah, wretched me!—I should die,—I should certainly die of grief——"
"You love your husband very much, Maria?"
"How could I help loving him? When, forsaken by every one, my parents dead, without a single relation, banished from your heart, I implored God to call me to Himself, because I had lost every reason for wishing to live, and the Lord not granting my prayer, I felt myself plunged in despair, this beloved youth had pity upon me and said: 'Come, poor forsaken one; rest upon my arm, and we will make the journey of life together; if you wish for love, I offer you a heart capable of loving:'—and I clung to him, as St. Peter did to the robe of Christ, when he felt himself drowning, and I was saved: life became pleasant to me, and has always remained so, because I feel that I give pleasure to him—to my husband—my only comfort on earth——"
"How happy you are! But reassure yourself, Maria; I shall know the moment he returns, and then I will contrive either to speak to him myself, or, failing in that, will send a monk of holy demeanor and sweet eloquence, who will be able to make him contented, and willing to appreciate your good and pious action, so that if he love virtue, as he must, loving you, he not only will bear no ill-will against you, but will love you a thousand times more than before——"
"You say well: but if you should not be able either to speak or to send to him; if, in the bitterness of the unexpected calamity, he should be overcome by passion, and destroy himself or fall sick—Alas! I tremble at the mere thought that he might be sick, and not have his Maria by his bedside to care for him——"
"I swear to you by my soul, that he shall know it before he enters the gates of Florence; do not fear, I bind myself by my word as a Princess and a Christian——"
"But even if I could trust you in this, Isabella, how could I endure to banish myself for ever from my country?"
"And what is there now in this country of ours to bind you to it? The spirit of the republic is irrevocably departed, not like a flame extinguished by force, but like a candle which has burned to the socket. Most of her worthiest children wander sadly, either in voluntary or forced exile, so that it may be said of Florence as it was of Pisa after the defeat at Meloria, that to see Pisa it was necessary to go to Genoa. In Lyons and in Paris you will meet the flower of our citizens. The royal buildings and the churches in France equal, if they do not surpass, our own. There, as here, the earth produces pleasant fruits; there, as here, the sun and stars shed their blessed light; there, as here, people love, hate, are born, live and die; and God exalts the humble, casts down the proud, and listens to the prayer of innocent souls like yours——"