On leaving Rome, I went to Parma, and spent some time with the members of the house of Correggio, who, while they were most kind and generous towards me, agreed but ill among themselves. They governed Parma, however, in a way unknown to that city within the memory of man, and the like of which it will hardly again enjoy in this present age.
I was conscious of the honour which I had but just received, and fearful lest it might seem to have been granted to one unworthy of the distinction; consequently, as I was walking one day in the mountains, and chanced to cross the river Enza to a place called Selva Piana, in the territory of Reggio, struck by the beauty of the spot, I began to write again upon the Africa, which I had laid aside. In my enthusiasm, which had seemed quite dead, I wrote some lines that very day, and some each day until I returned to Parma. Here I happened upon a quiet and retired house, which I afterwards bought, and which still belongs to me. I continued my task with such ardour, and completed the work in so short a space of time, that I cannot but marvel now at my despatch.[24] I had already passed my thirty-fourth year when I returned thence to the Fountain of the Sorgue, and to my Transalpine solitude. I had made a long stay both in Parma and Verona,[25] and everywhere I had, I am thankful to say, been treated with much greater esteem than I merited.
Some time after this, my growing reputation procured for me the good-will of a most excellent man, Giacomo the Younger, of Carrara, whose equal I do not know among the rulers of his time. For years he wearied me with messengers and letters when I was beyond the Alps, and with his petitions whenever I happened to be in Italy, urging me to accept his friendship. At last, although I anticipated little satisfaction from the venture, I determined to go to him and see what this insistence on the part of a person so eminent, and at the same time a stranger to me, might really mean. I appeared, though tardily, at Padua,[26] where I was received by him of illustrious memory, not as a mortal, but as the blessed are greeted in heaven—with such delight and such unspeakable affection and esteem, that I cannot adequately describe my welcome in words, and must, therefore, be silent. Among other things, learning that I had led a clerical life from boyhood, he had me made a canon of Padua, in order to bind me the closer to himself and his city. In fine, had his life been spared, I should have found there an end to all my wanderings. But alas! nothing mortal is enduring, and there is nothing sweet which does not presently end in bitterness. Scarcely two years was he spared to me, to his country, and to the world. God, who had given him to us, took him again.[27] Without being blinded by my love for him, I feel that neither I, nor his country, nor the world was worthy of him. Although his son, who succeeded him, was in every way a prudent and distinguished man, who, following his father's example, always loved and honoured me, I could not remain after the death of him with whom, by reason especially of the similarity of our ages, I had been much more closely united.
I returned to Gaul, not so much from a desire to see again what I had already beheld a thousand times, as from the hope, common to the afflicted, of coming to terms with my misfortunes by a change of scene.[28] ..............
The preceding brief autobiography, written at the close of his life,[29] does not extend beyond Petrarch's forty-seventh year, and in spite of its peculiar interest it is but a very imperfect sketch, which must be supplemented by the abundant data scattered through the correspondence. In order that the reader may approach the letters with a fuller understanding of the circumstances in which they were written, it is therefore desirable to touch upon certain points which Petrarch neglected in his account of himself, and then to trace his life from his return to Vaucluse in 1351, the last event mentioned in the Letter to Posterity to his death, twenty-three years later.
Of his parents he tells us but little. His father had, before his exile, held a responsible position in the Florentine Republic, and his readiness of speech had caused him to be chosen upon more than one occasion to perform important public missions. His name, Petracco, was changed by his son to Petrarca; why, we do not know. It has been suggested that Francesco invented the latter as more rhythmical, or adopted it on account of some hidden symbolic meaning, as four centuries later young Arouet mysteriously chose to call himself Voltaire. It is perhaps safer to look upon the alteration as merely an instance of the Latinisation of proper names, which was quite natural and almost necessary at a time when Latin was so generally employed.
Petracco père was a friend of Dante while they lived in Florence together, and when it pleased the citizens of that most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome to cast them out from her sweet bosom, and they were, as Dante tells us, borne to divers ports "by the dry wind that blows from grievous poverty,"[30] the bonds of friendship were knit the closer, for a community of misfortune as well as of tastes and interests served to bring them together. Petrarch's father was, however, forced by the care of his family to give up his studies. We know nothing of his literary tastes, except that he was an ardent admirer of Cicero; and, although his interest was probably legal rather than literary, his son confidently assumes that, had he been permitted by circumstances to continue his intellectual pursuits, he would have reached a high degree of scholarship.[31] Almost the only anecdote recorded of him is a trifling instance of his personal vanity. When somewhat past his fiftieth birthday, he was one day horrified to discover, upon looking into the glass, a single hair verging upon grey. Amazed at this indication of premature decay, he not only filled his own home but roused the whole neighbourhood with his laments. Petrarch adds, with an air of conscious virtue, that his own hair began to grow grey before he reached five and twenty.[32]
The only other kinsman to whom we need refer is Petrarch's brother, Gherardo, who was apparently two or three years his junior. A considerable number of the letters are addressed to him. The two spent much of their early life together, but Gherardo, when about thirty-five years old, turned his back upon the world and entered a Carthusian monastery. Some years later the elder brother felicitated him upon his escape from the exacting cares of a life of fashion: he no longer suffered the "piratical tortures" of the curling-iron, and his close-cropped hair left eyes and ears free to perform their functions; the elaborate costume of the fourteenth-century dandy, whose scrupulous folds were liable to be discomposed by every careless movement, had been exchanged for a simple monastic garment, readily donned or laid aside, and affording its wearer no anxiety. Petrarch admits that he is himself still held in bondage, that he still has a partiality for good clothes, though this passion grows hopefully less from day to day. He had, however, worse sins to reflect upon than the elaborate coiffures and tight boots of their frivolous days at Avignon. "What," he asks, for example, "have trivial verses, tilled with the false and offensive praise of women,[33] in common with songs of praise and holy vigils?" We shall refer later to these letters addressed to Gherardo, for they afford a convenient illustration of Petrarch's views of that most cherished of mediæval ideals, the monastic life.[34]
Petrarch, like Erasmus and Voltaire, had no place that he could call home, unless it were the hated Avignon, whither he was taken when about nine years old. This migration to Provence, to which Avignon then belonged, important as it was in the life of our poet, did not involve so complete a separation from Italian influences as would at first sight appear. The boy had in his earliest years learned the Tuscan dialect, which, Dante impatiently declares, was unreasonably held by the Florentines to be the highest form of Italian.[35] There was on the Rhone a considerable Italian colony, with which Petrarch's family associated, and at Carpentras, not far from Avignon, whither the family moved on account of the cheaper living, the little Checco, as he was familiarly called, had an Italian schoolmaster from Prato. Moreover, his later friends and patrons of the noble Roman house of Colonna undoubtedly maintained their national traditions, in spite of the growing French influences at the papal court.