The God of Love

by Justin H. McCarthy

I make no doubt that there were some who grumbled and carped and cavilled; said this and said that; grunted porcine over the pretty pass things were coming to in the city when a nobody or a next-to-nobody like young Dante of the Alighieri could presume to lift his impudent eyes to a daughter of a man like Folco Portinari, one of the first citizens of Florence, and a man that builded hospitals and basilicas at his own expense. But the growls of these grumblers and carpers and snarlers did not count in the general and genial applause that our youth gave to mellifluous numbers and lovely love, and the thousand beautiful things and thoughts that make this poor life of ours seem for a season Elysium. So they feasted and prattled, and I turn to another theme.

If the meaning of what Messer Dante said and the meaning of what Messer Dante did was plain and over-plain to Messer Folco, it was surely in the very nature of things no less plain to his daughter. To her, at least, there can have been no riddle to read in the young man's words, in the young man's actions. Love, splendid and fierce and humble, reigned in the glowing words that he read, ruled his failing voice, swayed his reeling figure. She could not question the identity of the Blessed One whose beauty made the singer sacrilegious in the white-heat of his devotion. She could not misinterpret the significance of the abandoned parchment lying discarded where it had fallen on the floor while the reciter, with his sad eyes fixed upon her face, repeated so familiarly the words which he was supposed never to have seen. For Beatrice, Dante of the Alighieri was the author of the ballad in praise of fair Florentines; for her he was the unknown poet whose fame had flamed through Florence, and she was the lady that was praised with words of such enchanting sweetness in his songs.

While the guests were going toward the banquet as brisk as bees to blossoms, Dante caught me by the hand and drew me apart, and entreated me to seek speech with Beatrice, and to entreat her to grant him an interview in private that very night. He dared not, so he said, approach her himself, in the first place because the doing so might prove too noticeable after what had occurred, and, in the second place, because he feared that she had some cause of complaint against him, seeing that she had of late refused him her salutation. He bade me urge her very strenuously to grant his prayer, for his soul's sake and his body's sake, that he might live and not die.

Since I was ever willing to serve my friend, I agreed to do this thing, and so left him to the care of Messer Guido, who came up on that instant and addressed him in very loving terms, charging him with being indeed the poet whose name they had sought so long. Dante not denying this, as indeed denial would have been idle, even if Dante had been willing, as indeed he never was, to utter such a falsehood, saying that he had not done that which he had done, Messer Guido began to praise him in such glowing words as would have made another man happy. But for Dante happiness lay only in the kind thoughts of his lady, and the very shaft of his ambition was only to please her. He listened very quietly while Messer Guido praised him so highly, and I, for my part, set about performing the task with which he had intrusted me.

I did not know at the time, though I learned it later, that my mission, if not forestalled, had in very truth been rendered much easier by the action of another. That masked youth I told you of, who would needs have Dante read his own poem that none there knew for his, was no other a person than Monna Vittoria. Vittoria had ever a freakish humor for slipping into man's apparel, which some of her friends found diverting and others not, as the mood took them. Madonna Vittoria took it into her head that she would be present at Messer Folco's festival, and to do so was easy enough for her when once she had clothed her shapely body in the habit of a cavalier, and flung a colored cloak about her, and curled her locks up under a cap, and clapped a vizard upon her face. She went to Messer Folco's house for this reason most of all, that she meant to speak with Madonna Beatrice, a thing not ordinarily very easy to come at for such as she. Indeed, there was no risk for her of discovery, doing what she did in the way she did, with a man's jacket on her back and a man's hose upon her legs.

She came, as it seems, upon Beatrice in the early hours of the festival, having bided her time till she should find Folco's daughter alone or nearly so, and then and there addressed her earnestly with a request for some private speech. In such a season of merry-making the request did not come so strangely from a masked youth as to seem either insolent or unfitting. But Beatrice knew at once that the voice was a woman's, and so said, smilingly, as she drew a little apart with her challenger. Then it appears that Vittoria unmasked and named herself, and that Beatrice looked at her very steadily and gravely, and said no more than this: "I have heard of you. You are very beautiful," the which words, as Vittoria told me later, gave her a greater pleasure than any she had ever tasted from the praises of men's lips.

Vittoria said, "If you have heard of me, perhaps you will think that I should not be here and seeking speech with you."

To which Beatrice answered, very sweetly, that it was no part of the law of her life to deny hearing to one that wished for speech with her, and while she spoke she was still smiling kindly, and there was no anger in her eyes and no scorn, but only a kind of sad wonder. Then Vittoria said that she had made bold to do what she did for the sake of a friend and for the sake of Beatrice herself. Thereat the manner of Beatrice, albeit still courteous, grew colder, and she answered that she did not know how the doings of any friend of Vittoria's could concern her, and Vittoria knew that she guessed who the friend was.

Vittoria said, "The friend of whom I speak, the friend whom I would serve with you, is not and never has been more than my friend."

At this Beatrice made a gesture as if to silence her and a movement as if to leave her.