I can picture to myself future generations saying: "So that's what Monarchy[3] was good for—to produce that sort of character and their portrayal by great artists. "
And yet I find an admirable example of this delicacy even in the republics of the Middle Ages; which seems to destroy my system of the influence of governments on the passions, but which I shall cite in good faith.
The reference is to those very touching verses of Dante:
Deh! quando tu sarai tomato al mondo
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Purgatorio, Cant. V.[4]
The woman, who speaks with so much restraint, had suffered in secret the fate of Desdemona, and, by a word, could make known her husband's crime to the friends, whom she had left on earth.
Nello della Pietra won the hand of Madonna Pia[(14)], sole heiress of the Tolomei, the richest and noblest family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admiration of Tuscany, sowed in her husband's heart the seed of jealousy, which, envenomed by false reports and suspicions ever and anon rekindled, led him to a heinous project. It is difficult, at this hour, to decide whether his wife was altogether innocent, but Dante represents her as such.
Her husband carried her off into the fens of Volterra, famous then, as now, for the effects of the aria cattiva. Never would he tell his unhappy wife the reason of her exile in so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to utter complaint or accusation. He lived alone with her in a deserted tower, the ruins of which by the edge of the sea I have been myself to visit. There he never broke his scornful silence, never answered his young wife's questions, never listened to her prayers. Coldly he waited at her side for the pestilential air to have its effect. The exhalations of these morasses were not long in withering those features—the loveliest, it is said, which, in that century, the world had seen. In a few months she died. Some chroniclers of those remote times report that Nello used the dagger to hasten her end. She died in the fens in some horrible way; but the kind of death was a mystery even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived to pass the rest of his days in a silence which he never broke.
Nothing nobler and more delicate than the way in which young la Pia addresses Dante. She wishes to be recalled to the memory of the friends, whom she had left on earth so young; and yet, telling who she is and giving the name of her husband, she will not allow herself the slightest complaint against a piece of cruelty unheard of, but for the future irreparable; she only points out that he knows the story of her death.