I sat on the sofa end and touched one of her little pink ears. She has pretty ears. They were the first of things physical about her that attracted me to her years ago in the Roman pension—they and the mass of silken flax that is her hair, and her violet eyes.
“Did you learn that particular way of talking in Paris?” I asked.
She had the effrontery to say she was imitating me and that it was a very good imitation indeed.
We talked about the book. I touched upon the great problem that requires solution—the harmonising and justifying of the contradictory opposites in Renaissance character: Fra Lippo Lippi breaking his own vows and breaking a nun’s for her; Perugino leading his money-grubbing, morose life and painting ethereal saints and madonnas in his bottega, while the Baglioni filled the streets outside with slaughter; Lorenzo de’ Medici bleeding literally and figuratively his fellow-citizens, going from that occupation to his Platonic Academy and disputing on the immortality of the soul, winding up with orgies of sensual depravity with his boon companion Pulci, and all the time making himself an historic name for statecraft; Pope Sixtus IV, at the very heart of the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the Medici—
“And Pope Nicholas V when drunk ordering a man to be executed, and being sorry for it when sober,” said Judith.
It is wonderful how Judith, with her quite unspecialised knowledge of history can now and then put her finger upon something vital. I have been racking my brain and searching my library for the past two or three days for an illustration of just that nature. I had not thought of it. Here is Tomaso da Sarzana, a quiet, retired schoolmaster, like myself, an editor of classical texts, a peaceful librarian of Cosmo de’ Medici, a scholar and a gentleman to the tips of his fingers; he is made Pope, a King Log to save the cardinalate from a possible King Stork Colonna; the Porcari conspiracy breaks out, is discovered and the conspirators are hunted over Italy and put to death; a gentleman called Anguillara is slightly inculpated; he is invited to Rome by Nicholas, and given a safe-conduct; when he arrives the Pope is drunk (at least Stefano Infessura, the contemporary diarist, says so); the next morning his Holiness finds to his surprise and annoyance that the gentleman’s head has been cut off by his orders. It is an amazing tale. To realise how amazing it is, one must picture the fantastic possibility of it happening at the Vatican nowadays. And the most astounding thing is this: that if all the dead and gone popes were alive, and the soul of the saintly Pontiff of to-day were to pass from him, the one who could most undetected occupy his simulacrum would be this very Thomas of Sarzana.
“Pardon me, my dear Judith,” said I. “But this is a story lying somewhat up one of the back-waters of history. Where did you come across it?”
“I saw it the other day in a French comic paper,” replied Judith.
I really don’t know which to admire the more: the inconsequent way in which the French toss about scholarship, or the marvellous power of assimilation possessed by Judith.
Before we separated she returned to the subject of Carlotta.