oudy night to Pitecchio, their
stronghold in the Apennine. For Messer Cino, it behoved him also to
advise seriously about his position. To sonnetteer is very well, but a
lover, to say nothing of a jurisconsult, must live; he cannot have his
throat cut if there is a way out.

There was a very simple way out, which he took. He went down to Lucca in
the plain and married his Margherita degli Ughi. With her Guelph
connections he felt himself safer. He bestowed his wife in the keeping
of her people for the time, bought himself a horse, and rode up to
Pitecchio among the green maize, the olive-yards, and sprouting vines to
claim asylum from Filippo, and to see once more the beautiful young
Selvaggia.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] So the Pistolesi described at once their government and the seat of
it.

III

There is hardly a sonnet, there are certainly neither _ballate_,
_canzoni_, nor _capitoli_ which do not contain some reference to Monna
Selvaggia's fine eyes, and always to the same tune. They scorch him,
they beacon him, they flash out upon him in the dark, so that he falls
prone as Saul (who got up with a new name and an honourable addition);
they are lodestones, swords, lamps, torches, fires, fixed and ambulatory
stars, the sun, the moon, candles. They hold lurking a thief to prey
upon the vitals of Cino; they are traitors, cruel lances; they kill him
by stabbing day after day. You can picture the high-spirited young lady
from his book--her noble bearing, her proud head, her unflinching
regard, again the sparks in her grey-green eyes, and so on. He plays
upon her _forte nome_, her dreadful name of Selvaggia; so she comes to
be Ferezza itself. "Tanto e altiera," he says, so haughtily she goes
that love sets him shaking; but, kind or cruel, it is all one to the
enamoured Master Cino; for even if she "un pochettin sorride (light him
a little smile)," it melts him as sun melts snow. In any case,
therefore, he must go, like Dante's cranes, trailing his woes. It
appears that she had very little mercy upon him; for all that in one
place he records that she was "of all sweet sport and solace amorous,"
in many more than one he complains of her bringing him to "death and
derision," of her being in a royal rage with her poet. At last he cries
out for Pity to become incarnate and vest his lady in her own robe. It
may be that he loved his misery; he is always on the point of dying,
but, like the swan, he was careful to set it to mus