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 alo