than
when a controversy arises concerning matters of the heart. All this
wisdom by the way. If Madonna Beatrice had been pale before, she was
paler now, and for a breathing-while it seemed as if she would swoon,
but she did not swoon. They sent for her physician, Messer Tommaso
Severo, who could do nothing, and said as much. Madonna Beatrice, he
declared, was very weak; it were well not to distress her over-much.
Beyond that he said little, partly because he was naturally enough in
agreement with Messer Folco in his views as to the rule of parents over
children, and partly because he was aware how frail a spirit of life was
housed in her sweet body, and knew that no art of his or of any man's
was of avail to strengthen it or to hinder its departure when the time
must be.

While all this was toward, Madonna Beatrice seemed to come out of the
silent fit into which the false news of Dante's death had cast her, and
when her father asked her again, something less sternly than before,
but still peremptorily, if she would have Messer Simone for mate, she
did no more than incline her head in what Messer Folco took to be a
signal of submission to his will. At this yielding he, being by nature
an authoritarian, seemed not a little pleased. For the death of Dante,
and the effect that death might have upon his daughter's welfare, he did
not care and did not profess to care in the least. Dante as a human
being was nothing to him--nothing more, at least, than a young man who
belonged to an opposite party, had no money or family backing, and owed
what little esteem he had gained in the public mind to his writing some
clever verses and making a mystery about their authorship, the said
verses being particularly offensive to him, Folco Portinari, because
they had the insolence to be aimed at his daughter. So having carried
his point and enforced his authority, Messer Folco straightway sent a
messenger to the church chosen for the ceremony to have all in readiness
for the immediate nuptials.

As for Beatrice, though she still seemed like a woman that was stricken
with a catalepsy, she was, by her father's orders, girded in a white
gown and girdled and garlanded with white roses, and in such guise
Messer Folco and Messer Simone between them--with my curse on them for a
fool and a knave--led their helpless victim from the Portinari house
into the open air. There a litter awaited her, into which she went
unresisting, and so with the people