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Three years had passed since the day at Vena di Fonte Alta, when Jeanne in despair had sworn to herself to love Piero no longer, feeling that henceforward she could love nothing else in the world. Nevertheless she always loved him; still, as in the past, she judged him with her intellect independent of her heart, an independence dear to her pride.
With the exception of a small village called Fonte Boa, retired from the main river, where we stopped to take in firewood, and which I shall have to speak of presently, we saw no human habitation the whole of the distance.
It has been seriously asserted that during the last half-century more books have been written by women and about women than during all the previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think of the innumerable volumes of Mémoires by Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each one justifying the existence of her own ten volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as many, we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of general treatises on the female sex, however, its education, life, health, diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages, encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally, there can be no doubt whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of public sentiment which no other age ever dreamed of. Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the Reformation, in this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the Venetian, who left a book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei Meriti delle Donne." There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who followed ten years after, with her essay, "La Nobilit
The friends, Propriety and Restraint, presided over the innocent banquet, and a dismal evening set in. The first infraction of this polite tranquillity came, I blush to say, from the descendant of John de Fonte. He exploded in a yawn of magnitude; to cover this, the young lady began hastily to play her old game of setting people astride their topic, and she selected David Dodd for the experiment.
Yet we may remember how a more illustrious refugee, the singer of the Divine Comedy, betook himself upon the same occasion to the lonely convent of Fonte Avellana on the Alps of Catria, and meditated there the cantos of his Purgatory.
The fame of Lorenzo, by reason of his most profound mastery in casting, had now spread throughout all Italy and abroad, insomuch that Jacopo della Fonte, Vecchietto of Siena, and Donato having made for the Signoria of Siena some scenes and figures in bronze that were to adorn the baptismal font of their Church of S. Giovanni, the people of Siena, having seen the works of Lorenzo in Florence, came to an agreement with him and caused him to make two scenes from the life of S. John the Baptist.
All the skill of the physicians and surgeons of Rieti not having had any effect towards the cure of their patient, he had himself taken to his Convent of Fonte Colombo, where they were to continue their remedies; and it was their opinion that a hot iron should be applied above his ear, from which it was expected he would obtain relief.
There is a whirl of words spoken by Don Clemente, by the lad Alberti, by the elderly Englishwoman, while fragments of the Vision flash like pictures before his mind's eye. Yes, he will go to Casa Selva, but only for a short time. As he ascends, the mighty voice of the Anio roars louder, ever louder, out of the depths: "Rome! Rome! Rome!" JEANNE TO NOEMI. VENA DI FONTE ALTA, July 4,
Jacopo, then, as it has been said, having brought this water below the walls, made the fountain which was then called the Fonte Guizianelli, and which is now named, by the corruption of the word, the Fonte Viniziana; this work endured from that time, which was the year 1354, up to the year 1527, and no more, for the reason that the plague of that year, the war that came afterwards, the fact that many intercepted the water at their own convenience for the use of their gardens, and still more the fact that Jacopo did not sink it, brought it about that to-day it is not, as it should be, standing.
The place contains about 500 inhabitants, chiefly half-castes and Indians of the Tucuna and Collina tribes, who are very little improved from their primitive state. The streets are narrow, and in rainy weather inches deep in mud; many houses are of substantial structure, but in a ruinous condition, and the place altogether presents the appearance, like Fonte Boa, of having seen better days.
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