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"Didn't you take me with you, knowing what sort of fellow I was? Didn't I tell you I had every sin and shame under heaven; and have I deceived you by the exhibition of a single virtue?" Morgante could not help laughing at a candour of this excessive nature. So they went on their way till they came to a wood, where they rested themselves by a fountain, and Margutte fell fast asleep.
Margutte, seeing this, and being always drunk and impudent, daubed his face like a Christmas clown, and making up to her with a frying-pan in his hand, demanded "something for the cook."
Perhaps the poet intended to make something of this in his way honest monster, possibly to have led him into virtuous paths by Morgante, but he soon got tired of his own creation, and in the next canto brought him to a comic end. Margutte has been brought forward as a proof of Pulci's frivolity; but he is needed to complete the picture of the poetry of the fifteenth century.
Perhaps the most tragic character would be that of a Margutte of the inner man, who, like the Margutte of Pulci, should die of laughter, but of laughter at himself. E riderá in eterno, he will laugh for all eternity, said the Angel Gabriel of Margutte. Do you not hear the laughter of God?
Pulci is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer.
Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his consideration, nevertheless, towards the poor selfish wretch who had had no better training.
Voltaire, however, does injustice to Pulci, when he pretends that in matters of belief he is like himself, a mere scoffer. It is observable that his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, and a most extraordinary personage.
Even in Pulci, accordingly, we find no parody, strictly speaking, of chivalry, nearly humour of his paladins at times approaches it. By their side stands the ideal of pugnacity the droll and jovial Morgante who masters whole armies with his bellclapper, and who is himself thrown into relief by contrast with the grotesque and most interesting monster Margutte.
There was a levity, nevertheless, in Margutte, which restored his spirits on the slightest glimpse of good fortune; and if he realised a hearty meal, he became the happiest, beastliest, and most confident of giants. The companions, in the course of their journey, delivered a damsel from the clutches of three other giants.
Pulci draws a picture of the Giant Margutte who, disregarding each and every religion, jovially confesses to every form of vice and sensuality, and only reserves to himself the merit of having never broken faith.
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