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She was a mattress-maker, and with one of her aunts had long gone from yard to yard at Bercy to comb and sew up mattresses. And, indeed, it was to the pestilential wool which she had combed in her youth that she ascribed her malady. For five years she had been making the round of the hospitals of Paris, and she spoke familiarly of all the great doctors.
In this instance she will be sure to call the concierge, the scrubber, the mattress-maker, and the seven sons of the fruit-seller; they will all kneel down in a circle around me; they will begin to cry, and then they will look so ugly that I shall be obliged to yield, so as not to have the pain of seeing them any more."
The less they travel, moreover, the prouder they are, and the stronger is their conviction that England leads the world in thought and art and action. In any town of France, Germany or Holland, the curious need not seek long for the mattress-maker.
In Spain, a country rarely visited by those persons who pride themselves upon being particular, the mattress-maker is a much more necessary factor in domestic life than is the sweep or the plumber in northern lands. No palace is too royal for him, no cottage is too humble to employ him. He is, moreover, the only man allowed inside a nunnery.
She was a mattress-maker, and with one of her aunts had long gone from yard to yard at Bercy to comb and sew up mattresses. And, indeed, it was to the pestilential wool which she had combed in her youth that she ascribed her malady. For five years she had been making the round of the hospitals of Paris, and she spoke familiarly of all the great doctors.
And all the while, from the moment that the mattress is open till the heap is complete, the two sticks never cease playing their thin and woody air so that any within hearing may know that the "colchonero" is at work. It is then that he gossips. In a Southern land such a worker as this must always have an audience, and the children hail with delight the coming of the mattress-maker.
The mattress-maker of Pampeluna was a thin man with a ropy neck, and keen black eyes that flashed hither and thither through the mist of wool and dust in which he worked. He was considered so essentially a domestic and harmless person that he was permitted to go where he listed in the house and high-walled garden.
All the while, through the beating of the wool, the two sticks beaten against each other play a distinct air, and each mattress-maker has his own, handed down from his forefathers, ending with a whole chromatic scale as the shorter stick swoops up the length of the longer to sweep away the lingering wool.
Look at me: I can cook, but I must not cook; I am skillful with the needle, but I must not take in sewing; I could keep accounts; I could nurse the sick; but I must not. I could be a confectioner, a milliner, a dressmaker, a vest-maker, a cleaner of gloves and laces, a dyer, a bird-seller, a mattress-maker, an upholsterer, a dancing-teacher, a florist "
In this we learn that Jacopo was born in Florence in 1477, the son of a mattress-maker named Tatti; but apparently 1486 is the right date.
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