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Updated: May 23, 2025
No greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels, her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse, the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.
As I recall your starry names, no blush hinting unmannerliness suspect and unconfessed hits me on the cheek: Simonetta, Ilaria, Nenciozza, Bettina; you too, candid Mariota of Prato; you, flinching little Imola; and you, snuff-taking, wool-carding ancient lady of the omnibus scorner of monks, I have kissed your hands, I have at least given our whole commerce frankly to the world; and I know not how any shall say we have been closer acquainted than we should.
I suppose they think of little more than the market price of spring onions: but then, why do their eyes speak like that? And what do they speak of? Dio mio, I am an honest man! So was not Lorenzo; listen to him: "Two eyes hath she so roguish and demure That, lit they on a rock, they'd make it feel; How shall poor melting man meet such a lure?" How indeed? Ah, Nenciozza mia!
For Lorenzo is gone, and, greater than he, the paladins and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, have followed the saints and virgins of Dante into the limbo of fair unrealities; and the very Greek and Roman heroes of a hundred years ago, the very knights and covenanters of forty years since, have joined them; but Valléra exists still, and still in the flesh exists his Nenciozza.
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