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But, meanwhile, your men are waiting for you; Madonna Paola di Santafior is waiting for you, and hark! the bellowing crowd is waiting for you." "They wait in vain," he snarled. "Who cares for them? The Lord of Pesaro am I." "Care you, then, nothing for them?
The Convent of San Paola is a sacred shrine for art-lovers they come from the round world over, just to see the ceiling in that one room the room of the Abbess Giovanni, where Antonio Allegri, the young man from Correggio, first placed his scaffolds in Parma. The village of Correggio is quite off the beaten track of travel. You will have to look five times on the map before you can find it.
He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became a poet for the season.
I stooped suddenly, under the sway of an impulse, I could not resist, and kissed her upturned face, turning almost dizzy in the act. Then I broke from her clasp, and bracing myself for the task to which we stood committed by that kiss "Paola," said I, "we must devise the means to get away. I will bear you to my mother's home near Biancomonte, that you may dwell there at least until we are wed.
Good old Guido of Parma, afar from home, once asked, with tear- filled eyes, of a recent visitor there "And tell me, you saw the Cathedral and the Convent of San Paola and are not the cherubs of Master Correggio grown to be men yet?" It is only life and love that give love and life. Correggio gave us both out of the fulness of a full heart.
The square is bare and brown, baked by the hot summer suns; but a little further away in the rear, the clear and noisy waters of the Acqua Paola fall bubbling from the three basins of a monumental fountain amidst sempiternal freshness.
It is patrimony enough for me, and there, with Madonna Paola, I'll take a long farewell of ambition, which is but the seed of discontent." "Why, as you will," he sighed. And then, before more could be said, there came from the adjoining room a piercing scream. Cesare raised his head, and his lips parted in the faintest vestige of a smile.
On a chair, the one usually occupied by Ramiro, himself, sat Madonna Paola, still in her torn and bedraggled raiment, her face white, her eyes wild as they had been when first she had been haled into Ramiro's presence, some two hours ago, and her features so rigidly composed that it told the tale of the awful self-control she must be exerting a self-control that might end with a sudden snap that would plunge her into madness.
"Why, since you ask me," he said, "I should hazard the opinion that Lazzaro, here, was of considerable assistance to the Lord Giovanni in the penning of those verses with which he delighted us all and you, Madonna, I believe, particularly." Madonna Paola crimsoned, and her eyes fell. The others looked at us with inquiring glances at her, at Filippo and at me.
Their leader, a gigantic man whose head was armed by no more than a pot of burnished steel, from which escaped the long red ringlets of his hair, was that same Ramiro del' Orca who had commanded the party pursuing Madonna Paola three years ago.
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