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Updated: May 13, 2025
I saw her daily now, and often would she choose me for her sole companion; often, sitting apart with me, would she unburden her heart and tell me much that I am assured she would have told no other. A strange thing may it have seemed, this confidence between the Fool and the noble Lady of Santafior my Holy Flower of the Quince, as in my thoughts I grew to name her.
I am referring to the mysterious disappearance of Madonna Paola di Santafior a disappearance of which you have assured me that you knew nothing, being even in ignorance of the fact that the lady was not really dead. I had confidently expected that the party searching for Madonna Paola would have succeeded ere this in finding her. But this morning my hopes suffered disappointment.
It was in that that I addressed her as the "Holy Flower of the Quince," which was the symbol of the House of Santafior. So great an impression made that ode that on the morrow the Lord Giovanni came to me with a second bribe and a second threat of torture. I gave him a sonnet of Petrarchian manner which went near to outshining the merits of the ode.
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?
It was two days later that the Lord Giovanni set out for Rome, obedient to the command he had received. But before his departure on the eve of it, to be precise there arrived at Pesaro a very wonderful and handsome gentleman. This was the brother of Madonna Paola, the High and Mighty Lord Filippo di Santafior.
For there was I know not what about this child that seemed to take me in its toils, and so wrought upon me that there and then I would have risked my life in her good service. Oh, you may laugh who read. Indeed, deep down in my heart I laughed myself, I think, at the heroics to which I was yielding I, the Fool, most base of lacqueys over a damsel of the noble House of Santafior.
All my life have men plagued me with marriages that were hateful to me, and this has culminated in the brutal act of Ramiro del' Orca. Do you not think that I have endured enough?" He stared at her for a moment. "Then you love this fellow?" he gasped. "You, Madonna Paola Sforza di Santafior, one of the noblest ladies in all Italy, confess to love this lordling of a few barren acres?"
It was not fear of what I had seen that now sent my thoughts into a new channel and inspired me with the wisdom of obeying Ramiro del' Orca's behest that I should don the hateful motley and play the Fool for his diversion. It was not that I feared death; it was that I feared what the consequences of my death might be to Paola di Santafior.
The cavalcade that had overtaken us proved to number some twenty men-at-arms, whose leader was no less a person than Ramiro del' Orca that same mountain of a man who had attended my departure from the Vatican three nights ago. From the circumstance that so important a personage should have been charged with the pursuit of the Lady of Santafior, I inferred that great issues were at stake.
But this poor chronicle of mine is rather concerned with the history of Madonna Paola di Santafior, and it were a divergence well-nigh unpardonable to set my pen at present to that other task. Moreover, there is scarce the need.
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