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Reading, he became absorbed in this fantastic, but not unhandsome piece; even Selvaggia pondered it with wide eyes and lips half parted. It was certainly very wonderful that a man could say such things, she thought. Were they true? Could they be true of any one in the world even of Beatrice Portinari, that wonderful dead lady?
Ridolfo and Ugolino Vergiolesi, the two elder brothers of Selvaggia, had stayed behind in Pistoja to share the fighting in the streets. They had plenty of it, given and received. Ridolfo had his head cut open, Ugolino went near to losing his sword arm; but in spite of these heroic sufferances the detested Cancellieri became masters of the city, and the chequer-board flag floated over the Podest
Before he left Pitecchio, and that was before the dawn came upon it, he wrote this letter to his mistress. "To his unending Lady, the image of all lovely delight, the Lady Selvaggia, Cino the poet, martyr for love, wisheth health and honour with kissing of feet.
He throve; he became a professor; his wife bore him five children. That should suffice him. As for the young Selvaggia, I suppose her bones are dust of the Apennine. "Unde proverbii loco etiamnunc usurpatur, præteriisse Borsii tempora." Este Chronicle.
Sending his suite around by another path, he went alone to her tomb and tarried for a time in prayer and sorrow. Later, in verse, he commemorates this visit, closing with the words: "...pur chiamando, Selvaggia! L'alpe passai, con voce di dolore."
A sonnet and a bunch of red anemones went to the Palazzo Vergiolesi that evening; thenceforth it rained sonnets till poor little Selvaggia ran near losing her five wits. It rained sonnets, I say, until the Cancellieri brought out the black Guelphs in a swarm. Then it rained blood, and the Vergiolesi fled one cloudy night to Pitecchio, their stronghold in the Apennine.
I know at least that he did not cease to love his beautiful and wild Selvaggia, so far as he understood that delicate state of the soul which she, perverse child, had so signally misapprehended. The truth may well be that he was tolerably happy at Verona, able to contemplate at his ease the divine image of his lady without any interference from the disturbing original.
You can picture the high-spirited young lady from his book her noble bearing, her proud head, her unflinching regard, again the sparks in her grey-green eyes, and so on. He plays upon her forte nome, her dreadful name of Selvaggia; so she comes to be Ferezza itself. In any case, therefore, he must go, like Dante's cranes, trailing his woes.
Lo, here is one stronger than I! At the next moment the three young rogues were about him, their knitted hands a fence, but the eyes of Selvaggia! Selvaggia, in truth, though she had fourteen years behind her, was a romp when no one was looking. There were three brothers at home, but no mother; she was half a boy for all her straight gown.
To embarrass this demure professor, to presume upon her sex while discarding it, was a great joke after a tediously droned mass at San Jacopo. Nicoletta would have made room, even the hardier Guglielmotta drew back; but the wicked Selvaggia pinched their fingers so that they could not escape. All this time Messer Cino had his eyes rooted in Selvaggia's, reading her as if she were a portent.