Tuscan Cities. William Dean Howells
him. He seconded his age in all its tendencies; corrupt as it was, he left it corrupter still in every way; he gave himself up to pleasure, and he taught his people to give themselves up to it, to its intoxication and its delirium."
XVIII
This is the sort of being whom human nature in self-defense ought always to recognize as a devil, and whom no glamour of circumstance or quality should be suffered to disguise. It is success like his which, as Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon's similar success, "confounds the human conscience," and kindles the lurid light in which assassination seems a holy duty. Lorenzo's tyranny in Florence was not only the extinction of public liberty, but the control of private life in all its relations. He made this marriage and he forbade that among the principal families, as it suited his pleasure; he decided employments and careers; he regulated the most intimate affairs of households in the interest of his power, with a final impunity which is inconceivable of that proud and fiery Florence. The smoldering resentment of his tyranny, which flamed out in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and history, in which the tragedy was enacted. It was always dramatizing itself there when I entered the Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of some vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while some high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its glittering procession. But I think the ghosts preferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duomo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead or alive, by the immense impression of stony bareness, of drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior, unless it is filled with people. Outside it is magnificently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and irregularity of its piazza. In spite of having no such approach as St. Mark's at Venice, or St Peter's at Rome, or even the cathedral at Milan, in spite of being almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops and cafes, it is noble, and more and more astonishing; and there is the baptistery, with its heavenly gates, and the tower of Giotto, with its immortal beauty, as novel for each new-comer as if freshly set out there overnight for his advantage. Nor do I object at all to the cabstands there, and the little shops all round, and the people thronging through the piazza, in and out of the half-score of crooked streets opening upon it. You do not get all the grandeur of the cathedral outside, but you get enough, while you come away from the interior in a sort of destitution. One needs some such function as I saw there one evening at dusk in order to realize all the spectacular capabilities of the place. This function consisted mainly of a visible array of the Church's forces "against blasphemy," as the printed notices informed me; but with the high altar blazing, a constellation of candles in the distant gloom, and the long train of priests, choristers, acolytes, and white-cowled penitents, each with his taper, and the archbishop, bearing the pyx, at their head, under a silken canopy, it formed a setting of incomparable vividness for the scene on the last Sunday before Ascension, 1478.
There is, to my thinking, no such mirror of the spirit of that time as the story of this conspiracy. A pope was at the head of it, and an archbishop was there in Florence to share actively in it. Having failed to find Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici together at Lorenzo's villa, the conspirators transfer the scene to the cathedral; the moment chosen for striking the blow is that supremely sacred moment when the very body of Christ is elevated for the adoration of the kneeling worshippers. What a contempt they all have for the place and the office! In this you read one effect of that study of antiquity which was among the means Lorenzo used to corrupt the souls of men; the Florentines are half repaganized. Yet at the bottom of the heart of one conspirator lingers a mediaeval compunction, and though not unwilling to kill a man, this soldier does not know about killing one in a church. Very well, then, give up your dagger, you simple soldier; give it to this priest; he knows what a church is, and how little sacred!
The cathedral is packed with people, and Lorenzo is there, but Giuliano is not come yet. Are we to be fooled a second time? Malediction! Send someone to fetch that Medicean beast, who is so slow coming to the slaughter! I am of the conspiracy, for I hate the Medici; but these muttered blasphemies, hissed and ground through the teeth, this frenzy for murder — it is getting to be little better than that — make me sick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his house, and being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke familiarly with him; we put our arms caressingly about him, and feel if he has a shirt of mail on, as we walk him between us through the crowd at the corner of the cafe there, invisibly, past all the cabmen ranked near the cathedral and the baptistery, not one of whom shall snatch his horse's oat-bag from his nose to invite us phantoms to a turn in the city. We have our friend safe in the cathedral at last — hapless, kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except that he is of that cursed race of the Medici — and now at last the priest elevates the host and it is time to strike; the little bell tinkles, the multitude hold its breath and falls upon its knees; Lorenzo and Giuliano kneel with the rest A moment, and Bernardo Bandini plunges his short dagger through the boy, who drops dead upon his face, and Francesco Fazzi flings himself upon the body, and blindly striking to make sure of his death, gives himself a wound in the leg that disables him for the rest of the work. And now we see the folly of entrusting Lorenzo to the unpracticed hand of a priest, who would have been neat enough, no doubt, at mixing a dose of poison. The bungler has only cut his man a little in the neck! Lorenzo's sword is out and making desperate play for his life; his friends close about him, and while the sacred vessels are tumbled from the altar and trampled underfoot in the mellay, and the cathedral rings with yells and shrieks and curses and the clash of weapons, they have hurried him into the sacristy and barred the doors, against which we shall beat ourselves in vain. Fury! Infamy! Malediction! Pick yourself up, Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may! There is no mounting to horse and crying liberty through the streets for you! All is over! The wretched populace, the servile signory, side with the Medici; in a few hours the Archbishop of Pisa is swinging by the neck from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio; and while he is yet alive you are dragged, bleeding and naked, from your bed through the streets and hung beside him, so close that in his dying agony he sets his teeth in your breast with a convulsive frenzy that leaves you fast m the death-clutch of his jaws till they cut the ropes and you run hideously down to the pavement below.
XIX
One must face these grisly details from time to time if he would feel what Florence was. All the world was like Florence at that time in its bloody cruelty; the wonder is that Florence, being what she otherwise was, should be like all the world in that One should take the trouble also to keep constantly in mind the smallness of the theatre in which these scenes were enacted. Compared with modern cities, Florence was but a large town, and these Pazzi were neighbors and kinsmen of the Medici, and they and their fathers had seen the time when the Medici were no more in the state than other families which had perhaps scorned to rise by their arts. It would be insufferable to any of us if some acquaintance whom we knew so well, root and branch, should come to reign over us; but this is what happened through the Medici in Florence.
I walked out one pleasant Sunday afternoon to the Villa Careggi, where Lorenzo made a dramatic end twenty years after the tragedy in the cathedral. It is some two miles from the city; I could not say in just what direction; but it does not matter, since if you do not come to Villa Careggi when you go to look for it, you come to something else equally memorable, by ways as beautiful and through landscapes as picturesque. I remember that there was hanging from a crevice of one of the stone walls which we sauntered between, one of those great purple anemones of Florence, tilting and swaying in the sunny air of February, and that there was a tender presentiment of spring in the atmosphere, and people were out languidly enjoying the warmth about their doors, as if the winter had been some malady of theirs, and they were now slowly convalescent The mountains were white with snow beyond Fiesole, but that was perhaps to set off to better advantage the nearer hill-sides, studded with villas gleaming white through black plumes of cypress, and blurred with long gray stretches of olive orchard; it is impossible to escape some such crazy impression of intention in the spectacular prospect of Italy, though that is probably less the fault of the prospect than of the people who have painted and printed so much about it There were vineyards, of course, as well as olive orchards on all those broken and irregular slopes, over which wandered a tangle of the high walls which everywhere shut you out from intimate approach to the fields about Florence; you may look up at them, afar off, or you may look down at them, but you cannot look