_Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante_--we read no more that day. Nor on any other. Had she, from whom Dante is equally inseparable, tremblingly kissed his mouth, it may be that not their reading merely but his writing would have ceased. But Dante, whom Petrarch called a miracle of nature, was not Paolo. Far from attempting to kiss Beatrice he did not even aspire to such a grace. He had, as the genius should have, everything, even to sex, in his brain, a circumstance that might have preserved him from Gemma Donati and la Gentucca,--the first, his wife; the second, another's--dual infidelities for which, at the summit of Purgatory, Beatrice, who, in the interim, had become very feminine, reproached him with slow scorn. For punishment he beheld her. The spectacle of her beauty was such that memories of his sins seared him like thin flames. He was in Purgatory. But Beatrice who in a cloud of flowers--_un nuvola di fiori_--had come, forgave him. Together then their ascension began. _Ella guardava suso, ed io in lei._ She looked above and he at her. In the mounting his sins fell by. As they did so her beauty increased. In proportion to his redemption she became more fair. That picture, at once real and ideal, displayed in its exquisiteness the miracle of two hearts saving and embellishing each other. Set at the threshold of modern life it prefigured what love was to be, what it is now when it truly appears, but what it was long in becoming. It had no part in the conceptions of Cecco Angioleiri, a poet contemporaneous, very vulgar, consequently more popular, who "sat" his heart on a donna and flung at her cries that were squeaks. Io ho in tal donna lo mio core assiso, Che chi dicesse: Ti fo imperadore, E sta che non la veggi per due ore, Io li direi: Va che to sia ucciso. Other was Petrarch, From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown A thousand thoughts beneath the sun, Each lucid with the name of One. The One was Laura. Petrarch, young, good-looking, already aureoled, saw her first at matins in a church at Avignon. She too was young. Married, a woman of position, of probable beauty, she was dark-eyed, fair-haired, pensive, serene. With spells as gossamer as those of the Monna Bice, at once she imparadised his heart. Precipitately he presented it to her. She refused it. Hughes de Sade, her husband, was a perfectly unsympathetic person, jealous without reason, notoriously hard. Yet his excuse, if he had one, may have resided in local conditions. Avignon stately and luxurious, was, Petrarch declared, the gully of every vice. "There is here," he said, "nothing holy, nothing just, nothing human. Decency and modesty are unknown."[55]