The Abbé de Sade, in his learned researches upon Laura, shows, that besides this daughter, the poet had a son named Giovanno. This young man was legitimatised by Pope Clement VI. in 1348; and in the papal brief he is mentioned as the son of unmarried parents: _De soluto et solutâ_. Baldelli believes that both children were by the same mother. Francesco Petrarca, who is characterised by Voltaire as a genius eminent for his constant repetition of the same thing, died in 1374, aged seventy. Nearly a century after his death, in 1471, an anonymous author, in a _Vita di Francesco Petrarca_, pretended that Pope Urbanus V., with whom the poet was an especial favourite, wished to give him Laura in marriage, but that Petrarca declined, saying that the fountain from which he drew his amorous inspiration for the composition of his sonnets, would fail him entirely were he to be united to the object of this love: “_E quantunque gli_ _volse essere data per donna, ad instanza di Papa Urbano quinto, il quale lui singularmente amava, concedendogli di tener colla donna i beneficii insieme, nol volse mai consentire, dicendo che il frutto che prendea dell’ amore, a scrivere, di poi che la cosa amata consequito avesse, tutto si perderia._” Notwithstanding the improbability of this confession, seeing that Pope Urbanus did not mount the pontifical throne until after the death of Laura, we may still infer from it that in the first years of the 15th century a very exalted opinion was not entertained of the sincerity of Petrarca’s passion. The mention of all these circumstances, no doubt instigated Tomasini, who was the most devoted of Petrarch’s biographers, and who looked upon the poet almost as a saint, to adduce a reason for his remaining unmarried to the end of his life. “He believed,” says he, “that marriage would extinguish his love.” “_Censebat nempè isto nexu amoris puritatem obfuscatam iri, neque cultum animi ita fore constantem, juxta illud Tibulli: Semper in absentes felicior æstus amantis._” In 1539 Squarciafico and Nicolò Franco attacked with much humour the morals and the life of Laura’s adorer. Ercole Giannini followed in the same vein; and the circumstances we have already mentioned tend to prove, that although Petrarca may have been a great poet, a great politician, a savant, and a prolific writer, there is more than one reason for believing that he was not altogether the Platonic lover some have represented him to be. With regard to Laura all is doubt, obscurity, and hypothesis. The traces left of her were so faint, even in the century in which she lived, that Baldelli says that doubts were even entertained of her existence. “_Tanto s’oscurò la sua memoria, che nei due secoli in cui l’Italia negli enti allegorici e di ragione, andava smarrita, alcuni dubitarono della esistenza di lui._” (See _Petrarca e sue opere_.)