lines where Dante complains of how soon a widow forgets her husband.[110] But this is all matter of the merest speculation. Gemma is known to have been alive in 1314.[111] She brought up her children, says Boccaccio, upon a trifling part of her husband's confiscated estate, recovered on the plea that it was a portion of her dowry. There may have been difficulties of a material kind, insuperable save to an ardent love that was not theirs, in the way of Gemma's joining her husband in any of his cities of refuge. Complete evidence exists of Dante's having in his later years lived for a longer or shorter time in the three cities of Lucca, Verona, and Ravenna. In Purgatory he meets a shade from Lucca, in the murmur of whose words he catches he 'knows not what of Gentucca;'[112] and when he charges the Lucchese to speak plainly out, he is told that Lucca shall yet be found pleasant by him because of a girl not yet grown to womanhood. Uguccione, acting in the interest of Pisa, took possession of Lucca in 1314, and Dante is supposed to have taken up his residence there for some considerable time. What we may certainly infer from his own words in the _Purgatorio_ is that they were written after a stay in Lucca had been sweetened to him by the society of a lady named Gentucca. He cannot well have found shelter there before the city was held by Uguccione; and research has established that at least two ladies of the uncommon name of Gentucca were resident there in 1314. From the whole tone of his allusion--the mention of her very name and of her innocent girlhood--we may gather that there was nothing in his liking for her of which he had any reason to feel ashamed. In the _Inferno_ he had covered the whole people of Lucca with his scorn.[113] By the time he got thus far with the _Purgatorio_ his thoughts of the place were all softened by his memory of one fair face--or shall we rather say, of one compassionate and womanly soul? That Dante was more than susceptible to feminine charms is coarsely asserted by Boccaccio.[114] But on such a matter Boccaccio is a prejudiced witness, and, in the absence of sufficient proof to the contrary, justice requires us to assume that the tenor of Dante's life was not at variance with that of his writings. He who was so severe a judge of others was not, as we can infer from more than one passage of the _Comedy_, a lenient judge when his own failings were concerned.[115] That his conduct never fell short of his standard no one will venture to maintain. But what should have hindered him, in his hours of weariness and when even his hold on the future seemed to slacken, in lonely castle or strange town, to seek sympathy from some fair woman who might remind him in something of Beatrice?[116]