Imaginary LIves by Marcel Schwob Page A

that Barberino put him out of his shop for his raggedness.
    So Cecco returned that night to the hut of the cobbler whom he found sitting in the candlelight singing a docile song to the Virgin Mary.
    They wept and embraced and Cecco told the cobbler how desperately he hated his father – that old man who threatened to live as long as Botadeo the Wandering Jew. A friar who came for alms persuaded Cecco to await his deliverance in the monastic state, so young Angiolieri followed the pious man to the abbey where they gave him a cell and an old robe, and the prior named him Fra Henri. In the choir at evensong he would touch the bare stones under him, as cold and grim as himself.
    Rage choked him when he thought of his father’s wealth. It seemed to him as if the sea would surely go dry before that old man died. There were moments when he even envied the kitchen scullions.
    At other times he indulged his pride grandly.
    “If I were fire,” he thought, “I would burn up the world. Were I the wind I’d smother it with hurricanes. If I were water I’d drown it in a deluge; were I God I’d hurl it into space. If I were the Pope there would be no more peace under the sun; were I the Emperor I’d cut off heads all around. If I were Death I’d find my father, and were I Cecco ... No, there is all my wish!” But he was only Fra Henri.
    Then he remembered his other hate.
    Procuring a copy of Dante’s songs to Beatrice he compared them diligently to his own verses written for Becchina. When a wandering monk told him how Dante had spoken of him disdainfully he set about searching for some revenge. To him the superiority of his sonnets appeared most evident. The songs to Bice (he gave her that vulgar name) were abstract and white while his songs were strong and colourful.
    First he sent his insulting verses to Dante, then imagined himself denouncing that poet before the good King Charles, Count of Provence. Finally, when neither letters nor poems consoled him, he threw off his holy garb, put on his old shirt, his worn jacket and weatherbeaten cape and left the monastery, returning to Florence and the Black cause.
    A great joy awaited him there. Dante was exiled and only a few of the great poet’s followers were left. Cecco found the cobbler whispering humbly to the Virgin of the next Black triumph and young Angiolieri forgot Becchina in his gratification.
    Eating dry crusts, he walked the streets all day or ran behind the Church messengers on their way to or from Rome. When the violent Black chief, Corso Donati, became a power in Florence he employed Cecco among others. On the night of June the tenth a mob of cooks, blacksmiths, friars and beggars invaded the aristocratic section of the city where the fine palaces of the Whites were. While the cobbler followed at a distance, admiring the holy sight, Cecco brandished a torch. They burned all. Cecco himself set fire to the wooden balconies on the palace of the Cavalcanti, who had been Dante’s friends. That night he fed his hate with fire and the next day sent his insulting verses to Dante “the Lombard” at the court of Verona where he had taken refuge. During the same day he became at last the Cecco of his heart’s desire. Old as Eli or Enoch, his father finally died.
    Speeding to Sienna Cecco threw open the coffers, plunging his hands deep into bags of new struck florins, repeating a hundred times over now he was no more Fra Henri but Lord of Arcidosso and Montegiovi, richer than Dante and a better poet.
    Then the sin of having desired his father’s death beset him so he repented. There in the fields he scribbled a sonnet demanding a Pope’s crusade against all who should henceforth insult their parents so. Eager for confession, he returned in haste to Florence and besought the cobbler to intercede in his behalf with the Virgin.
    From a dealer in holy waxes he bought a tall taper which the cobbler lighted unctuously. Together they wept over their prayers to Their Lady. Until