conceit of herself, that she had contracted a habit
of disparaging both men and women and all that she
saw, entirely regardless of her own defects, though
for odiousness, tiresomeness, and petulance she had
not her match among women, insomuch that there was
nought that could be done to her mind: besides
which, such was her pride that had she been of the
blood royal of France, ’twould have been inordinate.
And when she walked abroad, so fastidious was her
humour, she was ever averting her head, as if there
was never a soul she saw or met but reeked with a
foul smell. Now one day—not to speak
of other odious and tiresome ways that she had—it
so befell that being come home, where Fresco was,
she sat herself down beside him with a most languishing
air, and did nought but fume and chafe. Whereupon:—“Ciesca,”
quoth he, “what means this, that, though ’tis
a feast-day, yet thou art come back so soon?”
She, all but dissolved with her vapourish humours,
made answer:—“Why, the truth is, that
I am come back early because never, I believe, were
there such odious and tiresome men and women in this
city as there are to-day. I cannot pass a soul
in the street that I loathe not like ill-luck; and
I believe there is not a woman in the world that is
so distressed by the sight of odious people as I am;
and so I am come home thus soon to avoid the sight
of them.” Whereupon Fresco, to, whom his
niece’s bad manners were distasteful in the
extreme:—“Daughter,” quoth he,
“if thou loathe odious folk as much as thou
sayest, thou wert best, so thou wouldst live happy,
never to look at thyself in the glass.”
But she, empty as a reed, albeit in her own conceit
a match for Solomon in wisdom, was as far as any sheep
from apprehending the true sense of her uncle’s
jest; but answered that on the contrary she was minded
to look at herself in the glass like other women.
And so she remained, and yet remains, hidebound in
her folly.
NOVEL IX.
— Guido Cavalcanti by a quip meetly rebukes
certain Florentine gentlemen who had taken him at
a disadvantage. —
The queen, perceiving that Emilia had finished her
story, and that none but she, and he who had the privilege
of speaking last, now remained to tell, began on this
wise:—Albeit, debonair my ladies, you have
forestalled me to-day of more than two of the stories,
of which I had thought to tell one, yet one is still
left me to recount, which carries at the close of
it a quip of such a sort, that perhaps we have as yet
heard nought so pregnant.
You are to know, then, that in former times there
obtained in our city customs excellent and commendable
not a few, whereof today not one is left to us, thanks
to the greed which, growing with the wealth of our
folk, has banished them all from among us. One
of which customs was that in divers quarters of Florence
the gentlemen that there resided would assemble together
in companies of a limited number, taking care to include
