It is not to be supposed from this apostrophe that when I fell at once to love my master’s wife I saw in her more than my lamp and my saint, the gracious presence which should “imparadise,” in Dante’s phrase, my mind.  I was an honest lad, very serious and very simple.  Perhaps I was a fool, but I was a pure fool:  and he had been a very monster of depravity who could have cast unwholesome regard upon a welcome so generous and modest as hers.  I declare that she was never anything to me but a holy emanation, not to be approached but on the knees, not to be looked upon but through a veil.  So from this page until near the end of my long history she will appear to the reader.  I never had an unworthy thought of her, never an unworthy desire.  I never credited her with more than charity towards myself; and if I gloried in the fact that I was privileged to love so wondrous a being, the thought humiliated me at the same time.  I was conscious of my nothingness before her worthiness, and desperate to fit myself for her high society.  A noble rage for excellence possessed me; like any champion or knight of old I strove to approve my manhood, only that I might lay the spoils of it at her sacred feet.

By origin Aurelia was a Sienese, the daughter of the ancient, noble but reduced family of Gualandi, and had, without knowing it, caught the fancy of Dr. Lanfranchi when he was in her native city upon some political question or another.  At the age of eighteen she had been made the subject of a marriage treaty between her mother and this learned man of fifty—­a treaty conducted by correspondence and without any by-or-with-your-leave of hers.  It may be doubted whether she had done much more than see and quiz her husband until she was brought to his house, to be mistress of that and slave of its master.  Doing violence to the imaginations of a lover, I can look back upon her now with calmness, and yet see no flaw upon her extraordinary perfections.  I can still see her lovely in every part, a bright, glancing, various creature, equally compounded of simplicity and common sense.  Her greatest charm was precisely what we call charm—­a sweetly willing, pliant disposition, an air of gay seriousness, such as a child has, and a mood which could run swiftly, at the touch on some secret spring, from the ripple of laughter to the urgency of tears.  She was very devout, but not at all in our way, who must set our God very far off if we are to consider His awful nature; she carried her gaiety with her into church, and would laugh in the face of the Blessed Virgin or our Saviour just as freely as in that of the greatest sinner of us all.  Her carriage and conversation with Heaven were, indeed, exactly those which she held towards the world, and were such that it was impossible not to love her, and yet, for an honest man who desired to remain one, equally impossible to do it.  For although she was made in shape, line and feature to be a man’s torment and delight, she carried her beauties so easily, valued them so staidly, and considered them so unaffectedly her husband’s property, that he would have been a highway thief who had dared anything against her.