by George Eliot
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE.
WHAT FLORENCE WAS THINKING OF.
For several days Tito saw little of Romola. He told her gently, thenext morning, that it would be better for her to remove any smallarticles of her own from the library, as there would be agents coming topack up the antiquities. Then, leaning to kiss her on the brow, hesuggested that she should keep in her own room where the little paintedtabernacle was, and where she was then sitting, so that she might beaway from the noise of strange footsteps, Romola assented quietly,making no sign of emotion: the night had been one long waking to her,and, in spite of her healthy frame, sensation had become a dullcontinuous pain, as if she had been stunned and bruised. Tito divinedthat she felt ill, but he dared say no more; he only dared, perceivingthat her hand and brow were stone cold, to fetch a furred mantle andthrow it lightly round her. And in every brief interval that hereturned to her, the scene was nearly the same: he tried to propitiateher by some unobtrusive act or word of tenderness, and she seemed tohave lost the power of speaking to him, or of looking at him."Patience!" he said to himself. "She will recover it, and forgive atlast. The tie to me must still remain the strongest." When thestricken person is slow to recover and look as if nothing had happened,the striker easily glides into the position of the aggrieved party; hefeels no bruise himself, and is strongly conscious of his own amiablebehaviour since he inflicted the blow. But Tito was not naturallydisposed to feel himself aggrieved; the constant bent of his mind wastowards propitiation, and he would have submitted to much for the sakeof feeling Romola's hand resting on his head again, as it did thatmorning when he first shrank from looking at her.
But he found it the less difficult to wait patiently for the return ofhis home happiness, because his life out of doors was more and moreinteresting to him. A course of action which is in strictness aslowly-prepared outgrowth of the entire character, is yet almost alwaystraceable to a single impression as its point of apparent origin; andsince that moment in the Piazza del Duomo, when Tito, mounted on thebales, had tasted a keen pleasure in the consciousness of his ability totickle the ears of men with any phrases that pleased them, hisimagination had glanced continually towards a sort of political activitywhich the troubled public life of Florence was likely enough to findoccasion for. But the fresh dread of Baldassarre, waked in the samemoment, had lain like an immovable rocky obstruction across that path,and had urged him into the sale of the library, as a preparation for thepossible necessity of leaving Florence, at the very time when he wasbeginning to feel that it had a new attraction for him. That dread wasnearly removed _now_: he must wear his armour still, he must preparehimself for possible demands on his coolness and ingenuity, but he didnot feel obliged to take the inconvenient step of leaving Florence andseeking new fortunes. His father had refused the offered atonement--hadforced him into defiance; and an old man in a strange place, with hismemory gone, was weak enough to be defied.
Tito's implicit desires were working themselves out now in very explicitthoughts. As the freshness of young passion faded, life was taking moreand more decidedly for him the aspect of a game in which there was anagreeable mingling of skill and chance.
And the game that might be played in Florence promised to be rapid andexciting; it was a game of revolutionary and party struggle, sure toinclude plenty of that unavowed action in which brilliant ingenuity,able to get rid of all inconvenient beliefs except that "ginger is hotin the mouth," is apt to see the path of superior wisdom.
No sooner were the French guests gone than Florence was as agitated as acolony of ants when an alarming shadow has been removed, and the camphas to be repaired. "How are we to raise the money for the French king?How are we to manage the war with those obstinate Pisan rebels? Aboveall, how are we to mend our plan of government, so as to hit on the bestway of getting our magistrates chosen and our laws voted?" Till thosequestions were well answered trade was in danger of standing still, andthat large body of the working men who were not counted as citizens andhad not so much as a vote to serve as an anodyne to their stomachs werelikely to get impatient. Something must be done.
And first the great bell was sounded, to call the citizens to aparliament in the Piazza de' Signori; and when the crowd was wedgedclose, and hemmed in by armed men at all the outlets, the Signoria (orGonfaloniere and eight Priors for the time being) came out and stood bythe stone lion on the platform in front of the Old Palace, and proposedthat twenty chief men of the city should have dictatorial authoritygiven them, by force of which they should for one year choose allmagistrates, and set the frame of government in order. And the peopleshouted their assent, and felt themselves the electors of the Twenty.This kind of "parliament" was a very old Florentine fashion, by whichthe will of the few was made to seem the choice of the many.
The shouting in the Piazza was soon at an end, but not so the debatinginside the palace: was Florence to have a Great Council after theVenetian mode, where all the officers of government might be elected,and all laws voted by a wide number of citizens of a certain age and ofascertained qualifications, without question of rank or party? or, wasit to be governed on a narrower and less popular scheme, in which thehereditary influence of good families would be less adulterated with thevotes of shopkeepers. Doctors of law disputed day after day, and far oninto the night. Messer Pagolantonio Soderini alleged excellent reasonson the side of the popular scheme; Messer Guidantonio Vespucci allegedreasons equally excellent on the side, of a more aristocratic form. Itwas a question of boiled or roast, which had been prejudged by thepalates of the disputants, and the excellent arguing might have beenprotracted a long while without any other result than that of deferringthe cooking. The majority of the men inside the _palace_, having poweralready in their hands, agreed with Vespucci, and thought change shouldbe moderate; the majority outside the palace, conscious of little powerand many grievances, were less afraid of change.
And there was a force outside the palace which was gradually tending togive the vague desires of that majority the character of a determinatewill. That force was the preaching of Savonarola. Impelled partly bythe spiritual necessity that was laid upon him to guide the people, andpartly by the prompting of public-men who could get no measures carriedwithout his aid, he was rapidly passing in his daily sermons from thegeneral to the special--from telling his hearers that they must postponetheir private passions and interests to the public good, to telling themprecisely what sort of government they must have in order to promotethat good--from "Choose whatever is best for all" to "Choose the GreatCouncil," and "the Great Council is the will of God."
To Savonarola these were as good as identical propositions. The GreatCouncil was the only practicable plan for giving an expression to thepublic will large enough to counteract the vitiating influence of partyinterests: it was a plan that would make honest impartial public actionat least possible. And the purer the government of Florence wouldbecome--the more secure from the designs of men who saw their ownadvantage in the moral debasement of their fellows--the nearer would theFlorentine people approach the character of a pure community, worthy tolead the way in the renovation of the Church and the world. And FraGirolamo's mind never stopped short of that sublimest end: the objectstowards which he felt himself working had always the same moralmagnificence. He had no private malice--he sought no pettygratification. Even in the last terrible days, when ignominy, torture,and the fear of torture, had laid bare every hidden weakness of hissoul, he could say to his importunate judges: "Do not wonder if it seemsto you that I have told but few things; for my purposes were few andgreat." [Note 1.]
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Note 1. "Se vi pare che io abbia detto poche cose, non ve nemaravigliate, perche le mie cose erano poche e grandi."
