barbarous, nay, barbaric Pantagruelian
splendour of food, blood, and stenches) of Florence, is what we think of
throughout the poem. And, when Messer Luigi comes to narrate, with real
gravity and after the due invocation of the Virgin, the Trinity, and
the saints, the tremendous disaster of Roncevaux, he uses such words and
such similes, that above the neighing of horses and the clash of
hurtling armour and the yells of the combatants we suddenly hear the
nasal sing-song of Florentine tripe-vendors and pumpkin-pod-sellers, the
chaffer and oaths and laughter of the gluttonous crowd pouring through
the lanes of Calimala and Pellicceria; nay (horrible and grotesque
miracle), there seems to rise out of the confused darkness of the
battle-filled valley, there seems to disengage itself (as out of a mist)
from the chaos of heaped bodies, and the flash of steel among the
whirlwinds of dust, a vision, more and more distinct and familiar, of
the crowded square with its black rough-hewn, smoke-stained houses,
ornamented with Robbia-ware angels and lilies or painted madonnas; of
its black butchers dens, outside which hang the ghastly disembowelled
sheep with blood-stained fleeces, the huge red-veined hearts and livers;
of the piles of cabbage and cauli-flowers, the rows of tin ware and
copper saucepans, the heaps of maccaroni and pastes, of spices and
drugs; the garlands of onions and red peppers and piles of apples; the
fetid sliminess of the fish tressels; the rough pavement oozy and black,
slippery with cabbage-stalks, puddled with bullock's blood, strewn with
plucked feathers--all under the bright blue sky, with Giotto's
dove-coloured belfry soaring high above; a vision, finally, of one of
those deep dens, with walls, all covered with majolica plates and
dishes and flashing brass-embossed trenchers, in the dark depths of
which crackles perennially a ruddy fire, while a huge spit revolves,
offering to the flames now one now the other side of scores of legs of
mutton, rounds of beef, and larded chickens, trickling with the butter
unceasingly ladled by the white-dressed cooks. Roncisvalle, Charlemagne,
the paladins, paganism, Christendom--what of them? "I believe in capon,
roast or boiled, and sometimes done in butter; in mead and in must; and
I believe in the pasty and the pastykins, mother and children; but above
all things I believe in good wine "--as Margutte snuffles out in his
catechism; and as to Saracens and paladins, past,