I BEARS FALSE WITNESS 266
XXII. THE RETURN OF THE REDS 279
XXIII. THE PEACE OF THE CITY 286
XXIV. BREAKING THE PEACE 297
XXV. MEETING AND PARTING 309
XXVI. THE ENEMY AT THE GATE 322
XXVII. THE SOLITARY CITY 335
NOTE 343

THE GOD OF LOVE

I

THE MAY-DAY QUEEN

This is the book of Lappo Lappi, called by his friends the careless, the
happy-go-lucky, the devil-may-take-it, the God-knows-what. Called by his
enemies drinker, swinker, tumbler, tinker, swiver. Called by many women
that liked him pretty fellow, witty fellow, light fellow, bright fellow,
bad fellow, mad fellow, and the like. Called by some women who once
loved him Lapinello, Lappinaccio, little Lappo. Called now in God as a
good religious should be, Lappentarius, from a sweet saint myself
discovered--or invented; need we quibble?--in an ancient manuscript. And
it is my merry purpose now, in a time when I, that am no longer merry,
look back upon days and hours and weeks and months and years that were
very merry indeed, propose to set down something of my own jolly doings
and lovings, and incidentally to tell some things about a friend of
mine that was never so merry as I was, though a thousand times wiser;
and never so blithe as I was, though a thousand times the better man.
For it seems to me now, in this cool grim grayness of my present way,
with the cloisters for my kingdom and the nimbused frescoes on the walls
for my old-time ballads and romances, as if my life that was so sunburnt
and wine-sweetened and woman-kissed, my life that seemed to me as
bright, every second of it, as bright ducats rushing in a pleasant
plenteous stream from one hand to another, was after all intended to be
no more than a kind of ironic commentary on, and petty contrast to, the
life of my friend.

He and I lived our youth out in the greatest and fairest of all cities
that the world has ever seen, greater a thousand times than Troy or
Nineveh, or Babylon or Rome, and when I say this you will know, of
course, that I speak of the city of Florence, and we lived and loved at
the same time, lived and loved in so strangely different a fashion that
it seems to me that if the two lives were set side by side after the
fashion of Messer Plut