beautiful, and bade me ask what I liked as the reward of my trouble; for
since I had given them such perfect satisfaction, they wished to do the
like by me. I replied that my greatest reward and what I most desired
was to have rivalled the masterpieces of so eminent an artist; and that
if their lordships thought I had, I acknowledged myself to be most amply
rewarded. With this I took my leave, and they immediately sent me such a
very liberal present, that I was well content; indeed there grew in me
so great a spirit to do well, that to this event I attributed what will
afterwards be related of my progress.

Note 1. 'Gichero,' arum maculatum, and 'clizia,' the sunflower.



XXXII

I SHALL be obliged to digress a little from the history of my art,
unless I were to omit some annoying incidents which have happened in the
course of my troubled career. One of these, which I am about to
describe, brought me into the greatest risk of my life. I have already
told the story of the artists' club, and of the farcical adventures
which happened owing to the woman whom I mentioned, Pantasilea, the one
who felt for me that false and fulsome love. She was furiously enraged
because of the pleasant trick by which I brought Diego to our banquet,
and she swore to be revenged on me. How she did so is mixed up with the
history of a young man called Luigi Pulci, who had recently come to
Rome. He was the son of one of the Pulcis, who had been beheaded for
incest with his daughter; and the youth possessed extraordinary gifts
for poetry together with sound Latin scholarship; he wrote well, was
graceful in manners, and of surprising personal beauty; he had just left