Women of History

<h3>LAURA DE SADE.</h3> <p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_74" id="Page_74"></SPAN></span></p> <p class="heading">[BORN 1310. DIED 1348.]<br/> SISMONDI.</p> <p><ANTIMG src="images/ip.jpg" alt="P" width-obs="70" height-obs="68" class="floatl" />ETRARCH reproached himself with fostering a passion which had exerted so powerful an influence over his life, which he had nourished with such unsubdued constancy for one-and-twenty years, and which still remained sacred to his heart so long after the loss of its object. This remorse was groundless. Never did passion burn more purely than in the love of Petrarch for Laura. Of all the erotic poets, he alone never expresses a single hope offensive to the purity of a heart which had been pledged to another. When Petrarch first beheld her, on the 6th of April 1327, Laura was in the church of Avignon. She was the daughter of Audibert de Noves, and wife of Hugues de Sade, both of Avignon. When she died of the plague, on the 6th of April 1348, she had been the mother of eleven children. Petrarch has celebrated, in upwards of three hundred sonnets, all the little circumstances of their attachment; those precious favours which, after an acquaintance of fifteen or twenty years, consisted at most of a kind word, a glance not altogether severe, a momentary expression of regret or tenderness at his departure, or a deeper paleness at the idea of losing her beloved and constant friend. <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_75" id="Page_75"></SPAN></span></p> <p>Yet these marks of an attachment so pure and unobtrusive, and which he had so often struggled to subdue, were repressed by the coldness of Laura, who, to preserve her lover, cautiously abstained from giving the least encouragement to his love. She avoided his presence, except at church, in the brilliant levees of the papal court, or in the country, where, surrounded by her friends, she is described by Petrarch as exhibiting the semblance of a queen, prominent amongst them all in the grace of her figure and the brilliancy of her beauty. It does not appear that, in the whole course of these twenty years, the poet ever addressed her unless in the presence of witnesses. An interview with her alone would surely have been celebrated in a thousand verses; and as he has left us four sonnets on the good fortune he enjoyed in having an opportunity of picking up her glove, we may fairly presume that he would not have passed over in silence so happy a circumstance as a private interview.</p> <p>There is no poet in any language so perfectly pure as Petrarch, so completely above all reproach of levity and immorality; and this merit, which is equally due to the poet and his Laura, is still more remarkable when we consider that the models which he followed were by no means entitled to the same praise. The verses of the troubadours and the trouv�res were very licentious. The court of Avignon, at which Laura lived&mdash;the Babylon of the West, as the poet himself often terms it&mdash;was filled with the most shameful corruption; and even the popes, more especially Clement V. and Clement VI., had afforded examples of great depravity. Indeed, Petrarch himself, in his intercourse with other ladies, was by no means so reserved. For Laura he had conceived a sort of religious and enthusiastic passion, such as mystics imagine they feel towards the Deity, and such as Plato supposes to be the bond of union between elevated minds. The poets who have succeeded Petrarch have <span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_76" id="Page_76"></SPAN></span> amused themselves with giving representations of a similar passion, of which, in fact, they had little or no experience.</p> <div class="poem"> <p class="o1">"How jeering crowds have mocked my love-lorn woes;</p> <p>But folly's fruits are penitence and shame,</p> <p>With this just maxim, I've too dearly bought&mdash;</p> <p>That man's applause is but a transient dream."</p> </div> <div class="figcenter p4"> <ANTIMG src="images/i020.jpg" width-obs="191" height-obs="163" alt="Decoration" /></div> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />