cardinals, ambassadors, princes and the principal cavaliers of the court of Rome.
The equestrian procession was led by a team of six which, as everyone knows, is called the Vanguard; there followed the first three teams, that is, carriages, pulling ornamental floats, all of which merit a faithful description (but of which I, owing to my small stature, had only a partial and limited view).
In the first carriage, immediately applauded, sat the bride. The body of the carriage was all gilded, with nude figures representing Autumn and Winter in front and Summer and Spring behind. In the middle sat the Sun enthroned in majesty, the clear bringer of the said seasons, at the foot of which two rivers were depicted whose courses were united in the end, the whole surrounded and embellished by various frolicking cupids.
There followed, as is the custom with noble nuptials, a plain, empty black carriage.
The third carriage, finally, simply upholstered in crimson within and without any retinue, announced with deliberate self- effacement he whose triumph this celebration truly was, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Fabrizio.
From the richness and brave embellishment of the coaches, the Cardinal's generosity was visible for all to see in his gift to his nephew's spouse of so memorable a display of magnificence; but this one could appreciate all the better if one reflected upon the incredible sum which — so the people murmured that evening — that splendid gesture had cost him.
'They speak of twenty thousand scudi,' stammered a young lackey, taking advantage of the anonymity to be found in the humble crowd of plebeians, crushed one against the other.
The procession moved into the long avenue leading to the great house, acclaimed by the dense multitude of onlookers lining the route. Arriving at the space before the gracious fagade of the great house, it wheeled to the right, passed the orange trees and at last disappeared from my sight behind the plum orchard, wending its way towards the chapel. I made haste. I wanted to embrace my wife again as soon as possible. I raised my eyes to the first-floor window, where I knew that the Princess of Forano had her lodgings, but could descry nothing. I resolved to go up to the noble lady's door: I could surely not dare to knock but perhaps I might be able somehow to approach Cloridia. I imagined her to be rather busy, what with the infant, the care of the mother and the various recommendations that must needs be made. I found the corridor deserted: everyone had gone down to watch the arrival of the bride. I heard my wife's silvery voice through the half-open door.
'Cleophanes, the unworthy son of the excellent Themisto- cles did not receive his mother's milk and, for the same reason, Xantippos, the son of Pericles; Caligula, son of Germanicus; Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius; Domitian, son of Vespasian; and Absalom, son of David, whom I ought to have mentioned first, all degenerated. Is it a wonder if Aegisthus was an adulterer? He was suckled by a goat! A wolf gave suck to Romulus, whence came the cruel instinct to inveigh against his brother Remus and to ravish the Sabine women as though they were just so many ewes.'
I understood at once. I knew my Cloridia's child-rearing repertoire by heart. Her passion, in the hours that followed every successful confinement, was to wax eloquent concerning the extreme importance of feeding the newborn infant at its mother's breast.
'You will agree with me, Princess, that the bond of filial love arises from having been engendered, but is increased by nursing the child with one's own milk,' she explained in gentle, persuasive tones.
La Strozzi uttered not a word.
'Examples of this include Graccus, the valorous Roman,' continued Cloridia, 'whom they arranged to be met first at the gates of Rome on his return from the wars in Asia, by his mother and his nurse at the same time. Thereupon, he brought forth two gifts which he had taken care to procure during the campaign: a silver ring for his mother and a golden girdle for his nurse. To the mother, who was pained to find herself placed behind the nurse, Graccus replied: 'You, mother, made me after bearing me nine months in your womb. But, once born, you banished me from your bosom and from your bed. This nurse received me, fondled me and served me, not for nine months but for three full years.'
The Princess remained silent.
'This discourse by a pagan should make us blush,' insisted Cloridia, 'for being born Christians, we make the most perfect profession of faith, founded upon our belief and acts of charity; and if we are taught to love even our enemies, how much more does our faith teach us to love our children?'
'My dear,' responded a tired but determined voice, which I imagined to be that of the Princess, 'I have already suffered enough for this little one, and for his three brothers, without exhausting myself even further by giving him my milk.'
'Oh, listen to me, I beg of you,' insisted my indomitable consort, 'if only you were to consider the pleasure of which you are depriving your child in banishing him from his mother's bosom, I do not believe for one moment that you would do this. For little ones, there is no pastime as sweet in the whole wide world; no comedy comparable to those tears of impatience and those sudden movements upon touching the breast, and at last, that joyful laugh when the infant opens its mouth and sinks its nose and its whole face into its mother's warm bosom.'
The tender images evoked by my beautiful midwife of a spouse did not, however, seem to move the noblewoman.
'Why should I make such a sacrifice,' she replied with a hint of impatience in her voice, 'only to receive kicks as soon as he's able to make his first footsteps and later ingratitude and presumption when he has grown to manhood?'
'But this is precisely why children nowadays have so little love for their parents,' Cloridia dared hotly to venture. 'God so decrees that the lack of love at their beginnings reaps scant love once they have grown up.'
'My husband has already hired a wet-nurse a long time ago. He has sent for her and she will soon be here. Now, leave me, I wish to rest,' said the Princess, brusquely dismissing her.
When Cloridia emerged, red in the face and with clenched fists, she almost failed to notice me. She went rapidly down the back stairs; I followed her. Once we reached the kitchen, she exploded.
'Ah, the politics of modern childbearing!' she thundered, causing several scullery-maids to turn sharply towards us.
'Cloridia, what has happened?' they asked curiously.
'Oh, nothing! It is just that the ineradicably fertile fashion has sprung up,' she moved, accompanying her words with great gestures and grimaces, 'that mothers who are not of the common herd squeamishly disdain to give their breast to their own offspring, who've so long annoyed them by weighing down their wombs.'
Once they had grasped the argument, the scullery-maids began to laugh heartily. One of them, whom I knew to have a two-year-old daughter, drew one breast out from her blouse and squeezed the milk from it, which sprayed forth, showing that she was still nursing her little one at the breast.
'Does that seem vulgar to you?' she exclaimed, laughing broadly.
'Adieu, little ones, adieu!' raged on Cloridia, seeming almost a prophetess and waving her arms as she paced the kitchen, striving to release her suppressed fury at the Princess of Forano. 'Those who bore you can no longer bear you, for you made yourselves too odious with that all-too-tiresome pregnancy; too painful did you prove in that pressing child-bearing. The European infant is thus constrained to begin his life's journey on an unknown poop, when 'tis not a bestial one, and to wander on his peregrinations under a degenerate star, depending upon an alien nutriment. Maternal nature, thus disappointed, not to say abjured, is cast aside and milk flees the paps for fear of some deformity or the tedium of discomfort. Here we find the origin of the discrepancies between offspring and parents. The nobility of filial sentiments degenerates even from the cradle when the feeding's wrong. The spirit's genius is weakened when the body's abandoned to bovine rusticity. With milk, we drink down inclinations, and these will be sordid when their origin is a cowshed!'
It was not the first time that I had witnessed such a scene. The tale was forever repeating itself: whenever Cloridia assisted at the confinement of a noblewoman, the joy of the birth always gave way to her anxiety to use every means to convince the new mother to give the infant her own milk, without having recourse to wet-nurses, or worse, to goats or cows. All to no avail: what for a woman of the people was the most natural thing in the world (among other things, for economic reasons) became an unthinkable and outrageous chore in the eyes of a countess. And my Cloridia, who had herself given suck to our two daughters for the first three years of their lives, suffered from seeing this more than she could say and was ill-resigned to it.
After at last relinquishing her indignation with a sigh of resignation, she turned to me and, with a beautiful smile, embraced me.
'Where had you got to? Hardly had the Princess lost her waters than I sent for the little ones, but I urgently
