'Children, dear children! spare Sophocles. He is the most innocent of poets. Let him alone! Let him alone!'
And he pressed the precious leaves convulsively to his breast, but finding them tear beneath his too loving hands he burst into sobs and groans, dropped his treasure, and cried in impotent fury:--
'Know, ye sons of dogs, that one line of this inestimable Sophocles is worth all the prophecies put together of your madman, Fra Girolamo.'
'Old man, if you don't want to be taken by the heels and thrown after your pagan poets, you'll hold your tongue!' cried the children, dragging him from the library.
Then leaving the palace, they passed by Santa Maria del Fiore, and marched to the Piazza della Signoria.
In front of the dark and slender tower of the Palazzo Vecchio the pyre stood ready. It was thirty cubits in height, one hundred and twenty in circumference; an octagonal pyramid with at least fifteen steps. On the lowest were the comic masks, dresses, wigs, and other carnival properties; on the next three, profane books from Anacreon and Ovid to the _Decameron_, and the _Morgante Maggiore_ of Messer Luigi Pulci. Above the books were the instruments of female beauty--washes, essences, mirrors, puffs, curling-tongs, hair-pins, nail-nippers. Still higher were lutes and mandolines, cards, chessmen, balls, dice--all the games by means of which men serve the devil. Then came drawings, voluptuous pictures, portraits of light women; lastly, on the summit of the pyramid, the gods, heroes and sages of pagan antiquity, made of wood and of coloured wax. Above the pile, towering higher than anything else, the figure of Satan was enthroned, the lord of all 'vanities and things accursed,' a monstrous puppet, filled with gunpowder and sulphur, with goat's legs and a hairy skin, like Pan, the ancient god of the woods.
It was evening: the air was cold, but serene and clear, and one by one the stars were beginning their nightly shining. The crowd in the piazza surged and swayed, and pious murmurings filled the air. Hymns went up from Savonarola's followers--_Laudi spirituali_--which retaining the rhymes, the metre, and the air of carnival songs, had been radically changed in words and sense. Giovanni listened, and the incongruity between the lively music and the gloomy words resounded in his ears like some barbarous funeral chant.