What happened is described in the forty-fourth chapter of the _Amorosa Visione_. The twelve days were passed, he tells us in this allegory, when he heard a voice like a terrible thunder cry to him:--
"O tu ... che nel chiaro giorno Del dolce lume della luce mia, Che a te vago sì raggia d' intorno, Non ischernir con gabbo mia balìa Nè dubitar però per mia grandezza, La quale umil, quando vorrai, ti fia, Onora con amor la mia bellezza, Nè d' alcun' altra più non ti curare, Se tu non vo' provar mia rigidezza."
How can we interpret this? It seems that there was evidently an occasion in which Fiammetta gave him to understand that she was not averse from his love. What was this occasion? Della Torre[147]--certainly the most subtle and curious of his interpreters--thinks he has found it: that he can identify it with that in which Fiammetta bade him write the _Filocolo_.
[Illustration: SAPOR MOUNTING OVER THE PROSTRATE VALERIAN
_By the Dutch engraver called "The Master of the Subjects in the Boccaccio." "De Casibus Virorum." (Strasburg, 1476.)_]
In the prologue to that romance Boccaccio tells us that after leaving the temple of S. Lorenzo with full heart, and having sighed many days, he found himself by chance--he does not remember how--with some companions "in un santo tempio del Principe de' celestiali uccelli nominato": that is to say, as Casetti interprets it, in the convent of S. Arcangelo a Baiano, where Fiammetta had been. I have said that it was quite usual for nuns to receive visitors, both men and women, from the outside; the _Fiammetta_[148] itself confirms it if need be. The convents were in some sort fashionable resorts where one went to spend an hour in talk. On some such occasion Boccaccio went to S. Arcangelo with a friend, and finding Fiammetta there, probably told her stories from the French romances "del valoroso giovane Florio figliuolo di Felice grandissimo Re di Spagna," or of Lancelot and Guinivere, "con amorose parole," stuffed with piteous words. When he had finished, she, altogether charmed, turned to the young poet and bade him write such a romance as that--for her--"a little book in which the beginning of love, the courtship, and the fortune of the two lovers even to their death shall be told." Well, what could he do but obey gladly? "Hearing the sweetness of the words which came from that gracious mouth," he tells us, "and remembering that never once till this day had that noble lady asked anything of me, I took her prayer for a command, and saw therein hope for my desires";[149] so he answered that he would do his best to please her. She thanked him, and Boccaccio, "costretto più da ragione che da volontà," went home and began at once to compose his romance.[150] So ends the first period of his love-story, and the second, the period of courtship, begins.