The Old Yellow Book:Source of Robert Browning�s the Ring and the Book
Source of Robert Browning�s the Ring and the Book
Anonymous
9781465515988
pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Old Yellow Book is a soiled and bloody page from the criminal annals of Rome two centuries ago, saved apparently by mere chance for the one great artist of modern literature who could best use it, and who has raised this record of a forgotten crime to a permanent place in that ideal world of man’s creation where Caponsacchi and Pompilia have joined the company of Paolo and Francesca, of the Red Cross Knight, of Imogen, of Marguerite and Faust, and of Don Quixote. One June day of 1860, Robert Browning passed from the Casa Guidi home to enjoy the busy life of Florence. There, pushed by the hand ever above my shoulder, he entered the Piazza of San Lorenzo: crammed with booths, Buzzing and blaze, noontide and market-time. He had brought home from such wanderings many a rare old tapestry, or picture, or carving from the long artistic past of the city. This day his eye caught the soiled, vellum-covered volume, crowded between its insignificant neighbours. One glance at the lettered back, declares the poet, and Stall! a lira made it mine. All the way home and all day long, he pored over these pages, until by nightfall he had so mastered the facts of the case that the whole tragedy lay plain before his mind’s eye. The book led him, and leads us, back to the morning of January 3, 1698, when all Rome was astir with the sensation of a brutal assassination. The aged Comparini, cut to pieces in their own home in the very heart of Rome on the evening before by a band of assassins, were now exposed to the view of an excited mob of the curious and idle. Pompilia, desperately wounded, lay a-dying. A police captain and posse were in pursuit of the criminals, one of whom was a nobleman who had held office in the household of one of the great cardinals. Toward night the criminals were brought back to the city, and were followed through the streets to the prison doors by a great throng
