And now, these requests of the Lord Giovanni's assumed an almost daily regularity, until it came to seem that did affairs continue in this manner for yet a little while, I should have earned me enough to have repurchased Biancomonte, and, so, ended my troubles.

And good was the value that I gave him for his gold.

How good, he never knew; for how was he, the clod, to guess that this despised jester of his Court was pouring out his very soul into the lines he wrote to the tyrant's orders?
It is scant wonder that, at last, Madonna Paola who had begun by smiling, was touched and moved by the ardent worship that sighed from those perfervid verses.

So touched, indeed, was she as to believe the Lord Giovanni's love to be the pure and holy thing those lines presented it, and to conclude that his love had wrought in him a wondrous and ennobling transformation.

That so she thought I have the best of all reasons to affirm, for I had it from her very lips one day.
"Lazzaro," she sighed, "it is occurring to me that I have done the Lord Giovanni an injustice.