With these and other fine discoveries our fruitful explo

With these and other fine discoveries our fruitful explo?ration in the library ended. But before saying that we prepared, contentedly, to leave it (only to be involved in other events I will narrate shortly), I must make a con?fession to my reader. I said that our exploration was undertaken, originally, to seek the key to the myster?ious place but that, as we lingered along the way in the rooms we were marking down by subject and arrangement, we leafed through books of various kinds, as if we were exploring a mysterious continent or a terra incognita. And usually this second exploration pro?ceeded by common accord, as William and I browsed through the same books, I pointing out the most curi?ous ones to him, and he explaining to me many things I was unable to understand.
But at a certain point, and just as we were moving around the rooms of the south tower, known as LEONES, my master happened to stop in a room rich in Arabic works with odd optical drawings; and since we were that evening provided not with one but with two lamps, I moved, in my curiosity, into the next room, realizing that the wisdom and the prudence of the library’s planning had assembled along one of its walls books that certainly could not be handed out to anyone to read, because they dealt in various ways with diseases of body and spirit and were almost always written by infidel scholars. And my eye fell on a book, not large but adorned with miniatures far removed (luckily!) from the subject: flowers, vines, animals in pairs, some medicinal herbs. The title was Speculum amoris, by Maximus of Bologna, and it included quotations from many other works, all on the malady of love. As the reader will understand, it did not require much once more to inflame my mind, which had been numb since morning, and to excite it again with the girl’s image.
All that day I had driven myself to dispel my morn?ing thoughts, repeating that they were not those of a sober, balanced novice, and moreover, since the day’s events had been sufficiently rich and intense to distract me, my appetites had been dormant, so that I thought I had freed myself by now from what had been but a passing restlessness. Instead, I had only to see that book and I was forced to say, “De te fabula narratur,” and I discovered I was more sick with love than I had believed. I learned later that, reading books of medicine, you are always convinced you feel the pains of which they speak. So it was that the mere reading of those pages, glanced at hastily in fear that William would enter the room and ask me what I was so diligently investigating, caused me to believe that I was suffering from that very disease, whose symptoms were so splendidly described that if, on the one hand, I was distressed to discover I was sick (and on the infallible evidence of so many auctoritates), on the other I re?joiced to see my own situation depicted so vividly, convincing myself that even if I was ill, my illness was, so to speak, normal, inasmuch as countless others had suffered in the same way, and the quoted authors might have taken me personally as the model for their descriptions.