Calvo, Baldassarre

Tito Melema's adoptive father, a deserted and deeply injured old man, whose sufferings and wrongs affect his mind and leave him only one idea, that of vengeance. "He was very different in aspect from his two fellow-prisoners… he had passed the boundary of old age, and could hardly be less that four or five and sixty. His beard which had grown long in neglect, and the hair which fell thick and straight round his baldness, were nearly white. His thickset figure was still firm and upright, though emaciated, and seemed to express energy in spite of age--and exptression that was partly carried out in the dark eyes and strong dark eyebrows, which had a strangely isolated intensity of colour in the midst of his yellow, bloodless, deep-wrinkled face with its lank grey hairs. And yet there was something fitful in the eyes, which contradicted the occasional flash of energy; after looking round with quick fierceness at windows and faces, they fell again with a lost and wandering look." A great scholar and of ample means, he had adopted Tito Melema as a child and had brough him up as his own son. While journeying to Delos he is captured by pirates, though Tito, who carries their fortune in gems, escapes. Carried into captivity, he believes that his son will find and ransom him, and succeeds in sending Tito word of his whereabouts. After desertion and illness have broken him down, he is sent back to Italy, and, as a prisoner of the French, is brought to Florence, where Tito has been prospering since their separation. Near the Duomo he escapes from his guards and runs into Tito, who knows him, but denies him. Brooding over this treachery, he attempts to kill Tito when they meet again, and later, when his mental powers have returned temporarily, makes charges against Tito at the great supper in the Rucellai Gardens, but is again denied by Tito and again breaks down, and is cast into prison, where he languishes for two years, until released during the famine. Romola succours him and he seeks to enlist her aid against Tito, by telling her of Tito's "other wife", Tessa. Reduced to a pitiable condition by mental and physical suffering and forced to beg, he is kept alive only by the hope of vengeance. Eventually he finds Tito again, when the latter, worn out by his long swim to escape the mob, is cast ashore on the river bank, and he strangles Tito, dying himself immediately after. While Baldassarre Calvo is a fictitious character, there is an historical original for one of the events of his career. Villari, in his Life of Savonarola, tells of the escape of three prisoners at the time of the French entry into Florence who were liberated by the crowd just as in Romola. As this is the only printed source for this story, George Eliot undoubtedly took this incident from Villari, as Guido Biagi points out. (See Villari, Savonarola, p. 231; also Biagi edition of Romola. Introd. p. xxxiv.)

<em>Romola</em>

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