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Lost Weekends. Datini's marriage was unhappy, partly because his wife, Margherita, bore him no children, partly because he could not tear himself away from his depot in Florence and he neglected Margherita until she grew desperate. But he never wearied of nagging her from a distance. Day after day, he wrote her long letters—remember to lock the front door with all three keys, remember to drain excess water from the maturing vinegar, remember to search again for "the lost pillow-case.'' There were the lost weekends, spent in the office, which drew sarcastic rejoinders from poor Margherita. "Methinks," she wrote, "it is not needful to send me a message every Wednesday, to say you will be here on Sunday, for I trow on every Friday, you repent."
Datini's dearest friend was a simple, kindly notary who never failed to warn the merchant that there was more to life than business: ''To make money is what every man can do; but not every man knows how to work, and then leave go . . "
All such advice was humbly welcomed by Datini—and totally ignored. He grew busier and busier and richer and richer—through cargoes of Cornish tin, Cotswold and Minorcan wool, Milanese armor and iron spurs. Florentine lances, brass, leather, spices, ostrich eggs, feathers and Tartar slaves. Like every well-to-do Tuscan, Datini kept slaves in his own household, and was not above using them as concubines. His only children were bastards; his great marriage bed—four yards wide, with six linen-covered pillows and two of cloth of gold—remained barren and desolate.
New Age. It took a plague scare, plus weary old age, to pry Datini away from the great ledgers with their pious superscription, ''In the name of God and of profit." Wrote his friend the notary: "Of his death I will tell you little, for it would take a whole quire: his sufferings and his sayings, and his passing, which was in my arms. For it seemed to him very strange that he should have to die . . ."
Doubtless Datini was a "grasping, wilful man'' who hoped to save his soul by bequeathing all his possessions to charity. But he was also one of those men whose restless imagination—working through wares rather than art, through bills of sale rather than verse—pushed the horizons of narrow Europe to the far corners and ushered in a new age. The greedy merchant of Prato bequeathed a marvelous and instructive story to the modern world.