“You say that I have invented . . . Laura to have something to talk about and to have everyone talking about me,” Petrarch wrote to a friend, who, like many others—in the poet’s own time and since—have thought Laura the artful fabrication of an artful fabricator. But the mystery woman in the poems was real enough. Her full name was Laura de Sade, she was related by marriage to the infamous eighteenth-century Marquis de Sade, and Petrarch loved her as deeply and truly as he claimed, though perhaps not as chastely. He had children with at least two other women.
