Chapter IV: Preface (4)

Louis XII.'s manners, to every woman save his wife, were notoriously deferential. Anne, moreover, was still very youthful, and in the semi-darkness her great mass of shining hair could not but have looked soft, and young, and movingly incongruous with her sorrow. They spoke of the dead man's funeral. Anne expressed the wish that nothing that could do honour to his memory should be omitted. Louis answered instantly that all her wishes were sacred, and did, in fact, pay all the funeral expenses out of his private purse. Then she stated her desire to wear black as mourning, and once more Louis acquiesced with a visible desire to spare her feelings to the utmost of his capacity. In the soft, uncertain candlelight a new emotional quality may well have appertained to the girl so harshly and abruptly widowed. Surrounded by darkness, her desolate youthfulness, and her pitiful desire to obscure her youth in still more blackness, might easily have stirred an old admirer to a renewal of tenderness.

Anne continued to moan a good deal for several days, but it is questionable whether the hidden excursions of her mind were so storm-beaten after this visit as before it. The majority of women have an intuitive knowledge of the emotions felt by men when in their company, and Anne possessed great powers of discernment. She could perfectly understand that Louis XII. wished desperately to retain Brittany. By the terms of her marriage settlement it now indisputably belonged to her once more. She also knew, with an acute sense of the potentialities flung open by the fact, that the idea of having his own marriage annulled had become an invincible necessity of his nature. The wayward brutality of her conduct to him after the death of the Dauphin might have chilled original kindliness of feeling; but he had thought her charming previously, and the desire for Brittany would naturally facilitate the effort to find her charming henceforward.

There is no doubt that Louis's visit, at least in some degree, alleviated depression; for a little later, with the impetuosity that kept Anne from being a totally dull woman, she said, in answer to some remark of one of her ladies, that sooner than stoop to a lower than her husband she would be a widow all her days, adding, in the same breath, that she believed she could still one day be the reigning Queen of France if she should wish it. A quaint writer of that time described Anne accurately, but kindly, when he said, "The greatness of heart of the queen-duchess was beyond all belief, and could yield in nothing that belonged to her, neither suffer that she should not have entire control of it."

But her statement was literally correct. While she lived in the strict retirement of mourning, writing lucid, emphatic letters to Brittany, the new king flung himself into the business of repudiating Louis XI.'s daughter. It is an episode that considerably smirches the propriety of Anne--afterwards a great upholder of propriety--for several further visits took place between the black-robed widow and the new king, and that they did not meet merely to extol the merits of the dead husband soon became apparent. Charles died in April, and in August two acts, dated on the same day, were passed. In the one Anne consented to marry Louis so soon as his present marriage should be annulled in Rome, and in the second Louis agreed to give back to the duchess the two towns of Nantes and Fougeres, if by death or other impediment he should prove unable to marry her within a year.

The divorce was not a difficult one to obtain. Alexander needed French assistance for the aggrandisement of Cæsar Borgia, and sent him personally with the Bull to Louis. Then a tribunal, formed of a cardinal, two bishops, and other minor dignitaries, sat upon the case and called upon the queen to appear in person. Both she and the council knew that the inquiry was a degrading and unmerciful farce. Nevertheless, for form's sake, endless questions were put to the woman who was at one and the same time both so ugly and so beautiful. They questioned her concerning her father, Louis XI., pressing to obtain involuntary exposures. Jeanne's sensitive and finely poised reserve could not be splintered by insistence. "I am not aware of it," or "I do not think so," were all that her lips yielded. She rendered even distress a little lovely by the silence in which she sheltered it. In reality, Louis's memory must have been essentially painful. For, like her husband, he had unremittingly hated her. As a child her tutor was even in the habit of hiding her in his robe for safety if by chance Louis met them in a corridor.

From family discords the court passed to the question of her marriage. Bluntly, they informed the martyred woman that she was a deformity. "I know I am not as pretty or as well made as most women," was the answer, that seemed to carry a lifetime's tears below its plaintiveness. They insisted further that she was not fit for marriage. Then a little anguished humanness seems to have fluttered for a moment through her patient spirit. "I do not think that is so. I think I am as fit to be married as the wife of my groom George, who is quite deformed, and yet has given him beautiful children." But all the while both she and those who questioned her knew with perfect clarity that neither questions nor answers could affect the ultimate issue. They were but a mean and vulgar form gone through to blind the judgment of the people. Louis XII. denied that their union had ever passed beyond the marriage service. Once more Jeanne fell back upon grave words conveying nothing. "I want," she answered, "no other judges than the king himself. If he swears on oath that the facts brought against me are true, I consent to condemnation."

That gave all they needed, and the marriage was declared null and void. For the last time Jeanne and Louis went through the discomfort of an interview, and for once, and once only, Jeanne's consummate self-immolation drew tears from her husband. Then she passed out of his existence, and became, what she had always desired to be, a nun. In one of the sermons preached on the anniversary of her death, it was said of her, "She was so plain that she was repudiated by her husband; she was so beautiful that she became the bride of Jesus Christ."

Anne and Louis were then delivered from all impediments, and in the year after Charles's death were married at the Nantes Cathedral. The marriage settlement drawn up was entirely advantageous to Anne. Undoubtedly Louis loved her. In his time many kinds of women had engrossed him, for he was a man who, as one writer puts it kindly, "did not disdain the pastime of ladies." But after many love affairs, and much knowledge of women's subtleties, he finally surrendered to the charms of a woman possessed of no subtleties of any sort.

The attraction is difficult to account for. Possibly Anne held him through his domestic leanings, and through her own indomitable force of character. The monotonies of guilty love episodes may have given a restful grace to placid respectability; Louis knew by heart every cankering perversity inherent to the women who are not virtuous, and probably, therefore, set additional store by one possessing at least a steadfast and limpid purity. How much virtue in a woman, when she was not Jeanne, appealed to him is clear from a remark made some years later. It had reference to Anne's aggressiveness. Some one complained of it to Louis. His answer offered no consolation, but expressed a definite attitude of mind. He remarked merely, "One must forgive much to a virtuous woman."

Anne's affection for Louis is more immediately comprehensible. He was peculiarly lovable, though almost as ugly as Charles himself. He had a low forehead, prominent ruminating eyes, a sensual, affectionate mouth, high cheek-bones, and a flabby skin. It was the face of a man who liked life as it was, and people as they were; there appeared in it no desire for illusions of any kind. He had in his own nature all the sympathetic weaknesses, and his expression conveyed the easy tolerance of a nature which had at least used experience as a school of understanding. A Venetian ambassador once called him "a child of nature," and he was essentially natural, with an almost childlike trustfulness, not so much of manner as of opinion. He ruled--save for his unfortunate passion to possess a piece of Italy--like a man preoccupied with the happiness of his children. The people adored him. If money had to be raised, he made personal sacrifices rather than burden the poor with additional taxation, while his home policy was persistently humane and sensible. Historians rarely do him justice. Because he failed to prove a great diplomatist, they ignore his possession of a delightful personality. In regard to Italy, he was plainly foolish; but then Italy stood for the romance of life--the adventure that drew the commonplace out of existence. Even specialized astuteness could have blundered easily in the cunning complications of international politics at that crisis, and Louis went to Italy, not out of policy, but literally because he could not keep himself away from it.

Though in private life his interests were largely intellectual, he had always a certain strain of cordial earthliness. The "pastime of ladies" he is said to have given up entirely after his second marriage, but good dinners and good wine he liked to the end of life. When Ferdinand of Aragon was told that Louis complained of being twice cheated by him, he exclaimed exultantly, "He lies, the _drunkard_; I have cheated him more than ten times."

Anne stood for his antithesis. She was regrettably without small weaknesses, and she forgave nobody. When Louis came to the throne he remarked, "It would ill become the King of France to avenge the wrongs of the Duke of Orleans." But if any one hurt Anne, she could not rest until a greater hurt had been flung back upon the offender. Once a grown woman, and married to Louis, she was, except from the point of view of housewifery, almost completely a failure. She might have had more flagrant vices and aroused compassionate affection. But she was pre-eminently respectable, pious, hedged in by sedate rules of conduct. And all the time one of the most corroding sins possible flourished in her to offend posterity. Anne's revengefulness is like a blight, destroying the grace of her femininity.

Happily she was generous, and generosity is a sweet redemption of much crookedness. She loved to give presents. After her second marriage she kept a gallery full of jewellery and precious stones, which she gave from time to time to the "wives of the captains or others who had distinguished themselves in the wars, or faithfully served her husband Louis." Also, she never denied the tragic clamour of the poor. Mezerai wrote: "You saw thousands of poor waiting for her alms, whenever she left the palace."

Of the private life led by Anne and Louis an unusual amount is known. They got up at six in summer and seven in winter. They had their dinner at eight or nine in the morning. At two o'clock they took some light refreshments. By five or six supper was served, and either at eight or nine o'clock they went to bed, after having a glass of wine and some spiced cakes. An old rhyme of the period might have been written for them--

"To rise at five, and dine at nine,
Sup at five, and sleep at nine,
Keeps one alive until ninety-nine."

Louis passed the larger part of the day occupied with state matters. To quicken recognition of the gravity of a ruler's efforts, he read fragmentarily but constantly Cicero's "Treatise on Duties;" it was to him like a spring of stimulating waters. When he had nothing else to do, he made love to his "Bretonne"--the name, for intimate use, given by him to Anne. She could have stirred no poetic imaginings, but she was comfortable to his nature. Domesticity and the hearthside securities were expressed by her.

Meanwhile, Anne ruled her household after the manner of an austere schoolmistress. Like all unimaginative people, she shrank from any form of waywardness, and none was permitted near her person. Her court grew to be spoken of as a school of good conduct for girls of the upper classes. Whether because she took so many or not, the beds for the rooms of the maids of honour were six feet long by six feet wide, so that several girls slept in the same bed--a little row of heads on one long pillow. No maids of honour were allowed to address a man save with an audience in the room. When the king went hunting, Anne sat surrounded by intimidated ladies, all sedately at work upon huge pieces of tapestry.

Even their recreations had to be of a sober and cautious nature. Françoise D'Alençon, the sister-in-law of Margaret D'Angoulême, is reported to have kept intact the traditions of Anne's court, and the following quotation is a description of how her household was managed. "She made all her ladies also come into the room, and after having looked at them one by one, she called back any whose bearing struck her as plebeian or wanting in propriety. She scolded any whose dress was not as it should be. Then she examined each one's work, and if there was a fault, righted it, and if the little progress made showed negligence and laziness, scolded the worker pretty sharply. As to their morals, she allowed none of them to have any conversation alone with any man, nor suffered any conversation before them not strictly proper and honourable.... As to their pastimes and festivals, this prudent princess did not keep them so strictly but that they were allowed to walk about, and play in the gardens or in some honourable house; or that they '_balassent_,' or played the guitar, _d'espinettes_, or other musical instruments, recommended by the nobility and other honourable minds; or that they should sing modestly and religiously in their room, which she often made them do in her presence, and while she herself joined them. But she never allowed them to sing other songs than the Psalms of David, or the songs of the dead Queen of Navarre. She did as much for their literature, for as she herself only read the Scriptures, or some historical biography which contained no false doctrine, so she would not allow her ladies to read anything else either."

With insignificant alterations the picture conveys as accurately Anne's method of management as that of the inflexible Françoise D'Alençon. Perhaps of the two Anne's control permitted more brightness to stray through its severity. There were occasional dances at the court, as well as journeys from one town to another. But it was not Anne's destiny to retain either of her husbands comfortably at her elbow. Though Louis loved both his wife and his people, the desire for adventure fretted the surface of his domestic life. Before Anne gave birth to their first baby, he had already gone to struggle for a piece of the country which perpetually ensnared him with abnormal and inexplicable longings.

During the first expedition Ludovico Sforza was taken prisoner. In this one matter Louis's conduct freezes one's blood. He brought Il Moro to France, and imprisoned him underground at the castle of Loches, while to increase safety he was placed every night in an iron cage. For ten years Ludovico endured this extreme limit of mental and physical privation, his magnificent physique refusing to admit Death sooner. But even at this distance of time it is not possible to think without unhappiness of the destroying agony of such imprisonment.

While Louis was in Italy, Anne wrote to him daily. A little letter from her proving that Louis was both affectionate and in love is still in existence. It commenced, "A loving and beloved wife writes to her husband, still more beloved, the object both of her regrets and her pride, led by the desire of glory far from his own country. For her, poor _amante_, every moment is full of terrors. To be robbed of a prince more lover than husband, what a terrible anguish it is!" The words "more lover than husband" reveal the practice of constant minor and endearing attentions.

A miniature painting of the period discloses Anne writing one of these daily letters. She sits in her bedroom, clearly used as a sitting-room as well. Her black gown trails consequentially upon the floor, but her table and seat are both perfectly unpretentious. Round her, on the ground, sit her ladies-in-waiting, intensely docile and industrious. Besides being disciplined in an outward meekness, they were, it would seem, obliged to adopt a court uniform, since in all the pictures they are dressed absolutely alike. Anne's inkstand and pen are both gold, and a little handkerchief is set conveniently near to wipe the seemly tears that should blur her eyes as she writes. At the back is a charming four-poster, rich and radiant with opulent gold hangings.

When Louis returned to France, society flung its eager frivolity into a series of organized rejoicings. But already to Anne life was beginning to imply unrestfulness. Louise de Savoie had a son Francis; and unless Anne gave birth to one later, this child became heir to the throne of France. The two women hated each other with an almost equally tortured intensity; certainly from this time forward Louise spoiled the peace of Anne's existence. Even without the poignant person of Francis, Duc D'Angoulême, some friction would still have been unavoidable. Anne clung to sober and steadfast if uninspired propriety; Louise de Savoie in conduct had no morals, no restraint, and no delicate prejudices whatsoever. Her brain teemed with complexities, exaggerations, and superlatives. She saw everything through a falsifying excitement, while to weave a lie was one degree more comfortable to her than to speak veraciously. In appearance also the advantages were on her side, and possessing an intuitive gift for understanding the worst of men, her society was dangerously flattering and easy to them.

Anne flinched, both at the other's conduct and at her possession of an heir to the French throne. Fleurange, who knew Anne well, said that there was never an hour but these two houses were not quarrelling. Both women, as the years passed, grew to have a constant piercing apprehension that killed all abiding buoyancy of feeling. In Anne's case the anguish was far the sharper and the more pitiful. Again and again she throbbed at the expectation of motherhood, and after nine overwrought months, when to both women the suspense had grown almost more than they could suffer, a girl, or a boy born dead, came to crush the vitality out of Anne's brave spirit.

After the birth of Claude a still keener edge was given to disquietude. Almost immediately arose the question of a marriage between the girl and Francis. For years, with all the passionate fierceness of her nature, Anne fought to ward off this triumph for her adversary and to marry the child to a different husband. In 1501 a temporary victory expanded her heart. The baby became promised to the Duke of Luxembourg, afterwards Charles V., son of the Archduke Philip of Austria. This engagement continued for several years. Then Louis realized that the probability of his having a son had grown very small, and that under these conditions the Austrian marriage would be in the last degree impolitic. For some reason not stated, he and Anne stumbled at this period into a serious breach of tenderness. His attitude to the question of Claude's marriage may have roused her to a despairing fury. To surrender the little plain girl she delighted in, to the son of the woman she abominated, was a hard thing to do--too hard for a heart already contracted with useless yearnings. Louis met her strenuous obstinacy with an implacable conclusiveness. The pulse of the nation beat, he knew, for the young D'Angoulême, who was "all French;" and his own opinion could be summed up in one sentence--that "he preferred to marry his mice to rats of his own barn."

A chill, destroying discord rose between the married lovers, who had once known such warmth in each other's presence. Louis, stung out of placidity, even commenced to snub the proud and suffering woman struggling against his wishes. During one of the recurring discussions upon the same subject, he informed her that "at the creation of the world horns were given to the doe as well as to the stag, but the doe venturing to use these defences against her mate, they were taken from her." If he had whipped Anne, the sense of stinging humiliation could hardly, one imagines, have been sharper. For no woman bore herself with a more unyielding dignity before witnesses, and the remark was not made beyond the reach of auditors.

In 1505, Anne, fretted, sore of heart, beaten and discouraged, went to Brittany. The actual reason of her going is not given, but having gone she stayed there, and more, wrote no longer daily letters to "her loving and beloved." Outwardly she was happy--held magnificent receptions, and went interesting journeys from one town to another. Clearly it was rest of heart to be away. Home had become a place of piercing bitterness, of rending and exhausting antagonisms. On a vital question she and Louis pulled different ways. Here in Brittany friction and sorrow lulled a little. Her nerves took rest, and her heart forgot at intervals.

That she flinched from return as from a renewal of intolerable provocation is unmistakable. In the September of 1505 she was at Rennes; and while she was there, Louis's friend, the Cardinal D'Amboise--upon whose death Pope Julius II. "thanked God he was now Pope alone"--wrote with a hint of distraction concerning the gravity of her prolonged absence from France. He said, "The king sent for me this afternoon, madame. I have never seen him so put out, as also I understand from Gaspar, to whom he spoke in my presence." The letter concluded with an urgent appeal that she should return and "so satisfy the king and also stop strangers from gossiping."

Four days afterwards he wrote again: "Although wonderfully pleased at the assurance you send me of making all possible haste to return to court, I am deeply distressed that you do not mention any date. I do not know what to answer the king, who is in the greatest perplexity.... I wish to God I was with you.... I can only say that I grieve with all my heart that you and the king no longer speak frankly to one another." Still she lingered, like a person bathing weary limbs in warm and soothing waters. Amboise, seeing the oncoming of permanent alienation, wrote again, "For God's sake don't fall, you and the king, into these moods of mutual distrust, for if it lasts neither confidence nor love can hold out, not to speak of the harm that can come of it, and the contempt of the whole Christian world."

In the end Anne drew upon her tired courage and came back. Once together again, moreover, she and Louis must have yielded to gentler feelings, for two children were born afterwards. But from this time to the end Anne never again felt the glow of life really stream upon her--a chill loneliness sapped capacity for pleasure. Once Louis exchanged the lover for the husband, they possessed no mental companionableness to fall back upon. They saw few things with the same emotion, and for successful marriage this is the primal necessity. Anne was intuitively religious, and Louis had been excommunicated--without visible disturbance--for his exploits in the second Italian campaign. To increase a marked sense of the difference between their views, Brittany had been excluded from the excommunication.

Everything for Anne had grown a little out of gear--a little hurtful and antagonistic. Claude was lame and not pretty--Louise's handsome son and daughter were adored by everybody.

Moreover, she had been coerced and disregarded; for all her excessive stateliness men knew her as a humiliated and beaten woman. Before Louis left for the third Italian campaign, the betrothal of Claude to Francis had been ratified. Deputies from the different departments had visited Louis at Plessis-les-Tours. They called him "Father of his people;" then upon bent knees begged that he would "give madame your only daughter to Monsieur François here present, who is a thorough Frenchman." Both Louis and the kneeling deputies shed tears, but though a sentimental emotion fluttered them in passing, the scene was essentially an organized drama, gone through in order to cut the last possible ground of resistance from under Anne's feet. Two days later Francis, aged eleven, and Claude, aged six, were formally promised to one another.

There is one more outstanding incident in Anne's life--her bitter warfare with the great Marechale de Gie. It has been called the inexcusable stain upon her reputation. The story certainly leaves her nakedly crude, fiercely elemental, but at least upon this occasion a glaring provocation roused her to fury. Louis fell ill. He had enjoyed his youth too coarsely, and paid heavily in after years for the absence of more delicate cravings. Anne nursed him with an affection made quick through terror. "She never left his room all day, and did everything she was able herself." But Louis failed to get better. Each day he drew nearer the purlieus of finality; his doctors perceived no possibility even of return. Then Anne, sitting wearily by the bedside of the sick man, did undoubtedly think of practical matters. She remembered Louise and their mutual hatred. Historians express disgust at what followed, but in reality there is nothing to be deeply disgusted about. The brain in times of tense, overwrought excitement is assailed by many discordant and trumpery remembrances. Anne, alert and nervous both, gazed at the sinking patient, and recalled the valuable furniture, jewellery, and plate, whose possession might be contested later. Had she been a woman of momentous feeling, the knowledge could equally have flashed through her kindled intelligence, but would have left it bitterly indifferent. Anne was not strung with overwhelming affections, and her predominating common sense saw that after this man's death she had still a future to organize. Without relaxing one personal nursing labour, she gave rapid orders to the household, until all the articles stated as hers in the marriage contract were despatched by ship to Brittany.

Gie had long ago placed his interests upon the side of the power to follow. Being informed of the queen's arrangements, he stopped her vessels, definitely refusing to allow them to leave the country.

There was a certain reckless temerity in the action; but Louis, it was understood, could not live more than a few hours, and the new king would know how to reward such strenuous adroitness in his interests. But in this matter Gie was unlucky.

Louis suddenly--and apparently unreasonably--abandoned the notion of dying. From extreme collapse he rapidly recovered, and immediately afterwards banished Gie from court. There are slight variations in the story--in one account Anne was labouring to remove Claude to Brittany as well--but the above is the account given by the greatest number.

For a short time Gie remained thankfully at his magnificent place in the country, clutching at the fact that his punishment went very comfortably with his instincts. But Anne's heart was too primitive for trivial retaliations. Mezerai did not say for nothing, "She was terrible to those who offended her." Presently Gie received a summons to answer to the charges of _lèse-majesté_ and peculation, was arrested, and after being treated with a shameless brutality, received a verdict of guilty, with a loss of all honours and five years' banishment from court. The ugliest part of a story--in which from the beginning everybody behaved with a rather ignoble sagacity--is the report that Anne openly stated that she did not desire the Marechale's death, since death gave relief from suffering, and she chafed for him to live and feel all the misery of being low when he had been high; in other words, that she craved a long and cankering duration to his discomfiture.

After the birth of another daughter--the child Renée, subsequently to be Duchess of Ferrara--Anne's last fragment of happiness died in her. Jean Marot, father of the famous Clement Marot, referred to her in some verses with a singular realism and comprehension. He wrote--

"At this time was in Lyons
The uneasy queen. Always in grief
For the regrets her tired heart
Bore incessantly."

She was, in truth, tired to death of the involved labour of life. Thoughts of the complacent, unprincipled, mendacious Louise de Savoie, whose son was heir to the throne of France, fermented in her blood, and kept her heart from beating contentedly. From the time of Renée's birth she surrendered to an uncontested weakliness. Though she became _enceinte_ again shortly afterwards, hope scarcely fluttered, and her physical condition bore witness to a mind past any salutary optimism. She had already given birth to three sons, not one of whom had lived, and throughout the household it was recognized that she lacked good fortune in motherhood.

In 1512, some one wrote: "The queen is in great pain, and her baby is expected at the end of this month or the beginning of next. But there is not the fuss and excitement here that was made over the others."

The child came, but the triumphant Louise records the event in her diary with cynical cheerfulness: "... His birth will not hinder the exaltation of my Cæsar, for the infant was born dead."

Anne, worn and heartbroken in her second best bed--always used for _accouchements_--becomes at last entirely touching. She was by this time ultimately and irremediably beaten. The child had been a son, but was dead. "She took pleasure in nothing afterwards," said D'Argentre, while she continued so ill that most of the time she had to stay in bed. Louis, back from renewed disasters in Italy, found her there on his return. Shortly afterwards--on the 9th of February, 1514--she died.

Louis grieved considerably. The flaring heat of latter quarrels had burnt up much original tenderness, but De Seyssel's statement that Louis "loved her so that in her he had placed all his pleasure and delight," was an approximate interpretation of their position until vital antagonisms sharpened the tongues of both.

Anne was given a sumptuous funeral. The arrangements for it, could she have known them, would have caused her exquisite pleasure. For six days she lay in her own room, prayed for unceasingly. Then she was placed upon a _Lit de Parade_, and covered with a pall of gold cloth bordered with ermine, the fur represented by the coat-of-arms of Brittany. She lay underneath this, with white gloves upon her hands, and a crown upon her head; her dress was of purple velvet, and on each side were cushions holding the Sceptre and the Hand of Justice.

After the funeral Louis sent her heart in a golden case to be entombed in Brittany. On the casket was written--

"In this small vessel
Of pure, fine gold
Rests the greatest heart
Of any woman in the world."

But as a matter of fact, the one great drawback to Anne was that she had not heart enough. Her presence inspired neither tenderness nor laughter, her society neither encouraged nor comforted. And the consequence was that nobody could have been missed less. On the whole she had been a good woman; except in times of tumultuous temper, she had endeavoured to live conscientiously and reasonably. Only she possessed no deep-dwelling sympathies; consequently when she died she was dead immediately. It is the people who kindle perpetually at the needs of others who live for years in the hearts of those they have penetrated.

LUCREZIA BORGIA

1480-1519

Of all the famous women of the Renaissance, Lucrezia Borgia is, in one sense, though in one sense only, the most disappointing. There are a great number of books dealing with her personality, but little real information. Few personal friends reveal more of themselves than Margaret D'Angoulême, Anne of Brittany, or Beatrice D'Este. What is evasive about them is pleasantly evasive, since every woman should retain a little that is inexplicable. But Lucrezia Borgia evades altogether. There is nothing, from beginning to end, comprehensible to seize upon. All the facts of her life are ascertainable, but never a word concerning the temperament that to a certain extent gave life to them. The events of the first half of her existence are begrimed with evil, but the evil is so involved and extraordinary, so little in keeping with the second half of her existence, and in many instances so dubious, that it scarcely adheres to her. In the end she emerges with such inherent calm, such effulgent gentleness, that the whole story of her Roman days has an air, not only of inapplicability, but of extraneousness. The actions of that early period seem to cling to her little more than the unconscious proceedings of a sleep-walker.

To disarm once and for all any preconceived prejudice, it is only necessary to look at the supposed portrait of her as St. Catherine, painted by Pintorricchio. In that she is adorable. To believe in the absolute baseness of a creature with such an expression is not possible. Looking at it, do we see anything save a child, nearly grown up in years, but with a little brain absolutely muddled and unreasonable? Exquisitely plaintive and helpless, the figure seems surely as if its youth appealed against it knew not what. The creature is all prettiness, weakness, and grace. Standing with slender hands in a useless attitude, her expression appears destitute of any vital understandings, but conveys instead the very essence of the sweetness and dependence possible to femininity. The little mouth is weak but endearing, the little chin weak but tender-hearted. The whole face, framed in its loose and volatile hair, exhales a gentle, childish passivity. Only in the eyes lurks an unconscious wistfulness, as if they knew or foreboded being involved in many tragic contemplations. There is no evil anywhere--there is no _parti pris_, in fact, of any sort. A soft perplexity is perhaps the strongest impression given.

The other likeness of her, stamped upon a medal, and known incontestably to be a portrait, is not so lovable. But no woman's charm could be conveyed in the few hard lines of a profile struck upon a medal. There is no possible opportunity to convey more than an accentuated impression of nose, chin, and forehead. In the medal Lucrezia's gift of gaiety, here almost saucy, is the chief characteristic visible.

This power to be continuously gay, which was so markedly to distinguish her all her life, was perhaps the only good quality Alexander was able to transmit to his daughter; but by this one quality alone, almost, Lucrezia finally lifted herself away--as if it had been solely a cloak thrust about her by the brutality of others--from the darkness of her original reputation. Now one is chiefly conscious of a creature courageously cheerful; a creature continuously desirous to please, to convey gentle impressions, to smooth out everything into pleasantness. Having carefully and repeatedly read the various books upon her, the feeling left is actually of a woman who understood, up to a point, her woman's business uncommonly well, but who suffered sore mishandling during the early crucial years of her existence. The moment they took her out of the undesirable surroundings in which she had been reared, nothing but brave, becoming laughter and comfortable domesticity--Ruskin's demand that a woman should bring "comfort with pleasantness"--issued from her. Obviously there were no roots of evil to renew themselves; at the worst there had been only a nature over-adaptable to outside forces, and a temperament not forceful in powers of resistance.

Born in 1480, she was the daughter of Alexander, then known as Cardinal Rodriguez, and Vanozza Cataneri, a woman whose origin is obscure, but who was certainly educated, and who had two husbands, Giorgio di Croce, and later, when Alexander had turned to younger idols, a certain Carlo Canali, an author of some reputation in his day. During her babyhood Lucrezia remained with her mother in a house close to the cardinal's. But later, though why or when is not known, she was taken from Vanozza and given into the care of Madonna Adrienne, a widow, and a connection of the cardinal's, said by Gregorovius to be also "very deep" in the Spaniard's confidence. The atmosphere of Madonna Adrienne's house could not have created for Lucrezia early impressions of delicate or winning conduct--she had no groundwork afterwards of moving ideals to fall back upon. There is one incident which lets in all the daylight necessary upon the character of Lucrezia's guardian. Julia Farnese was her son's wife, and it was with her mother-in-law's complete acquiescence that the girl became Alexander's acknowledged mistress. There is something, therefore, under the flagrant circumstances of the case almost offensive in the fact that Adrienne had the child carefully instructed in religious observances, though, for that matter, they were all religious, these women of undesirable conduct. Vanozza, for instance, built a chapel, and was looked upon as deeply devout long before Alexander's death.

Lucrezia's intellectual education took the same surface quality as her spiritual one. The Renaissance ideas of culture for women had not penetrated to Rome, and the child underwent a very different schooling from the D'Estes, the Gonzagas, and so many others. Her chief facility appears to have been in the matter of languages. Bayard, in 1512, said of her, "She speaks Spanish, Greek, Italian, and French, and a little and very correctly Latin; she also writes and composes poems in all these languages." Moral sense must have remained absolutely sheathed. None of the set who brought her up would have dared to instil so dangerous and disturbing a quality. In Pintorricchio's portrait there is no sign of a living conscience, though she might well from her expression be wistfully looking for it, aware of something wanting.

When Lucrezia was eleven years old, besides, a new impropriety was added to the number already submersing ordinary moral comprehension. It was then that Julia Farnese, aged sixteen, became Alexander's mistress. There was no concealment, and Lucrezia became unhesitatingly involved in the new arrangements. To her the circumstance wore no more unnatural air than marriage. The child had never been in an atmosphere of customary domesticity since she was born; her playfellows were almost all the children of other cardinals, and in thinking of her life it should be remembered that few minds question easily the standards of conduct grown familiar since early childhood.

She was herself already engaged to two people. Alexander, looking at this time to his own country for a good match for his daughter, had formally promised her hand to a Spaniard. In the same year, considering it a better bargain, he also affianced her to a certain Don Gasparo; so that the child had actually two prospective husbands at one time. Nothing came of either. In 1492, Innocent VII. died, and Rodriguez Borgia was elected Pope in his place, assuming the name of Alexander. He had always notably pleasant manners, but Giovanni de Medici, looking at the new Pope, remarked, nevertheless, under his breath, "Now we are in the jaws of a ravening wolf, and if we do not flee he will devour us." He devoured a good many, though his primary policy was widespread propitiation.

For Lucrezia, her father's elevation from cardinal to Pope proved immediately significant. The two previously chosen husbands were dropped; neither was good enough for a Pope's daughter. And in 1493 they married her to Giovanni Sforza, who was an independent sovereign, and a relation also of the powerful Ludovico Sforza of Milan. She was then thirteen years of age, and was to remain, after the marriage, one more year in Rome before her husband took her away to his own possessions. Ostensibly, however, they made a woman of her immediately. She received a house of her own close to the Vatican, Madonna Adrienne passed from governess into lady-in-waiting, and the whole weariness of formal social life became a part of the child's ordinary duties. She had to receive all important visitors to Rome, and behave with the effortless dignity of a great lady. Alphonso of Ferrara, come to render homage to the new Pope, had also to pay his court to this thirteen-year-old bastard, whom he was himself later to marry. He brought her, in fact, as a wedding present from the duke his father, two large and beautifully worked silver washing jugs and basins.

Curiously enough, in the comments made about the marriage, there are none at all concerning the girl herself. At that age she had clearly no distinguishing precocities. The Ferrarese ambassador dismissed her with a phrase, and that referring more to Alexander than the newly made bride. He wrote that the Pope loved his daughter in a superlative degree. It may have been so: it is a fact most biographers lay stress upon. Nevertheless, almost every single known incident tells against much affection, and it is very certain that he sacrificed her whenever it was necessary, either for Cæsar's ambition or his own purposes.

Another brief reference made to her at this time is in the well-known letter by Pucci. From his statement it would almost seem as if Julia Farnese and Lucrezia were housed together. For he mentioned going to call upon Julia at the Palace of Santa Maria in Porlica, and wrote, "When we got there she had just been washing her hair. We found her sitting by the fire with Madonna Lucrezia, the daughter of his Holiness, and she welcomed both my companions and myself with every appearance of delight.... She desired me to see the child, who is already quite big and as like the Pope _adeo ut vere ex ejus semine orta dici possit_.

"Madonna Julia has grown fatter, having developed into a very beautiful woman. While I was there she unbound her hair and had it dressed. Once loose it fell to her feet; I have never seen anything to compare with it. Truly she has the most beautiful hair imaginable. She wore a thin lawn head-dress, and over it the lightest of nets interwoven with gold threads, shining like the sun.... Her dress was made after the style of the Neapolitans, and trimmed with fur. So was Madonna Lucrezia's, who after a while went and changed hers, coming back in a gown made of purple velvet."

The reference to Lucrezia is singularly meaningless, but the letter itself is interesting. The child of fourteen and the deliberate wanton were evidently, at least, in constant companionship. "Wanton" is a strong expression, but Julia Farnese belonged to the type for whom no other word is equally applicable. She was young, fresh, beautiful, and Pope Alexander was an old corrupt man of sixty. But she became his mistress with the same tranquil publicity with which a woman might become the consort of a reigning sovereign. The fact of her soiled youth and abandoned domestic decencies weighed no more upon imagination, than the casual discarding of an uncared-for garment.

Pintorricchio, in his series of frescoes at the Vatican, is said to have painted her as well as Alexander and Lucrezia. There is, above the door of the Hall of Arts, a madonna and child, the madonna of which is supposed to have been Julia. If so--and it looks essentially like a portrait--she was very interesting as well as exquisite. There is character and a sort of intelligent carelessness about the face--the kind of carelessness that suggests an intuitive consciousness of the insignificance of most minor occurrences. The error made by Julia was in including ethics among the non-important contingencies.

As regards the question whether she and Lucrezia were really painted by Pintorricchio, there seems little doubt that, since the portrait of Alexander is incontestable, those of the two girls would have been included somewhere in the series of frescoes. Alexander must so certainly have desired them painted, and both would have been about the ages they look in the frescoes at the time Pintorricchio was at work upon the private apartments of the Pope. As a matter of fact, Pintorricchio laboured quietly for years in the rooms through which Lucrezia was constantly passing, and he must have become so much part of unchanging daily impressions, that one imagines all her after memories of life in Rome held as a sort of background the consciousness of the wonderful pictures in which the painter expressed, with perhaps more completeness than anywhere else, his special sense of loveliness.

Lucrezia must have known Pintorricchio from the time when she was little more than a child until her third marriage, though it is probable that she was at this period too engrossed and light-headed to take much notice of the wistful-looking man making beauty upon every side of her. Certainly the complicated nature of her own domestic drama was in itself sufficient to absorb anybody. Not long after her marriage Il Moro had drawn France into the Neapolitan adventure. Alexander VI. was vehemently opposed to this invasion, and was, besides, close friends with the King of Naples. Instantly the situation became difficult for Lucrezia's husband; the policy of his house and that of his father-in-law had grown brusquely antagonistic.

Giovanni himself was acutely alive to the awkwardness of his own position. In 1494 he wrote to Ludovico that he had been asked by the Pope what he had to say to the situation, and had answered, "Holy Father, everybody in Rome believes that you are in agreement with the King of Naples, who is the enemy of Milan. If it is so, I am in a very difficult position, for I am in the pay of your Holiness and of the last-named state. If things are to follow this course, I do not see how I can serve the one without abandoning the other, though I desire to detach myself from neither." He concluded the letter by a statement very unflattering to Lucrezia. "If I had known, monseignor," wrote the distracted Sforza, "that I should find myself in my present position, I would sooner have eaten the straw of my bed than have made this marriage."

As a young girl, Lucrezia obviously arrested nobody's notice. This alone suggests that she was not wicked: wickedness always at least produces attention. To her first husband, when he wrote the above letter, she could have held no kind of significance. Shortly after sending it, however, Giovanni left Rome for his own town, Pesaro, taking the girl he so much regretted marrying with him. He was not yet openly on bad terms with the Vatican: in addition to his own wife, he had been given charge of quite a collection of the Pope's ladies. Julia Farnese, Madonna Adrienne, and Madonna Vanozza were all included, an outbreak of the plague in Rome having terrified Alexander as to the safety of the two younger women. Giovanni, probably, would have preferred Lucrezia to have been less accompanied. Involved always in this crowd of feminine connections, she must, as a young girl, have worn almost a mechanical air of manipulation--have seemed little better than a mouthpiece for the Vatican opinions. While they were at Pesaro, however, husband and wife went through the momentarily uniting experience of falling equally under the Pope's displeasure. They had, it seems, permitted Madonna Julia and Madonna Adrienne to leave them. Julia's brother was seriously ill, and the two women had gone to nurse him. Upon this matter, Alexander, who could be very petulant when thwarted, wrote himself, and not at dictation, to Lucrezia. He wrote that he was much surprised at not having heard more often from them, and in a tense and irritated sentence ordered the girl to be more punctilious for the future. But this was not the real grievance, and he passed instantly to the departure of Julia and her mother. Lucrezia and Giovanni were both held to have behaved equally inexcusably in letting them go without permission from Alexander. He wrote as if they had been two disobedient children, whose deliberate frowardness had resulted, as they must have known perfectly from the beginning, in great annoyance to him personally. At the end of exasperated remonstrance, they were warned that for the future they would never again be trusted. A letter like this, including both in mutual disgrace, might easily have fugitively roused a slight bond of friendliness between so young a couple. The general opinion is, notwithstanding, that they were never sympathetic. At Pesaro, besides, though Lucrezia remained there a year, they were very seldom together. Giovanni held the position of officer in the Pope's army, and it was a year of sharp anxiety for Alexander. It required Charles VIII.'s feeble return journey to France before the papal ground felt once more solid under the pontiff's feet.

Then Lucrezia was recalled to Rome, and the old wayward existence at her palace near the Vatican was taken up once more. From this time onwards the Borgia scandals thickened with extraordinary rapidity, becoming the interested gossip of every other court in Italy. Alexander's youngest son, Jofre, had married a Spanish girl several years older than himself, and upon the return of political quietude brought her back with him to Rome. This Madonna Sancia alone piled up a staggering accumulation of scandals for Italy to gasp at. She had a passion, in her most innocent moments, for the less tranquil pleasures of life. Her arrival whipped up the gaiety of social Rome into an extremity of worldliness. She was openly flagrant: the word "wickedness" seemed to have no more unpleasant meaning to her than another. Both her husband's brothers, Giovanni and Cæsar Borgia, were said to be among her lovers. Giovanni Borgia's subsequent murder, in fact, was looked upon by many people as the outcome of her lack of moral reasonableness, Cæsar's jealousy, it was thought, driving him to thrust the other prematurely upon eternity. Between the gorgeous wickedness of Sancia and Julia Farnese, Lucrezia was trailed like some insignificant and unconsidered appendage. She is mentioned constantly as in the society of Sancia, but no impropriety is even suggested concerning her, until the divorce with Giovanni involved her in the hate universally nourished against the rest of the family.

This divorce had been shaping ever since the French invasion had rendered the Sforzas politically useless to Alexander. One day Giovanni Sforza was bluntly requested to abandon Lucrezia. Should he refuse, extreme measures were threatened, and no man so intimate with the family could possibly have been unacquainted with the kind of coercion likely to be employed should he maintain obduracy. For a few days he went about hoarding rather more bitterness than he knew how to deal with. Then a dramatic urgency brought indecision to an abrupt conclusion. According to most accounts of the story, Jacomino, _camerière_ to Giovanni Sforza, was in Lucrezia's room one day when they heard Cæsar Borgia's footsteps outside. Lucrezia had already been made cognizant of the pending divorce. Alexander and Cæsar never regarded the soft and pliant creature as likely to need concealments. She was to them obviously the perfect tool, childlike, flighty, inherently docile, and moved by the least enticement to new anticipations. But Lucrezia even then had some instincts her people did not know of, and to deprive a man of the delight of living was not endurable to her. She must have suspected some sinister communication, for on hearing Cæsar's footsteps she thrust Jacomino behind some tapestry. In the course of conversation, Cæsar stated that the order to assassinate her husband had already been given. It sounds incredible, but then the whole Borgia history has the same quality of impossible melodrama. The moment he had gone Lucrezia rushed to the curtains: the man must go at once and save his master. Twenty-four hours later Giovanni Sforza reached Pesaro. His horse fell dead as he arrived.

Gregorovius states that Lucrezia was not agreeable to the divorce. It fits in pleasantly with one's conception of her to believe that this was true. The Lucrezia of recent discovery would have been bound by a light and gentle affection to any one not unkind to her, and all her instincts would have been against giving pain to anybody. Certainly, after Giovanni's escape, she felt the weight of some unpleasantness at the Vatican. And shortly afterwards she either went, or was sent in disgrace, to the convent of San Sisto on the Appian Way. In a letter written that June by Donati Aretino to Cardinal Hippolyte D'Este, he says: "Madonna Lucrezia has left the palace _insalutato hospite_, and has gone to stay at a convent called San Sisto, where she still is. It is rumoured by some that she desires to become a nun herself, but there are a number of other rumours as well, of a nature not possible to trust to a letter."

These "other rumours" are presumably the scandals which leapt into belief after the divorce, and which Giovanni, embittered to the marrow of his bones, is credited with having started.