Chapter V: Preface (5)

But the divorce obtained, a new marriage was instantly negotiated for the girl, whose ideas of customary conduct must have been so piteously topsy-turvy. The new match contemplated was solely intended to benefit Cæsar--in it Lucrezia became purely a means of assistance. Cæsar, having renounced the priesthood after the mysterious murder of his elder brother, which had taken place while Lucrezia was in the convent, had conceived the scheme of marrying Charlotte of Aragon, and through this marriage of becoming King of Naples. Since the French invasion the present reigning dynasty crumbled visibly. Cæsar had already asked for Princess Charlotte's hand, and had been emphatically refused. It was hoped at the Vatican that Lucrezia's marriage to Charlotte's brother, Don Alphonso, would pave the way for the other and more important wedding. Lucrezia was eighteen at the time of her second marriage, and, according to the ambassador of Mantua, really in love with the handsome boy who made her Duchess of Biselli.

Unfortunately they remained in Rome, in the undesirable set Lucrezia had belonged to from babyhood, and from this time horrible scandals grew as thickly round Lucrezia as the rest of her family. According to one of them, she had given birth to an illegitimate son, by a certain favourite of Alexander's, Perotto. This unfortunate is another person whom Cæsar is credited with having murdered. He did it apparently in the Pope's very presence, and splashed the blood all over the old man's garments. The existence of a child by Perotto is not corroborated, and the truth of later scandals, since discussed with bated breath, is less ascertainable still. At the same time, that Lucrezia should have given birth to an illegitimate baby is very feasible. In a society where lovers were more normal than husbands, it is difficult to conceive that she should have escaped with flawless, untarnished innocence--probably took a lover because she was young, affectionate, and nobody she knew thought it grievous behaviour. Nevertheless, though there is every reason for this individual scandal to have had roots in truth, the evidence for its genuineness is equally flimsy and unsupported.

For a year the Biselli marriage wore an air of ordinary successfulness. Then the politics of the Vatican veered once more, and tragically and brutally, Lucrezia's fate changed with them. Louis XII. had started the second Italian campaign, and Alexander was now upon the side of the French. Once more, therefore, the awkward factor in the situation became Lucrezia's husband. It seemed, indeed, as if she was to have a knack of possessing awkward spouses. In this second crisis Lucrezia, however, did not wait to be warned of danger, and one day Alphonso disappeared. A Venetian writer in Rome remarks: "The Duke of Biseglia, husband of Madonna Lucrezia, has secretly fled, and is gone to Genazzano, to the Colonnas. He has left his wife six months _enceinte_, and she does nothing but cry." The statement is at last a lifting of the veil for a second from the girl's character. She loved this second husband; at the hint of danger she sent him away, but once gone she cried for him all day. This is the whole conduct-sheet of any normal, tender woman.

Alphonso wrote and urged her to follow him, but Alexander, it is said, forced her to beg Alphonso to return instead. There is some confusion at this point. Certainly, in the end, Lucrezia was sent away into the country--to Spoleto--and here, after a little while, Alphonso joined her. It was dangerous, but they were at the age when evil anticipations are sustained with an effort. It is not natural in one's teens to hold for ever a problematical foreboding. Death in fulness of physical well-being is a dark midnight possibility, not a permanent obsession for broad and cheerful daylight. Foolishly, and yet so naturally, their fears gradually fell away, and Cæsar Borgia being at Forli, fighting, by the following October they were back in Rome, where Lucrezia gave birth to a son, and where, for another year, they lived undisturbed, while Michelangelo was at work upon his Pieta Copernicus, and Pintorricchio continued to make pictures round the walls of the Vatican.

In 1500, the year of Alexander's jubilee, Cæsar returned, and the calamity, which had practically been a foregone conclusion for a year, came upon the Biselli household. Before it occurred, however, an incident occurred which is another strong testimony to gentleness of heart in Lucrezia. A chimney fell upon Alexander, and during his brief illness it was not his mistress, nor any of the many persons whose business it was more or less to attend to him, who undertook the nursing, but the girl Lucrezia herself. It is said the old man refused to have anybody else about him. Clearly, then, she had more tender ways, more naturally capable and patient methods, than the rest, and to a patient made herself the comfortable embodiment of motherliness, sympathy, control, and unselfishness. No woman would be clamoured for in a sick-room who did not possess all the finer and warmer qualities of character.

Soon after this the inevitable happened. Alphonso, walking up the steps of the Vatican, was set upon by a group of masked men with daggers. Grievously wounded, he managed to tear past them into the Pope's own apartments, where Lucrezia was sitting with her father. As the bleeding man staggered into the room she fainted dead away. So would any normally tender woman, dragged suddenly from the trivial conversation into this new horror of desolation.

The dying man was put to bed, and joyfully given the last absolution. But Lucrezia, ill herself with a fever brought on by shock, made a desperate struggle to save the life belonging to her. Here again she shows as a perfectly natural woman. Driven at last into revolt by those she dared not openly defy, and heartsick, shaken, burning with terror, impotence, and distress, she yet fought them with all the pitiful means at her disposition. Nobody but herself or his sister Sancia were allowed to attend the wounded man; all his food these two cooked between them, probably with their hearts racing in perpetual fearfulness. It is said--and there seems always a vague suggestion behind these circumstances that Alexander was a weak man in the power of Cæsar--that the Pope himself sided with the two aching, troubled women, and helped to keep dangerous persons out of the sick-room. But Alphonso once convalescent, Cæsar could not be refused admittance. He had no recognized hand in the crime; none could openly accuse him. Nevertheless, his visit accentuated sinister anticipations. After making it he remarked grimly, "What was unsuccessful at noon may be successful at night."

He took every care that it should. One evening the two women--why is difficult to understand, for both were soaked in heartbreaking suspicions--left the room for a moment. Cæsar himself must surely have seen to their absence, for instantly afterwards he slipped in with his throttler Michelletto, and in a minute or two Lucrezia was a widow. The agony, sharp enough, had at least been brief.

This time, though there is not a single intimate statement written about her, Lucrezia must have made some primary outcry, some first plaint against the cruelty of such a widowhood. The Venetian ambassador refers to trouble between Lucrezia and her father. He writes: "Madonna Lucrezia, who is generous and discreet, was formerly in high favour with the Pope, but he seems no longer to care for her." The girl was then at Nepi. What had previously occurred no one knows, but she and her father would certainly not have fallen out if her meekness had remained predominant. Something must have overstrained docility and sent her once more out of Rome, either in a spirit of bitterness or because she exasperated those who controlled her existence.

But negotiations for a third marriage were not allowed to linger. When Cæsar had subdued the plucky and intensely wicked Catherine Sforza, and taken the town of Pesaro, Collenuccio mentions at the end of a letter, "The Pope intends to give this town as a dowry to Madonna Lucrezia, and to secure her an Italian husband who will always keep on good terms with the Valentinois. I do not know if this is the truth, but it is at least generally believed to be." In the same letter there is a sketch of Cæsar himself. Collenuccio says, "He is looked upon as brave, powerful, and generous, and they say he takes care to make much of wealthy people. He is pitiless in his vengeances; many people have told me this. He is a man with a great spirit, and set on greatness and glory, but it seems he prefers to conquer provinces than to pacify and organize them."

Nevertheless, because the Borgia was a man with an unrelaxed purpose, he stood, even for a good many of his enemies, as a type of greatness. Machiavelli actually made him the ideal of governing princedom--the subtle combination of the lion and the fox.

Machiavelli--himself so extraordinarily interesting--belongs to the history of Florence and not to that of Rome and Alexander. He never came actually into contact with Lucrezia, but the following description of his days, when he was living on his own small estate, given in a letter to a friend, is so luminously expressive of the spirit of the age in which he and Lucrezia lived that there seems more than sufficient reason for including it. He wrote that he got up at sunrise, and after a couple of hours in the woods, where he examined the work of the previous day and chatted with the wood-cutters, he walked to a certain grove with a volume of Dante, Petrarch, or one of the Latin poets, to read. Subsequently he strolled to the inn, gossiped with the people there, and by direct intercourse with many kinds of temperaments studied human nature. For dinner, which he spoke of as being very simple fare, he returned home; but the meal over, he made his way back to the inn, where he passed the afternoon playing at _cricca_ and _tric-trac_ with the host or any one else who happened to be there. It was not apparently desired to be a peaceful recreation. Machiavelli states, with a sort of cheerful glow, that they quarrelled incessantly, and shouted at each other like infuriated lunatics. But this boisterousness was for the day. When the evening came he once more went homewards, and this time, having discarded his muddy country clothes, and having dressed himself with as much care as if he were at court, he retired to his library till bedtime, and became absorbed in the works of past writers. This was in reality the intense portion of his days; all his nature, he wrote, became immersed in the joy of this intellectual companionship, everything else, every care, every thought for the present or the future, slipping away from him while he read.

Machiavelli's day contains the whole substance of Renaissance behaviour--absolute immersion of personality in fine art or good literature, and along with it the extreme of physical tempestuousness. These people almost panted with vitality; they were not yet subdued and wearied through the evil and sorrows of too many past generations.

Lucrezia, like the rest, responded to life far too instinctively to hold grief for any period. She took the interest of a giddy child in the suggestions for her third marriage, and this time Alexander had chosen Alphonso of Ferrara as the person essentially desirable. It was aiming ambitiously. The besmirched, divorced, and widowed daughter of a Pope did not constitute a suitable bride for the future Duke of Ferrara. In fact, the proposal created nothing less than a panic when laid before the chosen bridegroom and his father. Lucrezia's reputation was unspeakable.

The charge of incest was among others laid against her. It has been repeated by Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the poets Sanozzo and Pontanus. Nevertheless, nobody now believes it. Neither Alexander nor Cæsar's conduct makes it supposable. Secondly, all those who spread it had either personal animosity against the Borgias or repeated it solely from hearsay. The two poets, besides, were friends and subjects of the house of Aragon, and in Naples, after the murder of Alphonso, the word "Borgia" stood for abomination.

But in Ferrara the accusation was unquestioned, and Alphonso immediately and violently refused to entertain the idea of the suggested marriage for a second. The old Duke Ercole, though no less nauseated than his son, was even more harassed and more fearsome. To offend Alexander involved the security of his duchy. To make matters worse, when the Pope's proposal reached Ferrara, other wifely negotiations had already been started with France. And suddenly all pleasant plans were made parlous and uncertain. Distressed out of circumlocution, Ercole wrote plainly and rather piteously to the French ambassador, begging that the French king would not take the side of the Pope, but would write and support him by stating, which would have been almost the truth, that another marriage had already been arranged for. The whole letter was full of stress and pleading, and though ending with the statement that consent to the union would in any case never be wrung out of him, and that in addition nothing would induce his son to take the lady, it showed in every line the anguish of a revolt that knows its own futility.

Ercole found no friend to help him. His letters, after Louis had slithered out of the responsibility of abetting him, revealed the agitation this acceptance of a virtueless future duchess caused at Ferrara. Exasperated and miserable, he showed openly that he regarded the king's conduct as a mean refusal of good-fellowship. He gave in finally, as he was bound to do, but spoke of it with a tragic veracity as an act "postponing" the honesty of his most ancient house.

The news caused an almost outrageous joy at the Vatican, though Lucrezia's delight is perhaps the most inexplicable of the abundantly inexplicable facts of her existence. She could not have believed herself welcome, and she could not have conceived Alphonso as a genial, heart-stirring companion. He was emphatically a man satisfied with men's society. His appearance, besides, was in itself sufficient to terrorize a woman of light reputation. Lucrezia had seen him and the remorseless type of the straight, down-reaching nose, the tip almost touching the upper lip. Physically he was a fine creature, but cold suspicion glared out of him, and only excessive courage or excessive obtuseness would have dared to be wholly at ease in his presence. True, the marriage offered Lucrezia the great opportunity of her life--the opportunity to retrieve, which should follow everybody's primary misdemeanours. She rose, moreover, magnificently to the occasion, and through that fact alone made her life of deep and touching value. For no past human backsliding should be allowed to blur the smoothness of a changed and nobler future. There is no object in life if improvement is to be hindered by cast-off failings. But though Lucrezia wiped out a bad beginning by the finest possible maintenance of contrary behaviour, she was not the woman to think of this beforehand, or to plan deeply and carefully the development of a new character. She possessed too strongly the wisdom of living in the moment, and her retrievement came, not from any long-considered purpose, but _naturally_ when once removed from the constant, forceful on-thrust of evil people.

The instant the engagement had been brought about, a correspondence began between her and Ercole. Certainly men were practised liars in those days. When Ercole wrote to Cæsar Borgia accepting the proposed marriage, he stated that he did so "on account of the reverence we feel for the holiness of our Lord, and the admirable character of the most illustrious Madonna Lucrezia, but even more for the great affection we have for your Excellence."

When the marriage by proxy had taken place, he further wrote to Lucrezia herself that not only was the marriage a great happiness and comfort in his old age, but that he had loved his new daughter-in-law from the first, both because of the exceptional goodness of her character, and because of her relationship to the Pope and to Cæsar Borgia. Just at the end a grain of truth slipped in, when he stated that he hoped that posterity through her would be assured to his house in Ferrara.

In spite of these protestations of affection, the D'Estes were anything but comfortable. What they feared is clear from a letter of the Ferrarese ambassador, written after a long interview with Lucrezia. He wrote that she showed nothing but excellent qualities, and appeared extremely modest, gracious, and decorous, as well as fervently religious. He adds, "She is very pretty, but doubly so through the charm of her manners. To be brief, her character seems to me to warrant no evil anticipations, but to raise rather the most pleasant expectations." Another writer says of her at this same period that though she was not regularly beautiful, her golden hair, white skin, and gentle manners made her a most attractive person. Also he mentions, "She is very joyous and light-hearted, and is always laughing." The radiance of a sunny temperament was in reality one of the best things she brought to her reluctant husband.

At Ferrara, Isabella of Mantua came to help her brother to receive the Roman widow. Her letters to her husband give a graphic description of the first days of Lucrezia's third marriage. Isabella--a keen lover of admiration--was a little put out by rivalry with the new-comer. Every reference to Lucrezia holds the suspicion of a sting. Even the simple phrase, "I need not describe Lucrezia's appearance, as you have already seen her," placed in Isabella's context, conveys an unfavourable impression.

The irritation of a certain insecurity acidified opinion. Isabella was an acknowledged beauty; from babyhood she had been accustomed to be looked upon as a pearl among women. This disreputable Borgia, with hair equally as golden and with her incomparably magnificent clothes and jewellery, might produce a division of opinions. Even Isabella's own lady-in-waiting mentioned to the Marquis of Mantua that the bride was sweet and attractive in appearance. At any rate, the marchesana wrote: "Your Excellency enjoys more pleasure in being able to see our baby son every day than I am able to get out of these festivities.... Bride and bridegroom slept together last night, but we omitted the usual morning visit, since, to be frank, this is a very chill marriage. I think that both my suite and I compare favourably with the rest here, and we shall, at any rate, win the prize for card-playing, Spagnali having already won 500 gold pieces off the Jew. To-day there is dancing till four o'clock, after which another play is to be given...." She wrote again next day, and jealousy had evidently not been alleged in the interval. "We passed yesterday shut up in our rooms until four o'clock, as, being Friday, there was no dancing, and Madonna Lucrezia, in order to outdo the Duchess of Urbino and myself, insisted upon spending all these hours over her toilet.... Your Excellency has no cause to envy my presence at this wedding, for never was a more spiritless and unemotional an affair."

Isabella was a great, lusty creature, and Lucrezia a frail, slight woman, just arrived from an exhausting journey, after having been overtired before she started. If she could not charm, besides, in these first crucial days, her case was lost. Who cares at any time to champion an ugly woman with every fragment of evidence against her? But a fresh, smiling, childlike creature disarms antagonism through sheer contagion of joy. And Lucrezia, as one knows, could be like sunshine itself in her soft urbanity and good humour. She did her best to create a pacifying impression, and succeeded. Nevertheless, the marriage remained, as Isabella had said, a cold one. The bride was so lightly thought of that not even a pretence of affection could be asked from Alphonso. Alexander himself only required that he should actually be her husband, and, satisfied upon that point, remarked to the Ferrarese ambassador, "It is true that being young he wanders here and there after pleasure during the day, but he does well."

From the first, however, Lucrezia proved herself wonderful. She had no sooner reached Ferrara than she shed the soiled Roman personality, as she might have done a dirty garment. Without slow gradations, she showed herself a pleasant, sober housewife, lacking even the self-assurance to make demands upon fidelity. Intellectually, she could not compete with Isabella of Mantua or Elizabeth of Urbino; but she had, at least, sufficient vitality of character to turn her back in one bound, as it were, on her entire past life, as if she were trying to prove herself an alien personality.

Ercole she conquered immediately. He was old, and this girl, whose coming had so agitated him, possessed a very graceful attitude towards her elders. Also he was tired, and those nearing the tragic termination of existence are always fugitively warmed by the presence of attentive youthfulness. These two, at least, got on excellently. Once she fell ill, and had to go away for the sake of her health. During her absence the old man insisted upon receiving daily notes of her condition. They are the simplest, most disarming little letters imaginable. Of all things about Lucrezia, artfulness appears the most conspicuously absent. Her sins could never have been of the deliberate, prearranged order. She must have stumbled into them, more than anything, as a strayed, unshepherded lamb falls over a precipice.

Presently came the customary baby. It was a girl, thus thwarting the wishes of everybody. But Lucrezia knew some comfort, notwithstanding. For a time she was dangerously ill, and during this period Alphonso could hardly be drawn from her bedside. Evidently he had grown aware that she suited him, and the weak girl in her stuffy bed must have experienced an inflow of pleasure. She had not been good for nothing.

Her recovery brought her to one of the most fateful events of her fateful and dramatic existence. Alexander suddenly died. He and Cæsar had fallen ill simultaneously. Every one spoke of poison, but Alexander's symptoms were perfectly consistent with apoplexy. His death, however, placed the new Ferrarese lady in the utmost social peril. She had become Don Alphonso's wife solely because he and Ercole deeply feared her father. Now that he was dead, nothing could be easier than to draw upon the hoard of former scandals and to repudiate her upon the strength of them. Alexander was no sooner buried, in fact, than Louis XII. remarked diplomatically to the Ferrarese ambassador, "I know you never approved of this marriage. Madame Lucrezia has never been, in fact, the wife of Don Alphonso."

Lucrezia must have grown cold with terror; but nothing calamitous occurred. Fortunately she had been given sufficient time to show _how_ good she could be. By now neither Ercole nor Alphonso desired to change the gentle-mannered woman, who was needed to give an heir to the family. Her placid, light urbanity suited both, and the danger that threatened for a moment to overwhelm her drew off quietly like calm, receding waters. But in connection with it one of the principal friendships of Lucrezia's life at Ferrara comes into prominence. Bembo, at the time of her mourning--a year after her marriage--had become intimate enough to give the advice no man troubles to offer to a woman entirely indifferent to him. He wrote, referring to Alexander's death, that having been informed that her sorrow was terrible and extreme, he had called the day before in the hope of being able, in some small degree, to comfort her. But he owned regretfully that his visit had proved useless, for he had no sooner seen her than her forlorn unhappiness, and her piteous, black draperies, had stricken him with such an overwhelming heartache, that he had been literally unable to utter a single coherent sentence. He then went on to beg her--and he wrote with a kind of tender directness--to try and control her misery, for fear, the circumstances being evidently not absolutely straightforward, it should be thought she wept less for her father than for the possible insecurity of her present position. He reminded her gently that this was not the first dire calamity that a harsh fate had thrust upon her, and in some admirably sincere phrases he practically beseeched her, for her own sake, to show a brave and composed demeanour. He closed the letter by an almost ingratiating apology for having said so much, and with the request--so customary with a man in love--that she should take every care of her health.

Apart from the distress at seeing Lucrezia unhappy, the second part of the letter shows a man who had received confidences. Lucrezia's version--perhaps the true one--of the turbid past, was to some extent in his keeping, and he gave her what warning he could to save her from adding to her present precarious position in Ferrara.

The friendship of these two is another of the uncertainties in which everything intimately concerning Lucrezia lies. It has been dragged unnecessarily into a false appearance of shadiness. A lock of her hair was found among a packet of her letters to him, and though it is extremely doubtful that the hair could have been hers even, the intimacy because of it was immediately regarded as having passed the bounds of virtue. Yet why should a lock of hair incriminate anybody? The desire to soften the pains they see is strong in all mothering women. Lucrezia wore her hair about her shoulders; scissors must have been conveniently near owing to the amount of needlework done at that period. Bembo, then a young man, was also for a time very much in love, therefore capable of little sentimental comforts. A woman's hair is a fragment of her very personality. To grant a boon like that, under circumstances of such facility, would need merely a softened or impulsive moment. Lucrezia, besides, with a husband absorbed in the manufacture of explosives, may reasonably have been a little grateful that somebody at least loved her.

There is no habit so pernicious as that of deducing evil from trivial whimsicalities. No judgment that is unaware of the inner subtleties--the whole complex growth of any given circumstance--does aright to suppose harmfulness. A lock of hair may be the result of sheer frowardness, or it may be the outcome of the most unaccompanied compassion: it may be the meaningless consequence of sudden unconsidered laughter, or the proffered comfort of a heart with nothing else to offer. But in all cases it is entirely destitute, by itself, of anything justifying a condemnatory construction.

Bembo is too well known among Renaissance celebrities to need personal explanations. Vasari says of him: "The Italians cannot be sufficiently thankful to Bembo for having not only purified their language from the rust of ages, but given it such regularity and clearness that it has become what we see." Few men have known a life of more sustained triumph. At the time of his friendship with Lucrezia he was young--a good-looking man of about twenty-eight--but already he had attained a widespread appreciation.

He was not the only clever man in the duchess's society at Ferrara; the traditions of the house were intellectual. Lucrezia, at last, had fallen into excellent hands, and was being formed in the best school possible. Men, notable not only for genius, but for serious qualities of temperament, educated her by companionship. Bembo, Castiglione, Aldo Manuce, were all men who thought with some profundity and breadth. Ariosto, from 1503 in the service of Hippolyte D'Este, was another man of genius she must have known intimately, and among minor intellects the two Strozzi poets, as well as Tebaldeo and Callagnini, sang her praises from personal acquaintance.

It was not altogether, however, an easy-minded society. Alphonso, though he mixed little with his wife's _entourage_, formed a constantly dangerous background to it. His suspicions were always alert. The murder of the poet Strozzi is put down to him, and in 1505 Tebaldeo wrote to Isabella: "This duke hates me, though I do not know why, and it is not safe for me to stay in the town." Even Bembo, in his relations to his friend, had to be girded with the uttermost caution, and finally for him also it became unadvisable to remain longer in Ferrara. With his going one of the most delicate affections of Lucrezia's life fell to pieces. And yet not altogether; Bembo, though he took mistresses he loved to distraction, continued for fifteen years to correspond with his Ferrarese duchess. Unless their friendship had been very real and very rich in sincerities, it would have crumbled into nothingness within a year.

Lucrezia's intimacy with Castiglione was a slighter affair. He had no importance in her life, save as being among those who helped to give her culture. That she should have known him is interesting, however, because in his great book Castiglione expressed with a limpid particularity the Renaissance ideal of womanhood. On the whole it was an unimaginative conception--at least expressed as Castiglione expressed it. For no book ever avoided more completely than "The Courtier" any obliqueness or any individual frankness of idiosyncrasy. Tact, according to Castiglione, was the essential mainspring of feminine fascination--tact and the art of conversation. One wise point he insisted upon--suavity. That, he said, should be inseparable from every woman's society. The remark lingers in the memory,--suavity, a soft and soothing composure, having so nearly passed out of even the conception of good manners. Scandals, especially of her own sex, it was unpardonable for a woman either to utter or to attend to. Dancing and other accomplishments he urged as a necessary part of education; but, on the other hand, he did not encourage naturalness. He wrote: "When she cometh to dance or to show any kind of music, she ought to be brought to it with suffering herself somewhat to be prayed, and with a certain bashfulness that may declare the noble shamefastness that is contrary to headiness." The early Victorian code of good manners was therefore only a return to a former fashion, and a fashion instigated by men and not by women at all.

Castiglione wrote at length upon the question of dress. Here his common sense is unimpeachable: "Women ought to have a judgment to know what manner of garments set her out best, and be most fit for the exercise she intendeth to undertake at that instant, and with them array herself." He urged keenly that lean and fat should pay attention to their peculiarities. Every woman, he insisted, ought to do all in her power to keep herself "cleanly and handsome."

Upon the subject of morality, Castiglione possessed no grave feelings. He advocated virtue, but not because conduct is vital, far-reaching, touching momentarily the character and fate of so many besides the doer, but almost entirely on account of the greater safety attaching to circumspection. Intrigue involved so many dangers. Consequently, he urged women "to be heedful, and remember that men with less jeopardy show to be in love than women." He begged a woman to "give her lover nothing but her mind when either hatred of her husband or the love he beareth to others inclineth her to love." Words were so much vapour, but a definite action was perilously apt to produce definite consequences. Husbands had a knack of revenging in their own wives what they asked from the wives of others.

A quaint and almost subtle stipulation ends the list. The perfect lady, according to Castiglione, "must not only be learned, but able to devise sports and pastimes." All active brains need rest. The desirable woman should know, in consequence, how to relax the tension of absorbing thoughts, as well as how to tender the encouragement of sympathy. Health demands some intervals for relaxation and foolishness.

Castiglione himself married a child called Ippolyta Torelli, whose life was tragically brief. As a husband, nothing is known of him except that he was a good deal away from home. His wife wrote _one_ exquisite letter--one loves her because of it--and that is practically all that remains of their domestic existence. The note was written just before her death, which took place through the birth of her third child. She lay in bed, and put on paper--

"My dear Husband,

"I have given birth to a little girl, which I do not think you
will be displeased to hear. I have suffered this time much more
than before, and I have had three bad bouts of fever. But now I
am better, and hope to suffer no more pain. I will not write
more to you lest I overtax my strength. But with all my heart I
commend myself to your lordship.

"In Mantua, the 20th of August, 1520.

"Your wife, who is a little weary with pain."

The caressing prettiness of the last phrase is like the feel of a tired child's hand slipped into one's own. Castiglione felt her death acutely, and wrote that he never dreamt his wife, whom he referred to with great tenderness, would have died before him, and all he now prayed for was that the Almighty might not leave him long before he followed her.

Lucrezia needed friends at Ferrara. Her life was one almost without respite from harassments, internal troubles and political insecurity being always present. Plague and famine devastated the well-being of the duchy. Twice Lucrezia was left in charge of a famine-stricken district, and twice proved herself capable, resourceful, self-forgetting. On the first occasion she was ill, but, notwithstanding, absolutely refused to leave the town as ordered by the doctors. She worked for the unhappy people starving about her, in a flaming rush of pity. Jews and Christians were alike to Lucrezia; her protection of Jews was strenuous in a period when the mere name roused men's ferocity. That her heart throbbed in response to the right instincts is proved by the whole compassionate fabric of her later life. Any human being, intuitively conscious that pain equalizes all things, cannot be encased in the callousness of the really bad or cold nature. During all the years Lucrezia lived in Ferrara her care for charitable institutions was personal and active.

And it should be remembered that philanthropy had not yet become a fashionable occupation; sympathy of attitude by those in high places was still unusual and undemanded. The management of the few existing charitable houses during the Renaissance was deplorable. But Alphonso and Lucrezia not only built a new and improved hospital for infectious diseases, but took, besides, sufficient personal interest in its patients to dismiss a man for neglecting the invalids entrusted to his care.

This phase of Lucrezia's life ought to be dwelt upon at length. It lifts her from a flighty extravagance and immorality into positive goodness of behaviour. Depth she probably had not--deep, brooding persons are not necessary in great abundance--and the woman who left her only child, the son of the murdered Don Alphonso, could not have been fiercely tenacious of heart. In all Lucrezia's life, in fact, this is the worst incident--this abandonment of her baby. So much was thrust upon her; this surrender itself was so to a certain extent. But not the manner of it, the effortless blitheness, the impulsive acquiescence. It is this one revealing episode that chiefly keeps her from the region of supremely wronged and tragic persons.

In 1507 her brother Cæsar died. Alphonso was away at the time, fighting with Louis XII. A letter, despatched at once, told him how she took the news. According to the writer, "she showed great grief, but with constancy and without tears." This phrase "without tears" carries a certain poignant implication. Surely the hearer was at last sinking through shallowness to find some deep places in her nature. Shallowness can always shed tears. Had Lucrezia even been indifferent to Cæsar's death--and indifference is the least likely sensation--shallowness would have dropped a few tears of excitement, silliness, shock. There is a moving weariness of grief in any tearless conduct.

Isabella D'Este, who was with her at the time, wrote as well. She said that Lucrezia "immediately went to the monastery of the Corpo di Cristo, to offer up prayers for his soul. At the monastery she remained for two nights, and having left it, she found herself so much indisposed that her physician, for security, insisted on her keeping her bed, to which she is still confined."

Lucrezia had several children after her third marriage, and in the year following Cæsar's death she gave birth to the desired heir, Ercole, afterwards to marry the poor, cheerless Renée of France. But she had been a delicate, frail creature all her life, and when, in 1519, she gave birth to a dead child, the case immediately became hopeless. As a Roman Catholic, she was told at once how near Death loomed, though the information seems a cruel thing to give to any person not yet old enough to have wearied of existence. But Lucrezia, who had never yet made a fuss about anything, did not make a fuss over the last great unpleasantness of all. This composure at dying touches all her past serenity with something almost effulgent. It makes her suddenly full of strange wisdom and singular comprehensions; as if unconsciously she understood the real value of individual mortality, and knew it just sweet enough for smiles and laughter, but at the same time too slight, unstable, and finite for great commotions or disturbances.

Having been told that she could not live any longer, and seeing Alphonso suddenly attentive, the exhausted woman wasted no strength contesting the unalterable, but simply lay quietly in her bed and tried to think of God, the Virgin, and the world beyond. A few days before her death she wrote to Pope Leo X. Her letter is sedateness itself and courage. Nothing was further from its utterance than discomposure or demur. If forlornness reached her at leaving the lovely homeliness of mortal life, she was too magnanimously courteous to burden another person with a private sorrow. She wrote--

"Most Holy Father and Worshipful Lord,

"With all reverence I kiss your Holiness's feet, and humbly
commend myself to your good will. Having been in great pain for
more than two months, early on the morning of the 14th day of
the present month, according to the will of God, I gave birth to
a little daughter. I hoped then to get alleviation from my
sufferings, but the contrary took place, and I have to pay my
debt to nature. And through the grace of God I am conscious that
the end of my life is near, and that in a few hours, having
received the holy sacraments of the Church, I shall have passed
away. And having came to this state, as a Christian, although a
sinner, I beseech your Holiness in your goodness to give me from
the heavenly treasures spiritual consolation and your holy
benediction for my soul. This I most devoutly pray for, and to
your great mercy I commit my husband and my children, who are
all faithful servants of your Holiness.

"In Ferrara, the 22nd of June, 1519, at the fourteenth hour.

"Your Holiness's humble servant,

"Lucrezia da Este."

No braver letter, nor one more touching in its noble staidness of expression, was ever written by a woman, knowing that in a few hours life would have ceased for her. Two days after writing it she died, and Alphonso wrote after her death that it was hard to face the loss of so sweet a companion, the gentleness of her conduct having made the bond between them a very close and tender one. No single individual can possess the whole round of virtues--a fact too often ignored in current judgment of character--but every writer lingered upon Lucrezia's gentleness. There is no more winning thing than a gentle woman. Persistent gentleness not only excludes harsh thoughts, but is a force constantly wooing men out of turbulent bitterness and acrimony of spirit.

Alphonso fainted at his wife's funeral, and nothing could protest more eloquently against assertions of her wickedness. Grim men of Alphonso's fibre do not, after nine years of marriage, faint for a woman who has not known how to bring to life the softer undergrowths of character. Lucrezia must have possessed a more than normal degree of conciliatory seduction. And she charms still, in spite of much calumniating gossip, not only because she expressed undeviatingly the heartening value of good cheer, and set so fine an example of how to discard bad yesterdays, but to a certain extent because, as far as one knows, she babbled nothing for biographers to seize upon, and so left herself perpetually among the engrossing enigmas of European history.

MARGARET D'ANGOULÊME

1492-1549

The Renaissance in France has not the same degree of charm as the Renaissance in Italy. It misses the radiance and the sense of open-air sweetness that clings to the original movement. The women of the Italian Renaissance were constantly adventuring into the country; the enchantment of the climate lingers in all recollections of them. The Renaissance in France conveys a different impression--one colder, more troubled, more half-hearted. The large frescoed palaces, with their adorable colonnades, are gone, and the sensation given is of a bleaker, darker, and more housed existence. The entranced light-heartedness of the Italian period did not travel into France. When the Renaissance came into that country the Reformation came too, and the labours of the Sorbonne robbed it of the youth and irresponsibility that made the other so vital and complete. The Italian Renaissance breathed out the exultation of adolescence; the French, the reflectiveness of maturity.

Of the French Renaissance, Margaret D'Angoulême is the central female figure. She was born on April 11, 1492, when her mother, Louise de Savoie, was only fifteen. Louise had been a poor relation at court before she married, and her aunt, Anne of Beaujeu, had arranged her marriage. Louise de Savoie was among the women who had not been given a fair start in life. The bridegroom, Charles D'Angoulême, had already an attachment; he loved greatly a certain Jeanne de Polignac. He did his best not to marry Louise, and so remain unharassed in the service of his lady friend. But Anne de Beaujeu was very masterful, and Charles surrendered through necessity. He married Louise, then a child of twelve, and made Jeanne de Polignac one of her ladies-in-waiting.

When Louise was fifteen, Margaret was born, and two years afterwards, Francis--"My Cæsar, my lord"--came into the world. A year later Louise's husband died. She mentions the fact in her journal without expressions of regret. Not but that she had been happy enough in his lifetime. Charles, absorbed by his own love affairs, allowed his wife moderate freedom to indulge in hers. But his death made such amusements less anxious and more easy. The complaisance of husbands has always an element of uncertainty.

There was another trait in Louise's character to which her husband's death gave fuller scope--her ardent maternal instincts. The quality of her love for her children was vehement, jealous, and primitive. Margaret, as a result of this, became educated in an atmosphere unusual at that period. An indulged tenderness steeped her juvenile days in pleasantness. There were no severities at Cognac. Of Francis, Louise made an idol, but Margaret, though trained from the days she could lisp to worship this idol along with her mother, was also herself a treasured person. The glow of these early days left their influence upon her for a lifetime. She never shook off the warmliness of heart all her upbringing had encouraged.

Upon Louise's widowhood, Louis XII. was for a short time very kind to her and to her children. This mood suddenly changed--in a few days, it is said--and a certain Jean de St. Gelais, a friend of Louise's, is credited with having caused the alteration. Louise was ordered to retire to the castle of Blois, and there was talk of taking the children away from her. In the end, the Marechale de Gie, whose tragic downfall has been told in the life of Anne, was given practical control of her household. His first act--presumably under Louis's orders--consisted in the dismissal of St. Gelais. It was this action which Louise is supposed never to have forgiven. De Gie became her most devoted supporter; all his interests were on the same side as hers, all his aims were to place Francis subsequently upon the throne of France. But when the catastrophe of Anne's luggage occurred, Louise flung the weight of her evidence remorselessly against him, and lied with a sinister heartiness.

At Blois, Margaret was brought up with boys. A number of _pages d'honneur_ were being educated with the heir-presumptive. Margaret grew to know at an early age a good deal about the temperaments of the other sex, and a good deal about flirtation. At nine years old she went through her first love affairs. No wonder that later she knew, as Brantome put it, more about the art of pleasing (_galanterie_) than her daily bread.

The playfellow to whom Margaret lost her childish heart was the fascinating Gaston de Foix, but there were several others among her brother's pages who were momentous in her after existence. There was, for instance, Charles de Montpensier, afterwards Connétable de Bourbon, whom Louise de Savoie, by unduly persecuting--it is said because he refused to marry her--drove to the side of Charles V. Of this Connétable, Henry VIII. of England made a shrewd observation when he saw him at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. "If he was a subject of mine," he said, "he would not keep his head." There was also, among the pages at Blois, Anne de Montmorency, for whom Margaret's friendship continued long after both were grown up. He owed his subsequent position in a large measure to her assistance, but desirous of possessing the supreme influence over Francis himself, he grew to hate the woman who also possessed so much. The unworthy termination of the friendship began in the light-hearted childhood at Blois--it was Montmorency who made the famous remark to Francis: "If your majesty wants to rid the country of heretics, you must begin with your own sister"--which was among the sharpest disillusions of Margaret's existence.

But as a child her affection for Montmorency was as nothing to the adoration she felt for the gentle, endearing Gaston, who could do everything well, and whose manners won people's hearts perpetually. Unfortunately, at ten Margaret was marriageable, and she had no sooner reached that age than Louis XII. tried to arrange a marriage for her with the English Prince of Wales--afterwards Henry VIII. Happily, Henry wanted some one nearer the throne than a cousin, and the little group at Blois remained unbroken. But the question of marriage was always in the air--the sense that the enfolded home life might cease at any moment could never be entirely shaken off. Later, Margaret narrowly escaped another English husband. Henry VII., then an old widower, wanted a second wife. He made a formal proposal for Louise. She refused point-blank, and the ambassador then asked for the daughter. This was accepted, and arrangements were in progress, when Margaret herself suddenly set everybody agape by declining an old and decrepid husband. The marriage came to nothing, though probably not because of the small girl's protest; there were political reasons against it as well.

Meanwhile, Margaret's childish lover, Gaston, had left the château at Blois. The modest-mannered boy, known familiarly as "the Dove," had gone to take up a man's business, leaving his little weeping friend behind him. But Margaret had grown by now into an interesting-looking girl. Her face, at the age of sixteen, must have been singularly arresting. She had the charm that is rarest of all--the charm of strangeness. Her appearance was not like other people's. The portrait of her, painted when she was about twenty, leading Francis to the crucified Christ, is full of subtleties. The face is round, with the sweet fulness of young things, but the chin is tiny, lovable, incongruous--the chin of soft assents and surrenders. The nose is long, the over-long nose of Francis I.; the mouth deliciously curved and tender. All the lower half of the face expresses a desire for gentle pleasures and soft and caressing habits. But the eyes belong to a different temperament. They gaze out of the happy face with unexpected wistfulness and mysticism. Their expression is almost tired, as if so many difficult matters had vexed their understanding that they were weary before their time. The preoccupied eyes, the love-needing chin, the long, cold nose, and the charming outline of the head, make an extraordinary combination.

Every contemporary writer agreed that Margaret had the gift of fascination, and she had also in youth the kind of looks that linger in the imagination. It is, consequently, not surprising that while she sighed for the absent Gaston, some one else should have sighed for her. This second love affair is one of the interesting experiences of Margaret's life; it is rich in information about Margaret, about Louise, about the habits and customs of Margaret's times. Using fictitious names, she tells it herself, as well as her early affection for Gaston, in the "Heptameron." Bonnivet was a lieutenant when he first saw Margaret, and he fell in love with her immediately. Immediately also he set himself to try and arouse a corresponding emotion. She was a princess, and he was a simple gentleman of good family; marriage was out of the question. But one could live without marriage, and Bonnivet set to work instantly to realize a plan by which he could remain permanently near his enticing lady. There was a rich and ugly heiress who lived close to the castle of Amboise, and whose parents belonged to the royal circle. Bonnivet made love to her and married her. To further facilitate his own reception at the castle, his brother about this time received a post in Louise's household. Bonnivet then saw Margaret constantly. The girl considered herself forlorn. Her round blue eyes were plaintive under their first experience of a heartache. Bonnivet, fascinating and determined, became her friend. She confided to him all her innocent little love-story. He took the part of sympathizer. Margaret could never hate any one who liked her, and she was at the age when to be loved easily stirs a vague and evanescent fluttering.

Presently Bonnivet had to go away also--Louis was at war with Italy--and for two years Margaret saw nothing of either Gaston or her newer comrade. When Bonnivet returned he was warmly welcomed at the castle of Amboise. But apparently--it may have been a ruse--he had come back visibly dejected through the weight of some great sorrow. Margaret commenced to ask questions. This was clearly only out of a desire for flirtation, for Bonnivet's feelings had never known secrecy, and Margaret was more than ordinarily intelligent. One day they leant together at one of the windows of the castle. Bonnivet ceased to talk of Gaston, and confessed the reason of his own melancholy. Having done so, he stated that he must go away. Margaret--to suspect that she enjoyed all this is unavoidable--replied that there was no need, "she trusted utterly in his honour, she was not angry at all;" which last statement, at any rate, strikes one as being unmistakably accurate.

The confession, nevertheless, was an error. Margaret wanted to be loved, and she adored the glow of a sentimental friendship. But Bonnivet desired more than this, and showed that he did. The situation lost its grace and easiness. The girl found herself pressed by an emotion tired of simple playfulness; she grew uncomfortable, and Bonnivet, seeing that the situation had become untenable, went away. A wise, grave woman would have let him stay away. It is part of Margaret's appeal to us that she was never entirely sensible. She liked Bonnivet, and she felt that a young creature left destitute of love has lost a large part of the exquisiteness of youth. Gaston had faded by now into a sentimental and rather plaintive memory; she wrote, therefore, to Bonnivet to come back. Away among other women he could not be trusted to remain the same--he was one of those who love vehemently and often. He came in answer to her call, but shortly afterwards another Italian expedition removed him once more from her influence. In this war he was taken prisoner, and Margaret is said to have both fasted and gone pilgrimages in order to win God into releasing the prisoner. She had also promised him before he left that wherever she went after her marriage she would take his wife as one of her ladies, thereby assuring a re-meeting.

And marriage had become at last unavoidable. The Duc D'Alençon had asked the king and queen for her hand, and she had refused so many husbands that it was impossible to continue obdurate. Margaret hung back, but could not ultimately resist the wishes of the king, and though it is said she declared that she would rather have had death instead, the marriage took place at the court of Anne and Louis on October 9, 1509.