Transcriber's Note

The cover image was created by the transcriber for the convenience of the reader, and is placed in the public domain.

QUEENS OF THE RENAISSANCE

BY
M. BERESFORD RYLEY

WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1907

BEATRICE AND LUDOVICO KNEELING
ALTAR-PIECE BY ZENALE

To B——

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CONTENTS

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PREFACE

THERE are no two people who see with the same kind of vision. It is for this reason that, though twenty lives of the six women chosen for this book had been written previously, there would still, it seems to me, be room for a twenty-first. For though the facts might remain identical, there is no possible reiteration of another mind’s exact outlook. Hence I have not scrupled to add these six character studies to the many volumes similar in scope and subject.

The book is called “Queens of the Renaissance,” but Catherine of Siena lived before the Renaissance surged into being, and Anne of Brittany, though her two husbands brought its spirit into France, had not herself a hint of its lovely, penetrating eagerness. They are included because they help, nevertheless, to create continuity and coherence of impression, and the six leading, as they do naturally, one to the other, convey, in the mass, some co-ordinated notion of the Renaissance spirit.

The main object, perhaps, in writing at all lies in the intrinsic interest of any real life lived before us. For every existence is a parti pris towards existence; every character is a personal opinion upon the value of character, feeling, virtue, many things. No personality repeats another, no human drama renews just the same intricate complications of other dramas. In every life and in every person there is some element of uniqueness, some touch of speciality. Because of this even the dullest individuality becomes quickening in biography. It has, if no more, the pathos of its dulness, the didactic warnings of its refusals, the surprise of its individualizing blunders.

All the following lives convey inevitably and unconsciously some statement concerning the opportunity offered by existence. To one, it seemed a place for an ecstasy of joy, success, gratification; to another, a great educational establishment for the soul; to a third, an admirable groundwork for practical domestic arrangements and routine; to Renée of Ferrara, a bewildering, weary accumulation of difficulties and distress; to her more charming relative, an enigma shadowed always by the still greater and grimmer enigma of mortality. And lastly, for the strange, elusive Lucrezia, it is difficult to conceive what it must have meant at all, unless a sequence of circumstances never, under any conditions, to be dwelt upon in their annihilating entirety, but just to be taken piecemeal day by day, reduced and simplified by the littleness of separate hours and moments.

In a book of this kind, where the intention is mainly concerned with character, and for which the reading was inevitably full of bypaths and excursions, a complete bibliography would merely fill many pages, while seeming to a great extent to touch but remotely upon the ladies referred to, but among recent authors a deep debt of gratitude for information received is due to the following: Jacob Burckhardt, Julia Cartwright, Augusta Drane, Ferdinand Gregorovius, R. Luzio, E. Renier, E. Rodoconarchi, and J. Addington Symonds.

Finally, in reference to the portraits included in the life of Beatrice D’Este, a brief statement is necessary. For not only that of Bianca, wife of Giangaleazzo, but also those of Il Moro’s two mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli, are regrettably dubious. The picture of Bianca, however, by Ambrogio da Predis, is more than likely genuinely that of Bianca, though some writers still regard it as a likeness of Beatrice herself. It is to be wished that it were; her prettiness then would have been incontestable and delicious. But in reality there is no hope. One has but to look at the other known portraits of Beatrice to see that her face was podgy, or nearly so, and that her charm came entirely and illusively from personal intelligence. It evaporated the moment one came to fix her appearance in sculpture or on canvas. Nature had not really done much for her. There was no outline, no striking feature, no ravishing freshness of colouring. On a stupid woman Beatrice’s face would have been absolutely ugly. But she, through sheer “aliveness,” sheer buoyant trickery of expression, conveyed in actuality the equivalent of prettiness. But it was all unconscious conjuring,—in reality Beatrice was a plain woman, with sufficient delightfulness to seem a pretty one, while the portrait of Bianca is unmistakably and lovingly good-looking.

As regards the portraits, again, of Il Moro’s two mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli, there is no absolute certainty. The portrait facing page 6 in the life of Beatrice has been recently discovered in the collection of the Right Hon. the Earl of Roden, and in an article published by the Burlington Magazine it has been tentatively looked upon as that of Lucrezia Crivelli. This does not, however, appear probable, because Lucrezia, at the time of Il Moro’s infatuation, was a young girl, and the picture by Ambrogio da Predis is certainly that of a woman, and a woman, moreover, whose experiences have brought her perilously near the verge of cynicism.

At the same time, the portrait is not only beyond doubt that of a woman loved by Il Moro, but was presumably painted while his affection for her still continued, as not only are the little heart-shaped ornaments holding together the webs of her net thought to represent Il Moro’s badge of a mulberry-leaf, but painted exquisitely in a space of ⅜ by ⅝ inch upon the plaque at the waistbelt is a Moor’s head, another of Ludovico’s badges, while the letters L. O. are placed on either side of it, and the two Sforza S. S. at the back. A discarded mistress, if Ambrogio—one of Il Moro’s court painters—had painted her at all, would have had the discretion not to wear symbols obviously intended only for one beloved at that moment.

There seems—speculatively—every reason to suppose that the picture represents Cecilia Gallerani, who was already beyond the charm of youth before Ludovico reluctantly discarded her, and whom he not only cared for very greatly, but for quite a number of years. Cecilia Gallerani, besides, to strengthen the supposition, was an exceptionally intellectual woman, and the portrait in the possession of the Earl of Roden expresses above everything to an almost disheartened intelligence. To think deeply while in the position of any man’s mistress must leave embittering traces, and Cecilia became famous less even for physical attractions than because her mind was so intensely rich and receptive.

The other two—the pictures of “La Belle Ferronière” and the “Woman with the Weasel,”—by Leonardo da Vinci, have both a contested identity. But since the first is now almost universally looked upon as being the portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, the second must surely represent her also. For in both there is the same beautiful oval, the same youth, the same unfathomable eyes and gentle deceit of expression. Both, besides, represent to perfection the kind of beautiful girl likely to have drawn Ludovico into passionate admiration. He was no longer young when he cared for Lucrezia, and if Leonardo’s paintings are really portraits of her, she was like some emblematical figure of perfect youthfulness,—unique and unrepeatable.

M. B. R.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

QUEENS OF THE
RENAISSANCE

CATHERINE OF SIENA

1347-1380

CATHERINE of Siena does not actually belong to the Renaissance. At the same time she played an indirect part in furthering it, and she represented a strain of feeling which continued to the extreme limits of its duration. During the best period of the desire for culture, a successor—and imitator—of Catherine’s, Sister Lucia, became a craze in certain parts of Italy. Duke Ercole of Ferrara, then old and troubled about his soul, took as deep and personal an interest in enticing her to Ferrara as he did in the details of his son’s marriage to Lucrezia Borgia, just then being negotiated. The atmosphere Catherine created is never absent from the Renaissance. She fills out what is one-sided in the impression conveyed by the women who follow. She was also the contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, the acknowledged forerunners of the intellectual awakening that came after them, and being so, is well within the dawn, faint though it still was, of the coming Renaissance day. Finally, in her own person she contained so much power and fascination that to omit her, when there exists the least excuse for inclusion, would be wilfully to neglect one of the most enchanting characters among the women of Italian history.

The daughter of a well-to-do tradesman, Giacomo Benincasa, Catherine was born in Siena in 1347. Her father possessed several pleasant qualities, and a great reserve of speech, hating inherently all licence of expression. Catherine’s mother, Lapa, on the other hand, belonged to an ordinary type of working woman—laborious, but irritable and narrow. She brought twenty-five children into the world, and her irascibility may have been not unconnected with this heroic achievement. The sons also, after their marriages, continued to live, with their wives—it being the custom at that time—under the parental roof. Even a sociable temperament would easily have found such a community difficult always to handle cordially.

STATUE IN WOOD OF ST. CATHERINE
BY NEROCCIO LANDI

Catherine was Benincasa’s youngest child. As a baby she proved extraordinarily attractive. She was, in fact, so sweet and radiant that the neighbours nicknamed her Euphrosyne, and her little person was much enticed and humoured. Unfortunately, like all children of that period, she became bewilderingly precocious, and with the first development of intelligence, the religious passion revealed itself. With Catherine the desire for spirituality was inborn. At five years old she formed the habit of going upstairs on her knees, reciting the “Hail, Mary,” at every step. She delighted in being taken to churches and places of devotion, and at the age of six years her deliberate and piteous self-martyrdom commenced.

The child, during an errand on which she was sent, believed herself to have seen a holy vision. The incident had nothing extraordinary, for her imagination was keen, and her temperament nervous. In a later century, fed upon fairy stories, she would have seen gnomes, sprites, or golden-haired princesses. Instead, saturated in religious legends, she perceived Jesus Christ in magnificent robes, and with a tiara on His head, while on each side of Him stood a saint, and several nuns in white garments. This unchallenged vision produced colossal consequences. The child went home convinced that God Himself had come to call her to a better life; proud, frightened, and exultant, she set her mind to find out, therefore, how she might best become as good as God wanted her to be.

This beginning of Catherine’s religious life is painful to remember. She decided primarily that she must give up childish amusements; in addition, she determined to eat the least possible amount of food, and to fill up her life with penances in the manner of the grown-up holy men and women about her. She also procured some cord, and, having knotted it into a miniature scourge, formed the habit of secretly scourging herself until her back was lined with weals. Describing these first spiritual struggles of a child of six years old, Cafferini, her contemporary and biographer, says, “Moreover, by a secret instinct of grace, she understood that she had now entered on a warfare with nature, which demanded the mortification of every sense. She resolved, therefore, to add fasting and watching to her other penances, and in particular to abstain entirely from meat, so that when any was placed before her, she either gave it to her brother Stephen, who sat beside her, or threw it under the table to the cats, in such a manner as to avoid notice.”

This pitiable “warfare with nature” continued until she reached the age of twelve. Her parents, so far, had been pleased at her religious fervency. But at twelve years old the girl became marriageable. The comparative freedom of childhood ceased; Catherine was kept secluded in the house, besides being harried with injunctions concerning the arrangement of her hair and her dress.

She had, as a matter of fact, charming, warm brown hair. Unfortunately, a shade of gold was then fashionable, and Lapa, ambitious for a good marriage, insisted that the girl should do like others, and have it dyed that colour. Catherine resisted with all the strength of her frightened soul. But in the end, apparently through the persuasions of a favourite married sister, she allowed her hair to become golden. It was no sooner done than conscience suffered passionate remorse. In fact, to the end of life this one backsliding remained almost the sharpest regret Catherine possessed. She could never refer to it without sobbing, from which it is at least presumable that a canary-coloured head had its attractions for a saint of twelve years old.

Meanwhile, the choice of a husband became imminent. At this Catherine’s semi-passivity turned into actual panic. It was not possible both to marry and to give up one’s life to God. Only, who would listen to the refusals of so young a girl? Following the practice of the Roman Catholic religion, she took her difficulties to her confessor, and was saved through the proposal of a rather questionable trick. She had only to cut her hair off to make marriage impossible: no Italian would marry a woman with a shaven head. Catherine rushed home, and at once did as she was told, covering her work, when she had finished, with a white linen coif. Virgins in Italy wore their hair flowing; the stratagem, therefore, did not exist an hour before discovery took place. Then followed a passionate domestic scene. The whole family appears for once to have unanimously agreed that Catherine’s piety had overstepped the bounds of common sense. The loss of her child’s hair left Lapa infuriated. Exasperation grew so intense that for a time, with the view to breaking her stubborn spirit, Catherine was deliberately ill-treated. A servant had been kept for rough work in the kitchen; she was dismissed, and Catherine made to take her place. But the girl had not a temperament that could be cowed. She was a true Sienese, and Boccaccio, as well as others, speaks of the virile character of the people of Siena. The name Euphrosyne also still expressed her disposition. With a pretty childishness of imagination, she made religious play out of their harshness. Her father, she pretended, was Jesus Christ, Lapa she made the Virgin Mary, and her brothers and sisters the apostles and disciples. The kitchen became the innermost tabernacle of the temple where sacrifices were offered to God. In consequence, she went about diffusing radiance and a sober joy, and bewildering those who wanted to see her crushed and penitent.

In the end Giacomo interfered. He had the instinct of kindness, and was himself sincerely religious. Both the question of marriage and the system of ill-treatment were abandoned. A little later he gave consent to the pursuance of a religious vocation, and Catherine, still a child, became a member of the order of St. Dominic. It was not a strict community. The sisters did not live in retirement, but in their own homes, merely wearing a white veil and a black habit called Mantellate.

Just before this Catherine experienced a very human temptation. She became possessed by the longing to dress herself in the pretty clothes of a rich married woman, and to go out flaunting in silks and extravagance. The wish is more likeable than her physical self-torturings. The latter gain their power to distress, in fact, to some extent because her few temptations show that Catherine had all the average longings of humanity, and was not devoid of the companionable frailties of ordinary men and women.

The temptation was, of course, conquered, and from the glad moment of taking her vows Catherine intensified every austerity of conduct. As a child she had been robust and hardy. But the frightful treatment to which she subjected her system would have ruined any constitution, and from the time she grew up she became more and more delicate, suffering, and neurotic. The desire to suppress her excesses is very great. One could write abundantly and give only a life overflowing in fragrant incidents. But in the case of Catherine, to pass over foolishness would entail not only a falsification of character, but a falsification also of the curious atmosphere from which she drew the principal inspirations of her conduct.

From the age of twelve she forced herself gradually to eat so little, that her stomach became finally incapable of retaining solid food at all. How she kept life in her body for the last half of her existence is difficult to understand. Her bed, from the time she became a nun, consisted of a few planks with a log of wood for pillow. An iron band made part of her wearing apparel, and her discipline—if the one now shown as hers in the sacristy of St. Dominico is genuine—consisted of an iron chain with sharp projections for piercing and tearing the flesh. The idea was monstrous and horrible; nevertheless, its fortitude uplifts it into heroism. To pursue unflinchingly martyrdom such as this may be grotesque and ridiculous, but no invertebrate creature could contemplate it. Of all the violences, however, which Catherine did to her body, the one under which she suffered most acutely was her refusal of proper sleep. It is said, though it is extremely hard to believe, that for a certain length of time she took only half an hour’s sleep in the twenty-four hours, and that—only every other day.

Notwithstanding this, a picture given of her at the time by Father Thomas Antonio Cafferini, also a member of St. Dominic, and an intimate friend of the family, is altogether charming. He asserts that her face was always gay and smiling, more especially if she were called upon to help those troubled or out of health. Other contemporaries bear out this possession of an effulgent gladness. When she spoke her face became illuminated, and her smile was like some living radiance passing into the hearts of those she looked at. The same writer mentions her delight in singing and her love of flowers. A certain Fra Bartolomeo of Siena bears similar witness. He wrote, “She was always cheerful, and even merry.” He mentioned, besides, that she “was passionately fond of flowers, and used to arrange them into exquisite bouquets.” Catherine’s personal writings are strewn with references to plants and blossoms. It was also part of the fulness of a character unusually rich in finer fascinations that she was constantly singing. Melancholy she scarcely knew. The spirituality which did not produce happiness, she could only feel as a spurious effort. Either it lacked love or understanding.

For years she lived as a recluse in her father’s house, but while still in her teens it appeared to her—presumably through a natural wisdom of character—that God needed less personal worship than continuous benefits to others, out of her religious exaltation, and from that time Catherine’s public career commenced. Almost the first result of her belief in being called to an active existence was her constant attendance at the hospitals and among the lepers. One of the prettiest of all the stories told about her deals with her nursing labours. Pity had very small vitality either during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; it was almost a dead quality of character, and the Sienese were particularly hardened by harsh experiences.

A woman who had lived a notoriously bad life lay dying in one of the hospitals, absolutely and deliberately neglected. A sinner laid low was scum to spit at for most people. Catherine saw no scum on earth. She smiled with all her native inborn softness at the dying woman, listened to her desolate complainings, her maundering reminiscences, gave her the nourishment she liked best, coddled her with sweet attentions, and finally, without any violent denunciations, brought her to repentance and tranquillity. A child might as tenderly have been coaxed out of a phase of naughtiness.

The incident brings one naturally to Catherine’s reputation as a peacemaker. She was still a young girl when tales of her persuasiveness were told to amazed, arrested audiences throughout the country. The Sienese temper was fundamentally savage; nothing, therefore, could touch fancy more than stories of a nature capable of acting as a gentle and cooling balm upon outrageousness. Catherine, as a matter of fact, possessed both the magnetism of intense belief and the power of innate urbanity. The first awed superstition by incomprehensible achievements. Forestalling the Christian Scientists, she had healed the sick by prayer, while her mere enticements brought about the end of many virulent dissensions.

To dabble with mystical methods is an old and universal weakness. The wife of a certain Francesco Tolomei, head of one of the noblest families in Siena, heard of Catherine’s miracles, and being hard pressed by domestic difficulties, turned to the dyer’s daughter for assistance. Madonna Tolomei was herself a profoundly religious woman, but she anguished with the consciousness that the rest of her family were damned. The eldest son, Giacomo, had murdered two men before he was grown up, and his cruelty had now become diabolical, ingenious, and systematic. There were also two daughters, bitten with worldliness to the marrow of their bones. Both were fast, dyed, and painted. Catherine offered to see the girls, but expressed no confidence as to the consequences. She found them with the garish hair that always touched her to the quick, and possibly felt more yearningly because of it. No account has been given of the interview. The two sisters, with the Tolomei blood in their veins, could hardly have been easy natures to lure out of worldliness; but at the end of Catherine’s visit, they were like lambs in the hands of a skilful shepherd. According to Cafferini, they threw their cosmetics into the gutter, cut off their gleaming hair, and in a few days joined the Sisters of St. Dominic. This is the kind of triumph of which Catherine’s life is full. Her personal magnetism was extraordinary, her insight actually a touch of genius. At this time also she was young, and herself a living exponent of how seductively gay goodness could make one. To the end, in truth, she remained less a nun than a woman, and as a woman she was the embodiment of enchanting sympathies and comfort. Merely to see her,—soft, sweet, mysteriously comprehending,—was like a cordial to an aching heart. But the most astounding part of the Tolomei story is still to be told. Giacomo, with his mad and bloody passions, was away when his sisters’ conversion took place. He came home to cow the house with terror. A lunatic let loose would have been less persistently dangerous. Donna Tolomei, shaken now with physical and not spiritual forebodings, immediately sent a messenger to warn Catherine that no danger was too horrible to anticipate; in his present condition he was capable of doing anything. Catherine did not feel a quicker heart-beat. She was steeped in intuitions and spontaneous knowledge. Ostensibly as an act of exquisite courtesy, she sent Fra Bartolomeo—who must have been a brave man—to explain matters, while she prayed with all her heart and soul for the unmanageable sinner. Some hours later Bartolomeo came back. Catherine met him smiling; she knew already the news he brought. Her prayers—so passionately eager—had already been answered. Giacomo—the diabolical, murderous, implacable Giacomo—was already meek as a lamb under the shock of a new and overwhelming emotion. It is not the least curious part of the story that he remained a changed character, and continued to abominate wickedness with the same intensity that in his earlier days he had practised it. Towards the end of his life he even took the habit of a Dominican of the Tertiary Order, the obligations of this third order not being excessive.

There is another story of this earlier period more enchanting still, in its original and tragic graciousness. Only before telling it the question of Catherine’s miracles should, perhaps, be dealt with, for they also commenced when she was scarcely out of childhood, and helped enormously to render her a recognized celebrity. They and her austerities are the unlikeable side of Catherine’s holiness. At the same time no saint of the period could have obtained a hearing without them, and no human system could have endured the strain put upon it by a mediæval religious enthusiast, without producing self-hypnotism and catalepsy. Catherine, at an early age, fell into trances, described by her biographers as “ecstasies at the thought of God.” Describing one of these ecstasies, her friend Raymond wrote “that on these occasions her body became stiff, and raised in the air, gave out a wonderful fragrance.” All the old Catholic writers, to whom miracles were an integral part of saintship, were generous in multiplying supernatural details. A good deal has to be deducted from these statements; but even then there remain a good many so-called miracles attested by other and more critical witnesses. That she was seen raised from the ground while she prayed, is a fact sworn to by a number of people. A man called Francesco Malevolti affirms that he saw her “innumerable times” raised from the ground as she prayed, and remaining suspended in the air more than a cubit above the earth. He mentions, to give weight to his evidence, that in order to test the reality of the occurrence, he and some others passed their hands between her and the floor—a thing perfectly easy to do. As this occurred in broad daylight, modern spiritualistic séances become clumsy in comparison. Catherine could do better in the fourteenth century.

The most important miracle of all was, of course, the stigmatization. That alone definitely assured her position as one with authority from God; it constituted the final and irrefutable sign of Divine and miraculous intervention. At the time of its occurrence Catherine was twenty-eight, and suffered extreme agony from it. The most curious circumstance about the stigmata in Catherine’s case was that they were not properly visible during her lifetime, but became perfectly clear after her death. In this one matter her successor, St. Lucia, the religious celebrity of Lucrezia Borgia’s day, outdid the woman she tried to follow. Her stigmata were always visible—bleeding wounds anybody could look at.

ST. CATHERINE’S HOUSE AT SIENA

Returning to the loveliest of all the stories concerning Catherine’s girlhood, it must be remembered that the prisons of Siena were almost more filled with political prisoners than criminals. During the whole of the Renaissance political prisoners were in themselves almost sufficient in number decently to fill Italian dungeons. Catherine, who had the understanding to love sinners, habitually visited condemned offenders. Those forlorn of any hope in this world she insidiously replenished with winning dreams of hope hereafter. She did more. When the day of execution came, she joined the procession to the scaffold. What it meant, in the unconveyable desolation of that last public outgoing, to have the company of this woman, with her sweet, contagious promises in the name of Christ, would be hard to overestimate. She was at all times embodied comfort to be with, and even a sharp and reluctant death must have been easier when she was there to pour out pity and encouragement.

Among the prisoners at one time was a certain Nicholas di Toledo, who had spoken irreflectively against the Riformatori—the strong Government party. This Riformatori consisted of a council chosen originally at a tense political crisis for purposes of urgent amendments. The nobility had no part in it. Siena, since 1280, when a reconciliation occurred between the Sienese Guelfs and Ghibellines, had been a merchant oligarchy, first governed by the Nove, then by Dodici, and after both these had been swept away, by the Riformatori, into which some members of both the previous Governments had been included. The Riformatori began well and ended badly. The Noveschi and Dodicini members almost immediately worked against it; civil trouble became interminable. The new power, exasperated, fell back upon repressive horrors. People were arrested upon simple suspicion of disapproval, and then publicly tortured in order to appal others. A common habit was to tear a criminal slowly to pieces with red-hot pincers while he was bound upon a cart driven slowly through the principal streets.

ST. CATHERINE PRAYING AT AN EXECUTION
FRESCO BY SODOMA

In the case of Nicholas di Toledo, he had barely gone from the place of his impulsive utterance before he was arrested, and he was barely arrested before he was condemned to death. Such a sentence had never risen in his thoughts for one sickening moment even; it came with so awful an unexpectedness that his mind for an interval whirled to the verge of insanity. Nicholas di Toledo was scarcely more than a boy, and the first warmth of life ran in every pulse. This bitter, inconceivable end unnerved him—he could not make up his mind to die. Suddenly he thought of Catherine, of whom other prisoners may have babbled, and sent a messenger imploring her to come to him. She wrote afterwards to her confessor a full description of the brief drama. Her presence almost immediately calmed and heartened him. Both were young, and Catherine, if not actually pretty, was delicious with overflowing tenderness. For Nicholas, besides the optimism communicated to him by her spiritual promises, there must have been the unconsidered but poignant fact that she was a woman and he a man. It is undeniable that no monk, however good, could have helped his dying to the same extent. Catherine not only rendered it possible to go through with courage, but in the end tinged it with something almost blessed. She was with him, it would seem, most of the time, and not only promised to accompany him to the scaffold when the day of execution came, but previously took him to Mass, and persuaded him to communicate for the first occasion in his life.

Nicholas had been nothing deeper than a young society man, and the wrench of this merciless conclusion was all the greater because of it. Catherine, in her account of the circumstance, went on to say that he grew quite resigned, his only dread being lest his courage should fail him at the supreme moment. He repeated constantly, “Lord, be with me; abandon me not.” To help him she reiterated her assurance that she would be with him at the last. In a moment his face brightened, and he asked her with a boyish impulsiveness how it was so great a sweetness was being vouchsafed to him. With this to look forward to he could face the end, not only with courage, but with something strangely akin to pleasure.

They met, as she had promised, at the scaffold next day. Catherine wrote concerning it that when he saw her his face broke into a smile, and that he begged her to make the sign of the cross upon his forehead. She did so, whispering that soon, very soon, he would have passed to a life that never ends. Then occurred the unforgettable incident of the story. At the best Nicholas was a creature not disciplined to suffering, and the worst moment had yet to come. Leaping to obey an intuition in itself exquisite, Catherine did what the prudery alone of most religious women would have made unthinkable. She took the boy’s head in her thin, soft hands, and herself laid it in position upon the block. The action was like a caress in which his last impressions melted. He murmured the words “Jesus and Catherine.” The knife ripped through the air to his neck, and his head fell into the same trembling hands that had guided it during its last activity.

On its human side Catherine’s spirituality was seldom less than perfect. Character and beauty emanated from her every spontaneous action. Nicholas di Toledo was only one of the many men she fascinated, and the fact renders the question of her personal appearance peculiarly interesting. The triumphs of a plain woman are always more stirring than those achieved by a simple success of feature. The “divine plainness,” immortalized by Lamb, can convey subtleties not possible to the simple regularities of well-cut features. Catherine proved adorable to most people, but from her portraits it is practically impossible to receive any impression save that of dulness. This, at any time, was the last thing she could have been, but the conventions of the Roman Catholic Church in dealing with the portraits of saints opposed any lifelike treatment. The picture of her in the church of St. Domenico at Siena, said to be by Francesco Vanni, might do equally well for any other emaciated sister. There is no temperament in it, no illumination, no visible sweetness. The eyes are half closed, the expression is inert and apathetic. The mouth is small but meaningless, the nose is long and well formed, the oval of the face delightful. Vanni did slightly better on another occasion. There is an engraving by him which is very nearly attractive. The eyes, owing to the religious demand for humility, are again half closed, but the mouth is both delightful and winning, and a half-smile plays about her expression. Given the glamour of vivacity, the kindling changes of life, and Catherine when young must have been delightful to look at. Certainly many men loved her. She had the power of being poignant in recollection, and disturbingly sweet in her bodily presence.

Even the painter Vanni, wicked enough to have been conversion-proof, yielded to the disquieting need she roused in him. He had been a great hater, and the men he hated were assassinated without after-remorse. For some amazing reason—probably that of curiosity—he consented to interview Catherine. She was out when he called, and her Confessor Raymond received him. According to Raymond, who describes the incident, Vanni soon grew bored, and presently remarked bluntly that he had promised to call upon Catherine, but since she was out, and he was a busy man, he could not wait for her any longer.

At that moment Catherine appeared—according to Raymond, much to Vanni’s disgust. But Catherine was all smiles, comfortableness, and simple ease of manner. Vanni’s chances, in fact, of not being converted ended with her entrance. The manner of his surrender was humorously characteristic of the man himself. Catherine—she was always so clever when she was good—presently left the room. No woman ever knew better when another word would have been too much. She had hardly gone when Vanni broke out that, for the sake of courtesy, he could not wholly refuse her some gratification. At the moment he had four virulent hatreds, but to please Catherine he would give up, in the case of one of them, all thoughts of vengeance. He then started to leave the house, but before he reached the door stopped suddenly and declared he could hardly draw his breath, so intense was the sense of peace and ecstasy this one small action of the right kind had given him. Evidently it was useless to hold out against her influence, and he then and there declared himself conquered, and ready to abandon all the vices he could under Catherine’s gentle guidance.

Thus came an end to Vanni’s murders. Catherine held him for the rest of his days. It is only to be regretted that he did not paint her portrait before instead of after his conversion. He would have attended less to her reputation as a saint, and more to what was lovely and pictorial in her person.

Catherine no longer lived at home. She had instituted an informal sisterhood at Siena, where “Mantellate” sisters from every part of Lombardy lived in community. Her work still continued among the sick, the lepers, and prisoners. But rumours of her miracles, and of an almost miraculous gift of persuasion, were spreading to many parts of Italy. Talk of the dyer’s daughter had already reached the ears of the Pope at Avignon, and was paving the way to further political successes. Before Catherine had passed out of her teens she employed four secretaries to cope with the colossal inflow of correspondence that reached her. It was through the urgency of help in answering letters in fact that Catherine made the great friendship of her life, and drew under her influence the man who largely contributed towards keeping natural feelings alive in her.

Stephen Marconi never cast off a cheerful and innate earthliness. He came across Catherine originally, as so many people did, over the matter of a Sienese family feud. Stephen, headstrong and exuberant, had roused ill-feeling in both the Tolomei and Rinaldini families. Torrents of blood loomed as the sole termination. Mutual acquaintances had made useless attempts to produce peace; at the last crisis before violence Stephen’s mother implored him to go to the “Mantellate” sister. The suggestion drew some contemptuous comments. But the woman persisted, and essentially good-natured, Stephen went in order to pacify her. He had every reason subsequently to thank the solicitations that overbore derision. Catherine settled everything with absolute successfulness, Stephen himself speaking of the reconciliation that followed as truly miraculous.

More extraordinary than the reconciliation even was the effect of Catherine’s individuality upon Stephen Marconi. He possessed no natural aptitude for spirituality. Handsome, irresponsible, sought after, he epitomized effervescent worldliness. But, having once seen Catherine, he could not keep away. Excuses were raked together for further interviews, and one day, finding her overburdened with correspondence, he wrote a letter at her dictation. It was the beginning of the end. At first informally, and later explicitly, he became one of her secretaries; presently also a member of what was called her “spiritual family.”

Siena relished as a joke the dandy converted by the ascetic, but Stephen was unconcerned. An irrepressible humourist, he appreciated to the full the oddity of the situation; though if jocose, he was also deeply contented. Catherine had become almost instantly the instigating motive of his life, the one precious thing his heart needed. Catherine, on her side, was known to care for him more than for almost any other person. Her relations with him became those of a deep and exciting friendship. Towards the end of her life she heard a report that Stephen had definitely cast off his semi-worldliness and taken ascetic vows. Catherine should have known an exquisite and glowing comfort. Instead of it, her letter to him on the subject is very nearly petulant. That any action should have been taken without first becoming a matter of confidences between them clearly unspeakably hurt her. She wrote that of course it was a great joy to hear that he desired to lead a better life, but that she was “very surprised” that he should have made any decision without previously having said a word to her about it. She added further that there was something in the matter that she could not understand, though she prayed that whatever he did would prove to be for the benefit of his soul.

There is more sign in this of a woman stung by an unexpected neglect, than any religious exaltation at a soul saved. Stephen had not become a monk, and the misunderstanding swiftly passed over. But the letter is pleasant reading, because it was written at a time when Catherine’s mysticism threatened to overshadow the purely human kindnesses of her earlier years. The idea of Christ as the heavenly Husband had developed from vague symbolism into a definite expression of spiritual familiarity. It was an unrealized element of good fortune that Stephen’s whimsical frivolity kept alive in her a strain of normal sensations. She suffered whenever they were separated, and among the last letters she ever wrote, moreover, was one to Stephen with the pathetic, dependent cry, “When will you come, Stephen? Oh, come soon!”

Another secretary closely associated with Catherine’s life for many years was Neri di Landoccio, a poet belonging to the group of dawning Renaissance writers. He suffered from melancholy, and having once met Catherine, naturally clung to the heartening radiance of her presence. From his letters, his youth appears to have been vicious. He was, at any rate, haunted by the notion that his misdemeanours were greater than God would be likely to forgive. He worried himself into a dangerous dismalness—a gloom perceiving no remedy. Then Catherine wrote him a long letter. She reiterated that God was far more ready to forgive than humanity to offend; that He was the Physician, and mankind His sick and ailing children. She told him that sadness constituted the worst fault of all in a disciple of Christ. To believe in the unplumbable love of God, and still persist in disheartenment, was a form of unrighteousness.

Neri did his best, but a gentle wistfulness penetrated his disposition, and not even Catherine could give him gaiety of thoughts. He and Stephen Marconi—the extreme opposites in temperament—became deeply attached to one another. They corresponded when apart, and Stephen, after Catherine’s death, called Neri “among those whom the Lord has engrafted in the very innermost depths of my heart.” A third man constantly in Catherine’s society was her Confessor Raymond. Two small incidents told by himself, and against himself, suggest a perfectly honest and rather pleasant temperament, but a somewhat limited spiritual capacity. In the first, he confesses that when on their journeys great multitudes thronged to Catherine for confession and comfort, and that the fact of having to go for hours without food or rest greatly annoyed as well as wearied him.

From the other, both issue rather sweetly, but Catherine with almost a touch of greatness. Raymond, who again tells the story, says that she loved to talk to him upon spiritual matters, but that, not having the same mystical sensibility, these conversations frequently sent him to sleep. Catherine, absorbed in her subject, would continue for some time talking without perceiving that she lacked a listener, but when she did, she would merely wake the other, and good-humouredly tease him for allowing her to talk to the walls.

Catherine had by nature the sanest and tenderest common sense. It was she who wrote of prayer that everything done for the love of God or of our neighbours was a form of prayer, and those who were always doing good were always, as it were, at prayer. Love of one’s fellow-creatures was practically one long-continued lifting of the heart to God.

When Catherine came to the political portion of her life, the point at which she may be said to have indirectly affected the Renaissance in Italy was reached. The popes were still at Avignon, while Rome clamoured for a return of the papacy to its original capital. Petrarch, in a letter, pictured Rome as a venerable matron standing desolate and in rags at the gate of the Vatican. “I asked at last,” he wrote, “her name, and she murmured it forth. It reached me through the void, in the midst of sobs—it was Roma.” Certainly, since the removal of the popes to France, Rome, as a city, had gone to pieces. The churches were in ruins, grass grew through the pavements up to the very steps of St. Peter’s, peaceful sheep used its environments for pasturage. As the two great families of the town, the Colonna and Orsini fought unceasingly for supremacy, while the people were equally pestered, tortured, and destroyed by both. Save for those who fancied murder as a profession, life had grown a nightmare; decency and quiet were as things of which even the ashes had been scattered.

Catherine, like Petrarch, flung the weight of her eloquence on the side of the Romans, and Gregory’s return to Italy is always attributed by Roman Catholics to her influence. But before this question had become poignant between them, Gregory had already tested Catherine’s good sense in two political missions—one to Lucca, and one to Pisa. Both were successfully concluded, and in consequence, when Florence rose openly against the authority of the Pope, Catherine was chosen for a third time to conduct mediation. The employment of any woman as a diplomatic agent as early as 1370, was an extraordinary circumstance. During the Renaissance, frequent use was made of the intellectual adroitness of women. But, in Catherine’s day, females, as Boccaccio states definitely, had few occupations besides house-bound duties and the excitements of intrigue.

Catherine created an admirable impression in Florence. On her arrival she was formally met by the principal men of the city. The Florentine Republic had itself invited her to come to their assistance. At the same time pure enthusiasm would have effected nothing. Consummate intelligence only could move the Florentines. Each Bull that came from the French Court, and from a pope with every personal interest in a foreign country, newly exasperated them. Catherine watched warily, judging character and manipulating it, until Guelfs and Ghibellines, acute in unfailing antagonisms, equally authorized her to commence peace negotiations at Avignon. Catherine immediately started for France. Stephen Marconi went with her, and the actual journey must have filled her with many unavoidable pleasures. To begin with, she loved the country. In addition, the gypsy travelling of the day entailed perpetual chance incidents and unexpected humanizing makeshifts. A week of gentle progress among Italian scenery would keep the joy of life stirring in most people, if only unawares.

At Avignon her story becomes, even more than before, the dramatic triumph of personality. When she came nobody wanted her. The cardinals had strong reasons for not wishing an ascetic’s influence in the palace; Gregory, inert and ailing, flinched at the thought of a person noted for arousing qualities. She was received, notwithstanding, with ceremony. At her first audience, Gregory sat dressed in full canonicals, and surrounded by the entire conclave of cardinals, like a brilliant jewel in a purple case. Catherine behaved meekly, though in all likelihood her thoughts were less quiet than usual. For the papal residence was a gorgeous place; there were galleries, marble staircases, colonnades, magnificent gardens, elegant fountains. The ultimate possibility of luxury lay before Catherine’s sober eyes, the very air itself being perfumed.

This was sufficient to have perturbed her, for a markedly unclerical influence emanated from so much comfort. But the women who filled the palace jarred still more emphatically. Their sumptuous persons were obviously at home—the very atmosphere indicated femininity. A large number were, in fact, mistresses of the cardinals; the rest, relatives and friends of the Pope, who had been granted apartments in the palace. Gregory’s own morals have never been questioned. He sanctioned, by ignoring them, the scandals of his household, but his own life was that of an innocent and cultivated gentleman, with a liking for expensive living. Raynaldus, in his “Ecclesiasticus Annals,” says that he was of an affectionate and domestic nature, loving his own people, and, in fact, too much led by them, especially in the matter of benefices. His private life was above reproach,—chaste, kindly, and generous. A scholarly man, he delighted in the society of other scholars. At Rome he instantly remitted all the duties on corn, hay, wine, etc., which the clergy had previously levied, and which fell most heavily on the poor people. But the troubles and anxieties that followed his return to Italy, added to an internal disease, from which he had for some time suffered, brought about his death at the age of sixty-seven.

This internal disease had something to do with the gentle inertia of Gregory’s conduct. Once roused by Catherine to a certitude as to where his duty lay, he did it regardless of every personal inclination and affection.

But at the commencement of Catherine’s visit, the question was solely how best to deal with the disaffected Florentines. The issue did not prove gratifying. The Government had promised Catherine to send ambassadors to Avignon, suing for peace. New dissensions leaping up between Guelfs and Ghibellines, none were sent, and negotiations collapsed. In the mean time the ladies at Avignon had grown interested in the attenuated sister, who passed them constantly on her way to and from an audience. They started primarily with the frank indifference of society women to another of a lower class. But indifference became painful interest when in a few days it was breathed tempestuously that this pale woman had come almost solely in order to persuade the Pope to return to the Vatican at Rome. Scared and disordered, the papal ladies ceased to look insolent; they set themselves instead to conciliate the “Mantellate” woman. Led by the Pope’s sister, the Countess Valentinois, they made religion fashionable. Discarding all dancing, they instituted afternoon parties for pious conversation. The Countess Valentinois also visited Catherine in her own room, and after a few days, whenever Catherine went to the chapel to pray, she found all the court ladies following her example. Raymond, never very perspicacious, owns to being moved by “such unexpected signs of grace.” He even admired the lovely gowns and misleading courteseys of the seemingly repentant ladies. Clearly a little susceptible, Catherine’s churlish indifference greatly annoyed him. As her confessor, he had the opportunity of chiding her for this incivility—it was painful to see such pretty, graceful creatures repulsed so sternly. But Catherine upon this subject was adamant, and merely replying that had he the smallest inkling of the true dispositions of these mistresses of the cardinals, he would be nothing less than horrified.

Raymond, one imagines, still privately clung to a more pacific opinion; but if the story generally attributed to the Pope’s niece is true, his eyes were soon opened to the real sanctity of these ladies. Catherine had fallen into one of the trances frequent with her when at prayer. Elys de Beaufort Turenne happened to be kneeling conveniently near, and the opportunity to expose a spurious absorption thrilled her with pernicious pleasure. The temptation was too exceptionable to resist, and bending over, she presently ran a big pin into the Mantellate’s toe. The joke, as far as she was concerned, spurted into no more life than saturated fireworks. Catherine never stirred—unaware of the incident until afterwards. But Raymond realized for the future that some courtesies are means of concealment only.

The women of the Pope’s household were not alone in disliking Catherine. The cardinals objected to her as strongly. She had come to labour against everything pleasing in their lives. Those won over, besides, praised immoderately, and the instinct to strike a balance is natural and intuitive.

Her spiritual pretensions had not even, as far as they were concerned, been proved to be genuine. They solicited from the Pope, therefore, an interview with the Mantellate nun, in which the soundness of her theology might be tested. This encounter lasted from noon until late in the evening, during the whole of which time they endeavoured to confuse her into foolishness. But Catherine had a very clear brain and a very quick one. She knew her subject, and, being a clever woman, in a few minutes also, roughly, the temperaments of the men she was dealing with. The thought is a purely personal one, but it is difficult not to believe that she enjoyed the excitement. Catherine was humble through instinct, but she must have realized that she was considerably more capable than most people. Stephen Marconi, present during the interview, says that two of them were enticed over almost immediately, and took sides with Catherine against their own party. The questions put, however, were anything but easy to deal with. Among other points they queried how she knew that she was not really in the subtle clutches of Satan; it was no uncommon trick for the Evil One to change himself into an angel of light, or sham to be a vision of Christ himself. All this time her extraordinary manner of life might be simply a cunning prelude to damnation.

Catherine neither wavered nor deliberated; her calm was gracious and simple; she was exquisitely willing to be interrogated. The cardinals gave in; the struggle over, they had even the grace to admit that “they had never met a soul at once so humble and so illuminated.” Gregory, inherently a gentleman, afterwards apologized to Catherine for having permitted her to be molested by them, and from that time her troubles with the cardinals at any rate terminated.

Gregory himself had from the beginning been openly impressed by her. She left Avignon before the actual journey to Rome was made, but her passionately eager persuasions were the fire at which Gregory’s conscience chiefly ignited. For his household became desperate and loquacious at the mere suggestion. Gregory also had been born in France; all his roots were in the genial soil of Avignon. But Catherine would not let the matter rest. In a yearning and courageous letter, beginning, “Holy Father, I, your miserable little daughter Catherine,” she urged him to be overborne by nobody against doing his duty, for if God was with him, nobody could be against him.

Gregory went, and in a man old, fearsome, and extremely out of health, the action has an element of greatness. For the reputation of Rome, constantly reiterated by those about him, was very much like that of a den of wild beasts. Ser Amily, a provincial poet, who gives a rhymed description of the journey from Avignon, says, further, that all the physicians and astrologers prophesied a fatal termination to the expedition, but adds that they had apparently misread the constellations, as after some terrifying storms they sailed for the rest of the way upon a tranquil sea.

The fatal termination merely tarried somewhat, though the entrance into Rome proved a triumphant pageant. The streets had been laid with carpets, white flowers rained from every window—no welcome could have looked more cordial or inspiriting. The entry once over, however, Gregory found himself alone in an inimical country. Catherine wrote encouraging letters to him to discard all fears and strenuously to do all he could. But Gregory had done all he could. Rome, depraved and indocile, required a sterner nature at its head. He was ill and overtired, and fourteen months after having reached Italy, died, lonely and disheartened, at the age of sixty-seven.

Urban VI., by birth a peasant, short, squat, unpolished, succeeded him. The election was instantly unpopular. Half the people desired a French pope, residenced at Avignon and keeping French interests uppermost. The rest writhed under the truculent uncouthness of the new Pope, hating him personally. Matters became so envenomed that the most acutely aggrieved presently declared his election to have been illegal, and proceeded to place another pope at Avignon, known as Clement VII.

There were, in consequence, two popes—one at Rome, and the other in France. Both claimed supreme authority, and the confusion produced by them brought the papacy very near to the ridiculous. Then commenced, according to Muratori, a long series of terrible scandals in the Church. The result was unceasing private and public dissensions, incessantly culminating in murder. Urban excommunicated Clement and his cardinals. Clement, on his part, excommunicated Urban and his followers. The same benefices were conferred on different persons by the rival popes, each appointing his own bishop to every vacant see. Urban had been one of the cardinals during Catherine’s momentous stay at Avignon, and knowing his character, she wrote him after his election some very wistful counsel. The necessity of behaving benevolently was like a cry wrung out of her involuntarily; again and again, in different phraseology, she begged him to “restrain a little those too quick movements with which nature inspires you.”

This puts matters prettily—with an innate tact of feeling. Urban, in reality, was a man destitute of pleasant impulses. Fundamentally irritable, he possessed no control of utterance. Towards the cardinals his manners were inexcusable. He shouted the word “Fool!” at them upon the least hint of contradiction: over a difference of opinion he blurted furiously, “Hold your tongue; you don’t know what you are talking about.” Having determined to put down the rampant cupidity and immorality of these same cardinals, he raided their palaces as the quickest method of exposing them. On the other hand, he was a man of absolute probity, austerity, and courage. Petrarch had several times attacked the gluttony of high ecclesiastics. Urban ordered that one course only was ever to be seen upon the table of any prelate whatsoever, and adhered to the rule himself even upon occasions of hospitality. The following incident is a good example of his courage. As a result of the schism and his own extreme unpopularity, the people of Rome broke into open rebellion. The mob rushed to storm the Vatican. At the first rumour the household had fled to take refuge in other places. Only Urban refused to move, and remained alone in the great empty palace. When the mob stormed the doors and made for the Pope, they found him sitting motionless upon the throne, dressed in full pontifical splendour and holding the cross in solemn defiance in one upraised hand. The sight of his immovable figure, dramatic, repellent, denunciatory, broke the nerve of the impressionable Romans. They saw before them the representative of God, and with incoherent noises, fearful of eternal wrath, they fled, leaving the rigid figure impassive as an image, alone once more.

It was with Urban that Catherine went through the last exciting interview of her life. The impression left by her personality at Avignon must have been considerable, for when the election of Clement VII. took place and divided the Church into two disordered and querulous factions, the man who could not support a single adverse suggestion actually sent for Catherine to come and help him render the people of Rome at least loyal to the true Head of the Church. Catherine, though by now very frail in body, set out immediately, taking twenty helpful people with her, but, for some reason not given, leaving Stephen Marconi behind. Then, when she had got to Rome, and had recovered from the exhaustion of the journey, Urban insisted that she should give an address upon the schism before the entire assembly of cardinals.

She could only have looked a rather wan and paltry object set against the lace and silk and breadth of the well-fed cardinals. She was by this time nothing but a narrow line of black draperies and a thin white face. But the moment she began to speak the old warmth leapt into her voice, and the nun became more deeply rich in colour than all the scarlet and purple she fronted. Catherine never lost her head or her courage. She was there to rouse the sluggish morals of the cardinals, but she was quite aware that Urban stood almost as much in need of improvement as they did. With admirable clarity she laid stress upon the fact that the only weapons suitable for a pope were patience and charity. Urban owned neither, but the pluck and eloquence of the woman reached some responsive feeling, and he praised her then and there in a generous abundance of phrases. Unfortunately he did nothing else, and the following Christmas Catherine sent him another cajoling reminder—the kind of reminder only a subtle woman, and one with charming ways in private life, would have thought of. She preserved some oranges, coated them with sugar, and having gilded them, sent them to the Pope. With the present came a note, explaining that in the preserving all the acidity of the orange had been drawn out, and that, like the orange, the fruit of the soul, when prepared and sweetened and gilded on the outside with the gold of tenderness, would overcome all the evil results of the late schism, or, as with a careful selection of an unhurtful word, she put it—“the late mischance.”

Urban had previously empowered her to invite to Rome in his name whoever she considered would be useful to the divided Church in its hour of need. Among those Catherine wrote to William of England and Anthony of Nice, two friends, who lived in a pleasant convent at Lecceto, a few miles from Siena. A quaint correspondence resulted, for the two old men were sadly shaken in their comfortable habits by Catherine’s letter. Yet the letter itself was a singularly good one. She states in it plainly that the Church was in such dire necessity that the time had come to give up all questions of peace and solitude in order to succour her.

There were few characters that Catherine could not understand; certainly she understood her two friars perfectly. For the peace and quiet of their country retreat, where they sat and talked in the shady woods, had made them absolutely flabby of spirit. The thought of change and bustle flustered them from head to foot. Catherine had to write again, and this time she wrote with some directness that this was a crisis when character became visibly tested, and when there was no mistaking who really were the true servants of God, and who were merely seekers of a way of life personally congenial to them. These latter, she said, seemed to think that God dwelt in one particular place, and could not be found in any other. This letter must have harried the two old gentlemen sadly. Friar Anthony came to Rome at last, and though it is not clear whether Friar William accompanied him or not, it is probable that, when one gave in, both did.

Catherine endured great fatigue in Rome; it drained the remnant of strength left in her. Nevertheless she sent a letter from there to Stephen that was still almost playful. It is in this letter that occurred the winning petulance concerning the rumours of Stephen’s conversion. How little she could do without him issued again in a still later epistle, when she wrote to him, “Have patience with me.” At this time she was ill, in pain, tired to breaking-point with the Roman risings against the Pope. The schism had spread rapidly. Queen Joanna of Naples, to whom Catherine wrote regrettably stern letters, had flung her influence upon the side of Clement. Urban grew so uncertain that there was talk of sending Catherine—nearly dead through the strain already—to Paris, as the only ambassador likely to draw the French king over to the true Pontiff. She wrote instead, and while her letter was on its way, Charles V. joined the Anti-pope party.

When Rome, at least, had grown comparatively reconciled to Urban, Catherine returned to Siena. She was thirty-three, and the radiance that had magnetized men into contemplating even death with tranquillity, if she was only with them, had to a great extent gone out of her. Nevertheless, her correspondence shows that she never lost her fine discernment of character. Some of her letters are still masterpieces of practical understanding.

For a short time still she lived quietly with the men and women who loved and made much of her, though had she for a second realized how subtly indulged she was, a panic of dismay would have shaken her strenuous spirit. Physical strength, however, was almost exhausted. She suffered greatly, and with a touching foolishness—touching because of its presence in so much wisdom—she repeated again and again that God permitted demons to distress her, and, in consequence, bent her failing strength to wrestle with their torments. That a natural disease was killing her did not seem credible to imagination. Nevertheless, except during intolerable pain, her expression continued pathetically joyous. When she was well enough they carried her out into a neighbouring garden, lent for her use. Catherine never, after the first excesses of her childhood, repudiated out-of-door pleasures. She died in 1380, surrounded by a very passion of regret and tenderness. On her death-bed she confessed quaintly that in the early days of her spiritual career she had yearned for solitude, but that God would have none of it. Each creature possessed a cell in their own souls, where the spirit could live as solitarily and as enclosed in the world as out of it.

Stephen Marconi was with her when she died, and just before the end she entreated him to enter the Order of the Carthusians. Neri she begged to become a hermit. The injunction for a moment appears to lack her usual intuition. Yet it was probably the result of a very deep understanding. Neri’s nerves may have been more tranquil when not played upon by other people.

To the last she prayed, dying peacefully towards the “hour of Sext,” one Sunday evening, according to Stephen, the body until her burial retained a wonderful beauty and fragrance.

Her last request to the latter was reverently complied with, and for the future he carried on, with the grace of nature that made him so lovable, the most endearing of his dead friend’s labours—he became famous as a healer of feuds. The cult of Catherine’s memory gave a sentimental happiness to his days. He remembered her with the painful delight of a faithful lover. Nothing in their companionship had been too trivial for a living recollection. Being elected Father Superior to his monastery, he “invariably added the delicacy of beans to the fare of his religious on Easter Day.” He did this because one Easter Day he had dined with Catherine on beans, there having been nothing else in the house, and as Friar Bartholomew puts it, “the remembrance of that dinner stuck fast to the marrow of his spine.” As an old man, Stephen still cherished the smallest details of her life, and on one occasion, at the sudden recall of some little incident illustrative of her loving-kindness, he burst abruptly into tears, seeming as if his heart would break. The brothers were obliged to lead him gently to a seat out-of-doors, where a freshening wind restored him.

Neri also did as she wished. But his life as a hermit did not interfere with his literary labours, nor did it by any means leave him without society. Once he seems to have gone out of his mind for a time. Stephen mentions in one letter that he was told that he had been alienato, but that it is evident, since he had now heard from him, that he had recovered.

An account of his death, written by a monk to a certain friend of the dead man, Ser Jacomo, and given in the English version in Miss Drane’s life of Catherine, is sufficiently unusual to quote. It falls to the lot of few people to have their deaths recorded in quite such a superfluity of phrases.

“Dearest Father of Christ,

“My negligence—I need say no more—but yet with grief and sorrow I write to you, how our Father and our comfort, and our help, and our counsel, and our support, and our refreshment, and our guide, and our master, and our receiver, and our preparer, and our writer, and our visitor, and he who thought for us, and our delight, and our only good, and our entertainer; and his meekness, and his holy life, and his holy conversation, and his holy teachings, and his holy works, and his holy words, and his holy investigations. Alas, miserable ones, alas poor wretches, alas orphans, where shall we go, to whom shall we have recourse? Alas, well may we lament, since all our good is departed from us! I will say no more, for I am not worthy to remember him, yet I beg of you that, as it is the will of God, you will not let yourself be misled by the news; know then alas, I don’t know how I can tell you—alas, my dear Ser Jacomo, alas, my Father and my brother, I know not what to do, for I have lost all I cared for. I do not see you, and I know not how you are. Know then that our love and our father—alas, alas, Neri di Landoccio, alas, took sick on the 8th of March, Monday night, about daybreak, on account of the great cold, and the cough increasing, he could not get over it, alas. He passed out of his life, confessed, and with all the sacraments of the Holy Church, and on the 12th of March was buried by the brethren of Mount Olivet, outside the Porta Tufi, and died in the morning at the Aurora at break of day.”

According to the writer, Neri did not die until some hours after he had been buried at the Porta Tufi!

Catherine’s influence lingered in almost all those who had once responded to it. But the quality that remains rousing to the present day was her unremitting remembrance that one cannot be good without being happy. Though due to a different source, the spirit of the Renaissance seemed to emanate from her—the spirit that laboured so hard, in a world rich in all manner of things, to be joyful every minute. In Catherine’s case, it was the result, not only of a realization of life’s inherent wondrousness, but of an unconscious knowledge that heroism is never anything but smiling; that the acceptance which is not absolute, composed, and tendered in fulness of heart, is but a semi-acceptance after all.

In addition, Catherine had the one supreme characteristic that no age can render less superb or less inspiring. She was a nature drenched in loving-kindness. Consciously and unconsciously love streamed out of her, penetrating and unifying every soul she came in contact with. At all times there is nothing the world stands more in need of than loving saints,—at all times there is nothing that brings more creatures out of mistakenness, intractability, and mean-souled egoism than a glowing greatness of heart. And finally, there is nothing so vividly illuminating upon the intense and vital beauty of life and human efforts than the persons who, like Catherine, have but to enter a room, and,—satisfied, aflame, compassionate,—instantly transpose its atmosphere into delicious, renewing goodness.

BEATRICE D’ESTE

1475-1497

BEATRICE D’ESTE could never have been a beautiful woman, though most contemporary writers affirmed that she was. Neither was she particularly good; nevertheless, very few women of the Renaissance make anything like the same intimacy of appeal. Nothing in her life has become old-fashioned. She suggests no reflections peculiar merely to the time in which she lived. The drama of her domestic existence is so familiar and modern, that it might be the secret history of half the charming women of one’s acquaintance.

At the same time she was vividly typical of the Renaissance. Nobody expressed more completely what the determined quest for beauty and joy could do. And as far as she was concerned it could do everything—except make a woman happy. Her life, in fact, is one of the most absorbing instances of the tragedy that lies in wait for the majority of women after the pleasantness of youth is over.

Born at Ferrara on June 24, 1475, Beatrice was the younger sister of the great Isabella D’Este, who became one of the chief connoisseurs of the Renaissance. There is always some pain entailed in being the plainer sister of a beauty. Triumph also, in those days, was entirely for the precocious. Isabella embodied precocity itself. Though only a year older than Beatrice, she showed herself incomparably the more graceful, the more receptive, the more premature of the two. At six she had become the talk of the Ferrarese court circle. As a future woman was desired to do, she already showed signs of culture, of tact, of fascination. A pretty little prodigy, with hair like fine spun silk, her hand was constantly being asked for in marriage; and no visitor ever came to the court but Isabella was sent for to show off her premature accomplishments.

There is little said about Beatrice. A second girl had been so frankly unneeded that at her birth all public rejoicings were omitted. She passed her babyhood with her grandfather, the King of Naples, and when she came back, a round contented child, with a chubby face and black hair, she served chiefly as a foil to Isabella, who was like some fine and dainty flower, with her pale soft hair and finished elegancies of behaviour. At Ferrara education had become a hobby. A son of the great Guarino, who with Vittorino da Feltre practically laid the foundations of modern schooling, had the chief control of their education. It was not a bad one, perhaps, save for its excess. These two mites were at lessons of some kind from the time they got up to the time they went to bed. Happily, the Renaissance was all for the open air, and a good deal of their education took place in the garden of a country villa belonging to the D’Estes. Petrarch’s sonnets were among the lighter literature allowed them, and a good many of the sonnets were set to music especially for their thin incongruous voices. Guarino was their master for Cicero, Virgil, Roman and Greek history; other teachers took them in dancing, deportment, music, composition, and the rudiments of French. Isabella, indeed, is said to have spoken Latin as easily as her native tongue.

Though a little severe, Leonora was a capable and conscientious woman. Most of the qualities that Beatrice could have inherited from her mother would have been very good for temperament—presence of mind, courage, intelligence, decision. The girl’s light-heartedness she probably got from her Uncle Borso, Ercole’s brother and predecessor, whose fat and smiling face Corsa’s painting has made the very type of cruel joviality. Ercole was not jovial, and the chief characteristics he transmitted to his daughters were strong artistic and literary passions, a gift for diplomacy, and, perhaps, a little elasticity in the matter of conscience.

Culture pervaded the atmosphere at the court of Ferrara. And though Leonora saw to it that the children were strictly trained in religious observances, it was essentially life, and a full and engrossing life, that they were being prepared for. At six Isabella was already engaged to the future Duke of Mantua. Some time afterwards, Ludovico Sforza of Milan, uncle and regent for the young Duke Giangaleazzo, wrote and asked for her in marriage. He was not a person to refuse lightly. The real duke everybody knew to be foolish almost to the point of mental deficiency. Il Moro, as Ludovico was called, held the power of Milan, and politically an alliance with Milan would be good for Ferrara. Ercole answered the request by saying that his eldest daughter was already promised to Mantua, but that he had another daughter a year younger, and if the King of Naples, who had adopted her, gave his consent, Ludovico could have her instead. The political value of the marriage remained the same, and Ludovico accepted without demur the little makeshift lady. Hence, at nine years old, Beatrice, as a substitute for her more elegant sister, became engaged to a man of twenty-nine. She was then still living with her grandfather at Naples. But when, in the following year, she returned to Ferrara, to be educated with Isabella, she was publicly recognized as Ludovico’s future wife, and known as the Duchess of Bari, the title to be hers after marriage.

It was over this engagement that Beatrice was made acutely to realize the difference of life’s ways with the plain and the bewitching. The young Marquis of Mantua soon became an ardent lover of his golden-haired lady. He wrote to her, he sent her presents; a slight but pretty love affair went on between the two during all the years of their engagement. And when in due course they were married, it was with every show of eagerness upon the side of the handsome bridegroom. Ludovico, on the other hand, took no notice whatever of the childish Beatrice; there was no interchange of winning courtesies, no presents, no letters. Twice, when the marriage was definitely settled, Ludovico put it off; and on the second occasion, at any rate, no girl could avoid the sting of wounded vanity. Everybody had been eager to marry Isabella. Beatrice also, according to the notions of her time, was grown up, and far too clear-witted not to understand the gossip following upon Ludovico’s second withdrawal. Unmistakably she was not wanted. Her future husband had his heart already filled. There was another woman in the case, and a woman loved with such intensity that Il Moro literally had not the courage to face marriage with a different lady. On the arrival of the ambassadors asking for a second delay, an agent of the court wrote that everybody was annoyed and the Duke of Ferrara extremely angry.

This was in April, 1495, and for several months Beatrice lived on quietly in the Castello at Ferrara. To deepen the dulness, not only Isabella, but her half-sister Lucrezia, was now married. Among the people of the court it was openly said that the marriage with Ludovico would probably not take place at all. Beatrice went back to lessons, music—she was all her life a great lover of music—and to needlework in the garden. But she probably felt fiercely dispirited and without hope. Thankfulness for life itself cannot exist in youth. At fifteen it is not possible to thank God for just the length of time ahead. Most likely, also, she hated Ludovico. No girl of any spirit could have done otherwise, and Beatrice had more spirit than most.

Then, suddenly, in August, another ambassador arrived from Milan, and even then hopes began to float again. The ambassador had come this time with a present from the bridegroom to his betrothed. It was exquisite—a necklace of pearls made into flowers, with a pear-shaped pendant of rubies, pearls, and diamonds. The ambassador came also to fix a day for the wedding. Ludovico had at last made up his mind to the rupture with his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, the rare and beautifully mannered woman, who has been compared, with Isabella D’Este and Vittoria Colonna, as among the most cultured women of the Renaissance.

Now, at last, Beatrice became brusquely a person of importance. The subject of Cecilia Gallerani was dropped like a burning cinder, and outwardly everything smoothed to a satin surface. There was more money than in the Mantuan marriage, and no expense was consequently spared in Beatrice’s trousseaux. Only Leonora still worried a little. Ludovico came of a bad stock—the only one among the family to show fine qualities had been the famous Francesco Sforza, founder of the dynasty.

As for the present duke’s father, and Ludovico’s brother, Galeazzo Maria, he had been a fiend, whose very soundness of mind was questionable. True, Ludovico’s own ability was indubitable. The skill with which he had steered himself from exile into the regency could not be questioned. Moreover, though nominally only Regent, he had already commenced to drive in the thin end of the wedge of usurpation. The real duke was old enough to control his own state, and had recently been married to Isabella, daughter of the King of Naples. Notwithstanding this, the regency continued with a grasp tightened, rather than loosened, upon the affairs of Northern Italy. Meanwhile preparations for the marriage were rapid and luxurious, and as soon as possible, though it was then in the depth of winter, Beatrice and her suite started for the wedding. At Pavia Ludovico was waiting to receive them, and as soon as Beatrice had been helped on to a horse, wonderfully caparisoned for the occasion, the two rode slowly side by side from the water’s edge—she had come by boat up the Po—across the bridge that spans the river Ticino, and through the gates of the Castello of Pavia.

Alinari

THE BRIDGE AT PAVIA

It would be interesting to know what lay in the minds of both. In the case of Ludovico one surmise has as much likelihood as another. He was a man much experienced in women, and to a person whose mistresses were always beautiful and interesting, Beatrice, at first sight, could have offered very small attractions. She had not the features to possess beauty of the finest quality. At the same time she was compensated by almost all the minor enticements. The smooth and delicate freshness of youth was fragrant in her, and, like Isabella, she was extremely graceful in body. But the chief attraction of her face sprang from its oddity, and the inner rogue it suggested. According to rigid canons she was plain, but her plainness was so near to prettiness that it was as often as not over the border.

The first impression given by her portrait in the Altar-piece, said to be Lemale’s, is disappointing. From her personality the expectation is of something different—a little more distinguished, a little more wanton, and a little more incontestably seductive. But a mild fascination comes with familiarity. Waywardness and intelligence are both in the face; the gift of humour is clear as day. Her expression radiates a mixture of sauciness and wisdom. In certain clothes and in certain moods she must have looked adorable, more especially before she was actually dressed, when her curls hung upon her shoulders.

What Beatrice thought of Ludovico is more easily hazarded. The man was handsome, and bore every sign of a personal force of character. His profile formed too straight a line, but in the general effect his features were impressive and masterful. Beatrice was fifteen, and as Isabella’s plain sister had never yet been incensed with too much flattery. Ludovico had in fact reached at her childlike heart with unequal advantages; confronted by this suave and dignified person a girl’s imagination had everything to feed upon.

They were married next morning, and a few days later Beatrice made her state entry into Milan—Ludovico, Giangaleazzo, the real duke, his wife Isabella, and every Milanese person of importance, meeting her at the gates. She and Ludovico then rode side by side in a procession through the town, the horses being decorated and the streets lined with people to cheer them as they passed.

But the really interesting incident of the day was the meeting of the two girls, the reigning duchess and the duchess of the Regent. The situation pushed them into antagonism, and into mean and agitated rivalries. Isabella’s was the position of easier righteousness, Beatrice’s the one of more colossal temptations. Everything moreover in the future was to help them into unfairness. The wife of the futile duke was cringed to by nobody. All Milan cossetted and flattered the wife of the Regent who held the power, and suggested still greater power in the future. To have been meek and secondary would have required a temperament of great spiritual vitality. Beatrice came of a worldly family, and the reasons for not tethering ambition grew to be very specious. Giangaleazzo, as head of the State, was too clearly incapable. Il Moro did all the work, bore all the responsibility, and when necessary, all the execration. Why should an idle, dull-witted boy, who did nothing, enjoy the benefit of public precedence? Why should Beatrice and her husband walk humbly behind these two, whose importance was as a balloon inflated for the occasion?

Corio says that from the first days of her arrival in Milan, Beatrice chafed at yielding place to Isabella. But Corio, who wrote many years after the death of Beatrice and Ludovico, was bent upon making the worst of them. And to contradict him there is a good deal of correspondence which goes to show that at the beginning the girls were glad enough to have each other for companionship. Some writers of the struggle between Beatrice and Isabella also urge that it was Beatrice who drove Ludovico to schemes of usurpation. This is one of the statements that are introduced in the heat of advocacy. Ludovico had made his mark as a dangerous personality years before he married Ercole’s second daughter. The Ferrarese ambassador had written of him long before his marriage that he was a great man, who intended later on to make himself universally recognized as such.

The day before her state entry into Milan, Beatrice’s brother Alphonso was married to the gentle Anna, who, after her death, was to be succeeded by the enigmatic Lucrezia Borgia. A week of public rejoicing followed, after which Leonora returned to Ferrara, and Beatrice commenced the routine of her new existence. But the reports of Ludovico, sent shortly afterwards, were pleasant reading for the girl’s father.

BEATRICE D’ESTE
BUST IN THE LOUVRE

The Ferrarese representative at the court of Milan wrote that Ludovico was incessantly singing his wife’s praises, and a few days later added that he was brimming over with admiration both for his wife and his sister-in-law, and that he reiterated incessantly the extreme delight their society gave him. Then, some time after the last of Beatrice’s people had left, Trotti once more repeated that Ludovico appeared to have no thought but how to captivate and amuse his wife, and that every day he repeated how much he loved her.

Not only Trotti, but Palissena D’Este, a cousin, and one of Beatrice’s elder ladies-in-waiting, wrote enthusiastic accounts of the Milanese ménage at the commencement. Palissena’s letter was to Isabella, and not to Beatrice’s parents. She wrote that Beatrice was unceasingly made much of by her husband, and that every possible tender attention was paid to her by him. According to her accounts the two were delightful to see together, the man being evidently as delighted to spoil the pretty child, as the child was to be spoilt by him. And since Beatrice had been the plain member of the family, with uncertain prospects of future beauty, the writer mentions, with an evident sense of conveying good news, that in the new climate the girl had grown not only very much stronger, but very much better looking.

Beatrice was certainly very happy at this time—nothing in life compares with the first days of the first love affair—and Ludovico as a lover has already been insisted upon. Muratori, writing of her after the shyness of her arrival had worn off—she is mentioned as being timid at first—describes her as young and always occupied in dancing, singing, or in some kind of amusement. Muratori also touches upon one of Beatrice’s weaknesses. Truly never was a woman more intelligently fond of dress. She came to Milan a child, but within a year she knew her woman’s business like her alphabet, and of that, one of the serious items is to understand that a woman is most frequently rendered attractive by her clothes. In dress, Beatrice had one peculiar predilection—she loved ribbons. She liked to have her sleeves tied with them; she liked them, in fact, almost everywhere. In the Altar-piece portrait her gown is extremely ugly, but little superfluous-looking ribbons are tied all over it. She also grew certainly to be extravagant. On one occasion, when her mother went over her country house, she was shown the Duchess of Bari’s wardrobe. There were eighty-four gowns, pelisses, and mantles, besides many more that had been left in Milan. There is no doubt that eighty-four gowns and mantles were too many at one period. Beatrice grew over-rich for the finer qualities of character to keep exercised. To desire a thing, if only in passing, was to have it.

During the first months after her arrival in Milan, however, she was a child, and too much cossetted to realize more than a very limited responsibility. Her life for some time was little more than a perfect example of the winning freshness belonging to the Renaissance conception of happiness. Open-air pleasures were a large part of its delight. Every man who was rich enough had a country residence with shady places and pools of water. Beatrice constantly went picnics into the country. A certain Messer Galeazzo Sanseverino, who later married Ludovico’s illegitimate daughter Beatrice, wrote a description of one of them. He said—it was in a letter to Isabella—that they started early in the morning, and as they drove—he, Beatrice, and another lady—they sang part-songs arranged for three voices. Having arrived at their destination—Ludovico’s country house at Cussago—they immediately commenced fishing in the river, and caught so many fish that they were obliged to fling some back into the water. A portion of the rest was cooked for their midday meal, and afterwards, the writer says, for the sake of their digestions, they played a vigorous game of ball. This finished, they made a tour over the beautiful palace, and after that once more started fishing. This might well have been occupation enough for one day, but when fishing had grown wearisome horses were saddled, and they first flew falcons by the river-side, and then started hunting the stags on the duke’s estate. It was not until an hour after dark that the indefatigable and cheerful party got back to Milan.

When Rabelais wrote his description of a day in Pantagruel’s life, he might well have had this pleasure outing in remembrance.

Ludovico took no part in these outings; affairs of state, he said, absorbed his time. To have instantly suspected these affairs of state would have needed the sharpened wits of worldly knowledge. But presently, since everybody but the bride knew or guessed from the beginning how the duke really occupied himself, comments began to circulate. In the end Beatrice realized the truth. There are no letters showing how she first grasped the fact that Ludovico still gave tenderness to another woman; but she knew at last that Cecilia Gallerani was not only shortly expecting to be confined, but was also still lodged in apartments at one end of the Castello. The last fact in itself must have sufficed to be insufferable. Whether Beatrice made a scene or not, she could only have felt burnt up with anger as well as with sickness of heart. A crisis became inevitable. The particular motives were trivial, but the triviality occurred when anything would have been too much for her. Ludovico gave his wife a gown of woven gold. The moment she wore it curious expressions flickered over the faces of her household—Cecilia Gallerani was going about in its counterpart. Only one inference presented itself. Beatrice soon knew, and by this time had borne as much as the unseasoned endurance of her years was able. What followed is summarized in a letter by Trotti to the Duke of Ferrara—a letter which he begs the duke to burn immediately. Trotti speaks of the garment as a vest, showing that it was only part of a dress, and he says that Madonna Beatrice had refused to wear hers again if Madonna Cecilia was allowed to appear in another similar. The attitude was a bold one for a child of fifteen, and Beatrice must have made it with the most unhindered courage. For immediately afterwards Ludovico himself went to interview Trotti, and so make sure that something more soothing than a mere statement of Beatrice’s grievance went to Ferrara. He gave an actual promise that the liaison should come to a conclusion. He would either find a husband for the lady or send her into a nunnery.

Beatrice won, and, indeed, won handsomely. Political expediency was on her side, but the girl’s own likeableness must be counted for something in the matter. Ludovico was among the most cunning men of Italy, yet upon this occasion he did exactly what he promised. As soon as Cecilia had recovered from the birth of a son the two alternatives were considered. Her tastes were not for convents, and she married a Count Ludovico Bergamini. With this, as far as Il Moro was concerned, the episode closed. Beatrice would probably have preferred the convent, for, as things remained, Cecilia was not in any sense removed out of society. She continued to receive all the notable men of that part of the world at the beautiful palace a little way out of Milan which Ludovico had given her as an inheritance for his son, and at all court functions she appeared as usual.

Beatrice’s triumph may have come to her a little through her courage. It was a quality Ludovico admired above all things, though his own was not to be relied upon. Commines says of him, “Ludovico was very wise, but extremely timid, and very slippery when he was afraid. I speak as one well acquainted with him, and who has arranged much diplomatic business with him.”

Few characters of the Italian Renaissance are more difficult to get at than Ludovico’s. Like Cæsar Borgia, he had much of the magnificent adventurer in his blood, and though he never cut the figure in Italy that Cæsar Borgia did, he was in many ways the more interesting of the two. Cæsar Borgia outshines him easily as a schemer, as a fighter, as a man nothing stopped and nothing staggered; but Cæsar Borgia was known as a being more eager to conquer towns than to govern them, and Il Moro was above all admirable at the head of a state. His politics were over-cunning, but as a ruler of Milan he went consistently for improvement and for more humanity than was customary. In personal charm he must have run the Borgia close. All those who knew him intimately liked him. There was dignity of presence and an eloquent habit of speech. Leonardo da Vinci could not be reckoned an easy man to satisfy, but he lived for sixteen years contentedly under the patronage of Ludovico. Ludovico’s ambitions did not drive him at the same furious pace as the other’s, and he worked for a city and the future along with and in the interval of his own deep plots. A contemporary writer, Cagnola, says of him that he improved to an extraordinary degree the town of Milan, by enlarging and embellishing the streets and squares, and by the erection of many fine buildings, the fronts of which were decorated with frescoes. He did the same at Pavia, until both towns, previously hideous and filthy, were scarcely recognizable. Corio adduces further evidence in his favour by saying that every man of culture and learning, wherever he could be found, was enticed by Ludovico to Milan, and in some flowery phrases writes that all that was sweetest in music and finest in art and literature was to be found in the court of Il Moro.

This, put in plainer language, was very nearly true. Ludovico had a passion for having great men as company. His library, too, was famous. He collected books in France, Italy, and Germany. He had manuscripts printed, copied, illuminated wherever he could find them. In connection with this library, besides, a pleasant trait in his character comes out. He allowed scholars to borrow his books for purposes of study, and even gave facilities to them for using his library. The universities of both Milan and Pavia were saved by his energy, and his attitude towards education was always generous and impersonal.

To a man so full of temperament Beatrice’s own nature was very much in tune, and after the disposal of Cecilia Gallerani there came to her the really good time of her life. It seems more than probable, in fact, that Ludovico had already grown fond of the round-faced girl with the audacious expression and the inexhaustible vitality of ways. Some of her earlier escapades were like a schoolboy’s home for the holidays, but Ludovico referred to them invariably with a touch of pride. He wrote on one occasion to Isabella that his wife, the Duchess of Milan, and their suites, had, at Beatrice’s instigation, been dressing up in Turkish costumes. These dresses, also under Beatrice’s impetuous influence, were finished in one night’s labour. She herself sewed vigorously with the rest, and Ludovico wrote that upon the duchess expressing surprise at her energy, replied that she could do nothing without flinging her whole soul into it. That was like Beatrice; she had no impulses that were not glowing, tremendous, whole-hearted. Some of her nonsense at this time, nevertheless, was not so pleasing, though Ludovico does not appear to have realized its naughtiness. He wrote on another occasion, and still with an air of pride, that one of her amusements in the country was to ride races with the ladies of her suite, when she would gallop full speed behind some of them in the hope of making them tumble off their excited horses.

Of Beatrice’s pluck many instances are given, but at this time, undoubtedly, she was a little drunk with youth and happiness. Trotti wrote to Ferrara of a wrestling match between her and Isabella of Milan, in which Beatrice succeeded in throwing Isabella down. And the tirelessness of the creature came out also in a letter of her own to Isabella of Mantua, in which she told her sister how every day after their dinner she played ball with some of her courtiers. In the same letter there is another assurance that she was really happy, not only because she was young and vigorous, but because her heart was satisfied, for she mentions, as if it brimmed over spontaneously from a joy still fresh enough to be marvelled at, how tender her husband was to her. She added a pretty and affectionate touch by mentioning a bed of garlic which she had planted on purpose for her sister when she should come to stay with them, garlic being evidently a flavouring of which Isabella was extremely fond.

Beatrice’s statement of Ludovico’s affectionate habits is largely corroborated. Once, when she was ill, Trotti reported to Ferrara that Ludovico left her bedside neither night nor day, but spent his entire time trying to soothe and distract her.

As far as Beatrice was concerned, this illness could not consequently have been entirely lamentable. It is in the nature of women not to begrudge the price paid for visible assurances of being beloved, and to Beatrice Ludovico had soon become the integral requirement of life.

Some time after this the real duchess, Isabella, gave birth to a son. At last Giangaleazzo was not only duke, but possessed an heir to come after him. This child destroyed the Regent’s prospects. Giangaleazzo, weak as well as foolish, had not the making of old bones in him. Until now the able and popular Regent stood with an easy grace, one day to be persuaded to step into his nephew’s shoes. Isabella’s son put girders to her house, and thrust Ludovico’s future back to that of simple service, gilded and honourable, but yet, after all, merely service to the house of which he was not head. For Beatrice and Ludovico, moreover, this new-born infant tinged the situation either with flat mediocrity or with a new and secret ugliness. No change showed, however, upon the surface. Public rejoicings took place to celebrate the birth of an heir, and life then fell back into its customary habits. There is a picture of these days given many years after by Beatrice’s secretary, the elegantissimo Calmeta, as he was called at the time. He wrote that her court was filled with men of distinction, all of whom were expected to use their talents for her intellectual pleasure. When she had nothing else to do, a secretary read Dante or some minor poet out loud to her, on which occasions Ludovico would more often than not come and listen with her.

Calmeta mentions some of the men who made Beatrice’s court remarkable, but the greatest of all, Leonardo da Vinci, is not included. From what it is possible to ascertain, Leonardo came very little into Beatrice’s private existence. His life was enclosed by what Walter Pater calls “curiosity and the desire of beauty,” and the passion for humanity was very slightly developed in him. He believed in solitude, and, in a limited and cordial fashion, indulged in it.

In reference to his coming to Milan, Pater, referring to the facts given by Vasari, says, “He came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse’s skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible also to the power of music, and Leonardo’s nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him.”

Leonardo’s letter to Ludovico about his coming to Milan is written in a very different mood, and, read in the light of his fame, is wholly humorous. He says, “Having, most illustrious lord, seen and pondered over the experiments of all those who pass as masters in the art of constructing engines of war, and finding that their inventions are not one whit different from those already in use, I venture to ask for an opportunity of acquainting your excellency with some of my secrets.

“Firstly, I can build bridges, which are light and strong and easy to carry, so as to enable one to pursue and rout the enemy; also others of a stouter make, which, while resisting fire and assault, are easily taken to pieces and placed in position. I can also burn and destroy those of the enemy.

“Secondly, in times of siege I can cut off the water supply from the trenches, and make pontoons and scaling ladders and other contrivances of a like nature.”

Seven other paragraphs follow, explaining contrivances for ensuring success in warfare by land or sea. It was only at the end of the tenth that he touched upon less military matters. Then he wrote: “In times of peace, I believe that I could please you as completely as any one, both in the designing of public and private buildings, and in making aqueducts. In addition, I can undertake sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay. In painting I am as competent as any one else, whoever he may be. Moreover, I would execute the commission of the bronze horse, and so give immortal fame and honour to the glorious memory of your father and the illustrious house of Sforza.”

Leonardo had painted Cecilia Gallerani for Ludovico before the time of Beatrice’s arrival, but, as far as one knows, never painted Beatrice. Mrs. Cartwright suggests, and the opinion has been repeated elsewhere, that the reason for this sprang from Beatrice’s jealousy of the beautiful woman who had preceded her. But this is not in keeping with her nature. Beatrice loved all beautiful pictures, and was far too intuitive not to know that if any one could give her portrait beauty, Leonardo was that man. Whatever strangeness exhaled from within he would have drawn upon the surface. That he should never have painted her is extraordinary, but, at the same time, it is absolutely certain that he would never have felt any inclination to. Leonardo did not care for any woman’s face that could look happy and be satisfied with that mere possession. And the Regent’s wife had no withholdings in her expression, and no subtleties, save perhaps the subtlety of audacity and laughter.

Presently Beatrice gave birth to a son, and whatever sinister thoughts had ebbed and flowed in Ludovico’s brain before, now became permanent and concrete. Beatrice’s confinement was in itself the first open threat at Isabella. The arrangements for the child’s arrival were a menace in their unfitness. A queen’s son could not have been received into the world with more elaborate ceremony. The layette and cradle were exhibited to ambassadors as if a future monarch were being waited for. The cradle was of gold, its coverlet of cloth of gold. With no restraint as to cost, three rooms had been decorated—one for the mother, one for the child, and one for the presents, which poured in every hour. The boy was no sooner born than public rejoicings were ordered. Bells were rung for six days, processions were held, prisoners for debt were released, and ambassadors, councillors, and all important officials entered to congratulate the slender girl in her magnificent bed, with its mulberry and gold coloured hangings.

At the court of Giangaleazzo meanwhile Isabella must have felt as if bitterness stifled her—bitterness and the sick despair of any creature conscious suddenly that it is trapped. Everybody remembered that when the real heir to the duchy had been born two years before, there had been less extravagance and formality than for the entry of the Regent’s infant. And when a week later Isabella also went to bed and brought a second child into the world, the torture of the body must have been little in comparison to the torture of the mind that knew its children already marked out for disinheritance. Even her confinement became a convenience to Ludovico, who was able to inform the ambassadors that the rejoicings were for a double joy, though the statement was not made with any intention to deceive. The thin end of the wedge had been driven in, and Ludovico desired men to grow prepared and seasoned for what would one day be thrust upon them as an accomplished policy.

When both duchesses had recovered, ceremonies of thanksgiving were organized. They drove together in wonderful clothes and as part of a gorgeous procession to the church of St. Maria della Grazie. Beatrice may have uttered some light gratitude as she knelt, but to Isabella the day must have been a burning anguish, wearying to the very fibre of her nature. She and Beatrice sat side by side, and their dresses were almost equally extravagant. The public only saw two bejewelled and magnificent figures, but one of the two women already hated the other, with a heart swollen by the wrongs she did not dare to utter.

From this day forward Isabella’s life is ill to think of; for Ludovico’s plans were soon no longer secret. The King of the Romans was to marry his niece—Giangaleazzo’s sister—and to receive with her an immense dowry. In return he was to give Ludovico the investiture of Milan. On paper this change of dukes did not read as a flagrant usurpation. Giangaleazzo had been cleverly thrust into the position of sinner. It was seemingly abruptly discovered that he had no right to the dukedom at all without the consent of Maximilian. The Viscontis held it in fief from the empire. When they died it should have passed back into the keeping of Germany. The duchy belonged to the emperor, and the Sforzas holding it on their own authority made them nothing less than adventurers. Il Moro, confirmed as duke by the King of the Romans, would possess the duchy upon legal and unimpeachable grounds, and have only dispossessed therefore a creature without any rights to hold it at any time, and incapable into the bargain.

Isabella fought with an impassioned fury for her child and her position. It was brave, heart-rending, and useless. Giangaleazzo could not be made even to understand Ludovico’s treachery. In a fit of temper he could beat his wife, as a child strikes what offends it. But he could not grasp any more than a child that a person, who had never given it an unkind word, should nevertheless intend to do it evil. Sometimes driven beyond control, Isabella would fix the story of Ludovico’s coming usurpation into his wandering attention. For a moment her burning phrases stimulated some dim perception. But presently Ludovico and the boy would meet, and Giangaleazzo, in reality bewildered and helpless without the support of this capable, pleasant relative he had leant on since infancy, would blurt out all his wife’s accusations and come back to her soothed into the implicit faith of before. Not a soul that would, had the capacity to help her, whilst the crowd had gone over to the light-hearted, triumphant duchess who was stepping remorselessly into her place.

Of all the women of the Renaissance there are none more piteous and more innocently forlorn than this girl Isabella, married to the futile son of a madman and pitted against the unrighteous cravings of a Ludovico. He and Beatrice between them made her life a nightmare, but they never abased her courage. The letter to her father, given by Corio as hers, but generally looked upon as worded by the historian, shows the noble fierceness that ran through her body. In burning phrases she laid bare the unjust misery of her position. Giangaleazzo was of age, and should have succeeded some time back to the duchy of his father. But so far was this from being the case that even the bare necessities of existence were doled out to them by Ludovico, who not only enjoyed all political power, but who kept them practically both helpless and unbefriended. The bitter hurt she endured through Beatrice came out in the mention of the latter’s son and the royal honours paid to him at birth, while she and her children were treated as of no importance. In truth she added—and there is something so hot, so passionately and recklessly sincere in the whole letter that it is difficult to believe that anybody but Isabella herself wrote it—they remained at the palace in actual risk of their lives, the deadly envy of Ludovico aching to make her a widow. But her letter, for all its despair and anger, was imbued with an unbreakable spirit. When she had laid bare the danger, the loneliness, and humiliation of her position, explaining that she lacked even one soul she dared speak openly to, since all her attendants were provided by Ludovico, she closed with a brave and defiant statement that in spite of everything her courage still endured unshaken.

Beatrice, it is true, does not show bravely in this one matter. True, from the worldly standpoint of the time, it was not as ugly as it seems to-day. Position during the Renaissance was legitimately to those indomitable enough to seize it. But the private intuitions of the heart do not alter greatly at any period, and in these Beatrice was not by nature deficient. She had strong affections and abundant fundamental graces of temperament—laughter, courage, insight, whole-heartedness, multiplicity of talents. But during the first years of her married life she had too many happinesses at once. There was nothing in her life to quicken the spiritual qualities, nor to foster the more delicate undergrowths of character—pity, compassion, the living sense of other sorrows. She lived too quickly, and there was no time for conscience to hurt her. That she could be tender there are little incidents to bear witness. Her motherhood, for instance, was both charming and childlike. She wrote to her mother, in sending the baby’s portrait, that though it was only a week since the picture had been painted, the baby was already bigger, but that she dared not send his exact height because everybody told her that if she measured him he would never grow properly.

The innocent foolishness of this disarms harsh judgment. And in judging Beatrice’s relations to Isabella of Milan there is no need to deduce a bad disposition from one bad action. No individuality stands clear from some occasional unworthinesses. In this one matter Beatrice was inexcusable, heartless, driven by nothing but an unjust ambition. But in others she was charming, affectionate, thoughtful, and moreover, under circumstances of colossal temptations and a great deal too much wealth, she remained a devoted wife, a faithful friend, and a woman capable in the end of a sorrow deep enough, practically, to kill her. In addition, it was harder for Beatrice than for most people to be really very saintly. She had too much of everything—vitality, intelligence, charm of person—and the call of life in consequence became too loud and too insistent. It is partly because of this that one loves her. For she had enough grace to be lovable, but not enough to be above the need of a regretful compassion and understanding. It is, of course, possible to be extraordinarily robust—to feel life sing in one’s body through sheer physical well-being—and yet be all aflame in spirit also. But it is certain that when for a woman considerable personal fascination is added, this extreme vitality makes it much harder to retain only a sweet and limpid thinking. Each actual moment becomes too engrossing and sufficient.

There is, of course, no use in denying that from the time Ludovico was immersed in disreputable politics, Beatrice knew a great deal about them. To help, in fact, in their fulfilment she was herself presently sent as envoy to Venice. The Venetians were reluctant to fit in with Il Moro’s intentions, and it was realized at Milan that what may be lost by argument may be won by unuttered persuasion. In any case, a pretty woman, all gaiety, tact, and responsiveness, could only be a pleasant incident for a party of elderly gentlemen. So Beatrice, with all the clothes that most became her, went to Venice, where she set the teeth of the women on edge with the wicked excess of her personal splendour. But though the feminine society of Venice did not love her, Beatrice knew that her business was with men, and that to fascinate, therefore, she must give out the charm the eye perceives immediately.

During her visit she wrote long letters to her husband, telling him everything save the information not wise to trust on paper. She even gave a description of the clothes she wore on each occasion. The fact is interesting, because nothing could constitute a clearer revelation of the closeness of their married relationship. Only when a husband and wife are on the tenderest terms of comradeship does a man care to hear what his wife wears, and even then he must possess what might be called the talent for domesticity.

The wedding of Bianca, sister of Giangaleazzo, became the next step in Ludovico’s policy. It was during the pageants organized to show the greatness of the match that the Duchess Isabella made her last brave show in public. She knew exactly what lay at the back of the marriage, but maintained to the end the fine endurance of good breeding. Through all the ceremonies that preceded Bianca’s departure into Germany, Isabella outwardly bore herself as any tranquil-hearted woman, who was the first lady of Milan, should do. Later on, some at least of the anguish surging within was to overflow in a sudden torrent. But in public nothing broke her wonderful composure. Not until Charles VIII. came to see her privately did her accumulated sorrows openly express themselves.

Previously to this Louis XII., then Duke of Orleans, had been sent into Italy, to discuss plans with Ludovico. Nobody thought much then of the man who was later to destroy Il Moro. A contemporary wrote sneeringly that his head was too small to hold much in the way of brains, and that Ludovico would find it easy enough to outwit him. Charles followed, when Beatrice and her court journeyed from Milan to Asti in order to fascinate and amuse him. Beatrice even danced for his pleasure, and she was an exquisite dancer. As a result Charles metaphorically fell at her pretty feet, which was only natural, considering that her appearance must have been gay and young enough—in a dress of vivid green and with a bewildering blaze of jewels—to have fascinated anybody.

Coming after a duchess all radiance and light-heartedness, Isabella, on the other hand, empty of everything but desolation, could only appear a disagreeable interlude. Giangaleazzo was already ill at Pavia when Charles VIII. crossed into Italy, but after Ludovico and Beatrice had done everything possible to amuse the French king, he passed on to the town of Pavia. Here the real duke lay in bed, and it was Isabella who received the king and Ludovico at the entrance to the Castello, dramatically beautiful in her forlorn observance of social obligations. Commines gives a detailed account of Isabella’s sudden outcry against the downfall being prepared for her house. In this account he says that the king told him that he would like to have warned Giangaleazzo had he not feared the consequences with Ludovico. Commines adds that, disregarding the Duke of Bari’s presence, Isabella threw herself on her knees before the French king, and piteously besought him to have pity on her father and brother, in answer to which, the situation being a very awkward one for him, he could only beg her to think of her husband and herself, she being still so young and lovely a woman.

That Charles pitied these two, as lambs lying in the paws of a wolf, is very clear from Commines’ statement.

And a few days later Giangaleazzo died. His life had been useless, but he took leave of it with an arresting gentleness. After a serious illness he had rallied, taken a fair amount of nourishment, and slept a little. That same evening he asked to see two horses Ludovico had sent him, and they were brought into the great stone hall, out of which his room opened. He talked of Ludovico, his confidence remaining childlike and unshaken to the end. His uncle, he said, would have been sure, would he not, to come and see him, if the French business had not swallowed up attention? As he grew weaker, he asked his favourite attendant—much as a woman might ask about her lover, for the pleasure of the answer—if he thought his uncle loved him, and grieved at his serious illness. Satisfied, he begged to see his greyhounds, and then, all his little interests tranquillized, quietly fell asleep. He was dead next morning, and Ludovico’s path was made easier than before. He was, in fact, instantly proclaimed head of Milan. Guicciardini says of it, “It was proposed by the heads of the council that, considering the importance of the duchy, and the dangerous times dawning for Italy, it would be extremely undesirable that a child not yet five years old should succeed his father.... Ambition getting the better of honesty, the next morning, after some pretence of reluctance, he accepted the name and arms of the Duke of Milan.”

PORTRAIT,—PROBABLY OF CECILIA GALLERANI
SAID TO BE BY AMBROGIO DA PREDIS

At the time Ludovico was almost universally credited with having murdered Giangaleazzo, but the accusation has since fallen to the ground. Practically it was based upon the fact that the moment of the duke’s passing was too opportune to wear an air of naturalness. In spite, moreover, of what men thought, nothing dared be uttered openly, and Ludovico, blazing in cloth of gold, rode to the church of St. Ambrozio to give public thanks for his accession. The wind was with him for the moment. Beatrice, too, had become the first lady of Milan, and her soul stood in a more perilous state than ever. She had reached the place of her desire by ways too shady for loveliness of thought to have had much hold in her.

Isabella meanwhile, from this time onwards, passes into a desolate private existence. But there is an incident which occurred first that remains very difficult to penetrate. Literally at Ludovico’s mercy after her husband’s death, she still bore herself bravely. For a time she refused to leave Pavia. When she did, we are told that Beatrice drove out to meet her, and that when they came together, some two miles from town, she got out of her own carriage and entered Isabella’s, both women sobbing bitterly as she did so. That Isabella should cry was natural; she was weak with the weariness of sorrow. But Beatrice’s was not the nature to weep either easily or falsely. Clearly face to face with the price paid for her own position, it beat back upon her for a moment as an utter heaviness, and she cried because Isabella was the living expression of despair, and they had once been intimate and companionable. God knows what they said to each other in this drive together, or whether through the passing grace of a sudden penitence Beatrice found anything the widow could hear without a sense of nausea. For how dire Isabella felt her life to have become is revealed in a singularly tender reference made to her by the court jester Barone, who wrote that she was so changed, and so thin and grief-stricken, that the hardest heart could not have seen her without compassion.

But the Duchy of Milan was to yield little happiness to the two who had acquired it so shabbily. Charles’ Italian campaign soon thrust Ludovico into both difficulty and danger. At the commencement of it he had been a great man. But when one Italian town after another became as a doormat for Charles to walk over, he perceived suddenly the flaw in his French invasion policy. Ferrante of Naples wrecked was one thing; Italy given over to Charles VIII. another.

He was not even personally safe with Louis of Orleans at Asti. A league was formed, in which the Pope, the King of the Romans, the King and Queen of Spain, Henry VII. of England, the Signory of Venice, and the Duke of Milan all combined. Isabella D’Este’s husband was made captain, with the express duty of cutting off Charles’ triumphant return into France. This fight against the king, so cajoled at the beginning, and the subsequent peace patched up between him and Ludovico, is purely a matter of history. In the attack against Asti, made by Louis of Orleans, however, Beatrice showed a magnificent and practical courage. Ludovico’s own astuteness had died in a sickly terror, and he had rushed back to his fortified castle at Milan. At the time there is little doubt that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion; but it was Beatrice whose courageous eloquence roused Milan, and it was Beatrice who ordered the steps necessary to defend the town and Castello.

It was about this time, also, that she showed a disarming and warm-hearted rightness of feeling. Among the booty her sister Isabella’s husband, Francesco, had acquired from the French were some hangings that had belonged to Charles VIII.’s own tent. They were originally forwarded to Isabella, but presently Francesco asked her to send them back, as he wished to give them to Beatrice. That made Isabella angry. She had some degree of reason, but her expression of it was repellantly ungracious. The hangings, notwithstanding, were sent to Beatrice. Happily, she would not have them. As keenly as Isabella, she loved beautiful and notable things, but with the simple statement that, under the circumstances she felt she ought not to have them, she returned the draperies to her sister. In doing so she was beginning to practise the little niceties that help to keep existence lovable. Had she lived, she would almost surely have weathered the over-eager selfishnesses of her married life. They were after all largely due to the absorption that all youth suffers during the first unsettled, uncertain period, when life is still all newness and personal excitements. But her time was short, and after the settling of peace with France, the end drew horribly near to her.

For five years she had been happy. Ludovico constituted the integral part of heaven for her, and after the first fierce struggle she had lived in the soft security of an equal affection. Nature had given her brains and seductiveness. To have both in one person, and then, as crowning grace, to possess a genius for light-heartedness, was more than most women can rely upon in the unceasing labour of retaining a husband’s affectionateness. But Beatrice was bolstered by even more than this. The tastes of husband and wife were similar—Ludovico had no hobbies outside the radius of her understanding. Nevertheless, at twenty she stumbled upon the disheartenment that for most wives lurks about the forties. She could not keep her husband from the charm of other women. She had been everything, but the time had come when a pretty face was to sweep her peace down like a house of flimsy cardboard.

She had grown stale—observation, dulled by familiarity, could receive no fresh impression. The very years they had handled life together worked not for, but against, her. All her ways had grown a parrot-cry; those of other women were new and half mysterious. Further, she was at that time physically in a peculiarly defenceless condition. When Ludovico’s last passion swept him away from her, Beatrice was once more expecting to be a mother.

Among the members of her household at this time there had been included the daughter of a Milanese nobleman, a girl called Lucrezia Crivelli. This Lucrezia Crivelli was far too beautiful to be a safe person in the house of any man susceptible to all precious or lovely objects. Could anything, indeed, be more exquisite than her face as painted by Leonardo da Vinci? At the same time, to look for long at the beautiful oval is to see that its meekness is purely a sham expression. The eyes too, so gentle, undisturbed, observant, are just a little, though illusively, unscrupulous. It is essentially the face of a young girl with all the delicate finenesses and sweet, reliant placidities of inexperience; but it is also a face already rich in power, reservations, and a silent deliberateness of conduct. In addition to all this, her hair was golden, her head almost perfectly outlined. In any court she must have created a sensation—she was so dazzling, and yet so quiet, so self-contained, and so demurely and subtly dignified. The temperament was probably cold. There is more thought than feeling in its gracious quietude—thought and a dim suggestion of pain, not in the present, but for the future. Small wonder she drew Ludovico. To be young, beautiful—a sweet wonder to look at—and, in addition, to strain at men’s heartstrings by just a hint of wistfulness, is to be dangerous beyond bearing.

LUCREZIA CRIVELLI
BY LEONARDO DA VINCI

Ludovico’s admiration became rapidly unmistakable. From being constantly pin-pricked, Beatrice saw the friendship between the two spring suddenly into something mortal to her heart. The two were thrown hourly into each other’s society—the man with the inflammable response to beauty, and the girl with the discreet and tantalizing loveliness. It was a tense drama of three. For Beatrice was always there as the tortured third. From the commencement nothing was spared her. Each day some new incident shook her with unutterable anticipations. Slowly existence, as she watched these two, became a solidifying terror. There must have been some scenes at the commencement. No woman could accept a crisis such as this and not cry out for mercy. But Beatrice, with the innate wisdom that so soon grew strong in her, quickly realized that to plead was like a voice trying to be heard above a tempest. Ludovico was infatuated. Everybody knew, and talked of the affair, both at the Court of Milan and beyond it. In 1496, a Ferrarese ambassador wrote that the latest news from Milan was the duke’s infatuation for one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, with whom he passed the greater part of his time—a fact which was widely condemned there.

That same autumn Ludovico’s natural daughter, whom Beatrice had adopted when she came to Milan, and whom she loved dearly, died. Only a few months back she had been married to the Galeazzo di Sanseverino, who had helped so largely to keep Beatrice merry in the first months of her marriage. Her name was Bianca, and in her portrait by Ambrogio da Predis—a portrait sometimes said to be of Beatrice D’Este—she looks adorable. Her death struck Beatrice when she was already heartsick. A dozen times between daylight and bedtime Lucrezia and Ludovico had acquired the power to drive the blood to her temples. Muralto, who mentions Il Moro making the girl his mistress, says, with the simplicity characteristic of the period when touching anything emotional, that though it caused Beatrice bitter anguish of mind, it could not alter her love for him. It is very evident that Beatrice dared nothing against this later mistress. With an admirable wisdom—the wisdom of an intelligence which had deepened upon the facts of experience—she did not struggle, after five years of married life, against the fever of this tempestuous passion. But a passionate restlessness wore her out. She looked upon days unending and unbearable. In a few weeks her manner changed entirely. She, who had been like an embodied joy for years, grew to have tears always near the surface. In the end she became too weary to control them; for there is no weakness like that brought about by a forlornness constantly goaded into fresh sensations. Both her ladies and her courtiers, in the inevitable publicity of court habits, saw her eyes frequently blinded by silent tears. But she said nothing, and they could not be certain whether they fell because of her husband’s conduct or because of the death of Bianca.

PROBABLE PORTRAIT OF BIANCA SFORZA
WIFE OF GALEAZZO SANSEVERINO

To some extent she had become abruptly absorbed by a new outlook. All her life previously she had been a frank materialist; the question of death had loomed too distant to need attention. But suddenly life had betrayed her, and in the bitter knowledge of its cruelties the soul stirred to tragic wakefulness.

The Renaissance, as far as she was concerned, had shown itself inadequate. It had promised, with artistic and philosophic culture, to bring happiness. But in practice it provided nothing for the heart of women. It could not make men faithful, nor help the warm and simple ways of domesticity from the denudations of instability. There remained only the question of the afterlife to fall back upon, and Beatrice, enfevered and tortured, tried to fix her mind upon this prospect. Bianca had been buried in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and during the last months of her existence Beatrice formed the habit of going constantly to her tomb, and of staying there for hours at a time. In fact, shipwrecked as far as life was concerned, and brought by her approaching motherhood to the nearness and possibility of death, her soul sprung at last into a quivering alertness, drawing her to silent introspections in the dark and restful church, where the girl who had been alive a short time back, now lay quietly buried. Only the most unshaken agnostics can come close to death and not suddenly feel an overwhelming necessity for some preparatory equipment—some consciousness of a clean and justified existence. And Beatrice, whose manner hinted to those about her the possession of a secret foreboding of what was coming, had reached very close to the moment when this peace, both of remembrance and of hope, would be tragically necessary.

THE CHURCH OF ST. MARIA DELLE GRAZIE AT MILAN

On January 2, 1497, she drove as usual to the church of St. Maria delle Grazie. She remained there for hours, as if only in this one sombre place could she obtain a little respite and tranquillity. Her ladies—who probably disliked these outings beyond expression—had difficulty in coaxing her at last from the building. They got her home, and she seemed much as usual until about eight o’clock in the evening, when the agony of child-birth suddenly commenced in her.

Her pains only lasted three hours. Then she gave birth to a still-born child, and shortly after midnight she died. For a short hour she lay in her canopied bed, worn in body and uncomforted in soul. Then she died, and whom Ludovico loved or did not love mattered not one whit to her.

But her death had been brutal, unexpected, sudden, and acted upon Ludovico like a douche of icy water. Passion for Lucrezia died brusquely through the shock. Beatrice, had she known it, had never been profoundly discarded, and the thought of life without her had not formed part of the Lucrezia madness.

And suddenly she was dead. There had been no reconciliation. In the abruptness of her collapse, there had not been an interval in which to endear her back to joy. She had suffered great pain, and then, in a forlorn and piteous weakness, passed from existence.

Ludovico’s grief became intense. His passionate prostration was so unusual in the callousness of the period, that every one talked about it. He refused to have her name mentioned in his presence, and when most widowers of that time would have been thinking of a second wife, he was still spoken of as caring nothing any longer for his children, or his state, or for anything on earth.

Seven months after her death he continued still apparently a changed man. He had become religious, recited daily offices, observed fasts, and lived “chastily and devoutly.” His rooms were still draped in black, he took all his meals standing, and every day went for a time to his wife’s tomb in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie.

THE EFFIGY OF BEATRICE D’ESTE
AT SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM

His last action in connection with Beatrice has a certain moving sentimentality. It was when the miserable end of his adventure had commenced, and he was obliged to escape from Milan with all the haste he could. His safety depended upon his swiftness. Knowing this, he nevertheless stopped at the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and stayed so long by the tomb of his wife that the small group with him became anxious for their own skins as well as his. He came out at last with the tears streaming down his face, and three times, as he rode away, he looked back towards the church, as if all his heart held dear lay there behind him.

Not long afterwards he was captured, and his captivity at Loches is one of the few inexcusable stains upon Louis XII.’s character.

ANNE OF BRITTANY

1476-1514

WITH Anne of Brittany the Renaissance entered France. She herself, though she had her little fastidiousnesses, hardly belongs to it. No artistic strain ran through her temperament. She was an intelligent, but excessively practical woman, who twice married men of opposite dispositions from her own. Anne, it is certain, never glowed at the thought of a beautiful thing in her life, but both her husbands did, and both, as a result of their Italian campaigns, brought into France a variety of new and educative lovelinesses. Charles VIII., Anne’s first husband, and Louis XII., her second, gave the primary impulse to the Renaissance movement in France.

As for Anne herself, though in the end she appeals through a colossal weight of sorrow, one feels her chiefly as a warning. Almost every quality a woman ought to spend her strength in avoiding, she hugged unconsciously to her soul, and every quality a woman needs as the basis of her personality, she had not got. A woman should be indulgence itself, and Anne indulged nobody; a woman should be as a brimming receptacle of sympathy, toleration, and forgiveness, and Anne forgave no one, and tolerated nothing that went against her. A woman should be—it is without exaggeration her great essential—good to live with, cosy, accommodating, an insidious wheedler, almost without premeditation, not only into happiness, but into righteousness of living. Now, Anne could never have been cosy, and it is doubtful whether, once safely married for the second time, she would have condescended to wheedle any one. She had not sufficient love to have a surplus for distribution. Duties of some kinds she could observe excellently, but there was no sub-conscious sense that in marrying she was accepting one of the subtlest posts of influence in the world. She had not the capacity for understanding that it is a woman’s adorable privilege to be in herself so much, that the atmosphere of the house she controls must in the end express principally her personality. And nothing was more remote from Anne’s intelligence than the secret triumph of realizing how greatly the building up of character is the charge intrusted to her sex by destiny.

It was not her gift to make any house feel warmer when she entered it. Her second husband loved her—contrast is a frequent motive for falling in love—but she could do nothing for temperament. Character is not upheaved by violences, and Anne was all imperatives and despotism. Practical organizations are often admirably conducted with these methods, and as a housewife Anne attained considerable proficiency; but the more immaterial achievements are beyond the reaching power of a chill autocracy.

Born in 1476, she was the daughter of Francis II. of Brittany, enemy of Louis XI. of France. Her mother, Marguerite de Foix, died when she was little more than a baby, and the first thing one hears about the child Anne was, as usual, concerned with the question of marriage. At eight years old more than one suitor already desired her hand. The English Prince of Wales had been accepted, when his murder put an end to the engagement. Then the widowed Archduke of Austria, Maximilian, was seriously considered, and for a short time Louis, Duke of Orleans, subsequently her second husband, numbered among those said to be possibly acceptable. He was married already to Jeanne, daughter of Louis XI., but his dislike to the woman forced upon him by her sinister parent had never been disguised. A dispensation from the Pope could at any time make another marriage possible.

The notion did not hold attention long, but the man and the child, after all one day to come together, were excellent friends during the period when Anne was in the schoolroom. Louis of Orleans, restless and discontented, could bear anything better than the presence of his own wife. Jeanne, who was not only deformed but hideous, had wrung from her own father on one occasion the remark, “I did not know she was so ugly.” Curtained behind physical ungainliness, her nature was white as snow and soft as the breast of a bird; but though every thought that came to her fused into tenderness, she lacked the common gaieties needful for ordinary existence. She had wanted to be a nun, and instead they made her the wife of a boy who felt for her nothing but an uncontrollable physical repulsion.

Louis, when he fled to Brittany, did not take her with him, and every writer is agreed that the pretty, precocious child whom he found there, and the dissatisfied husband, became the best of comrades. One chronicler mentions that Anne was flattered by the hommage paid to her by Louis, but it is very much in keeping with his character to have been amused by a little creature with all the airs and graces, and all the feminine obstreperousnesses, that Jeanne did not possess. Louis admired character, and even at nine years old Anne must have required no trifling efforts to manage.

In 1488, her father, worsted at last by the French, was obliged to come to terms with them. Almost immediately afterwards he died, and Anne, at twelve years old, became Duchess of Brittany.

It was, under the circumstances, a tragic position for any child to be placed in, and Anne’s little baby face and thin childish voice, at the head of so forlornly placed a duchy, becomes suddenly pathetic. She was no sooner proclaimed her father’s successor, moreover, than France sent to state that, since there were differences of opinion concerning their respective rights to Brittany, she should, pending the decision of arbitrators, not take the title of duchess. The reply—firm but cautious—amounted to the statement that Anne had already convoked the states of Brittany, in order to have the recent treaty made by her father with France ratified.

This answer the child probably had nothing to do with, but, in the vital question of her marriage, she suddenly revealed herself very definitely the authoritative head of her own dominions. All her ministers desired a marriage with the Comte D’Albret, thought to be in a position to help Brittany against the claws of its enemy. D’Albret was a widower, old, ugly, bad tempered, and the father of twelve children. Anne hated him—he is said to have had a spotty face—and the shrinking antipathy of children is not controllable by reasons. Primarily she must have felt a little frightened when both her governess, and the great bearded men who controlled affairs, informed her that, whatever her feelings, the marriage must take place. Happily, she was not timid, and she understood perfectly that she had succeeded to the power of her father. She refused point-blank to marry D’Albret. They argued, coaxed, laboured with interminable explanations, but the girl merely became mulish. When their importunities allowed no other outlet, she declared that sooner than marry him she would enter a nunnery and become a nun. Obstinacy such as this, when the child owed subjection to nobody, was a thing to gasp at. The tempers of her ministers must have been sorely tested, but the D’Albret marriage had in the end to be abandoned.

Maximilian was then brought forward once more—a suitor towards whom Anne appears to have been more tractable. It was necessary to marry somebody. Maximilian she had never seen, and therefore could regard to some extent optimistically. At the worst he would be better than D’Albret, and there was the chance that he might be actually charming. Once she had consented they gave her no time to change her mind. Maximilian sent his favourite, Baron de Polhain, to Brittany, and a marriage by proxy, according to the German fashion, took place there. The bride, having been dressed in her best frock, was placed in her canopied bed, with the best pillows at her head, and the best counterpane over her small person, and in the presence of the necessary witnesses, Polhain bared one leg to the knee and introduced it into the bed. This brief and simple ceremony rendered Anne a married woman, wife of the King of Germany. For a year afterwards in all proclamations she was called Queen, and Maximilian Duke, of Brittany.

Had he been rich, Maximilian might have kept his wife and changed history. He was, however, too poor to send assistance, and France inordinately wanted Brittany. Anne’s position, therefore, grew month by month more desperate, until, after the town of Nantes had fallen, ultimate defeat became inevitable. Brittany, unaided, was a pigmy standing up to a colossus. What facts the little duchess’s childish mind grew to understand during the two years she ruled in Brittany are hard to imagine. Every night her people put her to bed knowing that the enemy crept, hour by hour, nearer to her person. Every morning fresh perplexities of state were tumbled into her strained, embittered understanding. She learnt by heart the cheerless vicissitudes of life before she knew its kindling compensations. And by nature Anne was proud, obstinate, prematurely intelligent. This little thing was no dazed creature propped up as a mere figure-head of state by powerful officials. No one knew better than Anne the value of her own position. If she cried when the lugubriousness of her household grew more patent, she cried, not from terror, but from the bitter knowledge of utter powerlessness. The mere thought of being conquered roused a tempest in the fiery spirit of the child-duchess.

She was fourteen when a compromise saved her. Charles VIII., to settle matters more securely than could be done by any temporary conquest, proposed to marry his past antagonist. When the proposal was first laid before her, Anne naturally refused with a sickened fury and vehemence. No extremity should drive her to think submissively of the man whose ambition had been the bane of her short existence. She argued, moreover, that she was already the wife of King Maximilian of Germany. But Brittany was in sore distress, and once more all those with power to persuade urged her to consider this proposal as a godsend to her country. She would not listen; every nerve in her body revolted against this man, whose very proposal carried a threat behind it. Finally a priest was called upon to help the troubled counsellor, and the poor girl, whose happiness throughout had been the one thing nobody considered, was informed that the Holy Church demanded this sacrifice for the welfare of her people. She gave in then; there remained no alternative open to her. An interview took place, when the enemies of yesterday fumbled with reluctant courtesies. Three days later they were betrothed, the Duke of Orleans being among the witnesses of the ceremony.

Anne at this time was, it is said, a pretty, fresh-looking girl, with an admirable carriage, for all that one leg was slightly shorter than the other. Charles VIII., on the other hand, could hardly have been uglier. His head was too big for his body, his eyes were prominent and expressionless, his lips flabby. There was nothing in his lethargic appearance to disarm Anne’s sullen misery, and during their first poignant meeting one can feel with certainty that she did nothing to render easier the polite apologies stammered out by the uneasy lover. But Charles’s manner was gentleness and simplicity itself. Even Commines, who considered him futile and childish, says of it, “No man was ever more gentle and kindly in speech. Truly I think he never in his life said a thing to hurt any one; small of body and ill-made, but so good, a better creature it would be impossible to find.”

The marriage once accomplished, Anne and her husband started upon a triumphal journey through Brittany. The marriage had been a brutal necessity, and, for all her determination, the girl of fourteen was in it only the tool of the men and women who called themselves her subjects. But once married, Charles showed the utmost tactfulness. In the “History of the Dukes of Brittany” we read, “The king, having against his will, as it were, become her husband, omitted nothing that could assuage the unhappiness their marriage had caused her, behaving so well that in the end she was quite satisfied with her new life, and felt for this prince the greatest love and tenderness.” But to have hated Charles would seem to have been impossible. All writers are unanimous as to the sweetness of his character in personal intercourse.

A good deal is known about Anne’s equipment for her first journey as a married woman. Her travelling dress was of black velvet trimmed with zebeline, and her gown for best occasions of gold material lined with ermine. Among the furniture also were two beds—a serviceable one, draped with black, white, and velvet cloth; and another hung with gold brocade and bordered with a heavy fringing of black.

During the journey Anne received innumerable wedding presents, and at the gates and squares of every town plays were acted for the two young people. Most of these were mystery plays, but a certain number of farces were introduced for variety. What these comic plays were like can be gathered from the Farce du Cuvier, famous a little later. It deals with a hen-pecked husband, whose wife had provided a written list of his household duties in order to jog his harried memory.

One day, while washing the linen, his wife fell into the copper. The conversation between them is the dramatic moment of the play. I quote it as given in Mr. Van Laun’s interesting “History of French Literature.”

Wife (in the copper). Good husband, save my life. I am already quite fainting; give me your hand a while.

Jacquemet. It is not in my list....

Wife. Alas! oh, who will hear me? Death will come and take me away.

Jac. (reading his list). “To bake, to attend to the oven, to wash, to sift, to cook.”

Wife. My blood is already quite changed. I am on the point of death.

Jac. (continuing to read). “To rub, to mend, to keep bright the kitchen utensils ...”

Wife. Come quickly to my assistance.

Jac. “To come, to go, to bustle, to run ...”

Wife. Never shall I pass this day.

Jac. “To bake the bread, to heat the oven ...”

Wife. Ah, your hand; I am approaching my last moment.

Jac. “To bring the corn to the mill ...”

Wife. You are worse than a mastiff.

Jac. “To make the bed early in the morning ...”

Wife. Oh, you think this is a joke.

Jac. “And then to put the pot on the fire ...”

Wife. Oh, where is my mother, Jacquette?

Jac. “And to keep the kitchen clean....”

Wife. Go and fetch the priest.

Jac. My paper is ended, but I tell you, without more ado, that it is not on my list.

In the end, having wrung from her a promise of docility, he helped her out. The farce concluded with the joyful murmur, “For the future, then, I shall be master, for my wife allows it.”

But the great day of Anne’s youth was the day of her coronation in France. No toy lay so dear to her heart as a crown, and no one could have felt more unspeakably proud and great when, before an immense crowd of nobles and people, her crowning took place at the church of St. Denis. She wore a gown of pure white satin, and hung her hair—which was long and beautiful—in two great plaits over her shoulders. St. Gelais de Montluc said of her at this time, “It did one good to look at her, for she was young, pretty, and so full of charm that it was a pleasure to watch her.”

Afterwards followed the unavoidable reaction, when the ordinary routine of existence had to be confronted. Anne’s position, once the glamorous days of public functions were over, revealed innumerable drawbacks. She was a little girl in a strange country, surrounded by persons unwilling to surrender either power or precedence. Anne of Beaujeu, the former Regent—harsh, efficient, domineering—was the first power with whom Anne suffered combat. Small questions of precedence kindled the tempers of both. The elder Anne loved power as much as the younger, and was a woman few people cared to defy. But the juvenile bride had been modelled a little bit after the same pattern; she also possessed indomitable qualities, and had no intention of being a queen for nothing. The Regent—her surprise must have been overwhelming—found herself worsted. Sensible as well as proud, she retired before any pronounced unseemliness had occurred, and left the two young people to manage the kingdom for themselves.

But the period of domesticity between Charles and Anne did not continue long. There was a little love-making, a little house decorating, and then came the momentous first invasion of Italy. Commines, a shrewd and plain-spoken observer, says a good deal about this Italian campaign, which he accompanied. Both he and the Italian historian Guicciardini refer with pronounced contempt to Charles’s mismanagement of it, while Commines goes so far as to state practically that nothing but the grace of God kept the army from annihilation.

While Charles was away time passed wearily for Anne. Previously to her husband’s departure, when barely fifteen years old, she had given birth to her first baby, the needful son and heir. But to make the days more empty and interminable, the child was taken from her at the beginning of hostilities. For safety’s sake he remained at the castle of Amboise, strongly guarded by a hundred of the Scottish guard. So carefully was he protected, in fact, that when one of his godfathers, François de Paule, came to see him, he was only allowed to bring one other priest with him—a man born in France, and one who had never been to Naples. Unfortunately, no guards could save a life so feeble as this child’s of a child-mother. Almost immediately after Charles had come back from Italy the little creature fell ill and died with tragic suddenness.

Before this, and after her husband’s safe arrival, Anne is said to have been unprecedently light-hearted. To exist for months, as she had been doing, waiting hour after hour for the daily courier’s arrival, was to become drained at last of every feeling except a tortured expectancy. Charles’s death would not only have made her a widow, it would have taken her cherished crown away from her also. To hold both safe again relaxed even Anne’s cherished decorum of manner. But the death of the Dauphin struck the newly arisen gaiety abruptly out of her. She grieved passionately, bewildered that God should do this inexplicable and bitter thing to her. How fiercely she rebelled is shown by the following incident. Her friend of childish days, Louis, Duke of Orleans, was now once more heir to the throne. In a court of mourning he struck Anne as unduly blithe and cheerful, and instantly her sore heart revolted and hated him. Commines, who mentions the circumstance, says that “for a long time afterwards they did not speak.” As a matter of fact, Anne insisted upon his removal from the court circle. Louis retired to his own home at Blois, where he fell back upon the hobbies of his father, the childlike poet Louis of Bourbon, whose poems he collected while he waited for his old friend’s nerves to tranquillize.

Charles meanwhile gladdened his spirit with architectural interests. He had come back deeply influenced by the beauty of Italian methods, and having brought with him a crowd of Italian artists and craftsmen.

How the tumultuous Anne struck him after the subtlety of Italian womenfolk is not mentioned. The women of the Italian Renaissance were an education in themselves. Charles had been cajoled by Beatrice, had been knelt to by Isabella of Aragon, had been flattered delicately and unceasingly. His path to Rome had been strewn with gracious ladies, all more consummate, more complex, more highly wrought, as it were, than his own house-bound countrywomen. Anne, besides, could never have been a person of irresistible daily whimsicalities. Fortunately, Charles possessed strong domestic instincts, and in justice to Anne it should be mentioned that she did not show the same indifference to personal graces usually associated with women of her practical temperament. She had a few dainty vanities—was particular about baths and washing in basins all of gold; and had shoals of little scented sachets placed between her linen and in the clothes she wore, violets being her favourite perfume.

FROM THE CALENDRIER
IN ANNE’S “BOOK OF HOURS”

In the April after the Italian campaign the two were at Amboise Castle, Charles, it is said, having grown from an irresponsible youth into a ruler actuated by definite tenderness for his people. And then a tragic thing happened. On the Saturday before Easter some of the household were playing tennis in the courtyard. Anne and Charles went to watch them play, but in passing through a corridor known as the Galerie Hacquelebac—about to be pulled down—Charles hit his head against the low frame of a doorway. The accident seemed trivial, and for some time he watched the players as if unaffected by it; but suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, he dropped mysteriously to the ground. Placed upon a mattress, he lingered until the evening, and died at eleven o’clock at night. He was then twenty-eight, and Anne, struck brusquely from placid trivialities to the supreme incident of existence, was twenty-four.

Louis of Orleans had become King of France. Anne, huddled in a darkened room at Amboise, cried for hours without ceasing. She sat forlornly on the floor, and knew the uselessness of wordy consolations. Charles had been good to her; the future would have been full of pleasant habits. Now he was dead, and there remained nobody whose interests and hers were identical. Many would be brazenly glad that she was cast down. She who yesterday had been Queen of France, was now nobody—a widow—whose crown, that salient, exalting possession, belonged to the wife of Louis. True, she was still Duchess of Brittany, but she had suffered sufficient baneful experience to know that they would soon try and wrench that honour from her also.

No efforts could appease her grief. A contemporary nobleman, writing to his wife four days after Charles’s death, remarked, “The queen still continues the same mourning, and they cannot pacify her.” How could they, when all that she craved had been subtracted from her life? For days she crouched upon the floor of a black-draped room, desolately rebellious against the stupid harshness of life. Hour after hour she moaned, and cried, and wrung her hands. Nevertheless, for all her stricken gestures, her brain worked well enough. She began to write letters the day after Charles’s death, and as soon as she had at last been induced to eat, she signed an order to re-establish the Chancellorship of Brittany. Courage and intelligence continued intact for all the abasement of her attitude. She wept, but as she wept she thought out practical behaviour for the future.

At the same time, there is no doubt that she was genuinely disturbed and disconsolate. When, after some days, they brought her the usual charming white of royal widows, her pitiable and comfortless thoughts mutinied instinctively against its serenity and calm. She would not wear it: black was the only hue that could meet the blackness of her life—white revolted her as an equal offence and mockery. With a dogged insistence upon the hurt that tortured her, she set an undesirable fashion, and through a tumultuous intolerance of pain did away with an old prettiness of custom.

Three days after her widowhood her old friend the new king called to express condolence. Anne still repined in her darkened chamber. The only light that fell upon her came from two great candles. She had not risen when a bishop came to offer consolation, but she probably did so now, and made a grudging obeisance to the man who had suddenly climbed above her.

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.

ANNE KNEELING
FROM THE “BOOK OF HOURS”

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.

ST. HELENA
FROM ANNE’S “BOOK OF HOURS”

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