M. Beresford Ryley

“ 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. ”

“ But the grace of Renée’s life lies in the fact that she used it for development. The self-engrossed, unfriendly girl who fought with Ercole, slowly but momentously learned from experience. Handicapped both by nature and circumstances, she yet issued from the tempestuous stumblings of youth into an old age, still clumsy enough to an eye seeing only in a dull moment, but exquisite to a consciousness aware how the soul had continuously developed [Pg 303] through every untoward incident of existence. As a girl Renée had been too querulous to circumvent her own ugliness. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ Nothing in a monotonous existence is more uplifting than an incident to make plans for, and now from the sudden quickening influence of a contemplated holiday she was flung back again upon the old confusing friction of her days in the grim Castello.
Every year Ercole’s interests diverged more widely from her own. Renée loved France instinctively, as people love the home of their forefathers. When she first married Ferrara’s interests lay in friendship with France. But Ercole’s policy brought him later to the side of Pope and Emperor, when support from France ceased to be important. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, as one knows, there must inevitably have been some in the hectored years of Renée’s Italian existence. And among them was certainly the visit of Vittoria Colonna. She stayed for ten months, and all the information given implies that during that period there was almost peace at the Castello. This is to Ercole’s credit, for Vittoria Colonna would have bored any but a practised intelligence. Her forte lay in an unerring sense of what was fine in everything—art, conduct, and deliberation. Clever men adored her, and her brain was certainly imposing, deliberate, attentive, and comprehending. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are a great number of books dealing with her personality, but little real information. Few personal friends reveal more of themselves than Margaret D’Angoulême, Anne of Brittany, or Beatrice D’Este. What is evasive about them is pleasantly evasive, since every woman should retain a little that is inexplicable. But Lucrezia Borgia evades altogether. There is nothing, from beginning to end, comprehensible to seize upon. All the facts of her life are ascertainable, but never a word concerning the temperament that to a certain extent gave life to them. ”

“ From this time onwards the Borgia scandals thickened with extraordinary rapidity, becoming the interested gossip of every other court in Italy. Alexander’s youngest son, Jofre, had married a Spanish girl several years older than himself, and upon the return of political quietude brought her back with him to Rome. This Madonna Sancia alone piled up a staggering accumulation of scandals for Italy to gasp at. She had a passion, in her most innocent moments, for the less tranquil pleasures of life. Her arrival whipped up the gaiety of social Rome into an extremity of worldliness. ”

“ The action is wholly beautiful. No girl disfigures and hurts herself unless driven by a fundamental instinct of the soul into an extremity for salvation. Margaret was afraid—terribly afraid. She liked Bonnivet, she hated her husband, and she was not made of stone; after all, she was the daughter of Louise and Charles of Savoie, and the sister of Francis. But she wanted more ardently to be good than anything, and she knew no surer way than this to defend herself while the youth ran so hot in her pulsing body. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Her father had been rich in them, but the self-willed spirit of her mother, Anne, was more noticeable in the character of her second daughter than the paternal trait. To have lived with Renée would undoubtedly have rendered affection difficult. But to know her without the irritation of daily intercourse, as a perplexed, mistaken, blundering, wistful, and unloved woman, is to be drawn into a reluctant sympathy. She was, to begin with, ugly, and there is nothing in its consequences more pathetic than a woman’s ugliness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the end she emerges with such inherent calm, such effulgent gentleness, that the whole story of her Roman days has an air, not only of inapplicability, but of extraneousness. The actions of that early period seem to cling to her little more than the unconscious proceedings of a sleep-walker.
To disarm once and for all any preconceived prejudice, it is only necessary to look at the supposed portrait of her as St. Catherine, painted by Pintorricchio. In that she is adorable. To believe in the absolute baseness of a creature with such an expression is not possible. ”

“ The last duchess to be welcomed to Ferrara had been the attractive, sweet-faced Lucrezia Borgia, dubious, it is true, in morals, but pleasant as a flower to look upon. This “ugly and hunch-backed” French girl could not avoid coming as a disagreeable shock, both to the crowd and to her new connections. It is the bitter fate of an ugly woman that she must always destroy antipathetic first impressions before she can hope to sow favourable ones. And Renée, on her side, was as little pleased as those who received her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No soft remembrances freighted her thoughts with gentleness, and when she came to Italy she was already destitute of the exaltation that, out of the abundance of its own contentment, craves to create nothing but contentment about it. For this immediate hostility Ercole must have been in a measure responsible. A woman happy in her married life is incapable of passionately revolting against the accessories that encompass it. Renée never liked her husband, and the fact that she did not may have been due to his half-hearted efforts as lover. ”

“ The portrait of her, painted when she was about twenty, leading Francis to the crucified Christ, is full of subtleties. The face is round, with the sweet fulness of young things, but the chin is tiny, lovable, incongruous—the chin of soft assents and surrenders. The nose is long, the over-long nose of Francis I.; the mouth deliciously curved and tender. All the lower half of the face expresses a desire for gentle pleasures and soft and caressing habits. But the eyes belong to a different temperament. They gaze out of the happy face with unexpected wistfulness and mysticism. ”

“ Isabella was a great, lusty creature, and Lucrezia a frail, slight woman, just arrived from an exhausting journey, after having been overtired before she started. If she could not charm, besides, in these first crucial days, her case was lost. Who cares at any time to champion an ugly woman with every fragment of evidence against her? But a fresh, smiling, childlike creature disarms antagonism through sheer contagion of joy. And Lucrezia, as one knows, could be like sunshine itself in her soft urbanity and good humour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”