M. Beresford Ryley

1510-1575

RENÉE, daughter of Anne of Brittany, was, like her mother, destitute of any sympathy with the intellectuality of the period in which she lived. But the Renaissance brought about the reaction of the Reformation, and RenÉe’s life is interesting as the story of the domestic difficulties confronted by an individual sympathetic to the new doctrines during their first calamitous strivings in Italy. The danger to a person of the same views in France has been seen in the life of Margaret D’AngoulÊme.

RenÉe’s Italian career is interesting, besides, as the intimate history of a stubborn, unimaginative, and unadaptable temperament in a married life betraying from the commencement extreme incompatibility of disposition. The circumstance may occur to any one, and each woman deals with it according to her nature. Exactly how she does so, is one of the clearest tests of her valour and her intelligence. A true woman of the Renaissance—Vittoria Colonna and Isabella of Mantua, for instance, carried a dignified marital complaisance to heroic extremities—would have preserved surface amenities, however distasteful the husband. But RenÉe, brought up by people to whom she was simply a dull and undesirable orphan, never learnt that small accommodations of behaviour are among the primary and desirable virtues. 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. She was also, almost from her babyhood, without one single person who truly loved her. From the outset her character had been chilled and bleakened.

Born on October 25, 1510, though she came disappointingly enough to the woman craving for a son, RenÉe was made welcome with a careful pomp that bordered almost upon tenderness. Her baptism became the pretext for a magnificent pageant, and in an account of the expenses incurred for her childish household, she is called the king’s “very dear and much loved daughter, RenÉe.”

Two years after RenÉe’s birth Anne died. At five years old RenÉe was an orphan, and with her sister Claude, the patient, piteous, and most mishandled wife of Francis I., passed into the care of Louise de Savoie. They were the children of Louise’s most persistent enemy; she could not, therefore, have done otherwise than dislike them. Brantome says that she was extremely harsh to both, and it is certain that RenÉe, plain, delicate, and deformed, never became to anybody a person of sufficient importance to be coaxed into prettiness of ways and feelings. The gentle Claude must have loved her smaller sister while she lived, but Claude died of consumption almost immediately after Francis I. started for Italy, when RenÉe was only fourteen years of age, and from that time until her marriage the girl knew no one prepared to do more than a cold and pleasureless duty towards her.

In justice to Louise it must be admitted that every effort was made to procure RenÉe a suitable husband. They promised her at one time to the Archduke Charles, but already her want of average good looks rendered some apologies necessary. The life of any girl towards whom such an attitude has to be assumed must possess an undue measure of painfulness. Before presenting the bride to the Archduke it was considered imperative to tell him that “the charm of her conversation greatly atoned for her want of beauty.” The proposal came to nothing, and after several other unavailing negotiations Francis settled upon a marriage with Ercole of Ferrara, the son of Duke Alphonso and Lucrezia.

It was not a good match for a girl in whose veins ran the blood of a king of France. Mezeray said of it, “The king arranged a very poor match for this princess, and sent her into a far country, lest she should ask him one day for a share in Brittany and in the patrimony of Louis.”

Mezeray spoke from a knowledge of Francis’s character, but the motives in this one instance were probably less cunning than he thought them. RenÉe was not an easy young girl to marry; her own father had said years ago that it would be difficult to find a husband for her. Nevertheless, at this time she was probably as nearly nice-looking as at any time of her existence. She had just turned eighteen, and, in spite of a slight deformity, possessed a certain dignity of carriage, inherited from her mother. She had also the whitest of skins, and beautiful fair hair that reached to the ground. It was said that she had at this time more to thank nature for than to complain of, and the early portraits of her are at least not actually ugly. The principal thing that strikes one in them is a certain dulness of expression, as if heaviness of spirit had crushed out vivacity. Her face suggests strongly the uncared-for upbringing of her childhood—the blue eyes are apathetic and unamused, the mouth wistfully inanimate. It is just possible that Ercole might have kissed her into a childlike lightness of thought; but Ercole did not find her kissable, and she was in any case born with the confined and congealing seriousness of character that came to her as an intensified quality from her unimaginative and easily scandalized mother.

Ercole represented the antithesis of his future wife. His appearance was fascinating, his manners were good; all the culture of the Renaissance permeated his blood. Small wonder, therefore, that RenÉe’s looks came as a bitter shock to him. He wrote to his father after the first interview, and stated plainly, “Madama Renea non e bella.” The Ferrarese ambassador also wrote that his master would have preferred the lady to possess a better figure. But Ercole had come to France chiefly to make a good political marriage, and his objections to poor RenÉe personally were greatly outweighed by her parentage and her dowry.

Oddly enough, the girl herself does not appear to have liked the handsome Italian any better than he liked her. At the formal engagement she behaved with extreme shyness and a visible distress of manner. Nobody cared, however, what she thought in the matter, and a month later the wedding was celebrated. For that one day Louise does certainly appear to have tried to make the most of her. The girl’s magnificent hair hung, soft and moving in itself, unbound about her shoulders, and her gown of scarlet and ermine literally gleamed with the jewels heaped upon it. RenÉe’s skin was undeniably good—Bonnet refers to the whiteness of her breast and throat—and above the heavy splendour of her wedding garments her little subdued and plaintive face could only have worn a look of quaint, appealing incongruity.

The subsequent festivities continued until both bride and bridegroom became rather comically ill—through excess of food and want of sleep. RenÉe, who all her life suffered from the tragedy of headaches, had the migraine, and they began to think the time had come to start for Italy. Francis I. himself accompanied them to the gates of Paris. Here he solemnly confided his sister-in-law into the care of her husband, who was ordered always to treat her as a daughter of the royal house of France. Ercole, feeling that he had no reason to be diffident as regards his relations to the other sex, answered that he would have no difficulty in both pleasing and managing the lady. Subsequent events rendered the reply a little humorous. The small, meek wife, who heard the remark probably without even the desire to smile, proved in after years to the last degree intractable. Certainly Ercole never succeeded in managing her.

Ferrara, at the time of RenÉe’s marriage, had been devastated by the plague. Before she made her state entry, an order was issued commanding the people to reopen their shops, put on their best clothes, and, whatever their private emotions, show a cheerful countenance upon the arrival of their future duchess. Triumphal arches were erected, windows hung with silk, and through an almost painful effort RenÉe was received with the usual good-natured welcome from the people. Isabella of Mantua, the new bride’s aunt-in-law, always in great request for social occasions, had come to assist in receiving her, and several days were filled with public pageants, banquets, and plays.

But below the surface neither the new arrival nor those that received her were in a rejoicing mood. 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. It is generally supposed, in fact, that her instant and intense dislike to Ferrara had a good deal to do with her initial mistakes in Italy.

Certainly Ferrara was not an attractive city. Set in the middle of an enormous plain, a dreary monotony encompassed it, while the town itself, having pre-eminently to consider the necessities of defence, was grim, sinister, and aggressive looking. Even the Castello appeared nothing more than a powerful and gloomy fortress. Subject to unhealthy mists from the Po, the climate, moreover, underwent continual extremes of temperature, and one of RenÉe’s ladies-in-waiting describes it bitterly as a perfect hotbed of fleas. Frogs croaked all night and crows cawed all day. The inside of the castle, besides, was pitiably dilapidated. The house of Ferrara, constantly in want of money, had a habit of leaving matters needing repairs until repairs were no longer needed.

To RenÉe the place exhaled the chill of exile. In addition, as all the amusements arranged for her reception were in Italian, they only bored her beyond expression. In fact, one of the gravest faults of the girl’s Italian career lay in her reluctance to acquire Italian phrases. She arrived in Ferrara ignorant of even a rudimentary knowledge of her husband’s language, and taking an immediate dislike to the place and to the people, refused to make any real effort to learn the speech of those about her. This slow, and at all times inefficient, acquirement of Italian remained steadily against her, keeping her, apart from any other consideration, a very isolated person in her own establishment—an outsider where she should have been the central figure.

The only attempt she made in the right direction was to order, soon after her arrival, a number of dresses cut after the Italian fashions. But even this, due probably to an evanescent dazzlement at the charming appearance of the Italian women, she rendered an actual affront in the sequence. For shortly afterwards, either in bitterness of soul at her own poor appearance in them, or because she deliberately wished to behave with provocation, they were discarded for her former French style of dressing, which she then bluntly stated to be “more holy and more decent.” From the beginning RenÉe persistently refused to identify herself with her husband’s interests. She clung with stupid pathos to the associations of her by no means happy childhood, and was homesick all the years of her Italian sojourn for the ways of her own people.

All through, her conduct was hopelessly mistaken. In the give and take of marriage it is part of a woman’s lovely chances always to give a little more than is yielded back to her. At the same time, it is questionable whether, owing to her ugliness and want of charm, RenÉe, whatever she had done, could have become popular. There ought, in truth, almost to exist a different code for the really ugly woman. The fact is so profoundly and entirely tragic. Tenderness is the heart of life to women, and any woman so misused by nature as to be unable to rouse this becomes, through subtle piteousness, beyond ordinary judgment. She lives in a world both unjust and inimical, practically with her back to the wall. Sweet follies have never harmonized her to the unreason of humanity; failure lies always upon her soul. For inherited, deep-rooted, ineradicable, is in most women the unformulated knowledge that to attract men is the normal fate of their sex; the creature who cannot do this once at least in life, carries a hidden sense not only of loneliness, and of something vital ungranted by destiny, but of secret shame and humiliation.

RenÉe had never glowed bewildered under absurdities of praise. If only as an isolated experience, this mad blitheness is curiously good for character. Afterwards a woman knows—is sympathetically inside the circle of things—seeing the dramas of others, not like a child staring starved at a food shop, but as one who has already had her fill of cakes with the best of them. All her life RenÉe remained the hungry child who sees others overfed on the sweets denied to her. Small wonder, in consequence, that she hated the ways of frivolity, and was slow in advances of friendship. 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. A girl of eighteen, ugly, neglected, and unattractive, cannot be a difficult person for a handsome man to ensnare. RenÉe, besides, was a very ordinary woman—she had inherent need to cling to some one. It would certainly have bored Ercole had he been the creature she clung to, but the boredom would at least have saved him years of dangerous domestic friction, and a life of disagreements in which he did not always get the best of it.

As it was, mutual dissatisfaction came almost immediately. Very soon after their arrival in Ferrara they had begun to quarrel. Among the French women RenÉe had brought with her from France was her old governess, Madame de Soubise, whose leanings were strongly Protestant. She had instilled the same sympathies into her pupil, and a very short time after her arrival in Ferrara the new duchess was surrounded by a large number of persons professing the new religion. A good deal of her personal income also went in assisting French fugitives who happened to pass through the city. Both proceedings were objected to by Ercole. The presence of Protestants in his household constituted an actual danger to his own and his father’s position. The tenure of the Dukedom of Ferrara depended upon the maintenance of friendly relations with Rome and Germany. RenÉe’s monetary kindness to French fugitives he complained about as “inordinate and ill-considered expenses,” and since her allowance from France was very irregularly paid, this grievance had a certain rational basis. Nobody attached to the duchess’s personal service was Italian, a final discourtesy in her arrangements that added to the growing exasperation of her new relations. As regards the Protestantism of RenÉe’s household, no direct mention was made of it in Ercole’s objections. With the indirect methods of his family, he merely stated that the duchess had surrounded herself with a number of people unfit for the functions attributed to them. That certainly was true. A certain number of RenÉe’s so-called servants did absolutely nothing for their pay, save keep some lingering memories of her French home vivid in her thoughts. Consequently, in the first definite publication of friction between the newly married couple, most of the reasonable complaints were Ercole’s. They show, however, the rapidity with which these two had got upon each other’s nerves. Neither, at any stage of their intercourse, made the least attempt to adopt a conciliatory attitude.

RenÉe’s generosity, nevertheless, was the redemption of her character. For there is more than one kind of generosity. There is the careless output of a person chiefly feckless, and not desirous of uttering disagreeable refusals, and the deliberate, anxious, continuous assistance of a nature really capable of fretting for the distresses of other people. RenÉe’s generosity was essentially of this sort. The most prominent facts in the book of her daily expenses are sums given in some form of charity. She appears, indeed, to have been unable to refuse any cry for assistance, and all her life gave with equal pleasure either to Roman Catholics or to Protestants. Anne had been generous, but in the showy and semi-profitable manner so easy for great people. RenÉe’s generosity was entirely lovely and intuitive.

Concerning her attitude in the matter of her household arrangements, it is more difficult to guess what lay in her peevish spirit. Madame de Soubise had obviously brought her up—sub rosa—to a tentative liking for the new religion. But by character she belonged to the conservatives; she was supremely among those who consider that what has been good enough for their parents is good enough for them also. And Louise and Francis—of whom she stood in awe—were not likely to receive pleasantly the news that her religious soundness had become doubtful. At the beginning there are no statements suggesting that she was not fairly comfortable in the tenets she conformed to. It is possible, in fact, that the people of her entourage were originally chosen without intention of offence, from sheer obtuseness to perceive unsuitability. Then when it became evident that they caused annoyance to Ercole, it may have become a sulky pleasure to retain them.

Ercole and RenÉe were two personalities that ought never to have come together. Both were capable of pleasant relations with other people, but there existed between them the instinctive and intractable antipathy which almost every nature experiences against some one person in the world. It is an emotion outside the reach of argument and very nearly beyond control. And no person can flower into the best possibilities of character when confronted with another fundamentally antagonistic. In the presence of a mind closed to perceive any kind of graciousness and merit, only the worst of nature will rise uppermost, flung out in a despairing perversity, distress, and irritation. For the actual sweetness of their souls no two people capable only of mutual repugnance should even make an effort to live together. Good—bewildered and assaulted—shrivels like a frozen plant under the chilling air of interminable disparagement.

RenÉe, less than a year after her marriage, already wrote unhappy letters to France. She spoke in one of them of being badly treated, but of not expecting that the real truth about the matter would ever reach the king and queen. She mentioned that both her husband and her father-in-law nourished some grievance against her. Soon afterwards she fell ill, and for a short time Ercole’s repugnance lulled into vague compassion. He sent two bulletins every day to Paris, and mentioned, almost with a hint of pleasure, when she was well enough to leave her bed for a little while daily. Even after her recovery no quarrels are mentioned for some time. The duchess had become enceinte, and the fact in itself, where an heir was so urgently needed, yielded sufficient pleasure to bring about temporary toleration.

Nevertheless, irritation between husband and wife must have smouldered unceasingly, and after the birth of a daughter in November, 1531, contention flared once more into an open blaze between them. Madame de Soubise represented the duke’s new object of denunciation. A good deal of the turmoil of RenÉe’s existence, in fact, arose from the influence of her former governess. She was old enough to be the girl’s mother, and had lived sufficiently long in the world to know all the needful facts about life and character. RenÉe clung to her as the one friend familiar from childhood, and the older woman was in a position to have incalculably helped a rather dense nature in the first crucial months of marriage.

For reasons difficult to understand, she did exactly the opposite. Ercole loathed her, and at any cost desired to have her back in Paris. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been a simple matter, but the position of Madame de Soubise was not so straightforward as it seemed. The Ferrarese authorities knew perfectly that she acted as secret agent to the French king. Owing to this fact, dismissal was unpolitic: Ferrara could not afford to offend France. It is to Ercole’s credit that Madame de Soubise did not die a sudden death. The temptation to bring about an untimely ending must have been extraordinarily insistent.

To add to Ercole’s domestic discomfort, Madame de Soubise’s daughter was also among RenÉe’s ladies-in-waiting. About this time, in fact, she married Monsieur Pons, another member of the household, and the man whose later friendship with RenÉe was to fleck the solemnity of her character with an incongruous suggestion of scandal.

During the time that husband and wife were bitterly fighting out the question of Madame de Soubise, RenÉe gave birth to another child—the son so necessary to the welfare of the house. A second lull in hostilities followed. For the first time since she had come to Italy, Ercole’s wife had done a truly desirable and conciliatory thing—she had given an heir to the dukedom. A feeling of pleasure lightened the constant tension of Ercole’s establishment. Even the mother, conscious of being at last approved of, yielded to the warmth of a fugitive commendation and became almost frivolous. Her clothes, during the rejoicings that followed, were for once so sumptuous that all Ferrara talked of them.

Not long afterwards the old Duke Alphonso died, and Ercole became reigning Duke of Ferrara. Concerning his accession a curious incident is reported. After the religious ceremony of his inauguration, RenÉe met him at the entrance to the palace, where, it is said, in an outburst of mutual excitement and satisfaction, they fell into each other’s arms. For a moment the interests of husband and wife were identical. The motive for this passing concord was in itself unworthy enough, but it is curiously interesting as an example of how intensely married people are fortified, by the very nature of marriage itself, into some sort of fellowship and good feeling. The immense number of mutual interests should be in themselves sufficient to save any but the really vicious or abnormally unsuited from total disunion and antipathy.

But the impulse of an exultant moment rapidly chilled in the case of Ercole and his duchess. Madame de Soubise’s secret labours prevented any but the briefest pacification. And Ercole had not long been duke when he came to the conclusion that, even at the price of a break with France, the daily infliction of her person was no longer supportable. With as much tact as the circumstances permitted, he wrote to Francis I. upon the subject, and in the end received authority for her departure. But even so, difficulties arose about the actual journey, and she still continued long enough in Ferrara to negotiate one last unpleasantness for Ercole.

He went away for a short time, and during his absence Madame de Soubise subtly arranged with the French royalties that RenÉe should at last go on a visit to her own country. Ercole returned to find the invitation waiting for him. He was placed by it in a very awkward position. An unhappy wife, quivering to tell a tale of misery and ill-treatment, was not a politic person to send to her own people when, should it suit them, they possessed the power to make affairs very difficult for the husband. On the other hand, to refuse might be to rouse suspicion and displeasure.

Not entirely unperturbed, Ercole chose the second risk as the less dangerous of the two. In reply to the French invitation, he wrote that RenÉe had several small children to take care of, and that she was also still too feeble in health to undertake so long and dangerous a journey. The refusal came almost like a loss of all hope to RenÉe. Thought of it had been a sudden irradiating anticipation in the drear distastefulness of life. 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. After Madame de Soubise, therefore, had at last been sent from Italy, and all hope of RenÉe’s going home had been withdrawn, the latter must have experienced almost a sense of desolation. The easement of heart entailed by merely telling the hoarded mischances of her married life would have warmed her spirit like a cordial.

She did not naturally love Ercole better for getting rid of the woman who had been motherly to her all her days, and for having thwarted the one intense longing which it was in his power to gratify. Their antagonism quieted not a whit through the departure of RenÉe’s governess; Ercole had rid himself of one grievance only to find another grow more hardy.

Its first public demonstration took place during a Good Friday service in the church of Ferrara. As the cross was being raised for adoration, a little singer, Zanetto, belonging to the duchess’s service, suddenly walked out of the building, making blasphemous comments in a voice of penetrating clarity. He was arrested that evening, and trouble and danger swept into RenÉe’s household. She herself had for some time past secretly belonged to the Protestant party. Ercole’s hope that his wife would fall into a weary acquiescence of conduct, when the influence of Madame de Soubise had been withdrawn, ended in inevitable failure. RenÉe was disastrously obstinate, and in addition, the doctrines of Calvin had already become too deeply engrafted in her ever to be really uprooted. Religion was an urgent necessity to her.

She was an unloved woman, and consequently the other world had never slunk into vagueness through the engrossing sufficiencies of this one. The appeal made to her by the new religion is easy to understand. Her little soul was narrow, but it was at the same time eager, and temperamentally attuned to austere and dreary dogmas. RenÉe belonged to the class who prefer to take life sadly—a gloomy religion, hedged in by appalling terrors, met the needs of her character far more closely than the shifty and cheerful methods of Roman Catholicism could ever have done.

Before the Good Friday incident Calvin had secretly been to see her, had preached to her, and exhorted her. No man was better fitted to keep a hold over RenÉe; for Calvin was not merely the great preacher of a new religion, he was an impassioned and autocratic schoolmaster. When later he controlled the town of Geneva, it became impossible to indulge in even the mildest private weaknesses. Domestic conduct fell under the jurisdiction of a council, which inflicted penalties for the least undesirable idiosyncrasy. It was at Geneva, for instance, that Calvin had a gambler set in the stocks for an hour, with his playing-cards hung round his neck; the inventor of a masquerade was forced to ask pardon for it on his knees in the cathedral; a man guilty of perjury they hoisted on a ladder and kept there for several hours, his right hand fastened to the top; while a man and woman, whose love lay under the stigma of impropriety, were paraded through the streets of the city for the abuse of virtuous horror. Calvin flung immense energy into the conversion of RenÉe. As an individual he thought little of her, but converts among the socially great were momentous for the growth of the cause. RenÉe, moreover, gave awed and pliant assent to the uncompromising preacher’s teaching, until the arrest of her singer for blasphemy brought the sudden sharpness of danger into her household. This created panic. Not actually for herself—while Francis I. remained King of France she relied implicitly upon French protection—but for the people of her entourage. Zanetto, placed upon the rack, broke down at the third twist of the screw, and a list of names poured out of his lips. They were all persons employed in the duchess’s service. Several had already been arrested as accomplices, though concerning one of them, usually thought to be Calvin, there is considerable mystery. The arrests had been made by Ercole’s orders, chiefly, it would appear, to exasperate his wife.

He owed her a fresh sword-thrust. This public religious scandal constituted a really serious danger for him. The Vatican had some time previously realized that the new heresy must be exterminated if it were not to become a growing danger to the power at Rome. Apart from this, RenÉe had been behaving with an inimical cunning difficult for any man to pass over good-humouredly. She had been writing secret letters to the Pope, supplicating him to have the prisoners delivered out of the power of Ercole into the authority of France.

In retaliation, Ercole had Cardillan, treasurer and controller of finances to RenÉe ever since her arrival in Ferrara, imprisoned with the others. Few things could have hurt her more, and the scenes that took place between the two over the Zanetto business must again have driven them into unforgettable personalities. In the matter of personal interviews Ercole no doubt had the best of it. RenÉe did not possess the gift of facile utterance; her face alone shows a mind easily disconcerted. But her stolid silence would have held as much inner rancour as the other’s violence. Beyond question, when roused, Ercole frightened her, but not sufficiently to abate forlorn contrariness. All he could achieve was to make her hate him a little more desperately than before, and to fling her with renewed tenacity upon the policy of aggravation. According to current rumour, Ercole beat her. The allegation has not been proved, but she was the type of woman liable to ill-treatment, and it is more than likely that he did. Certainly no respect was enforced towards her, for RenÉe, writing to Margaret of Navarre, complained that the Inquisitor whom she interviewed concerning the arrested heretics spoke to her with so much contempt and insolence, that the other would have been dumbfounded had she been present.

The situation of husband and wife at that period could not possibly have been worse. Ercole’s enflamed resentment also found utterance in a letter. It was written to the Ferrarese envoy at the French court. Extreme caution in statements conveyed to paper formed part of Italian education, and the plain truthfulness of the duke’s expressions could only have issued from a spirit choking with a sense of injury. He wrote: “If it were not for the respect I owe to the king, I should certainly not have suffered such an insult, and should have shown madame the deep resentment I feel.”

The bustling distress and excitement roused by the heretics nevertheless fizzled out. That a scandal of this sort should take serious proportions would have brought very evil notoriety upon the Ferrarese court. Cardillan was released and banished; the other prisoners conveniently permitted to escape. Ercole still gained his main object—the satisfaction of depriving RenÉe of another of her French attendants. Probably husband and wife hated each other a little more keenly than before, but to all appearances another storm had passed over. For the two still continued to share one bedroom. They must in consequence have enjoyed intervals of ordinary conversation and apparent friendliness. Moreover, they had children. In all the divergences of their interests, there remained some that could not be separated. After the sharp encounter brought about by the unwisdom of Zanetto, RenÉe gave birth to another infant. Household trivialities provided permanent groundwork for amiable bedroom discussions, and, however apathetically, they must at least have gone through intervals of superficial good-humour.

Outwardly, at any rate, there occurred another lull in the fighting. The court removed into the country, and eased everything by an out-of-door existence. Marot, who had been sent by Margaret of Navarre to RenÉe for safety, made light, enticing verses upon the ladies he transiently delighted in. He also wrote a sonnet to RenÉe herself, that, besides containing one line of exquisite musicalness—“O la douceur des douceurs feminines”—shows how unconcealed the failure of her marriage had become. It suggests, in fact, that Ercole’s behaviour was publicly abusive and unpardonable. He wrote—

The rest is uninteresting. But the reference to Ercole, allowing for prejudice, could not have been uttered, one imagines, wholly without justification. No fundamentally pleasant person could be referred to so uncompromisingly as steeped in hateful violences. Marot sided deeply with RenÉe, and wrote some additional verses to Margaret, which he told her openly were intended to convey a picture of the wrongs and sufferings to which the duchess was subjected. All the lines dealing directly with the subject read as if sincere and vivid, while the note of gravity was struck in the poignant bluntness of the opening verse. Marot meant the queen to realize that he handled something unmistakably and acutely tragic—

Few phrases could expose more explicitly a brutal husband. Allowing for exaggeration, Ercole obviously behaved like a boor, making his wife’s meals, when he was present, little else than a weeping martyrdom. RenÉe certainly had the temperament to cry often and easily, though not tempestuously; but at Ferrara the vague-looking eyes seem to have possessed ample reason for being constantly and bitterly watered. Marot, of course, had neither the opportunity nor the desire to dwell upon intervals of passivity. 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. The woman who understood Michelangelo could scarcely fail to grasp the meanings of lesser intelligences. But the minor gaieties she had not; the quaint, swift humour with which subtle women sweep away tension would never have lightened Vittoria’s solid arguments. She wrote poetry—very insincere and laboured—but she possessed no imagination. The gravity of existence, and the fact that each soul in it is born to exist eternally, clothed her thoughts with an almost restricting austerity. Few jokes would have sounded suitable in her presence. She appeared too exquisitely reasonable, cool, and punctiliously magnificent for any descent into the ridiculous.

Undoubtedly Vittoria’s presence eased domestic friction, though it is doubtful, notwithstanding, whether RenÉe liked her. There are letters between Vittoria and Ercole, but none to be found between the two women. Vittoria Colonna was inherently good, but she was also triumphant, pampered, flattered, and successful. When she came to Ferrara she was received with a voluntary public ovation. Flanked by the mental sumptuousness of this efficient creature, RenÉe’s insignificance was accentuated; the contrast dragged the whole extent of her ineffectuality into light. And RenÉe, almost meek in appearance, with her “weakened body,” as Brantome put it, and her vague-looking face, was not meek in disposition. She forgot at no time of her life that but for the Salic law she would have sat upon the throne of France.

There is no statement against the existence of affection between the two women, but the probabilities are not for it. There is far more likelihood that Vittoria got upon her hostess’s nerves, and chilled her by flaming, for all her disadvantages of years, with a sort of opulent beauty that intensified the pallid ugliness of the foreign duchess. Small wonder that RenÉe turned to the sympathy offered by Monsieur Pons; small wonder that she permitted the elegant and amiable Frenchman to make inroads upon her affections.

Monsieur Pons represents the solitary scandal of RenÉe’s existence. Some writers do not like Monsieur Pons. They desire the page unblemished by this warm and doubtful incident. To them RenÉe must stand as a blameless martyr to the cause of Protestantism, and this friendship confuses the picture. In such hands Monsieur Pons fades into an insignificance not sufficiently substantial for impropriety.

The effacement is entirely to be regretted. Monsieur Pons was the one wholly tender circumstance in RenÉe’s life. It is ridiculous to pretend that she did not love him. Her harassed heart, unaccustomed to being besieged, surrendered naturally to sympathetic advances from a fascinating man of her own nationality. He made love to her discreetly, mildly, and, no doubt, indirectly, while the woman warmed under it before she realized the fearsome pleasantness of the sensation. They may actually have had sympathy of temperament. Monsieur Pons also may really have experienced a slight compassionate tenderness for the frail, misshapen little duchess, who was openly ill-treated by a lusty and unfaithful husband. It is difficult to probe Monsieur Pons’s motives. Policy is rarely absent from the mind of those who deal with powerful persons. He was upon admirable terms with his own wife. So was RenÉe, notwithstanding a friendship for the husband exhilarated by a hint of something just a little more alive and poignant. Genuine impropriety, one feels assured, there was not. Yet to those anxious for scandal the duchess’s letters would in themselves be considered sufficient to take away any woman’s character. They are personal, intimate, and interwoven with unspoken statements. Actually they have charm—the charm that issues when a woman with some grace of mind desires her letter to be chiefly a persuasive form of flirtation. The word “love” is not mentioned in them, but for all that they are undeniably love-letters. They are, in addition, the love-letters of a woman not yet muddled by any uncertainty as to the recipient’s reciprocity.

It must be admitted that RenÉe, had she behaved with strict decorum, would not have written these documents. Married persons forfeit the licence to indulge in a certain kind of correspondence. But there is no reason to suppose that because a woman writes a delicately flirtatious letter she has any evil thoughts at the back of it, or that the relations of the two will at any time transgress the limits of an audacious friendliness. The mistake is usually made, though few things show less acquaintance with human nature.

RenÉe of Ferrara was temperamentally incapable of the scandal some of her biographers have foisted upon her. Putting it upon the lowest basis, she had neither sufficient courage nor sufficient pliancy for unfaithfulness. The distinguishing trait of RenÉe’s character was her incapacity ever to go the extreme length in anything. There are no tenable grounds, besides, for supposing that she desired to forget right living for Monsieur Pons and passion. She was not an ardent woman; the dull face expresses nothing so unmistakable as a wistful apathy and a bad circulation.

From the internal evidence of the letters themselves, one finds a romantic and sentimental friendship, or, phrased more colloquially, a flirtation. But the essence of a flirtation is to play at being more than it is in reality—to hover skilfully about borders neither player would really care to trespass. Not a phrase in RenÉe’s letters reveals any desire to thrust aside cautious boundaries. She had also perfect knowledge of Monsieur Pons’s comfortable domestic circumstances. Madame de Pons was her friend, the closest woman companion remaining to her. What is more than likely is that she and Madame Pons—madame with a finger secretly to her nose—enjoyed a perfect understanding as to RenÉe’s relations with the husband. They agreed together in worship of Monsieur Pons, while he on his side was supposed to love them both—though RenÉe, of course, with discretion, with reverence, with the distance that her rank necessitated.

Madame Pons was safe; she could afford this dismal and lonely woman some farcical illusions. RenÉe, in consequence, was allowed her pathetic share in Monsieur Pons. The real, warm, comfortable possession could only be the wife’s, but RenÉe felt that she also had her small, vague place; she was included; she was dear to Monsieur Pons; she had her right of confidences, and perhaps—who knows?—in certain ways, might convey an appeal his wife lacked possession of. The wanderings of a heart ill-fed are always wild and a little tragic.

The letters were written during a diplomatic mission to France, upon which Monsieur Pons had been sent by the duke. They contain intimate accounts of little everyday doings, put down with a woeful disregard of grammar, and yet with something approaching literary instinct. Reading them, one discovers that the duchess was not an entirely stupid woman. Without possessing the least intellectual capacity, she shows a gift of irony, of graceful utterance, and of oblique suggestion that is totally unexpected.

She says in one, “If this letter is badly written, it is because of the place and the hour, for I write in bed, and I began so early that I can scarcely see clearly; but I hope to write more every day until the Basque starts again. I began yesterday, the very day he arrived.... The wee doggie came, and fondled me a thousand times, in betweenwhiles seizing the pen with his little teeth, after which he came and settled himself on my arm, with the pen under his head, and so went to sleep, and I too, to keep him company, for I don’t know which of us needed it most.” This little pet dog, and another, evidently given to her by Monsieur Pons, figure several times in the correspondence. She writes again, “The Basque will give you an account of your wife’s state of health, of our little company, and, above all, of the wee doggies who still, as always, sleep with me, and refuse to leave my side.”

How much Monsieur Pons was missed, is said many times and in diverse ways. She conveys it very prettily upon one occasion, in the statement, “Lesleu was saying that since you had gone the house seems deserted. He is not the only one who thinks this. Several others say the same, and there are some who are only too well aware of it.” In French the meaning is both more finely and more definitely transmitted. In another place she says, “We need you to bring back the joy you took away with your departure.”

Madame Pons gave birth to a boy during her husband’s absence, and RenÉe writes that it resembles its father in chin and mouth, adding immediately that she had kissed the little lips “two or three” times. She also says, “He has such a sweet expression; everybody likes to look at him. He does not sulk like the others.” His mouth, she states, is infinitesimal. Later, when his wife continued very unwell, RenÉe wrote, “I beg you to try and return before the winter, as much for her as for me, of whom I will say nothing, for I think less of my own troubles than that you should be successful in your undertaking.”

There were no concealments between Monsieur Pons and herself concerning Ercole. She tells the diplomatist that her visit to France had once more been broached by the ambassador, who had received the usual answer, “when the weather permitted.” With delicious irony the duchess adds, “I think he means when the wind carries me.” At all times she was indifferent to her husband’s mistresses. And she tells Monsieur Pons, “Monday, which was the eve of St. John, I took him (the ambassador) to the mountain where monsieur was having supper with the Calcaquine.... The day after the birth of your son I had supper with the cardinal and monsieur, and the day of St. John I had supper in the ‘bosquet’ with monsieur and the ambassador.” The Contessa Calcaquine was at that time Ercole’s mistress. In the continuation of daily details RenÉe makes it quite clear how little she enjoyed “monsieur’s” society. She had been asked by him to join, if she cared to, a little party spending the evening on the hill—presumably at the contessa’s. But, she says, with an undercurrent of wider meaning than the actual words express, “I made the excuse that it would be too late.”

RenÉe implied no objection upon the grounds of the hostess. She mentions quite gaily a visit to one of Ercole’s ladies, concluding, “That is all the fresh air I have had since you left, but I am waiting till your wife is up again, and then we shall go out together, and with all the more pleasure because you will be with us.”

It is deeply to be regretted that all these letters, unknown to RenÉe, were intercepted by the duke, though he must have been interested at the almost contemptuous calm of his wife’s attitude towards him personally. RenÉe wondered why the answers from France were so few. She had no suspicion that her lengthy correspondence lay locked up in the care of her husband, and never journeyed across the Alps at any time. Ercole, secretive by nature and by training, made no remarks about these intercepted letters. With a house full of spies, he stood in a position to know how flimsy the flirtation really was. When Monsieur Pons returned, he allowed the same intimacy as previously. Only very soon afterwards RenÉe was sent into the country and kept there, away from her friend.

Then Ercole, considering the moment opportune, got rid of both wife and husband. A story of an extremely mischievous nature was foisted upon them. The charges were, in fact, dangerous for two foreigners in the power of a man hating them both. RenÉe’s household became shaken to the depths with fear and excitement, and Monsieur and Madame Pons fled almost immediately to Venice. The action was no more than wise. Ercole had called Madame Pons “an infernal fury.” Any possible extremity would have been proceeded to, if even a fraction of the charges stated could have been proved against them.

The months that followed were among the most dismal of RenÉe’s life. The flight of her friend chilled her to the marrow of her being. Realization could not be avoided. She was over thirty, and the bitter sense of being suddenly old and weary is unavoidable in any woman brusquely abandoned by the man who has kept her young with kindnesses. All the vaporous flimsiness of her hold upon Monsieur Pons lay brutally exposed and patent. His wife had got into difficulties; his business lay immediately with the welfare of his wife. No outside woman existed in the intimate agitation of private affairs. RenÉe was simply dropped like some acquaintance grown needless, and husband, wife, and the baby, whose mouth RenÉe had described as so incredibly small, practically withdrew from her existence.

The next crucial circumstance—perhaps the most crucial of RenÉe’s long and uncomfortable life—was her encounter with the Inquisition. This supreme test of RenÉe’s character came when Paul III. died and Julius III. succeeded to the throne of Rome. Paul had been mild, gentle, and favourable to some reformation in the ways of the Church. Contarini, in a letter, spoke of him as “this our good old man.” His successor had no leanings towards change; mercy sent no gentle warmth through his system. The heresy practised by the Duchess of Ferrara had been notorious for a considerable period; her household constituted a sanctuary for heretics; she permitted herself Protestant preachers and Protestant services. Her attendance at mass had ceased, and she was accused, though it seems unjustly, of eating meat on Fridays. Ercole’s position, consequently, at this time was far from easy, the basis of his political security requiring that he should maintain peace with the authorities of Rome. RenÉe’s new religion endangered his duchy. She either did not understand the political risks of what she persisted in doing, or did not care. But Ercole, alarmed as well as furious, wrote bluntly to the King of France, saying what he thought of her. The unburdenment was no longer incautious. Francis I. had been dead some time. Henry II. felt no obligation to be bothered by an elderly woman whom he did not know, and whose claims upon him were negligible. Himself an intolerant Roman Catholic, he wrote to her upon receiving Ercole’s letter, and explained unambiguously that should she be relying upon the support of France, her confidence was founded upon false anticipations. He did more—he sent the famous Inquisitor Orriz, with orders to use “rigour and severity,” sooner than return to France without having reduced the elderly lady to a proper religious disposition.

The letter in which Orriz received directions shows a curious method of thinking. RenÉe was exhorted to return more easily to the Mother Church, “by consideration of the great favours which God has granted to her, and among others that of being the issue of the purest blood of the most Christian house of France, where no monster has ever existed.” The sentence ended with the statement that should she “choose to remain in stubbornness and pertinacity, it would displease the king as much as anything in the world, and would cause him entirely to forget the friendship, with all the observances and demonstrations of a good nephew, he hating nothing with a greater hatred than all those of the reprobate sects, whose mortal enemy he was.”

The following paragraph was still more plain spoken, and might well have sent a shiver through the hard-pressed duchess. Henry wrote, “And if, after such remonstrances and persuasions, together with those which the said Doctor Orriz shall employ of his own way and profession, to make her know the truth, and the difference there is between light and darkness, it shall appear that he is unable by gentle means to gain her and to reclaim her, he shall take counsel with the said lord duke as to what can possibly be done in the way of rigour and severity to bring her to reason.”

RenÉe’s position had at last become dire and dangerous. She stood with none to help her, pressed about by a crowd of enemies. From the moment Orriz arrived in Ferrara her life became a nightmare. When he chose to preach, she had to listen; when he questioned, she had to answer; when he threatened, she had to preserve quiescence. Morning, noon, and evening, the menacing presence of the French Inquisitor kept her shaken, sickened, lacerated. His arguments could only have been torture to her, for pitted against the subtlety of the trained heretic-catcher, RenÉe’s mentality would have been the incarnation of incoherent feebleness. Her person, moreover, made no appeal to mercy; ugly, drear, and wrinkled, she did not even possess dramatic dignity—only tears and an obstreperous dismalness of manner. Gradually, however, Orriz was to discover that dismalness did not necessarily accompany weakness. He could make her cry, but that was about all he could do with her. His own temper must have quickly sharpened. The position left him ridiculous. Presently the Inquisitor and the husband took counsel together. RenÉe’s unexpected fortitude proved equally serious for both. Ercole had given his word to the Pope that the lady should return duly submissive to the fold she outraged. RenÉe had got to be mastered somehow. Words left her tearfully obstinate—there remained nothing but harsher measures. Ercole himself wrote in a letter, “We kept her shut up for fifteen days, with only people who had no sort of Lutheran tendencies to wait upon her. We also threatened to confiscate all her property.”

RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA
FROM A DRAWING IN THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE