A favorite's husband.—The natural course of things.—Italian respectability.—The three brothers, Francesco, Ferdinand, and Pietro.—The ladies of the Court.—Francesco's temper—his avarice—and wealth.—Frolicsome days at Florence.—The Cardinal recommends respectability.—The Duke ensures it.—A Court dialogue.

Whatever considerations of decency may have at first thrown some measure of concealment around Francesco's connection with Bianca, their operation lasted but a very short time. The unfortunate Giovanna very soon found, not only that the place, which she should have occupied in her husband's affection, was already given away to another, but that most even of the external tokens of respect and homage which belonged to her position were usurped by the same audacious rival. The ascendancy exercised by Bianca over the weak mind of Francesco soon began to make itself manifest. It seems to have been at an early period of their connection, that she induced him solemnly to promise, "before a sacred image," that should a time come, when they should both be free, he would marry her. The promise originally made, that Francesco should use his influence to obtain the reversal of the sentence passed by the tribunals of the Republic against Bianca and her husband, was also duly performed, but ineffectually. The Senate of Venice refused either to pardon the culprits, or to restore the six thousand crowns of Bianca's inheritance.[151]

One, who stood in the envied and distinguished position of Bonaventuri, however, could easily dispense with his wife's fortune. The husband of the sovereign's mistress was in no great want of six thousand crowns. Bonaventuri became, naturally, one of the distinguished members of the Florentine "jeunesse dorÉe;" and soon showed himself fitted by nature to shine in such society, despite his clerkly bringing up.

There was at that time among the ornaments of the society of Florence a young and beautiful widow, Cassandra Bongianni; who was well inclined to avail herself to any extent of the freedom from restraint such a position secured to her. But Cassandra Bongianni had been "nata" Cassandra Ricci, and that proud and powerful family had intimated to the gay widow their intention not to permit any scandal to be cast on the family name by irregularities of hers. And the warning had been already significantly enough enforced by the assassination of two pretenders to the widow's favour. A Cavalcanti[152] and a Del Caccia had fallen in the dangerous pursuit, stabbed in the streets of Florence. Here then was an enterprise worthy of the new aspirant for fashionable distinction. Perhaps he imagined that two murders committed unavailingly might have induced the Ricci to abandon the task of protecting their kinswoman's fair fame at such a cost. Still more probably he relied on the protection of court favour. In any case he became the known lover of the dangerous widow.

But one night[153] as he was returning to his home in the Via Maggio, accompanied by two servants, he was assailed by twelve men at the foot of the Trinity bridge, over the Arno, which he had to pass. One of the servants fled; the other was struck down dead at the first onset. Bonaventuri however succeeded in fighting his way across the bridge, killing one of his assailants, and was near his own house, when he fell, and was dispatched by the daggers of the Ricci bravos.

Such an occurrence in the streets of Florence was very far from rare. An hundred and eighty–six assassinations took place within the city in the first eighteen months after the death of Cosmo.[154] So the death of the favorite's husband excited but little notice. The murder of Cassandra in her bed on the same night by certain masked men, who entered the chamber and performed the execution as quietly as if it had been a judicial sentence, was more notable. But she had had her two previous warnings; and the "honour" of the Ricci family was thus made safe.

Bianca demanded from the duke vengeance on her husband's murderers; and it was promised. But the measures taken for that purpose were so evidently such as to give the culprits every facility for escape, that public opinion accused Francesco of having been privy to the crime. And it is asserted that he confessed as much to a certain court chaplain,[155] one Giambattista Confetti. But if, as seems probable, this was really so, it is difficult to suppose, that Bianca was not equally an accomplice before the fact in the murder. The demand for justice was a matter of course. Not to have made it, would have almost amounted to an avowal of at least approbation of the deed. The complete subjection of Francesco's mind to his mistress, makes it exceedingly improbable that he would have connived at such a design without imparting it to her. And the only motive, that either of them could have had for such a crime, beyond the possible wish to get rid of one whose excesses and ill–conduct threw scandal on his connection with the court, must be sought in that promise, which Bianca had extorted from the Duke, to take effect in case they should both be freed from the bonds of marriage. The removal of Bonaventuri overcame what was likely otherwise to have proved the more insuperable obstacle to this event.

For the unhappy Giovanna, crushed beneath the audacious effrontery of her rival, languishing from the neglect and open indifference of her husband, solitary and apart amid the festivities of a court, whose loose morals were to her Austrian correctness an abomination, and whose recent sovereignty her Austrian pride despised; the mother of daughters only to her husband's great regret, and increased dislike; of unamiable, reserved manners, and of unlovely appearance,—this unhappy Giovanna might very possibly, (even without any assistance from such means as both Francesco and Bianca knew very well how to avail themselves of, if need were,) not continue long to be an obstacle in their way.

Meanwhile the young Princes Ferdinando and Pietro were becoming of an age to exert an influence on the family history and fortunes. Ferdinando the Cardinal, had lived chiefly at Rome. At an early age he had already acquired the reputation of a well educated and well informed man, a dexterous and prudent statesman, and a well–intentioned and respectable prince.

Respectability, though many people are inclined to deem it a specially British production, is yet now as three hundred years ago far more specially an Italian virtue. No people in the world care so much what is said of them by those around them. It is true that much is respectable there, which would not be able to be respected here. But this is only because all Italian society is more fully and unanimously agreed on considering that seeming is more important than being. With us, respectability must have no chinks nor crannies in its surface, through which peering eyes can discover anything derogatory to its character. But the Italian world declines to peer. Let only a good will to show a fair outside be apparent, and the world will industriously avoid looking beyond that outside. The state will overlook your breaking the laws if you will seem to respect them. The Church does not mind your infidelity if you will make believe to believe. Society will take no notice of your neglect of social duties, if you will not fling your defiance in its face. Break the commandments as much as you will. But observe the "convenances" religiously.

Now Ferdinando was above all a respectable prince, holding an eminently respectable position; and it was his great misfortune to have two brothers, who were both audaciously, though in different degrees, and according to their different natures, the reverse.

Francesco, his eider brother, assuredly did not fail in achieving respectability from any too great openness or sincerity of character. For a more dissembling nature has rarely perhaps existed. His hypocrisy frequently exhibited itself in traits of so strangely profound a kind, as to have the appearance of a hope to deceive either himself or his Creator. For he would practise them upon his own confederates in crime. Nor was ever any one less indifferent to the estimate his fellows might form of him. The honour of the Medicean name, as he understood the meaning of that phrase, was very dear to him. Yet he made himself the common fable of the courts of Italy. He contrived to earn the contempt of every crowned head in Europe; and was constantly giving rise to that "scandal" which is a respectable Italian's greatest horror. Strong passions, and an obstinate will exaggerated by the possession of absolute power into something at times very like partial insanity, joined to great weakness of all the higher intellectual faculties, and a profound ignorance of the nature, beauty, and value of real worth and nobleness, led him into all this mischief, and were a source of never–ending sorrow and trouble to the Cardinal.

Pietro, the younger brother, was almost an equal thorn in his prudent and respectably ambitious brother's side. His was a nature as unlike as possible to that of either the Duke or the Cardinal; and was not without some indications, that under better circumstances, it might have contained in it the elements of a finer character than either of theirs. As it was, Pietro was an unmitigated and avowed scamp; the centre and leader of all the most profligate young men in the city; the terror of quiet citizens, the insulter of the impotent laws which he braved, the despair of the Cardinal as a disgrace to the family, and the dread of the Duke from his constant and insatiable demands for money.[156]

Cosmo, the old duke, died in 1574; but before he went, he provided his scapegrace son with a wife, after a fashion, which unfortunately had not the effect of reclaiming him from his wild courses. There was living in the court a certain Eleonora di Garzia, a niece of Cosmo's first wife, Eleonora di Toledo. She was pretty, and pleased Cosmo's eye. But being of a noble Spanish family, with interest at the Spanish court, the "convenances" had to be assiduously attended to. So when it appeared one day that Eleonora was likely to become a mother, the exemplary sovereign and excellent father, suddenly struck with the idea that marriage was just the thing to steady his runagate son Pietro, handed over the lady to the young man, and bade him marry her.[157] Pietro obediently did so; and the lady's "honour," and Cosmo's "honour," and the Toledo family "honour" was all "saved" as bright as ever; which was wholly satisfactory to all those honourable persons. But beyond this very desirable result, the well–imagined arrangement was not found to answer. Pietro led a worse life than ever; and Eleonora had no inclination to be a faithful wife to a husband she rarely saw. But Cosmo went to his grave under the dome of St. Lorenzo, with his honour saved, and left his fatherly management to work to what results it might.

There were thus five ladies belonging to the Medicean family party at the time of Cosmo's death. 1. His widow Camilla Martelli. 2. Francesco's wife, poor Joan of Austria. 3. The gay and dashing widow bewitched, Isabella Orsini. 4. Pietro's neglected but equally gay wife, Eleonora. And, 5. Bianca Capello.

Poor Camilla was very shortly eliminated, being sentenced by the new Grand–duke to perform suttee, by being buried alive in a monastery; where he with inveterate hatred kept her imprisoned during his whole life, notwithstanding the reiterated intercessions of the Cardinal.

The position of his own wife, Giovanna, was not much better. She led a lonely life in her own apartments, treated with all but insult by the courtiers, who lavished on Bianca the homage which follows the dispenser of court favours.

Remained the three younger ladies, the ornaments of Francesco's court, the cynosure of Florentine eyes, the promoters and centre of all festivities, and the devisers of all sorts of diversions and frolic schemes. The general licence of the manners of the time, the high social position of the fair bevy, and the special dissoluteness and neglect of their natural protectors, permitted them to push their sport unchecked very considerably beyond the boundary line, which separates venial levity from conduct that leaves permanent and ineffaceable stains behind it. Isabella had long since "thrown her cap over the roofs," to use the classic French phrase—aye, over the topmost cupola of the Duomo. Paolo Giordano Orsini was pursuing his own not very dissimilar course at Rome, and took but little heed of the almost unknown wife, who was off his hands under the care of her own family; and Isabella had ingratiated herself with her brother Francesco in the manner most acceptable to him, by taking kindly to Bianca from the first;[158] the more so as she was the only one of his family who had ever done so. Pietro's young wife, Eleonora, showed every disposition to follow to the full extent the example he set her. And Bianca, though her doings do not appear to have at any time taken such a shape as to give Francesco any cause for jealousy, was ready to go all lengths with the others of the trio as far as lavish extravagance, festivities of which the details were more or less unfit to meet the scrutiny of the public eye, and general "emancipation" from "prejudice," were concerned.

So that the Grand Duke Francesco found himself at the head of a somewhat skittish court; a Capua of the renaissance, which was beginning to attract unfavourable notice from the other courts of Italy. When the pot chances to be a shade blacker than usual, the kettle, we know, is ever loudest in abuse of it. Besides, the disorders of the Tuscan court seem to have had a certain Tom–and–Jerry flavour about them, which greatly scandalised and disgusted many Highnesses, Eminences, and Excellencies of different degrees of Illustriousness and Serenity, who would not have minded a few decently veiled assassinations or any amount of respectably quiet poisonings. And Francesco, who flattered himself, very mistakenly, that by dint of a certain dose of Louis–Onze–like devoutness, he had contrived to keep character enough for one, was painfully conscious of the fact that he assuredly had not any to spare for covering the deficiencies of others.

Francesco, moreover, was not a man of a festive disposition. On the contrary, he was almost always under the shadow of a black and unwholesome melancholy. Not that he abstained from excess in many ways. Indeed, all the habits of his life were especially marked by the absence of all moderation. But a savage and ungenial nature showed itself in his pleasures as in his more serious moments. His violence of ill–temper, and sombre suspicious moodiness, must often have taxed to the utmost all Bianca's powers of dissimulation, and all her forbearance. The lot, which she sacrificed fair fame, peace of mind, and ease of conscience to attain, was one which few would have endured without flinching, had it been awarded to them to bear it. All the contemporary accounts represent Bianca's powers of fascination and persuasion to have been remarkable. And she had need of them all to soothe the ill–governed mind, and calm the half–insane violences of the Grand Duke's savage moods.

These had of late years been growing on him. He had no child to be his heir; and this was a constant source of brooding discontent and melancholy. His wife, Giovanna, had given birth to several infants; but they were all daughters. Bianca had never presented him with a child. To Francesco it was an odious and intolerable thought that either of his brothers should be the successor to his throne. And it was as much a matter of repining to him that Bianca was childless, as that his wife should not have given him an heir. A subsequent marriage legitimises a child born out of wedlock, according to the Romish code. Failing other means, pontifical dispensations were always at hand to help orthodox and Church–loving princes over such difficulties. And Francesco would have deemed a son by Bianca almost as desirable as one by his legitimate wife. But the years went on, and he continued without either.

All this contributed, as may be easily imagined, to make Bianca's task a hard one, and her life a continued series of anxieties, contrivances, plottings, and machinations.

But Francesco had another passion, which led him to look with a discontented eye on the disorders and excesses of his court,—his avarice. He, like his father, Cosmo, was rich, far beyond what might have been supposed, from his rank and position among the sovereigns of Europe. No mode of extracting money from his subjects was left untried by him. Venal pardons, excessive taxation, and wholesale confiscations, helped to fill his coffers. But he derived still larger revenues from the trading speculations which both he and Cosmo carried on in almost every part of Europe. There was hardly one of the great commercial centres of the time, where the Grand Duke of Florence had not a share in some banking concern. He was also interested as a partner in a great variety of speculations of various kinds. And besides all this, he traded largely with ships of his own in grain, wool, pepper and other spices, silk and leather.

The vast wealth thus amassed he used in purchasing by large loans the good–will and seeming consideration of the courts of Paris and Madrid. In both he was despised and disliked. But both were so accustomed to look upon him as a squeezeable money–dealer, that we find the French court absolutely making jealous complaints[159] of the amount he had furnished to that of Spain.

All these circumstances combined to make the mood of Francesco dangerous to those about him in the years which immediately followed his father's death. Don Pietro's recklessly scandalous life, and much worse still his constant demands for money, annoyed him. The remonstrances and preachments of the Cardinal Ferdinando from Rome irritated him. But Francesco was perfect as a dissembler. No man or woman was his confidant. Not even to Bianca did he show any sign that his ill–humour was rising to a point above its usual mark.

So the reckless holiday–keeping court circle spun on in their usual course around him. Isabella and Eleonora were busy with their free–lance captains, and court pages. Bianca was hoarding money to send to her greedy family at Venice, or was holding secret council with some philtre–dealer or black–art professor of one sort or another. Pietro was wilder, more lawless, and audacious in his debaucheries than ever. And the highly respectable Ferdinand was anxiously, and almost despairingly, watching them all from Rome, while they were continually throwing down, by the disreputableness of their lives, the edifice of the family greatness, which he was ever laboriously and dexterously scheming to build up.

It must be admitted that his respectable Eminence the Cardinal had enough to provoke and embitter him with his relatives. He and Bianca had from the first been declared enemies. He deplored his brother's weakness in becoming enamoured of this designing Venetian woman. He was indignant at the publicity Francesco had permitted his connection with her to assume. He remonstrated again and again with him on the impropriety of allowing her to have the influence in matters of government which it was notorious she exercised, and on the impolicy of exposing himself to the contempt and ridicule of every court in Europe on her account. But his exhortations had only had the effect of producing a state of enmity between Francesco and himself, which Bianca is accused of having used all her art to perpetuate and envenom.[160]

Such was the state of things in the Medicean domestic circle in the summer of the year 1576; when the working together of all these passions, and all these ill–conditioned and depraved wills culminated in one of those catastrophes which have rendered the name of Medici infamous throughout all time, and made it a beacon to warn off mankind from any approach towards that condition of social system which rendered the production of such hideous phenomena possible.

The Cardinal Ferdinand, though rarely seen in Florence, kept himself accurately and minutely informed of all that passed in his brother's court there. No nunnery wall was scaled by Don Pietro, no masked night excursion planned by Donna Isabella, no assignation made by Donna Eleonora, no secret colloquy held with some scoundrel black–art quack and poison–dealer by Donna Bianca, no fresh outrage on his murmuring subjects committed by the Duke, without speedy and detailed information thereof reaching the much provoked Cardinal in his Roman palace. And whether it so happened, that tidings of some more flagrant indecency than usual had reached his Eminence just then, or whether it were merely that the last drop had made the cup run over, it would seem that Ferdinando—(who, to do him justice, never permitted[161] his resentment against his brother to stand in the way of his efforts to support the family interest, and to save Francesco from the consequences of his own ill–conduct)—made, about the time mentioned, some communication to the Duke, urging on him the absolute necessity of putting some stop to the scandals caused by the conduct of the ladies of his family.

Many similar exhortations had produced no visible effect. But it would appear that the irritating message this time fell on Francesco's moody mind at a dangerous moment. His first step was to send off a summons to Paolo Giordano Orsini at Rome, to come forthwith, and with all secrecy, to Florence.[162]

Now, when Orsini had left his wife in Florence, he had placed one of his relatives, Troilo Orsini, near her, as a sort of guardian and mentor. Troilo, however, soon became one of Isabella's numerous lovers; and limited the duties of his mentorship to insisting that he should be her only one. But there was a certain court page, one Lelio Torelli, of whom he was especially jealous. And as his efforts to induce Isabella to give up this youth were vain, he performed his duty to his kinsman by running the page through the body. Torelli unfortunately was the son of a man of note, who had been one of Duke Cosmo's chief ministers; and the murder, therefore, could not be easily hushed up or overlooked. Criminal proceedings were instituted against Troilo Orsini, and in the course of them a number of facts were revealed criminatory[163] of Isabella.

All this Francesco poured into the ear of Paolo Giordano Orsini on his arrival in Florence. No record has reached us of the details of what passed between the Duke and his brother–in–law at the secret colloquy that took place between them on this occasion. But the last words that Francesco uttered, as Orsini left him, were overheard, and have curiously enough been preserved.[164] "When you have satisfied yourself of the odious truth, remember always that you are a Christian and a gentleman!" said the Duke, who had learned his ideas of either character in the school of Philip II. of Spain. He moreover lent Orsini during his stay in Florence the villa now called Poggio Imperiale, near the Roman gate of the city. To Isabella her husband assumed the appearance of perfect cordiality and affection. He had brought her, he said, a present of a couple of greyhounds, and begged her to accompany him to the villa to try them. It is said that the unhappy woman accepted the invitation with terrible misgivings. She went, however; and the next morning Florence heard that the Lady Isabella had died suddenly in the night; and the court physicians, who were called to look at the body, testified that apoplexy was the cause of her death. The cause of the apoplexy was not stated; but the general belief was, and has been among Florentine historians ever since, that it was brought on by a cord around her neck drawn tightly by the hands of her husband.[165]

The historians admit that there exists no direct proof that Francesco and Ferdinando, both or either of them, were accomplices in this murder. But they appear to have very little doubt upon the subject; and, indeed, the circumstantial evidence seems almost conclusive, especially as regards Francesco. There is the direct statement of the Settimanni[166] chronicle, that Orsini was sent for from Rome that he might consent to his wife's death. There is the general popular belief at the time and ever since. And there is the fact that both Ferdinando and Francesco continued on perfectly friendly terms with Paolo Giordano after Isabella's death, and interested themselves, as they had not before done, in the settlement of his numerous debts.

The unfortunate Isabella Orsini has been very leniently judged by her countrymen. She was beautiful; carefully and highly educated, so far as the phrase includes exclusively intellectual culture; was a distinguished musician; spoke and wrote correctly several languages, including that of ancient Rome; was a poetess in a small way; and some philological treatise by her, still to be found in print in Italian libraries, indicates that she was not wholly given up to pursuits little compatible with intellectual exercise. Impudicity had been from her tender years instilled into her, both by precept and example, by an authority which nature's earliest dictates teach a child to consider as sacred above all others. With such a father and sovereign as Cosmo, and living in such a state of society as that which surrounded her, where the abundant practice of "religious duties" intertwined with, and forming a large part of every–day life, was joined to a degree of ignorance and neglect of "moral duties" unequalled, perhaps, in any other age and country, could Isabella Orsini have been other than lost as she was?

But the reforming hand which was to restore the court and family of the Medici to respectability, was not satisfied with one victim. It was on the 16th of July that Isabella Orsini was murdered; some days having been lost, as may be supposed, between the remonstrance of the Cardinal and the arrival of Paolo Giordano in Florence. The other victim, therefore, whose destined executioner was at hand, perished exactly one week earlier. When Francesco sent for his brother–in–law from Rome, he also summoned his brother Pietro to an interview.

Here again we have no means of knowing what passed between the brothers, other than such as can be gathered from the facts which followed thereupon, and from the well–known and well–marked characters of the actors. Drawing from these sources of knowledge, Guerrazzi, in his Racconto, entitled "Isabella Orsini," has fashioned forth the dialogue which may be supposed to have passed between them, with a verisimilitude as to circumstances and words, and an absolute truth as to character, so vividly illustrative of the men and the time, that an extract from it will convey more historical truth than many a page from a matter–of–fact chronicle.

Francesco begins by reproaching Don Pietro with his extravagances. "Don Francesco," answers the scapegrace, "Remember that I have come hither on the faith of your safe–conduct. Do not kill me with a sermon."

"Do I deserve this at your hands?" returned the elder, after some further disputing. "Have I not given, and do I not continue to give, proof of my love for my own blood?"

"As for your own, I don't know; but you certainly love blood...."

"I have to tell you then," said Francesco, "that you are the most abject, the most shameless, and most infamous knight that lives this day in Christendom."

"Strong language!" sneered Pietro. "Let us come to facts."

"Your wife is an adulteress."

"I am perfectly well aware of the circumstance."

"What! you know it! and have not avenged your shame!"

"We Medici have never been lucky in our wives."

Francesco, in fury, asks what he means to insinuate against either the Grand Duchess or Bianca. And here the writer commits an error in chronology. For he writes as if this conversation occurred after the death of the Grand Duchess, which was not the fact. The circumstances of this narrative took place in 1576, and the Grand Duchess lived till 1578. As to Bianca, in reply to the Grand Duke's assertion that she must be considered as washed from all that had preceded his connection with her, Pietro retorts:

"Such washing will not remove all stains. Sometimes a piece of the stuff may sooner be destroyed than the spot on it. And on your hand there must be a certain red mark that all Arno cannot wash away. It is the stain of Bonaventuri's blood."

"Who says that I slew Bonaventuri? If my father asserted it, I would tell him that he lied. I neither did nor ordered anything. I can swear it."

"Between ordering, insinuating, foreseeing, suspecting, conniving, not seeing, and so forth, no doubt if the cause had to be tried before this world's judges, the pettifoggers of the courts could find you so many limitations and distinctions that you would be acquitted nem. con. But before God one does not appear by means of one's attorney...."

"Ungrateful! How much have my enemies given you to make me die of anger? Is this a way to speak to your liege lord, who if he would, could break you like a reed. And that, too, when I am intent on preserving your reputation!... I have discovered the infamous destroyer of your honour, and have put him to death."

"Poor fellow! he deserved it, but he was a very worthy cavalier."

"Who told you that he was a cavalier?"

"What! Bernardino Antinori, whom you had strangled in prison! Who told me? Well, that is good! Who told me, indeed? Francesco, let me say a few words to you plainly and openly after my own manner. We can do what we think fit; but on one condition, which is this; that we let others talk as they think fit. The people we employ in matters of this sort are vile and infamous from their birth upwards; and if they could find some one to throw them a bigger sop for murdering us, than we give them for murdering others, they would do so. Do you expect fidelity or secrecy from such? In the taverns and in their low orgies, they vomit forth their secrets of blood, often true, oftener exaggerated twofold, till down there among the people, who know us but little, we find an accumulated hoard of hatred that makes one shudder to look at it."

"Have you done?"

"One minute, and I have done. Add to all this the curse of the pen.... Who knows how many traders are at this hour writing in their ledgers between the records of a purchase of wool, and a sale of silk: Item. I record that on such a day in such a year from the Incarnation, Francesco de' Medici caused the Cavaliere Bernardino Antinori to be strangled for adultery with the lady Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Don Pietro dei Medici.[167] And then, besides the merchants, there are the moralisers, and the history–writers, and all the rest of the literary generation, to whom I make a point of being civil, since we cannot drive them out of the world.... But I see that I am putting you to sleep. You were saying—what was it? Oh! that you had had the Cavaliere Antinori strangled."

Francesco, continues Signor Guerrazzi, who was naturally and habitually sparing of speech, and wont to come directly to his point, felt as if his head was going round with all this flux of words. He needed to recover himself a little; and it was sometime before he resumed his discourse thus.

"Well then, if you know the treason of your wife, why is she still alive?"

"Because, if I come to my confiteor, I fancy that I have more sins on my shoulders than she has; and, further, because I do not see clearly who would save me from the vengeance of her uncle the Duke of Alva, and her brother Toledo, who, between ourselves, are not altogether saints to have to deal with."

"And can we not protect you against a viceroy and a duke...."

"In short, you want me to make you a present of the life of Eleonora; and I am willing to do so. A wife is not worth falling out about. But you on your part must be a good brother ... and let me have some forty thousand ducats, that I am sadly in want of."

"All of you eaten up with debt! All out at elbows! You, the Cardinal, and Orsini would swallow all Peru. Where am I to get all this money?"

"A squeeze well administered to the udders of the Republic would put all to rights. But you have no need even to do that. Rumour says, that what with gold in coin and in ingots, and in precious stones, you have hoarded better than ten millions of money.... Besides, the public revenue, after all expenses are paid, gives you more than three hundred thousand ducats."

"And who dares to call me to account as to the amount?"

"You had better hang the multiplication table. Then, again, you make a mine of money by your commerce in leather, precious stones, grain, and pepper."

"Losses upon all of them! I have made up my mind to give up commerce. Perhaps,—I have not quite made up my mind,—perhaps I may continue to trade in pepper. But no more leather!—no more grain! He who trades in grain dies on straw."

"Do as you think best. But will you give me the forty thousand ducats?"

"Good heaven! where can you get rid of so much money?"

"Give it to me, and be sure that in so doing you lay it out well. I employ it in making you friends. I spend it among the people in festivities, in banquets, in pleasure. The rising generation is thus habituated to expense and luxury. I enervate it to your hand; I degrade it; I emasculate its intellect; I destroy its dignity of mind and its strength of body. I prepare it to receive the seed; so that you may sow it with what best suits your purpose."

"In truth, your humour is of a strange turn! You shall have the forty thousand ducats. But you will sign me an obligation to repay them little by little from your Pisan property."

"As for obligations, I will sign you as many as you please."

"Moreover——"

"Oh dear me! now come the restrictions!"

"No! only you will undertake the removal of your infamous wife when and where I shall command."

"This article is also agreed to. When am I to have the ducats?"

"To–morrow!"

And in accordance with the characteristic scene thus painted for us by Signor Guerrazzi, we find on returning from verisimilitude to recorded fact, that on the ninth of July in the year 1576, just a week previous to the murder of Isabella Orsini, the wretched Eleonora,—she too another victim of Cosmo's atrocious profligacy—was put to death by Don Pietro's own hand at the Villa of Cafaggiuolo. That ill–omened place is a castle among the Apennines, some fifteen or twenty miles from Florence, which the traveller thence to Bologna will hardly fail to notice. Solitary and desolate as it stands now among the mountains by the side of the high–road, it was yet more so, when no such road existed. The dark naked stone tower standing there on the hill–side turf, without tree or cultivation near it of any kind, strikes the imagination as the very spot adapted for such a crime.

Of course, as usual, there were medical declarations of the cause of her death, and the courts were duly informed that God had pleased to take to himself our dearly beloved sister–in–law, &c. But it is remarkable that to his agent at the court of Philip II., Francesco wrote a private letter, which is still extant,[168] ordering him to communicate the whole truth of the murder to that monarch. And Philip, while expressing regret for the cause of the crime, manifested no disapproval of it, and promised all secrecy concerning it.

It is recorded, that Don Pietro immediately after the perpetration of the deed, with hands yet bloody from the task, took the precaution of imploring pardon for it, from a figure of the Virgin Mary in an adjoining chapel, promising at the same time, that as an expiation he would thenceforth remain single;—a vow which he did not keep.

Thus were decency and respectability restored, it was hoped, to the court life at Florence. Bianca's sins, as has been intimated, were of a different kind, from those of the two murdered princesses. But Francesco's gloomy temper and fits of violence, joined to such an example of his mode of action when irritated, could not have been re–assuring to the survivor of the trio court beauties.