Parisina, the Marchioness d’Este, that other heroine whom Ferrara has contributed to romance, or—if you will—to history, for she makes her first English appearance in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” has been less fortunate in finding defenders; perhaps because her guilt was less. Very shadowy appears that ill-starred Malatesta bride, of whom nothing seems recorded save that she and her paramour, Hugo, her husband’s natural son, were beheaded by her righteously indignant spouse. Yet she grew suddenly solid when I found a scribble of hers neighbouring Lucrezia Borgia’s washing-list. “Mandate per lo portatore del presente dieci ducati d’oro per una certa spesa la quale habiamo fatto.” It sounds suspiciously vague, I fear. “For a certain expense.” What could Parisina have bought with those ten ducats?

But for aught we know they may have been dispensed in charity. And for aught history can tell us, she may have been as spotless as Desdemona. Gibbon, mark you, is by no means convinced of her guilt. If the couple were innocent, he observes oracularly, the husband was unfortunate; if they were guilty, he was still more unfortunate. “Unfortunate” is a mild word for the Margrave, as if his begetting of Hugo were a mere casualty. It is true that at this period in Italy there was little discrimination against bastards, especially those of Popes and Princes. Still Nicholas had only himself to blame for thrusting his Hugo into the contiguity of his wife. Byron, indeed, in his mediocre poem of “Parisina,” makes Hugo offer vivid reproaches to his father (mellifluously transformed to Azo, which the poet omits to say was really the name of the first Margrave of the line). But though these reproaches are comprehensive enough:

and embrace even the charge that Parisina was originally destined for Hugo himself, but refused to him by the father on the brazen ground that his birth was unworthy of her, nevertheless Byron, like most vicious men, preserves the conventional view of the husband’s rights.

In his poem Parisina’s fate is left artistically uncertain.

But the guides know better. She was beheaded in her dungeon, and the original door leading to that dungeon is still standing in the mighty old castle, and I passed through it. The cell is two storeys below this grim portal, and is reached through a trap-door and passages, and then a second trap-door and more passages, and then a door of iron on wood, and then a door wholly iron, with an iron flap through which her food was pushed. Poor Parisina, poor fluttering bird, caught in that cage of iron! The very light filters into this cell only through a series of six cobwebbed gratings, tapering narrower and narrower, as though some elf of a prisoner might squeeze his way out into the moat. Through such peep-holes, and as fuscously, filters the light of history to us adown the cobwebbed centuries.