simply sank into unconsciousness. At the last she struggled back for a
second from stupor, and, grasping a cross that lay upon the bed,
muttered, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," and fell back dead.
RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA
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."
[Illustration: RENÉE OF FERRARA, AGED FIFTEEN
CORNEILLE DE LYON]
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.
[Illustration: THE CASTELLO AT FERRARA
_Alinari_]
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.