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:
“Nor are my mother’s wrongs forgot,
Her slighted love and ruined name,
Her offspring’s heritage of shame,”
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.
“No more in palace, hall, or bower
Was Parisina heard or seen.”
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.