I.
Valentine Visconti, greater than Helen as the cause of battles, was born in the Abbey of Pavia, in the year 1366. Her grandfather, Galeazzo Visconti, had left Milan rather suddenly, being ill with gout and “temendo la severità” of one so skilled in the use of succession-powders as Bernabò his brother, co-tyrant with him of Lombardy. He had designed a safe and splendid castle for himself in Pavia. While it was still unfinished Valentine was born in the hospitable old Certosa there.[[11]]
Galeazzo Visconti had taken with him from Milan his wife, Blanche of Savoy, his little daughter Iolanthe, and his married son Giangaleazzo, with his wife Isabelle. These last were the parents of Valentine. When she was born her mother was sixteen and her father fifteen years of age.[[12]] At her nativity there were, we are told, incredible rejoicings; for the pride of Galeazzo Visconti was gratified by the birth of a grandchild who was no less the grand-daughter of a King of France.
The mother of Valentine was that little French princess who, six years ago, had been sold into Lombardy to help to raise the golden millions of her father’s ransom. John the Good had received for his daughter the sum of five hundred thousand golden florins, a sort of inverse marriage portion, the price of a royal alliance. But Galeazzo had not paid for barren honour only: Isabelle had brought her husband the county and the title of Vertus in Champagne. Though the little girl had gone weeping into Italy, her tears were soon dried. She had left a devastated and ruined country; she came into a land of sumptuous tyranny, of riches and magnificence. Life was easy at Milan and at Pavia, where Galeazzo was busied with his new university, where Giangaleazzo—a timid, intellectual, orderly creature—spent day after day in his study full of enormous parchment ledgers, directing the staff of secretaries who copied into them his accounts, his memoranda, and duplicates of his correspondence. Priests and friars from the old Certosa, professors of law and learning from the new college, poets also—the English poet, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, and the prince of poets himself, Messer Francesco Petrarca,—learned men like Philippe de Mézières, visitors from so far away as England, France, or Cyprus—these were the guests of the palace. Gradually the stately home echoed with children’s voices. Valentine was born in 1366. One brother grew strong and playful at her side; another died in babyhood. When the third was born, in 1373, Isabelle died, and a few months afterwards her baby followed her.
The immense castle of Pavia was very quiet now. Iolanthe, the girl-widow of the Duke of Clarence, had married, in 1372, the Marquis of Monferrat. There were only the old Visconti and his wife, and the studious young Count of Vertus and his two little children. It was quieter still when, in 1378, Galeazzo Visconti died. He had been a terrible old man: cruel, unscrupulous, scholarly. It was he who obtained from the Emperor, Charles IV., in 1361, the privilege to found the University of Pavia, and he who protected it by an edict threatening with heavy punishments the Milanese who dared to study in another school. And he it was, also, who threw alive into a fiery furnace two priests who came to him on an unwelcome message; and he who, with his brother Bernabò, had poisoned a third brother, co-heir and co-tyrant with them in Lombardy. They had divided his share, Galeazzo taking Piacenza, Pavia, the west to Novara, and as far as Como in the north; while Bernabò possessed the rich province of the east. Both ruled alike in Milan. Both should have been equally powerful. But Galeazzo had left all his share to the sole Count of Vertus, and he, too, had only one son to follow him, whereas the signory of Bernabò was strengthened and divided by eleven turbulent and violent young sons.
Valentine’s father remembered the fate of his uncle. He kept very quiet, surrounded himself with priests and guards, ate of no dish before a score of stewards tasted of it, and dissimulated his ambition. This he did so well that the timid Count of Vertus became a by-word and a laughing-stock in the house of Bernabò. Although the young man had taken care to obtain from the Emperor investitures which conferred upon him absolute authority;[[13]] although by his judicious protection of the people he made himself the desired deliverer of the unhappy Milanese, still Bernabò and his children could not take their kinsman seriously. And the better to lull their suspicions, in 1380 the young Count of Vertus came a-courting to the noisy Castello di Porta Giovio, where Bernabò kept house with such of his nine-and-twenty children as still remained in Milan. It was a great riotous house full of voices, full of splendid young men in armour (Palamedes, Lancilotto, Sagramoro), full of beautiful women and fair young girls with lovely names (Achiletta, Verde, Damigella), and not less radiant for their easy familiarity with evil. One of these dangerous maidens, Caterina, the Count of Vertus took to be his second wife. In the next year, in 1381, on the 4th of October, his boy, Astorre, died.
Valentine was now his only heir, for during the first eight years of their marriage Caterina Visconti had no children. Valentine was fifteen years old, of an age to be dowered and married. Her father, however, kept her at home with him, teaching her many things—too much, some people said, for they thought her as wise as Medea. She could invent posies; she could read not only Italian books, but Latin, French, and German. Into whatever court she might hereafter marry, she would be not only the daughter of the Duke of Milan, but his diplomatic agent. I do not know if she could speak English, but in those years of warfare the English were often at Milan, and Valentine when a little girl had seen (a brilliant, sudden vision) her English uncle of Clarence, who had died so strangely at Alba, and was buried at Pavia. She was a scholarly maiden, possessing of her own no less than eleven books; more than her grandfather, King John, had ever owned in his royal library at Paris. And she could write as well as read—a clear, excellent hand, of which the signature still exists in the Paris archives. Froissart in later days remarked on the frequent letters that she wrote to her father: “Madame Valentine wrote him all she knew.”
I do not know if Valentine was beautiful. A line in “Le Pastouralet” speaks of her as
“Maret, qui le miex dasoit,”
and mentions the courtesy of “la touse mignotte”—the dainty dame. This conveys an impression of nothing more positive than elegance and grace. We can fill up the frame with a couple of portraits which still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale: small grisaille illuminations adorning a manuscript poem[[14]] in defence of Valentine. There is nothing very distinctive in either portrait—no accent of striking personality or resemblance. They represent the same young and slender woman, rather tall, with a long neck and slim arms, and a bust both full and delicate. The head is small, the hair parted from ear to ear across the middle of the head, the back locks being tied in a Greek knot, the front ones divided again in the middle and looped in pendant braids above the ear. Under this severe coiffure we discern a serious gentle placid face—long narrow eyes, a high forehead, a full mouth with pretty pursed lips; a face too closely following the mediæval ideal for it to impress us very strongly as a likeness. Valentine is clothed in a low-cut, tight gown girdled round the hips, with long, tight sleeves descending to the knuckles of the slim and delicate hands—over this she wears a very ample trained surtout, also low in the neck, falling in rich folds to her feet and buttoned down the front to the hips, where it is sewn together, but split up at the arms in immense wide sleeve-holes, a yard long, revealing the under dress. If the young duchess was not precisely beautiful, yet certainly she was beautifully attired. The catalogue of her gala-dresses is a thing to wonder on: scarlet, and silver, and cloth of gold, and rich embroidery; cloths of peacock-green and mulberry colour; tissues of netted pearls. And she had as many pearls, diamonds, sapphires, and balass-rubies as any princess in a fairy-story. She wore them sewn all over her caps, round her girdles, encircling her young throat, and showered broadcast across the brocades and embroidery of her gowns. With all this, at sixteen, and with the subtle sweetness of the natural Lombard grace, it is not necessary to be beautiful.