Last year I was in Lombardy, and, as a faithful adherent of the Viscontis, I stayed a little in Pavia. I found it a rather gloomy little Lombard town, white-washed and paven. Here and there a wine-coloured wall or tower broke the pallid monotony of the streets. The famous fortress, where Isabel of Arragon eat her heart in bitterness so many years, still exists, much rebuilt and altered indeed, but always a mass of fine red colour. In Pavia, however, there was nothing so interesting to me as those phantoms of vanished Viscontis and long-supplanted Sforzas that seemed so strangely out of place in this sad little sordid university town. And among these ranks of tragic shadows, the least forgiven, the least beloved, was always the Duchess Beatrice.
I had known her too long, the youthful and charming Lady Macbeth of Lombardy. I knew her as well as one can know a person, familiar through the gossip of acquaintance, although unseen and distant. I had heard of her as a haughty and ambitious woman, accepting with a smile the crimes that placed the crown of Milan on her head. She appeared as some Herodias of Luini’s, exquisite and sinister. And yet I knew she had been dearly worshipped in her lifetime and long lamented in her tomb. There are such Sirens, heartless and chill themselves, but capable of seizing an honest love with the same hands that grasp at a blood-stained treasure. Such, in my eyes, was the adored and evil wife of Lodovico il Moro.
It was Christmas-time and cold; with difficulty I roused myself to visit the Certosa. It is six miles, I suppose, from Pavia. The wretched carriage slowly dragged along through the muddy country; and from the whitened window one felt rather than saw the immense desolation of the view. On either hand of the raised road, a sluggish canal, and beyond a monotonous landscape of brown marshy pastures and bright green rice fields flecked with water, across which the scant snow drifted. The road seemed to extend for ever in front, unbroken, unturning. Suddenly in the middle of the country the carriage stopped; I walked a few steps up a muddy lane. To the right over a wall there appeared a great dome, with rose-red minarets, with spires of pale red, ivory and marble, among innumerable shaft-like towers tipped with cream-white columns. It is the Certosa.
At another season and in better health I should have found much to linger over in the great façade of the Certosa, fantastic, incoherent as a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Every inch of the front is covered thickly with ornament in high relief—Roman emperors and paladins of chivalry, eagles with praying angels on their outspread pinions, exquisite maidens floating full-length on a dolphin’s back, Sirens suckling their unearthly babes, hippogriffs, Prophets of Israel: strange, unexpected as the visions of delirium, they are assembled there. But, alone, in the bitter wind, I glanced at it all for a moment and entered the vast foundation of Giangaleazzo Visconti. Great halls, enormous, cold, spoiled as much as may be by the seventeenth century; a few good pictures by Borgognone, many bad ones; posthumous portraits of the great Viscontis: it was not so interesting as I had supposed.
Still I wandered on, making reflections on the difference of type in the Sforza and Visconti heads: the older tyrants keen-faced, refined with delicate, bone-less oval faces, and thin firm lips ridged out in a narrow line. There is something wolf-like in the long pointed noses, the pointed chins, low foreheads, as well as in the keen eyes, narrow and high in the head; altogether an interesting type, subtle, cruel, intellectual, and fierce. The Sforzas with their Wellington noses, their strongly marked eyebrows, prim-pursed lips and rounded chins, seem a square-faced kindly race of captains. Lodovico il Moro himself is there, with the fat face and fine chin of the elderly Napoleon, the delicate beak-like nose of Wellington; a small querulous neat-lipped mouth, and immense eyebrows, stretched like the talons of an eagle across the low forehead, complete the odd, refined physiognomy of the man. I looked at him with interest for a moment. But there, straight before me, stood the tomb of the wife he lost so young, the Duchess Beatrice.
To think that she is dead, and to think she was a woman! Impossible. She is a lively child, fallen asleep in playtime: motionless, but full of a contained vivacity. Her tumbled curls hang loosely round her shoulders, and stand up in a little frizz above the rounded childish forehead. As she lies there, a look of infantine candour is diffused over the soft, adorable, irregular features. She has straight, brief eyebrows like a little girl, but her closed eyelids are rounded like the petals of a thick white flower, and richly fringed with lashes. The little nose is of no particular shape—not quite a straight nose, but certainly not a snub; it is the prettiest nose at Court, with a rounded end like a child’s. The cheeks, too, are round apple-cheeks, not in the least like the Herodias of Luini; and round is the neat bewitching chin. But her chief beauty is her mouth—a mouth with the soft-closed lips of a dear child pretending to be asleep, yet smiling as if to say, “Soon I shall jump up and throw my arms round your neck, and you will be so surprised!”
The round head rises from a long plump throat. The small figure too is slender and plump at once, and very small, full of life still, it seems, under the pretty tight silk dress, with the slashed and purfled sleeves, and the long train of brocade, so lovingly, so carefully arranged not to encumber nor hide those little pattened feet, that were so fain of dancing and seem so ready to awake and dance again. This, then, is the famous Beatrice!—I looked and looked, at last I understood not only her, but the love of Lodovico: “And so, dear child, thou canst not live without a crown?—Ah well! What shouldst thou know of murder, dishonour, and the ruin of great states? Thou wilt never understand these gloomy things, and I shall pay the price—Ah God in heaven, I thank Thee for the gift of an immortal soul, since I may lose it for the pleasure of this child!”
Perhaps it was in this way that Lodovico reasoned; or perhaps it may be that at heart Macbeth is no less ambitious than his wife. Who knows? The wife, at least, must stand for something. At least, some share in the ruin of their country must be accorded to these three women—Bonne, who recalled Lodovico to Milan; Isabel, who inspired the war of Arragon and Sforza; and Beatrice, whose ambition urged her husband to invite the French to Italy.
[111]. “Cecco ed i suoi colleghi oltra modo d’animo furono consternati” (Corio, book vii.).