II
The king received the artist with cordiality, and talked long with him of his works, past and future, respectfully saluting him as 'father' and 'teacher.'
Leonardo proposed to remodel the castle of Amboise, also to construct an immense canal, which, converting the barren marshes into a luxuriant garden, should connect the Loire and the Saône at Macon, and thus open a new route from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. In this wise he thought to benefit a foreign country by those gifts of knowledge which his fatherland had contemned. The king was pleased by the project, and at once Leonardo set out to explore the locality, studying the soil of the Sologne near Romorantin, the tributaries of the Loire and the Cher, the level of the waters, the topography of the whole district.
One day he visited Loches, a small town to the south of Amboise, where was the castle in which Ludovico Il Moro, Duke of Lombardy, had been incarcerated for eight years. The old warden told Leonardo how Il Moro had once made his escape, by hiding in a cart loaded with straw; not knowing the roads, however, he had lost his way in the forest, and next day had been easily recaptured. His last years had been spent in pious meditation, in prayer, and in the study of Dante's Commedia, the only book he had been allowed to bring out of Italy. At fifty he was a feeble wrinkled old man; only at rare intervals did his eyes flash, when rumours reached him of grave political changes. He died in May 1508 after a short illness.
The warden told further how Ludovico had, a few months before his death, devised a pastime for himself; had begged for brushes and paints and had decorated the walls and arches of his prison. Leonardo found traces of his work on the damp and mouldy plaster; involved patterns, stripes and bars; stars and crosses; red on a white, yellow on a blue ground; in the middle, the helmeted head of a warrior, probably himself, thus inscribed in broken French, 'Je porte en prison pour ma devise que je m'arme de pacience par force de peines que l'on me fait porter.'
Another sentence ran all round the ceiling; it began with huge letters: 'Celui qui,' then, space failing, continued in characters small and cramped, 'net pas contan.' Reading these piteous inscriptions and looking at the clumsy drawings, Leonardo remembered how Il Moro had smiled admiringly on the swans in the moat of the fortress at Milan. 'Perhaps,' thought he, 'the love of beauty which is certainly in his soul will justify him before the tribunal of the Most High.'
Meditating on the fall of the hapless duke, he remembered also what he had been told of the fate of another of his patrons, Cæsar Borgia. Julius II. had treacherously handed Cæsar over to his enemies, who had carried him to Spain and confined him in the tower of Medina del Campo. Daring and ingenious, he escaped by means of a rope let down from his prison window. The jailers had time to sever the rope; he fell and was seriously hurt, but none the less crawled to the horse provided by an accomplice, and rode away. He went to Pampeluna to the court of his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, where he took service as a condottiere.
Consternation spread through Italy; the pope trembled; and ten thousand ducats were set upon the head of the fugitive. On a wintry night of 1507 in an encounter with the French mercenaries under Beaumont, Cæsar was deserted by his followers, and driven into the dry bed of a river, where, like an animal at bay, he defended himself with desperate courage. At last he fell, pierced by twenty wounds. The mercenaries tore the splendid trappings from the dead warrior, and left him naked where he had fallen. Later, when the Navarrese came to seek him they knew him not; only Juanito, his little page, recognised his lord by reason of his great love for him; and flinging himself on the corpse he embraced it sobbing. Beautiful was the dead face, upturned to the heavens; and it seemed he had died even as he had lived, fearless, and without knowledge of remorse. Madonna Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, wept ever for her brother; and when she died they found a hair shirt chafing her tender body. And Cæsar's youthful widow, Charlotte d'Albret, who in the few days she had been with him had come to love him as a very Griselda, having learned of his death, retired to perpetual seclusion in the castle of La Motte Feuillée, buried in the heart of a forest, where only winds rustled the dry leaves; nor used to leave her chamber, hung with perpetual mourning, save to distribute alms, imploring pensioners to pray for the soul of Cæsar.
And likewise the duke's subjects in Romagna, husbandmen and half-savage shepherds from the valleys of the Apennine, kept most grateful memory of him. Long they refused to believe him dead, but waited for him as a god who should some day return and establish justice in the land, cast down the tyrants, and defend the poor. Beggars who wandered from village to village chanted 'the woeful lament for the Duca Valentino,' in which was the line—
'Fe' cose estreme, ma senza misura.'