What cared he! He merely shrugged his shoulders and sardonically hinted that as he had brought his wife from Florence—from Florence, too, had he learned how to take personal vengeance upon a faithless spouse and her accomplice! The dark deed was done on 21st September 1589, and Count Ulisse lived on with his evil conscience and his new wife till 1618, when he, too, fell in Bologna by an assassin’s blade—just retribution for the foul murder of lovely Pellegrina Buonaventuri.
CHAPTER VI — Pathetic Victims of Fateful Passion — Eleanora degli Albizzi and Sforza Almeni — Cammilla de’ Martelli — Virginia de’ Medici e d’Este — Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici.
“Di fare il piacere di Cosimo”—To serve for Cosimo’s pleasure! In such words, an immoral father condemned his lovely daughter to feed the unholy lust of the “Tyrant of Florence”—Moloch was never better served.
Eleanora and Cammilla, cousins after the flesh, were each dedicated as a cosa di Cosimo—the property of Cosimo. If he did not murder their bodies, he slew their souls—that was the manner of the man, the fashion of his time.
Romantic attachments, full of thrilling pathos, ran then like golden threads through the vulgar woof and web of woe and death. Someone has said that “Love and murder are next of kin”; true, indeed, was this what time Eleanora and Cammilla were fresh young girls in Florence. They were each made for love, and love they had; but that love was the embrace of a living death, selfish, cruel, and damning. Better, perhaps, had they died right out by sword or poison than suffer, as they did, the extremity of pathos—the shame of illicit love!
The tragedy of Eleanora degli Albizzi was, perhaps, the most callous and the most pathetic of all those lurid domestic vicissitudes which traced their source to the “Tyrant of Florence,” Cosimo I., Grand Duke of Tuscany.
She was not the only Eleanora whose name as, alas, we know, spelled misfortune. Eleanora de Toledo of the broken heart, and Eleanora de Garzia de Toledo of the bleeding heart, awaited in Paradise Eleanora degli Albizzi of the heart of desertion.