This timely arrangement was made on 20th July, and Carlo and Eleanora became man and wife the following month. Duke Cosimo on the same day caused little Giovanni to be legitimatised, and he was entered in the Register of Baptisms as “Giovanni de’ Medici, undoubted son of Cosimo I. Duke of Florence and Siena.” An ample provision was made for the child’s maintenance by the Duke, and Carlo de’ Panciatichi agreed to his being an inmate in his house along with his mother.
The marriage was celebrated privately in the presence of the two Dukes, in the chapel of the Pitti Palace, and the young couple at once took up their residence at the Panciatichi Palace in the Via Larga. Upon Carlo was conferred the order of “Knight of San Stefano,” and Messer Bartolommeo, his father, was enrolled as a senator for life.
It would appear that Eleanora abandoned herself to her new life with exemplary fortitude and resignation. She certainly had exchanged “new lamps for old,” and she made the best of an honourable marriage, in spite of the violent and arrogant manner of her husband, whose fame as a violent braggadocio was a safeguard against the advances of young Piero de’ Medici. Three years after the marriage a child was born, to whom the name of Cosimo was given, a laconic compliment to the old libertine! A second son appeared in 1571, Bartolommeo, but he died within a twelvemonth of his birth, and then, in 1577, came a third child to the Panciatichi mansion, another Bartolommeo, so Eleanora decreed. This boy, however, brought with him ineffaceable trouble, for Cavaliere Carlo refused to acknowledge him, and angrily pointed to Don Piero de’ Medici as his putative father!
Piero made light of this charge—he was well used to that sort of thing, but, with rare effrontery, he held the infant at the font, whilst Panciatichi absented himself, and Eleanora made a tacit avowal of his parentage. The relations between Carlo and his wife had quite naturally never been of the best, and as gradually fears of death, upon the scaffold faded, or by a retributive d’Antonio hand, and he found himself the untrammelled master of his actions, he began to resent the callousness of the arrangement with Duke Cosimo, after 1570, Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Eleanora’s intrigue with Don Piero clenched the matter of her cohabitation with her husband. Carlo refused her both bed and board, and, in the spring of 1578, he forced her into the Franciscan convent of San Onofrio da Foligno—a favourite place of sanctuary for dishonoured gentlewomen!
Poor, sinful, sinned-against Eleanora, the pathetic example of a young and beautiful life wasted and corrupted by the ill-conditioned lusts of a profligate lover and his libertine son! With her freedom of action absolutely curtailed, and her complete isolation from her family, the gay and attractive mistress of Castello and of the Medici Palace at Pisa, with countless admirers and many lovers, was indeed an object of sympathetic commiseration. To be sure, the Cavaliere made ample provision for his wife’s maintenance, appointed a small suite of attendants, and permitted her to carry with her many cherished bits of furniture and bric-à-brac. He likewise committed to her charge both her children, and offered no objection to occasional visits to his mother of Don Giovanni de’ Medici, now a growing boy of eleven.
The Grand Duke Francesco cordially approved this arrangement. With respect to certain jewels and personal effects which Eleanora retained, the Grand Duke made an order that, as they belonged to Guardaroba of the Sovereign, they should be deposited, during the period of her residence in the convent, in the State Treasury.
Then a thick veil was drawn over the life of Eleanora di Cavaliere Carlo de’ Panciatichi, and the gates of the convent were closed upon her, never to be opened for her egress! Her beauty and her talents, and the gaiety of her manner were matured, cultivated and restrained in harmony with her melancholy surroundings. Youth gave way to middle age, and middle age to the crepuscule of life, and the seasons came, and the seasons went, and one life in that sanctuary seemed fated to go on for ever. Forgotten and unvisited, Eleanora, the druda of Cosimo I., cast off and spurned; the innamorata of Piero de’ Medici, wronged and despised; the wife of Carlo de’ Panciatichi, divorced and cloistered, lived on and on, far beyond the scriptural limit of threescore years and ten—the pathetic victim of a callous world.
In the Libri di Ricordanze of the convent is a notice for the year 1634, which startles the sympathetic reader of the tragedy of Eleanora degli Albizzi: “Upon 19th March of this year there passed to a better life the most illustrious Lady, Donna Eleanora degli Albizzi de’ Panciatichi, who had resided in this monastery for fifty-six years, and had reached the ninetieth year of her age. She lived in the odour of sanctity with the devotion of a religious, and endowed the monastery with a goodly bequest.” The Cosa di Cosimo—per il piacere di Cosimo! as time-serving, unfatherlike Messer Luigi degli Albizzi called the immolation of his fair young daughter, had become the Bride of Christ!
And what of unsympathetic, violent Carlo de’ Panciatichi? Well, he, too, got his deserts. The very year after he had put away his wife, he again made himself liable to execution for murder. One morning a servant of his, Sebastiano del Valdarno, who had not been paid wages due to him, ventured to remind his master of the circumstance. Cavaliere Carlo, who could never tolerate demands for money with equanimity, was enraged by the man’s presumption, and, seizing hold of a heavy pouch full of bronze denari, he flung it at the unlucky fellow, saying—“Go to hell and take your money with you!”