To B——
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| PREFACE | [ix] |
| CATHERINE OF SIENA | [1] |
| BEATRICE D’ESTE | [53] |
| ANNE OF BRITTANY | [104] |
| LUCREZIA BORGIA | [150] |
| MARGARET D’ANGOULÊME | [202] |
| RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA | [251] |
PREFACE
THERE are no two people who see with the same kind of vision. It is for this reason that, though twenty lives of the six women chosen for this book had been written previously, there would still, it seems to me, be room for a twenty-first. For though the facts might remain identical, there is no possible reiteration of another mind’s exact outlook. Hence I have not scrupled to add these six character studies to the many volumes similar in scope and subject.
The book is called “Queens of the Renaissance,” but Catherine of Siena lived before the Renaissance surged into being, and Anne of Brittany, though her two husbands brought its spirit into France, had not herself a hint of its lovely, penetrating eagerness. They are included because they help, nevertheless, to create continuity and coherence of impression, and the six leading, as they do naturally, one to the other, convey, in the mass, some co-ordinated notion of the Renaissance spirit.
The main object, perhaps, in writing at all lies in the intrinsic interest of any real life lived before us. For every existence is a parti pris towards existence; every character is a personal opinion upon the value of character, feeling, virtue, many things. No personality repeats another, no human drama renews just the same intricate complications of other dramas. In every life and in every person there is some element of uniqueness, some touch of speciality. Because of this even the dullest individuality becomes quickening in biography. It has, if no more, the pathos of its dulness, the didactic warnings of its refusals, the surprise of its individualizing blunders.