THE EFFIGY OF BEATRICE D’ESTE
AT SOUTH KENSINGTON MUSEUM
His last action in connection with Beatrice has a certain moving sentimentality. It was when the miserable end of his adventure had commenced, and he was obliged to escape from Milan with all the haste he could. His safety depended upon his swiftness. Knowing this, he nevertheless stopped at the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and stayed so long by the tomb of his wife that the small group with him became anxious for their own skins as well as his. He came out at last with the tears streaming down his face, and three times, as he rode away, he looked back towards the church, as if all his heart held dear lay there behind him.
Not long afterwards he was captured, and his captivity at Loches is one of the few inexcusable stains upon Louis XII.’s character.
ANNE OF BRITTANY
1476-1514
WITH Anne of Brittany the Renaissance entered France. She herself, though she had her little fastidiousnesses, hardly belongs to it. No artistic strain ran through her temperament. She was an intelligent, but excessively practical woman, who twice married men of opposite dispositions from her own. Anne, it is certain, never glowed at the thought of a beautiful thing in her life, but both her husbands did, and both, as a result of their Italian campaigns, brought into France a variety of new and educative lovelinesses. Charles VIII., Anne’s first husband, and Louis XII., her second, gave the primary impulse to the Renaissance movement in France.
As for Anne herself, though in the end she appeals through a colossal weight of sorrow, one feels her chiefly as a warning. Almost every quality a woman ought to spend her strength in avoiding, she hugged unconsciously to her soul, and every quality a woman needs as the basis of her personality, she had not got. A woman should be indulgence itself, and Anne indulged nobody; a woman should be as a brimming receptacle of sympathy, toleration, and forgiveness, and Anne forgave no one, and tolerated nothing that went against her. A woman should be—it is without exaggeration her great essential—good to live with, cosy, accommodating, an insidious wheedler, almost without premeditation, not only into happiness, but into righteousness of living. Now, Anne could never have been cosy, and it is doubtful whether, once safely married for the second time, she would have condescended to wheedle any one. She had not sufficient love to have a surplus for distribution. Duties of some kinds she could observe excellently, but there was no sub-conscious sense that in marrying she was accepting one of the subtlest posts of influence in the world. She had not the capacity for understanding that it is a woman’s adorable privilege to be in herself so much, that the atmosphere of the house she controls must in the end express principally her personality. And nothing was more remote from Anne’s intelligence than the secret triumph of realizing how greatly the building up of character is the charge intrusted to her sex by destiny.
It was not her gift to make any house feel warmer when she entered it. Her second husband loved her—contrast is a frequent motive for falling in love—but she could do nothing for temperament. Character is not upheaved by violences, and Anne was all imperatives and despotism. Practical organizations are often admirably conducted with these methods, and as a housewife Anne attained considerable proficiency; but the more immaterial achievements are beyond the reaching power of a chill autocracy.