“My dear Husband,
“I have given birth to a little girl, which I do not think you will be displeased to hear. I have suffered this time much more than before, and I have had three bad bouts of fever. But now I am better, and hope to suffer no more pain. I will not write more to you lest I overtax my strength. But with all my heart I commend myself to your lordship.
“In Mantua, the 20th of August, 1520.
“Your wife, who is a little weary with pain.”
The caressing prettiness of the last phrase is like the feel of a tired child’s hand slipped into one’s own. Castiglione felt her death acutely, and wrote that he never dreamt his wife, whom he referred to with great tenderness, would have died before him, and all he now prayed for was that the Almighty might not leave him long before he followed her.
Lucrezia needed friends at Ferrara. Her life was one almost without respite from harassments, internal troubles and political insecurity being always present. Plague and famine devastated the well-being of the duchy. Twice Lucrezia was left in charge of a famine-stricken district, and twice proved herself capable, resourceful, self-forgetting. On the first occasion she was ill, but, notwithstanding, absolutely refused to leave the town as ordered by the doctors. She worked for the unhappy people starving about her, in a flaming rush of pity. Jews and Christians were alike to Lucrezia; her protection of Jews was strenuous in a period when the mere name roused men’s ferocity. That her heart throbbed in response to the right instincts is proved by the whole compassionate fabric of her later life. Any human being, intuitively conscious that pain equalizes all things, cannot be encased in the callousness of the really bad or cold nature. During all the years Lucrezia lived in Ferrara her care for charitable institutions was personal and active.
And it should be remembered that philanthropy had not yet become a fashionable occupation; sympathy of attitude by those in high places was still unusual and undemanded. The management of the few existing charitable houses during the Renaissance was deplorable. But Alphonso and Lucrezia not only built a new and improved hospital for infectious diseases, but took, besides, sufficient personal interest in its patients to dismiss a man for neglecting the invalids entrusted to his care.
This phase of Lucrezia’s life ought to be dwelt upon at length. It lifts her from a flighty extravagance and immorality into positive goodness of behaviour. Depth she probably had not—deep, brooding persons are not necessary in great abundance—and the woman who left her only child, the son of the murdered Don Alphonso, could not have been fiercely tenacious of heart. In all Lucrezia’s life, in fact, this is the worst incident—this abandonment of her baby. So much was thrust upon her; this surrender itself was so to a certain extent. But not the manner of it, the effortless blitheness, the impulsive acquiescence. It is this one revealing episode that chiefly keeps her from the region of supremely wronged and tragic persons.
In 1507 her brother Cæsar died. Alphonso was away at the time, fighting with Louis XII. A letter, despatched at once, told him how she took the news. According to the writer, “she showed great grief, but with constancy and without tears.” This phrase “without tears” carries a certain poignant implication. Surely the hearer was at last sinking through shallowness to find some deep places in her nature. Shallowness can always shed tears. Had Lucrezia even been indifferent to Cæsar’s death—and indifference is the least likely sensation—shallowness would have dropped a few tears of excitement, silliness, shock. There is a moving weariness of grief in any tearless conduct.
Isabella D’Este, who was with her at the time, wrote as well. She said that Lucrezia “immediately went to the monastery of the Corpo di Cristo, to offer up prayers for his soul. At the monastery she remained for two nights, and having left it, she found herself so much indisposed that her physician, for security, insisted on her keeping her bed, to which she is still confined.”
Lucrezia had several children after her third marriage, and in the year following Cæsar’s death she gave birth to the desired heir, Ercole, afterwards to marry the poor, cheerless Renée of France. But she had been a delicate, frail creature all her life, and when, in 1519, she gave birth to a dead child, the case immediately became hopeless. As a Roman Catholic, she was told at once how near Death loomed, though the information seems a cruel thing to give to any person not yet old enough to have wearied of existence. But Lucrezia, who had never yet made a fuss about anything, did not make a fuss over the last great unpleasantness of all. This composure at dying touches all her past serenity with something almost effulgent. It makes her suddenly full of strange wisdom and singular comprehensions; as if unconsciously she understood the real value of individual mortality, and knew it just sweet enough for smiles and laughter, but at the same time too slight, unstable, and finite for great commotions or disturbances.
Having been told that she could not live any longer, and seeing Alphonso suddenly attentive, the exhausted woman wasted no strength contesting the unalterable, but simply lay quietly in her bed and tried to think of God, the Virgin, and the world beyond. A few days before her death she wrote to Pope Leo X. Her letter is sedateness itself and courage. Nothing was further from its utterance than discomposure or demur. If forlornness reached her at leaving the lovely homeliness of mortal life, she was too magnanimously courteous to burden another person with a private sorrow. She wrote—
“Most Holy Father and Worshipful Lord,
“With all reverence I kiss your Holiness’s feet, and humbly commend myself to your good will. Having been in great pain for more than two months, early on the morning of the 14th day of the present month, according to the will of God, I gave birth to a little daughter. I hoped then to get alleviation from my sufferings, but the contrary took place, and I have to pay my debt to nature. And through the grace of God I am conscious that the end of my life is near, and that in a few hours, having received the holy sacraments of the Church, I shall have passed away. And having came to this state, as a Christian, although a sinner, I beseech your Holiness in your goodness to give me from the heavenly treasures spiritual consolation and your holy benediction for my soul. This I most devoutly pray for, and to your great mercy I commit my husband and my children, who are all faithful servants of your Holiness.
“In Ferrara, the 22nd of June, 1519, at the fourteenth hour.
“Your Holiness’s humble servant,
“Lucrezia da Este.”