RENÉE OF FERRARA, AGED FIFTEEN
CORNEILLE DE LYON
Mezeray spoke from a knowledge of Francis’s character, but the motives in this one instance were probably less cunning than he thought them. Renée was not an easy young girl to marry; her own father had said years ago that it would be difficult to find a husband for her. Nevertheless, at this time she was probably as nearly nice-looking as at any time of her existence. She had just turned eighteen, and, in spite of a slight deformity, possessed a certain dignity of carriage, inherited from her mother. She had also the whitest of skins, and beautiful fair hair that reached to the ground. It was said that she had at this time more to thank nature for than to complain of, and the early portraits of her are at least not actually ugly. The principal thing that strikes one in them is a certain dulness of expression, as if heaviness of spirit had crushed out vivacity. Her face suggests strongly the uncared-for upbringing of her childhood—the blue eyes are apathetic and unamused, the mouth wistfully inanimate. It is just possible that Ercole might have kissed her into a childlike lightness of thought; but Ercole did not find her kissable, and she was in any case born with the confined and congealing seriousness of character that came to her as an intensified quality from her unimaginative and easily scandalized mother.
Ercole represented the antithesis of his future wife. His appearance was fascinating, his manners were good; all the culture of the Renaissance permeated his blood. Small wonder, therefore, that Renée’s looks came as a bitter shock to him. He wrote to his father after the first interview, and stated plainly, “Madama Renea non e bella.” The Ferrarese ambassador also wrote that his master would have preferred the lady to possess a better figure. But Ercole had come to France chiefly to make a good political marriage, and his objections to poor Renée personally were greatly outweighed by her parentage and her dowry.
Oddly enough, the girl herself does not appear to have liked the handsome Italian any better than he liked her. At the formal engagement she behaved with extreme shyness and a visible distress of manner. Nobody cared, however, what she thought in the matter, and a month later the wedding was celebrated. For that one day Louise does certainly appear to have tried to make the most of her. The girl’s magnificent hair hung, soft and moving in itself, unbound about her shoulders, and her gown of scarlet and ermine literally gleamed with the jewels heaped upon it. Renée’s skin was undeniably good—Bonnet refers to the whiteness of her breast and throat—and above the heavy splendour of her wedding garments her little subdued and plaintive face could only have worn a look of quaint, appealing incongruity.
The subsequent festivities continued until both bride and bridegroom became rather comically ill—through excess of food and want of sleep. Renée, who all her life suffered from the tragedy of headaches, had the migraine, and they began to think the time had come to start for Italy. Francis I. himself accompanied them to the gates of Paris. Here he solemnly confided his sister-in-law into the care of her husband, who was ordered always to treat her as a daughter of the royal house of France. Ercole, feeling that he had no reason to be diffident as regards his relations to the other sex, answered that he would have no difficulty in both pleasing and managing the lady. Subsequent events rendered the reply a little humorous. The small, meek wife, who heard the remark probably without even the desire to smile, proved in after years to the last degree intractable. Certainly Ercole never succeeded in managing her.
Ferrara, at the time of Renée’s marriage, had been devastated by the plague. Before she made her state entry, an order was issued commanding the people to reopen their shops, put on their best clothes, and, whatever their private emotions, show a cheerful countenance upon the arrival of their future duchess. Triumphal arches were erected, windows hung with silk, and through an almost painful effort Renée was received with the usual good-natured welcome from the people. Isabella of Mantua, the new bride’s aunt-in-law, always in great request for social occasions, had come to assist in receiving her, and several days were filled with public pageants, banquets, and plays.
But below the surface neither the new arrival nor those that received her were in a rejoicing mood. The last duchess to be welcomed to Ferrara had been the attractive, sweet-faced Lucrezia Borgia, dubious, it is true, in morals, but pleasant as a flower to look upon. This “ugly and hunch-backed” French girl could not avoid coming as a disagreeable shock, both to the crowd and to her new connections. It is the bitter fate of an ugly woman that she must always destroy antipathetic first impressions before she can hope to sow favourable ones. And Renée, on her side, was as little pleased as those who received her. It is generally supposed, in fact, that her instant and intense dislike to Ferrara had a good deal to do with her initial mistakes in Italy.
Certainly Ferrara was not an attractive city. Set in the middle of an enormous plain, a dreary monotony encompassed it, while the town itself, having pre-eminently to consider the necessities of defence, was grim, sinister, and aggressive looking. Even the Castello appeared nothing more than a powerful and gloomy fortress. Subject to unhealthy mists from the Po, the climate, moreover, underwent continual extremes of temperature, and one of Renée’s ladies-in-waiting describes it bitterly as a perfect hotbed of fleas. Frogs croaked all night and crows cawed all day. The inside of the castle, besides, was pitiably dilapidated. The house of Ferrara, constantly in want of money, had a habit of leaving matters needing repairs until repairs were no longer needed.
To Renée the place exhaled the chill of exile. In addition, as all the amusements arranged for her reception were in Italian, they only bored her beyond expression. In fact, one of the gravest faults of the girl’s Italian career lay in her reluctance to acquire Italian phrases. She arrived in Ferrara ignorant of even a rudimentary knowledge of her husband’s language, and taking an immediate dislike to the place and to the people, refused to make any real effort to learn the speech of those about her. This slow, and at all times inefficient, acquirement of Italian remained steadily against her, keeping her, apart from any other consideration, a very isolated person in her own establishment—an outsider where she should have been the central figure.
The only attempt she made in the right direction was to order, soon after her arrival, a number of dresses cut after the Italian fashions. But even this, due probably to an evanescent dazzlement at the charming appearance of the Italian women, she rendered an actual affront in the sequence. For shortly afterwards, either in bitterness of soul at her own poor appearance in them, or because she deliberately wished to behave with provocation, they were discarded for her former French style of dressing, which she then bluntly stated to be “more holy and more decent.” From the beginning Renée persistently refused to identify herself with her husband’s interests. She clung with stupid pathos to the associations of her by no means happy childhood, and was homesick all the years of her Italian sojourn for the ways of her own people.