Queens of the Renaissance

by M. Beresford Ryley

Alinari

THE CASTELLO AT FERRARA

All through, her conduct was hopelessly mistaken. In the give and take of marriage it is part of a woman’s lovely chances always to give a little more than is yielded back to her. At the same time, it is questionable whether, owing to her ugliness and want of charm, Renée, whatever she had done, could have become popular. There ought, in truth, almost to exist a different code for the really ugly woman. The fact is so profoundly and entirely tragic. Tenderness is the heart of life to women, and any woman so misused by nature as to be unable to rouse this becomes, through subtle piteousness, beyond ordinary judgment. She lives in a world both unjust and inimical, practically with her back to the wall. Sweet follies have never harmonized her to the unreason of humanity; failure lies always upon her soul. For inherited, deep-rooted, ineradicable, is in most women the unformulated knowledge that to attract men is the normal fate of their sex; the creature who cannot do this once at least in life, carries a hidden sense not only of loneliness, and of something vital ungranted by destiny, but of secret shame and humiliation.

Renée had never glowed bewildered under absurdities of praise. If only as an isolated experience, this mad blitheness is curiously good for character. Afterwards a woman knows—is sympathetically inside the circle of things—seeing the dramas of others, not like a child staring starved at a food shop, but as one who has already had her fill of cakes with the best of them.

All her life Renée remained the hungry child who sees others overfed on the sweets denied to her. Small wonder, in consequence, that she hated the ways of frivolity, and was slow in advances of friendship. No soft remembrances freighted her thoughts with gentleness, and when she came to Italy she was already destitute of the exaltation that, out of the abundance of its own contentment, craves to create nothing but contentment about it. For this immediate hostility Ercole must have been in a measure responsible. A woman happy in her married life is incapable of passionately revolting against the accessories that encompass it. Renée never liked her husband, and the fact that she did not may have been due to his half-hearted efforts as lover. A girl of eighteen, ugly, neglected, and unattractive, cannot be a difficult person for a handsome man to ensnare. Renée, besides, was a very ordinary woman—she had inherent need to cling to some one. It would certainly have bored Ercole had he been the creature she clung to, but the boredom would at least have saved him years of dangerous domestic friction, and a life of disagreements in which he did not always get the best of it.

As it was, mutual dissatisfaction came almost immediately. Very soon after their arrival in Ferrara they had begun to quarrel. Among the French women Renée had brought with her from France was her old governess, Madame de Soubise, whose leanings were strongly Protestant. She had instilled the same sympathies into her pupil, and a very short time after her arrival in Ferrara the new duchess was surrounded by a large number of persons professing the new religion. A good deal of her personal income also went in assisting French fugitives who happened to pass through the city. Both proceedings were objected to by Ercole. The presence of Protestants in his household constituted an actual danger to his own and his father’s position. The tenure of the Dukedom of Ferrara depended upon the maintenance of friendly relations with Rome and Germany. Renée’s monetary kindness to French fugitives he complained about as “inordinate and ill-considered expenses,” and since her allowance from France was very irregularly paid, this grievance had a certain rational basis. Nobody attached to the duchess’s personal service was Italian, a final discourtesy in her arrangements that added to the growing exasperation of her new relations.

As regards the Protestantism of Renée’s household, no direct mention was made of it in Ercole’s objections. With the indirect methods of his family, he merely stated that the duchess had surrounded herself with a number of people unfit for the functions attributed to them. That certainly was true. A certain number of Renée’s so-called servants did absolutely nothing for their pay, save keep some lingering memories of her French home vivid in her thoughts. Consequently, in the first definite publication of friction between the newly married couple, most of the reasonable complaints were Ercole’s. They show, however, the rapidity with which these two had got upon each other’s nerves. Neither, at any stage of their intercourse, made the least attempt to adopt a conciliatory attitude.

Renée’s generosity, nevertheless, was the redemption of her character. For there is more than one kind of generosity. There is the careless output of a person chiefly feckless, and not desirous of uttering disagreeable refusals, and the deliberate, anxious, continuous assistance of a nature really capable of fretting for the distresses of other people. Renée’s generosity was essentially of this sort. The most prominent facts in the book of her daily expenses are sums given in some form of charity. She appears, indeed, to have been unable to refuse any cry for assistance, and all her life gave with equal pleasure either to Roman Catholics or to Protestants. Anne had been generous, but in the showy and semi-profitable manner so easy for great people. Renée’s generosity was entirely lovely and intuitive.