Not entirely unperturbed, Ercole chose the second risk as the less dangerous of the two. In reply to the French invitation, he wrote that Renée had several small children to take care of, and that she was also still too feeble in health to undertake so long and dangerous a journey. The refusal came almost like a loss of all hope to Renée. Thought of it had been a sudden irradiating anticipation in the drear distastefulness of life. Nothing in a monotonous existence is more uplifting than an incident to make plans for, and now from the sudden quickening influence of a contemplated holiday she was flung back again upon the old confusing friction of her days in the grim Castello.
Every year Ercole’s interests diverged more widely from her own. Renée loved France instinctively, as people love the home of their forefathers. When she first married Ferrara’s interests lay in friendship with France. But Ercole’s policy brought him later to the side of Pope and Emperor, when support from France ceased to be important. After Madame de Soubise, therefore, had at last been sent from Italy, and all hope of Renée’s going home had been withdrawn, the latter must have experienced almost a sense of desolation. The easement of heart entailed by merely telling the hoarded mischances of her married life would have warmed her spirit like a cordial.
She did not naturally love Ercole better for getting rid of the woman who had been motherly to her all her days, and for having thwarted the one intense longing which it was in his power to gratify. Their antagonism quieted not a whit through the departure of Renée’s governess; Ercole had rid himself of one grievance only to find another grow more hardy.
Its first public demonstration took place during a Good Friday service in the church of Ferrara. As the cross was being raised for adoration, a little singer, Zanetto, belonging to the duchess’s service, suddenly walked out of the building, making blasphemous comments in a voice of penetrating clarity. He was arrested that evening, and trouble and danger swept into Renée’s household. She herself had for some time past secretly belonged to the Protestant party. Ercole’s hope that his wife would fall into a weary acquiescence of conduct, when the influence of Madame de Soubise had been withdrawn, ended in inevitable failure. Renée was disastrously obstinate, and in addition, the doctrines of Calvin had already become too deeply engrafted in her ever to be really uprooted. Religion was an urgent necessity to her.
She was an unloved woman, and consequently the other world had never slunk into vagueness through the engrossing sufficiencies of this one. The appeal made to her by the new religion is easy to understand. Her little soul was narrow, but it was at the same time eager, and temperamentally attuned to austere and dreary dogmas. Renée belonged to the class who prefer to take life sadly—a gloomy religion, hedged in by appalling terrors, met the needs of her character far more closely than the shifty and cheerful methods of Roman Catholicism could ever have done.
Before the Good Friday incident Calvin had secretly been to see her, had preached to her, and exhorted her. No man was better fitted to keep a hold over Renée; for Calvin was not merely the great preacher of a new religion, he was an impassioned and autocratic schoolmaster. When later he controlled the town of Geneva, it became impossible to indulge in even the mildest private weaknesses. Domestic conduct fell under the jurisdiction of a council, which inflicted penalties for the least undesirable idiosyncrasy. It was at Geneva, for instance, that Calvin had a gambler set in the stocks for an hour, with his playing-cards hung round his neck; the inventor of a masquerade was forced to ask pardon for it on his knees in the cathedral; a man guilty of perjury they hoisted on a ladder and kept there for several hours, his right hand fastened to the top; while a man and woman, whose love lay under the stigma of impropriety, were paraded through the streets of the city for the abuse of virtuous horror. Calvin flung immense energy into the conversion of Renée. As an individual he thought little of her, but converts among the socially great were momentous for the growth of the cause. Renée, moreover, gave awed and pliant assent to the uncompromising preacher’s teaching, until the arrest of her singer for blasphemy brought the sudden sharpness of danger into her household. This created panic. Not actually for herself—while Francis I. remained King of France she relied implicitly upon French protection—but for the people of her entourage. Zanetto, placed upon the rack, broke down at the third twist of the screw, and a list of names poured out of his lips. They were all persons employed in the duchess’s service. Several had already been arrested as accomplices, though concerning one of them, usually thought to be Calvin, there is considerable mystery. The arrests had been made by Ercole’s orders, chiefly, it would appear, to exasperate his wife.
He owed her a fresh sword-thrust. This public religious scandal constituted a really serious danger for him. The Vatican had some time previously realized that the new heresy must be exterminated if it were not to become a growing danger to the power at Rome. Apart from this, Renée had been behaving with an inimical cunning difficult for any man to pass over good-humouredly. She had been writing secret letters to the Pope, supplicating him to have the prisoners delivered out of the power of Ercole into the authority of France.
In retaliation, Ercole had Cardillan, treasurer and controller of finances to Renée ever since her arrival in Ferrara, imprisoned with the others. Few things could have hurt her more, and the scenes that took place between the two over the Zanetto business must again have driven them into unforgettable personalities. In the matter of personal interviews Ercole no doubt had the best of it. Renée did not possess the gift of facile utterance; her face alone shows a mind easily disconcerted. But her stolid silence would have held as much inner rancour as the other’s violence. Beyond question, when roused, Ercole frightened her, but not sufficiently to abate forlorn contrariness. All he could achieve was to make her hate him a little more desperately than before, and to fling her with renewed tenacity upon the policy of aggravation. According to current rumour, Ercole beat her. The allegation has not been proved, but she was the type of woman liable to ill-treatment, and it is more than likely that he did. Certainly no respect was enforced towards her, for Renée, writing to Margaret of Navarre, complained that the Inquisitor whom she interviewed concerning the arrested heretics spoke to her with so much contempt and insolence, that the other would have been dumbfounded had she been present.
The situation of husband and wife at that period could not possibly have been worse. Ercole’s enflamed resentment also found utterance in a letter. It was written to the Ferrarese envoy at the French court. Extreme caution in statements conveyed to paper formed part of Italian education, and the plain truthfulness of the duke’s expressions could only have issued from a spirit choking with a sense of injury. He wrote: “If it were not for the respect I owe to the king, I should certainly not have suffered such an insult, and should have shown madame the deep resentment I feel.”
The bustling distress and excitement roused by the heretics nevertheless fizzled out. That a scandal of this sort should take serious proportions would have brought very evil notoriety upon the Ferrarese court. Cardillan was released and banished; the other prisoners conveniently permitted to escape. Ercole still gained his main object—the satisfaction of depriving Renée of another of her French attendants. Probably husband and wife hated each other a little more keenly than before, but to all appearances another storm had passed over. For the two still continued to share one bedroom. They must in consequence have enjoyed intervals of ordinary conversation and apparent friendliness. Moreover, they had children. In all the divergences of their interests, there remained some that could not be separated. After the sharp encounter brought about by the unwisdom of Zanetto, Renée gave birth to another infant. Household trivialities provided permanent groundwork for amiable bedroom discussions, and, however apathetically, they must at least have gone through intervals of superficial good-humour.