Et plus à craindre.”
* * * * *
Few phrases could expose more explicitly a brutal husband. Allowing for exaggeration, Ercole obviously behaved like a boor, making his wife’s meals, when he was present, little else than a weeping martyrdom. Renée certainly had the temperament to cry often and easily, though not tempestuously; but at Ferrara the vague-looking eyes seem to have possessed ample reason for being constantly and bitterly watered. Marot, of course, had neither the opportunity nor the desire to dwell upon intervals of passivity. But, as one knows, there must inevitably have been some in the hectored years of Renée’s Italian existence. And among them was certainly the visit of Vittoria Colonna. She stayed for ten months, and all the information given implies that during that period there was almost peace at the Castello. This is to Ercole’s credit, for Vittoria Colonna would have bored any but a practised intelligence. Her forte lay in an unerring sense of what was fine in everything—art, conduct, and deliberation. Clever men adored her, and her brain was certainly imposing, deliberate, attentive, and comprehending. The woman who understood Michelangelo could scarcely fail to grasp the meanings of lesser intelligences. But the minor gaieties she had not; the quaint, swift humour with which subtle women sweep away tension would never have lightened Vittoria’s solid arguments. She wrote poetry—very insincere and laboured—but she possessed no imagination. The gravity of existence, and the fact that each soul in it is born to exist eternally, clothed her thoughts with an almost restricting austerity. Few jokes would have sounded suitable in her presence. She appeared too exquisitely reasonable, cool, and punctiliously magnificent for any descent into the ridiculous.
Undoubtedly Vittoria’s presence eased domestic friction, though it is doubtful, notwithstanding, whether Renée liked her. There are letters between Vittoria and Ercole, but none to be found between the two women. Vittoria Colonna was inherently good, but she was also triumphant, pampered, flattered, and successful. When she came to Ferrara she was received with a voluntary public ovation. Flanked by the mental sumptuousness of this efficient creature, Renée’s insignificance was accentuated; the contrast dragged the whole extent of her ineffectuality into light. And Renée, almost meek in appearance, with her “weakened body,” as Brantome put it, and her vague-looking face, was not meek in disposition. She forgot at no time of her life that but for the Salic law she would have sat upon the throne of France.
There is no statement against the existence of affection between the two women, but the probabilities are not for it. There is far more likelihood that Vittoria got upon her hostess’s nerves, and chilled her by flaming, for all her disadvantages of years, with a sort of opulent beauty that intensified the pallid ugliness of the foreign duchess. Small wonder that Renée turned to the sympathy offered by Monsieur Pons; small wonder that she permitted the elegant and amiable Frenchman to make inroads upon her affections.
Monsieur Pons represents the solitary scandal of Renée’s existence. Some writers do not like Monsieur Pons. They desire the page unblemished by this warm and doubtful incident. To them Renée must stand as a blameless martyr to the cause of Protestantism, and this friendship confuses the picture. In such hands Monsieur Pons fades into an insignificance not sufficiently substantial for impropriety.
The effacement is entirely to be regretted. Monsieur Pons was the one wholly tender circumstance in Renée’s life. It is ridiculous to pretend that she did not love him. Her harassed heart, unaccustomed to being besieged, surrendered naturally to sympathetic advances from a fascinating man of her own nationality. He made love to her discreetly, mildly, and, no doubt, indirectly, while the woman warmed under it before she realized the fearsome pleasantness of the sensation. They may actually have had sympathy of temperament. Monsieur Pons also may really have experienced a slight compassionate tenderness for the frail, misshapen little duchess, who was openly ill-treated by a lusty and unfaithful husband. It is difficult to probe Monsieur Pons’s motives. Policy is rarely absent from the mind of those who deal with powerful persons. He was upon admirable terms with his own wife. So was Renée, notwithstanding a friendship for the husband exhilarated by a hint of something just a little more alive and poignant. Genuine impropriety, one feels assured, there was not. Yet to those anxious for scandal the duchess’s letters would in themselves be considered sufficient to take away any woman’s character. They are personal, intimate, and interwoven with unspoken statements. Actually they have charm—the charm that issues when a woman with some grace of mind desires her letter to be chiefly a persuasive form of flirtation. The word “love” is not mentioned in them, but for all that they are undeniably love-letters. They are, in addition, the love-letters of a woman not yet muddled by any uncertainty as to the recipient’s reciprocity.
It must be admitted that Renée, had she behaved with strict decorum, would not have written these documents. Married persons forfeit the licence to indulge in a certain kind of correspondence. But there is no reason to suppose that because a woman writes a delicately flirtatious letter she has any evil thoughts at the back of it, or that the relations of the two will at any time transgress the limits of an audacious friendliness. The mistake is usually made, though few things show less acquaintance with human nature.
Renée of Ferrara was temperamentally incapable of the scandal some of her biographers have foisted upon her. Putting it upon the lowest basis, she had neither sufficient courage nor sufficient pliancy for unfaithfulness. The distinguishing trait of Renée’s character was her incapacity ever to go the extreme length in anything. There are no tenable grounds, besides, for supposing that she desired to forget right living for Monsieur Pons and passion. She was not an ardent woman; the dull face expresses nothing so unmistakable as a wistful apathy and a bad circulation.
From the internal evidence of the letters themselves, one finds a romantic and sentimental friendship, or, phrased more colloquially, a flirtation. But the essence of a flirtation is to play at being more than it is in reality—to hover skilfully about borders neither player would really care to trespass. Not a phrase in Renée’s letters reveals any desire to thrust aside cautious boundaries. She had also perfect knowledge of Monsieur Pons’s comfortable domestic circumstances. Madame de Pons was her friend, the closest woman companion remaining to her. What is more than likely is that she and Madame Pons—madame with a finger secretly to her nose—enjoyed a perfect understanding as to Renée’s relations with the husband. They agreed together in worship of Monsieur Pons, while he on his side was supposed to love them both—though Renée, of course, with discretion, with reverence, with the distance that her rank necessitated.