A Decade of Italian Women, vol. 2 (of 2)

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Francesco, his eider brother, assuredly did not fail in achieving respectability from any too great openness or sincerity of character. For a more dissembling nature has rarely perhaps existed. His hypocrisy frequently exhibited itself in traits of so strangely profound a kind, as to have the appearance of a hope to deceive either himself or his Creator. For he would practise them upon his own confederates in crime. Nor was ever any one less indifferent to the estimate his fellows might form of him. The honour of the Medicean name, as he understood the meaning of that phrase, was very dear to him. Yet he made himself the common fable of the courts of Italy. He contrived to earn the contempt of every crowned head in Europe; and was constantly giving rise to that "scandal" which is a respectable Italian's greatest horror. Strong passions, and an obstinate will exaggerated by the possession of absolute power into something at times very like partial insanity, joined to great weakness of all the higher intellectual faculties, and a profound ignorance of the nature, beauty, and value of real worth and nobleness, led him into all this mischief, and were a source of never–ending sorrow and trouble to the Cardinal.

PIETRO DE' MEDICI.

Pietro, the younger brother, was almost an equal thorn in his prudent and respectably ambitious brother's side. His was a nature as unlike as possible to that of either the Duke or the Cardinal; and was not without some indications, that under better circumstances, it might have contained in it the elements of a finer character than either of theirs. As it was, Pietro was an unmitigated and avowed scamp; the centre and leader of all the most profligate young men in the city; the terror of quiet citizens, the insulter of the impotent laws which he braved, the despair of the Cardinal as a disgrace to the family, and the dread of the Duke from his constant and insatiable demands for money.[156]

Cosmo, the old duke, died in 1574; but before he went, he provided his scapegrace son with a wife, after a fashion, which unfortunately had not the effect of reclaiming him from his wild courses. There was living in the court a certain Eleonora di Garzia, a niece of Cosmo's first wife, Eleonora di Toledo. She was pretty, and pleased Cosmo's eye. But being of a noble Spanish family, with interest at the Spanish court, the "convenances" had to be assiduously attended to. So when it appeared one day that Eleonora was likely to become a mother, the exemplary sovereign and excellent father, suddenly struck with the idea that marriage was just the thing to steady his runagate son Pietro, handed over the lady to the young man, and bade him marry her.[157] Pietro obediently did so; and the lady's "honour," and Cosmo's "honour," and the Toledo family "honour" was all "saved" as bright as ever; which was wholly satisfactory to all those honourable persons. But beyond this very desirable result, the well–imagined arrangement was not found to answer. Pietro led a worse life than ever; and Eleonora had no inclination to be a faithful wife to a husband she rarely saw. But Cosmo went to his grave under the dome of St. Lorenzo, with his honour saved, and left his fatherly management to work to what results it might.

There were thus five ladies belonging to the Medicean family party at the time of Cosmo's death. 1. His widow Camilla Martelli. 2. Francesco's wife, poor Joan of Austria. 3. The gay and dashing widow bewitched, Isabella Orsini. 4. Pietro's neglected but equally gay wife, Eleonora. And, 5. Bianca Capello.

Poor Camilla was very shortly eliminated, being sentenced by the new Grand–duke to perform suttee, by being buried alive in a monastery; where he with inveterate hatred kept her imprisoned during his whole life, notwithstanding the reiterated intercessions of the Cardinal.

ISABELLA ORSINI.

The position of his own wife, Giovanna, was not much better. She led a lonely life in her own apartments, treated with all but insult by the courtiers, who lavished on Bianca the homage which follows the dispenser of court favours.

Remained the three younger ladies, the ornaments of Francesco's court, the cynosure of Florentine eyes, the promoters and centre of all festivities, and the devisers of all sorts of diversions and frolic schemes. The general licence of the manners of the time, the high social position of the fair bevy, and the special dissoluteness and neglect of their natural protectors, permitted them to push their sport unchecked very considerably beyond the boundary line, which separates venial levity from conduct that leaves permanent and ineffaceable stains behind it. Isabella had long since "thrown her cap over the roofs," to use the classic French phrase—aye, over the topmost cupola of the Duomo. Paolo Giordano Orsini was pursuing his own not very dissimilar course at Rome, and took but little heed of the almost unknown wife, who was off his hands under the care of her own family; and Isabella had ingratiated herself with her brother Francesco in the manner most acceptable to him, by taking kindly to Bianca from the first;[158] the more so as she was the only one of his family who had ever done so. Pietro's young wife, Eleonora, showed every disposition to follow to the full extent the example he set her. And Bianca, though her doings do not appear to have at any time taken such a shape as to give Francesco any cause for jealousy, was ready to go all lengths with the others of the trio as far as lavish extravagance, festivities of which the details were more or less unfit to meet the scrutiny of the public eye, and general "emancipation" from "prejudice," were concerned.

So that the Grand Duke Francesco found himself at the head of a somewhat skittish court; a Capua of the renaissance, which was beginning to attract unfavourable notice from the other courts of Italy. When the pot chances to be a shade blacker than usual, the kettle, we know, is ever loudest in abuse of it. Besides, the disorders of the Tuscan court seem to have had a certain Tom–and–Jerry flavour about them, which greatly scandalised and disgusted many Highnesses, Eminences, and Excellencies of different degrees of Illustriousness and Serenity, who would not have minded a few decently veiled assassinations or any amount of respectably quiet poisonings. And Francesco, who flattered himself, very mistakenly, that by dint of a certain dose of Louis–Onze–like devoutness, he had contrived to keep character enough for one, was painfully conscious of the fact that he assuredly had not any to spare for covering the deficiencies of others.