Thus were decency and respectability restored, it was hoped, to the court life at Florence. Bianca's sins, as has been intimated, were of a different kind, from those of the two murdered princesses. But Francesco's gloomy temper and fits of violence, joined to such an example of his mode of action when irritated, could not have been re–assuring to the survivor of the trio court beauties.
CHAPTER III.
Bianca balances her accounts.—Dangers in her path.—A bold step—and its consequences.—Facilis descensus.—A proud father.—Bianca's witchcraft.—The Cardinal is checkmated, for this game.
But whatever other effect the untimely deaths of these two unfortunate women may have produced, they had not that of removing the gloom from the brow of Francesco. Surely, indeed, if he is to be considered human, and in any degree sane, it may be thought, that such events must have contributed no little to increase the irritability of his temper, and the sudden melancholy, ever and anon bursting out into savageness. It is likely enough that Francesco's education at the Court of Spain, the obsequious casuistry of his own theologians, and the total absence from cradle to grave of any one wholesome moral influence, of any one ray of light to dissipate, however fitfully, the thick darkness of an ignorance of right and wrong far deeper, more dangerous, and more perverse than that of a savage;—it is possible enough, that all this may have enabled him to say to his own heart, when kneeling at the feet of his most favourite idol, that his act had not made him guilty within the limitations of God's statute law, and the intricate modifications of it made by subsequent legislation, in such and such acts of such and such a year of this or the other Pope's reign.
Still, assure himself of this as he might, and fortify the assurance by whatsoever most satisfactory "case," drawn up by the shrewdest sacerdotal pettifogger who ever discovered a flaw in heaven's eternal ordinances, it may be fancied that he did not sleep better of nights after that July, 1576, and that Bianca's position and task were not improved by what had happened.
Some thirty years or so ago, a Florentine publisher, happening to have become possessed of the house which once belonged to Bianca, in the Via Maggio, conceived the idea of pretending to have found concealed in a wall therein a MS. containing her autobiography. A prefatory notice stated, that unfortunately the chemical means used for restoring the faded characters to legibility had had the effect of entirely destroying them, so that the finder of these precious papers could not have the satisfaction he had hoped of showing them to persons interested in such matters! The forgery was an impudent and ridiculously ill–executed one. A very superficial knowledge of the language sufficed to convince any reader of the first two pages of the silly catch–penny trash, that the phraseology was of the nineteenth and not the sixteenth century, even had the tone of the narrative been at all assorted to the character of the supposed writer.
But what a treat would such a find be, were it genuine! What a psychological treasure would be a peep into the real feelings of such a mind and heart! Did Bianca consider her career to be a triumphant one, successfully achieving the "excelsior" of her ideal by painful but victorious struggle with opposing fortune? Or did she look on herself as the victim of a chain of unfortunate circumstances, entangled in the meshes of a destiny, which drew her fatally on, and irresistibly wrapped its darkening clouds around her. Few recorded careers illustrate so exactly, regularly, and undeviatingly the lessons of the moralist as that of Bianca. No invented story of progress from bad to worse can better exemplify the law that compels evil to generate ever new evil.