Bembo is too well known among Renaissance celebrities to need personal explanations. Vasari says of him: “The Italians cannot be sufficiently thankful to Bembo for having not only purified their language from the rust of ages, but given it such regularity and clearness that it has become what we see.” Few men have known a life of more sustained triumph. At the time of his friendship with Lucrezia he was young—a good-looking man of about twenty-eight—but already he had attained a widespread appreciation.

He was not the only clever man in the duchess’s society at Ferrara; the traditions of the house were intellectual. Lucrezia, at last, had fallen into excellent hands, and was being formed in the best school possible. Men, notable not only for genius, but for serious qualities of temperament, educated her by companionship. Bembo, Castiglione, Aldo Manuce, were all men who thought with some profundity and breadth. Ariosto, from 1503 in the service of Hippolyte D’Este, was another man of genius she must have known intimately, and among minor intellects the two Strozzi poets, as well as Tebaldeo and Callagnini, sang her praises from personal acquaintance.

It was not altogether, however, an easy-minded society. Alphonso, though he mixed little with his wife’s entourage, formed a constantly dangerous background to it. His suspicions were always alert. The murder of the poet Strozzi is put down to him, and in 1505 Tebaldeo wrote to Isabella: “This duke hates me, though I do not know why, and it is not safe for me to stay in the town.” Even Bembo, in his relations to his friend, had to be girded with the uttermost caution, and finally for him also it became unadvisable to remain longer in Ferrara. With his going one of the most delicate affections of Lucrezia’s life fell to pieces. And yet not altogether; Bembo, though he took mistresses he loved to distraction, continued for fifteen years to correspond with his Ferrarese duchess. Unless their friendship had been very real and very rich in sincerities, it would have crumbled into nothingness within a year.

Lucrezia’s intimacy with Castiglione was a slighter affair. He had no importance in her life, save as being among those who helped to give her culture. That she should have known him is interesting, however, because in his great book Castiglione expressed with a limpid particularity the Renaissance ideal of womanhood. On the whole it was an unimaginative conception—at least expressed as Castiglione expressed it. For no book ever avoided more completely than “The Courtier” any obliqueness or any individual frankness of idiosyncrasy. Tact, according to Castiglione, was the essential mainspring of feminine fascination—tact and the art of conversation. One wise point he insisted upon—suavity. That, he said, should be inseparable from every woman’s society. The remark lingers in the memory,—suavity, a soft and soothing composure, having so nearly passed out of even the conception of good manners. Scandals, especially of her own sex, it was unpardonable for a woman either to utter or to attend to. Dancing and other accomplishments he urged as a necessary part of education; but, on the other hand, he did not encourage naturalness. He wrote: “When she cometh to dance or to show any kind of music, she ought to be brought to it with suffering herself somewhat to be prayed, and with a certain bashfulness that may declare the noble shamefastness that is contrary to headiness.” The early Victorian code of good manners was therefore only a return to a former fashion, and a fashion instigated by men and not by women at all.

Castiglione wrote at length upon the question of dress. Here his common sense is unimpeachable: “Women ought to have a judgment to know what manner of garments set her out best, and be most fit for the exercise she intendeth to undertake at that instant, and with them array herself.” He urged keenly that lean and fat should pay attention to their peculiarities. Every woman, he insisted, ought to do all in her power to keep herself “cleanly and handsome.”

Upon the subject of morality, Castiglione possessed no grave feelings. He advocated virtue, but not because conduct is vital, far-reaching, touching momentarily the character and fate of so many besides the doer, but almost entirely on account of the greater safety attaching to circumspection. Intrigue involved so many dangers. Consequently, he urged women “to be heedful, and remember that men with less jeopardy show to be in love than women.” He begged a woman to “give her lover nothing but her mind when either hatred of her husband or the love he beareth to others inclineth her to love.” Words were so much vapour, but a definite action was perilously apt to produce definite consequences. Husbands had a knack of revenging in their own wives what they asked from the wives of others.

A quaint and almost subtle stipulation ends the list. The perfect lady, according to Castiglione, “must not only be learned, but able to devise sports and pastimes.” All active brains need rest. The desirable woman should know, in consequence, how to relax the tension of absorbing thoughts, as well as how to tender the encouragement of sympathy. Health demands some intervals for relaxation and foolishness.

Castiglione himself married a child called Ippolyta Torelli, whose life was tragically brief. As a husband, nothing is known of him except that he was a good deal away from home. His wife wrote one exquisite letter—one loves her because of it—and that is practically all that remains of their domestic existence. The note was written just before her death, which took place through the birth of her third child. She lay in bed, and put on paper—

“My dear Husband,

“I have given birth to a little girl, which I do not think you will be displeased to hear. I have suffered this time much more than before, and I have had three bad bouts of fever. But now I am better, and hope to suffer no more pain. I will not write more to you lest I overtax my strength. But with all my heart I commend myself to your lordship.

“In Mantua, the 20th of August, 1520.

“Your wife, who is a little weary with pain.”

The caressing prettiness of the last phrase is like the feel of a tired child’s hand slipped into one’s own. Castiglione felt her death acutely, and wrote that he never dreamt his wife, whom he referred to with great tenderness, would have died before him, and all he now prayed for was that the Almighty might not leave him long before he followed her.

Lucrezia needed friends at Ferrara. Her life was one almost without respite from harassments, internal troubles and political insecurity being always present. Plague and famine devastated the well-being of the duchy. Twice Lucrezia was left in charge of a famine-stricken district, and twice proved herself capable, resourceful, self-forgetting. On the first occasion she was ill, but, notwithstanding, absolutely refused to leave the town as ordered by the doctors. She worked for the unhappy people starving about her, in a flaming rush of pity. Jews and Christians were alike to Lucrezia; her protection of Jews was strenuous in a period when the mere name roused men’s ferocity. That her heart throbbed in response to the right instincts is proved by the whole compassionate fabric of her later life. Any human being, intuitively conscious that pain equalizes all things, cannot be encased in the callousness of the really bad or cold nature. During all the years Lucrezia lived in Ferrara her care for charitable institutions was personal and active.

And it should be remembered that philanthropy had not yet become a fashionable occupation; sympathy of attitude by those in high places was still unusual and undemanded. The management of the few existing charitable houses during the Renaissance was deplorable. But Alphonso and Lucrezia not only built a new and improved hospital for infectious diseases, but took, besides, sufficient personal interest in its patients to dismiss a man for neglecting the invalids entrusted to his care.

This phase of Lucrezia’s life ought to be dwelt upon at length. It lifts her from a flighty extravagance and immorality into positive goodness of behaviour. Depth she probably had not—deep, brooding persons are not necessary in great abundance—and the woman who left her only child, the son of the murdered Don Alphonso, could not have been fiercely tenacious of heart. In all Lucrezia’s life, in fact, this is the worst incident—this abandonment of her baby. So much was thrust upon her; this surrender itself was so to a certain extent. But not the manner of it, the effortless blitheness, the impulsive acquiescence. It is this one revealing episode that chiefly keeps her from the region of supremely wronged and tragic persons.

In 1507 her brother Cæsar died. Alphonso was away at the time, fighting with Louis XII. A letter, despatched at once, told him how she took the news. According to the writer, “she showed great grief, but with constancy and without tears.” This phrase “without tears” carries a certain poignant implication. Surely the hearer was at last sinking through shallowness to find some deep places in her nature. Shallowness can always shed tears. Had Lucrezia even been indifferent to Cæsar’s death—and indifference is the least likely sensation—shallowness would have dropped a few tears of excitement, silliness, shock. There is a moving weariness of grief in any tearless conduct.

Isabella D’Este, who was with her at the time, wrote as well. She said that Lucrezia “immediately went to the monastery of the Corpo di Cristo, to offer up prayers for his soul. At the monastery she remained for two nights, and having left it, she found herself so much indisposed that her physician, for security, insisted on her keeping her bed, to which she is still confined.”

Lucrezia had several children after her third marriage, and in the year following Cæsar’s death she gave birth to the desired heir, Ercole, afterwards to marry the poor, cheerless Renée of France. But she had been a delicate, frail creature all her life, and when, in 1519, she gave birth to a dead child, the case immediately became hopeless. As a Roman Catholic, she was told at once how near Death loomed, though the information seems a cruel thing to give to any person not yet old enough to have wearied of existence. But Lucrezia, who had never yet made a fuss about anything, did not make a fuss over the last great unpleasantness of all. This composure at dying touches all her past serenity with something almost effulgent. It makes her suddenly full of strange wisdom and singular comprehensions; as if unconsciously she understood the real value of individual mortality, and knew it just sweet enough for smiles and laughter, but at the same time too slight, unstable, and finite for great commotions or disturbances.

Having been told that she could not live any longer, and seeing Alphonso suddenly attentive, the exhausted woman wasted no strength contesting the unalterable, but simply lay quietly in her bed and tried to think of God, the Virgin, and the world beyond. A few days before her death she wrote to Pope Leo X. Her letter is sedateness itself and courage. Nothing was further from its utterance than discomposure or demur. If forlornness reached her at leaving the lovely homeliness of mortal life, she was too magnanimously courteous to burden another person with a private sorrow. She wrote—

“Most Holy Father and Worshipful Lord,

“With all reverence I kiss your Holiness’s feet, and humbly commend myself to your good will. Having been in great pain for more than two months, early on the morning of the 14th day of the present month, according to the will of God, I gave birth to a little daughter. I hoped then to get alleviation from my sufferings, but the contrary took place, and I have to pay my debt to nature. And through the grace of God I am conscious that the end of my life is near, and that in a few hours, having received the holy sacraments of the Church, I shall have passed away. And having came to this state, as a Christian, although a sinner, I beseech your Holiness in your goodness to give me from the heavenly treasures spiritual consolation and your holy benediction for my soul. This I most devoutly pray for, and to your great mercy I commit my husband and my children, who are all faithful servants of your Holiness.

“In Ferrara, the 22nd of June, 1519, at the fourteenth hour.

“Your Holiness’s humble servant,

“Lucrezia da Este.”

No braver letter, nor one more touching in its noble staidness of expression, was ever written by a woman, knowing that in a few hours life would have ceased for her. Two days after writing it she died, and Alphonso wrote after her death that it was hard to face the loss of so sweet a companion, the gentleness of her conduct having made the bond between them a very close and tender one. No single individual can possess the whole round of virtues—a fact too often ignored in current judgment of character—but every writer lingered upon Lucrezia’s gentleness. There is no more winning thing than a gentle woman. Persistent gentleness not only excludes harsh thoughts, but is a force constantly wooing men out of turbulent bitterness and acrimony of spirit.

Alphonso fainted at his wife’s funeral, and nothing could protest more eloquently against assertions of her wickedness. Grim men of Alphonso’s fibre do not, after nine years of marriage, faint for a woman who has not known how to bring to life the softer undergrowths of character. Lucrezia must have possessed a more than normal degree of conciliatory seduction. And she charms still, in spite of much calumniating gossip, not only because she expressed undeviatingly the heartening value of good cheer, and set so fine an example of how to discard bad yesterdays, but to a certain extent because, as far as one knows, she babbled nothing for biographers to seize upon, and so left herself perpetually among the engrossing enigmas of European history.