At the time Ludovico was almost universally credited with having murdered Giangaleazzo, but the accusation has since fallen to the ground. Practically it was based upon the fact that the moment of the duke’s passing was too opportune to wear an air of naturalness. In spite, moreover, of what men thought, nothing dared be uttered openly, and Ludovico, blazing in cloth of gold, rode to the church of St. Ambrozio to give public thanks for his accession. The wind was with him for the moment. Beatrice, too, had become the first lady of Milan, and her soul stood in a more perilous state than ever. She had reached the place of her desire by ways too shady for loveliness of thought to have had much hold in her.
Isabella meanwhile, from this time onwards, passes into a desolate private existence. But there is an incident which occurred first that remains very difficult to penetrate. Literally at Ludovico’s mercy after her husband’s death, she still bore herself bravely. For a time she refused to leave Pavia. When she did, we are told that Beatrice drove out to meet her, and that when they came together, some two miles from town, she got out of her own carriage and entered Isabella’s, both women sobbing bitterly as she did so. That Isabella should cry was natural; she was weak with the weariness of sorrow. But Beatrice’s was not the nature to weep either easily or falsely. Clearly face to face with the price paid for her own position, it beat back upon her for a moment as an utter heaviness, and she cried because Isabella was the living expression of despair, and they had once been intimate and companionable. God knows what they said to each other in this drive together, or whether through the passing grace of a sudden penitence Beatrice found anything the widow could hear without a sense of nausea. For how dire Isabella felt her life to have become is revealed in a singularly tender reference made to her by the court jester Barone, who wrote that she was so changed, and so thin and grief-stricken, that the hardest heart could not have seen her without compassion.
But the Duchy of Milan was to yield little happiness to the two who had acquired it so shabbily. Charles’ Italian campaign soon thrust Ludovico into both difficulty and danger. At the commencement of it he had been a great man. But when one Italian town after another became as a doormat for Charles to walk over, he perceived suddenly the flaw in his French invasion policy. Ferrante of Naples wrecked was one thing; Italy given over to Charles VIII. another.
He was not even personally safe with Louis of Orleans at Asti. A league was formed, in which the Pope, the King of the Romans, the King and Queen of Spain, Henry VII. of England, the Signory of Venice, and the Duke of Milan all combined. Isabella D’Este’s husband was made captain, with the express duty of cutting off Charles’ triumphant return into France. This fight against the king, so cajoled at the beginning, and the subsequent peace patched up between him and Ludovico, is purely a matter of history. In the attack against Asti, made by Louis of Orleans, however, Beatrice showed a magnificent and practical courage. Ludovico’s own astuteness had died in a sickly terror, and he had rushed back to his fortified castle at Milan. At the time there is little doubt that he was suffering from nervous exhaustion; but it was Beatrice whose courageous eloquence roused Milan, and it was Beatrice who ordered the steps necessary to defend the town and Castello.
It was about this time, also, that she showed a disarming and warm-hearted rightness of feeling. Among the booty her sister Isabella’s husband, Francesco, had acquired from the French were some hangings that had belonged to Charles VIII.’s own tent. They were originally forwarded to Isabella, but presently Francesco asked her to send them back, as he wished to give them to Beatrice. That made Isabella angry. She had some degree of reason, but her expression of it was repellantly ungracious. The hangings, notwithstanding, were sent to Beatrice. Happily, she would not have them. As keenly as Isabella, she loved beautiful and notable things, but with the simple statement that, under the circumstances she felt she ought not to have them, she returned the draperies to her sister. In doing so she was beginning to practise the little niceties that help to keep existence lovable. Had she lived, she would almost surely have weathered the over-eager selfishnesses of her married life. They were after all largely due to the absorption that all youth suffers during the first unsettled, uncertain period, when life is still all newness and personal excitements. But her time was short, and after the settling of peace with France, the end drew horribly near to her.
For five years she had been happy. Ludovico constituted the integral part of heaven for her, and after the first fierce struggle she had lived in the soft security of an equal affection. Nature had given her brains and seductiveness. To have both in one person, and then, as crowning grace, to possess a genius for light-heartedness, was more than most women can rely upon in the unceasing labour of retaining a husband’s affectionateness. But Beatrice was bolstered by even more than this. The tastes of husband and wife were similar—Ludovico had no hobbies outside the radius of her understanding. Nevertheless, at twenty she stumbled upon the disheartenment that for most wives lurks about the forties. She could not keep her husband from the charm of other women. She had been everything, but the time had come when a pretty face was to sweep her peace down like a house of flimsy cardboard.
She had grown stale—observation, dulled by familiarity, could receive no fresh impression. The very years they had handled life together worked not for, but against, her. All her ways had grown a parrot-cry; those of other women were new and half mysterious. Further, she was at that time physically in a peculiarly defenceless condition. When Ludovico’s last passion swept him away from her, Beatrice was once more expecting to be a mother.
Among the members of her household at this time there had been included the daughter of a Milanese nobleman, a girl called Lucrezia Crivelli. This Lucrezia Crivelli was far too beautiful to be a safe person in the house of any man susceptible to all precious or lovely objects. Could anything, indeed, be more exquisite than her face as painted by Leonardo da Vinci? At the same time, to look for long at the beautiful oval is to see that its meekness is purely a sham expression. The eyes too, so gentle, undisturbed, observant, are just a little, though illusively, unscrupulous. It is essentially the face of a young girl with all the delicate finenesses and sweet, reliant placidities of inexperience; but it is also a face already rich in power, reservations, and a silent deliberateness of conduct. In addition to all this, her hair was golden, her head almost perfectly outlined. In any court she must have created a sensation—she was so dazzling, and yet so quiet, so self-contained, and so demurely and subtly dignified. The temperament was probably cold. There is more thought than feeling in its gracious quietude—thought and a dim suggestion of pain, not in the present, but for the future. Small wonder she drew Ludovico. To be young, beautiful—a sweet wonder to look at—and, in addition, to strain at men’s heartstrings by just a hint of wistfulness, is to be dangerous beyond bearing.
Ludovico’s admiration became rapidly unmistakable. From being constantly pin-pricked, Beatrice saw the friendship between the two spring suddenly into something mortal to her heart. The two were thrown hourly into each other’s society—the man with the inflammable response to beauty, and the girl with the discreet and tantalizing loveliness. It was a tense drama of three. For Beatrice was always there as the tortured third. From the commencement nothing was spared her. Each day some new incident shook her with unutterable anticipations. Slowly existence, as she watched these two, became a solidifying terror. There must have been some scenes at the commencement. No woman could accept a crisis such as this and not cry out for mercy. But Beatrice, with the innate wisdom that so soon grew strong in her, quickly realized that to plead was like a voice trying to be heard above a tempest. Ludovico was infatuated. Everybody knew, and talked of the affair, both at the Court of Milan and beyond it. In 1496, a Ferrarese ambassador wrote that the latest news from Milan was the duke’s infatuation for one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, with whom he passed the greater part of his time—a fact which was widely condemned there.
That same autumn Ludovico’s natural daughter, whom Beatrice had adopted when she came to Milan, and whom she loved dearly, died. Only a few months back she had been married to the Galeazzo di Sanseverino, who had helped so largely to keep Beatrice merry in the first months of her marriage. Her name was Bianca, and in her portrait by Ambrogio da Predis—a portrait sometimes said to be of Beatrice D’Este—she looks adorable. Her death struck Beatrice when she was already heartsick. A dozen times between daylight and bedtime Lucrezia and Ludovico had acquired the power to drive the blood to her temples. Muralto, who mentions Il Moro making the girl his mistress, says, with the simplicity characteristic of the period when touching anything emotional, that though it caused Beatrice bitter anguish of mind, it could not alter her love for him. It is very evident that Beatrice dared nothing against this later mistress. With an admirable wisdom—the wisdom of an intelligence which had deepened upon the facts of experience—she did not struggle, after five years of married life, against the fever of this tempestuous passion. But a passionate restlessness wore her out. She looked upon days unending and unbearable. In a few weeks her manner changed entirely. She, who had been like an embodied joy for years, grew to have tears always near the surface. In the end she became too weary to control them; for there is no weakness like that brought about by a forlornness constantly goaded into fresh sensations. Both her ladies and her courtiers, in the inevitable publicity of court habits, saw her eyes frequently blinded by silent tears. But she said nothing, and they could not be certain whether they fell because of her husband’s conduct or because of the death of Bianca.
To some extent she had become abruptly absorbed by a new outlook. All her life previously she had been a frank materialist; the question of death had loomed too distant to need attention. But suddenly life had betrayed her, and in the bitter knowledge of its cruelties the soul stirred to tragic wakefulness.
The Renaissance, as far as she was concerned, had shown itself inadequate. It had promised, with artistic and philosophic culture, to bring happiness. But in practice it provided nothing for the heart of women. It could not make men faithful, nor help the warm and simple ways of domesticity from the denudations of instability. There remained only the question of the afterlife to fall back upon, and Beatrice, enfevered and tortured, tried to fix her mind upon this prospect. Bianca had been buried in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and during the last months of her existence Beatrice formed the habit of going constantly to her tomb, and of staying there for hours at a time. In fact, shipwrecked as far as life was concerned, and brought by her approaching motherhood to the nearness and possibility of death, her soul sprung at last into a quivering alertness, drawing her to silent introspections in the dark and restful church, where the girl who had been alive a short time back, now lay quietly buried. Only the most unshaken agnostics can come close to death and not suddenly feel an overwhelming necessity for some preparatory equipment—some consciousness of a clean and justified existence. And Beatrice, whose manner hinted to those about her the possession of a secret foreboding of what was coming, had reached very close to the moment when this peace, both of remembrance and of hope, would be tragically necessary.
On January 2, 1497, she drove as usual to the church of St. Maria delle Grazie. She remained there for hours, as if only in this one sombre place could she obtain a little respite and tranquillity. Her ladies—who probably disliked these outings beyond expression—had difficulty in coaxing her at last from the building. They got her home, and she seemed much as usual until about eight o’clock in the evening, when the agony of child-birth suddenly commenced in her.
Her pains only lasted three hours. Then she gave birth to a still-born child, and shortly after midnight she died. For a short hour she lay in her canopied bed, worn in body and uncomforted in soul. Then she died, and whom Ludovico loved or did not love mattered not one whit to her.
But her death had been brutal, unexpected, sudden, and acted upon Ludovico like a douche of icy water. Passion for Lucrezia died brusquely through the shock. Beatrice, had she known it, had never been profoundly discarded, and the thought of life without her had not formed part of the Lucrezia madness.
And suddenly she was dead. There had been no reconciliation. In the abruptness of her collapse, there had not been an interval in which to endear her back to joy. She had suffered great pain, and then, in a forlorn and piteous weakness, passed from existence.
Ludovico’s grief became intense. His passionate prostration was so unusual in the callousness of the period, that every one talked about it. He refused to have her name mentioned in his presence, and when most widowers of that time would have been thinking of a second wife, he was still spoken of as caring nothing any longer for his children, or his state, or for anything on earth.
Seven months after her death he continued still apparently a changed man. He had become religious, recited daily offices, observed fasts, and lived “chastily and devoutly.” His rooms were still draped in black, he took all his meals standing, and every day went for a time to his wife’s tomb in the church of St. Maria delle Grazie.
His last action in connection with Beatrice has a certain moving sentimentality. It was when the miserable end of his adventure had commenced, and he was obliged to escape from Milan with all the haste he could. His safety depended upon his swiftness. Knowing this, he nevertheless stopped at the church of St. Maria delle Grazie, and stayed so long by the tomb of his wife that the small group with him became anxious for their own skins as well as his. He came out at last with the tears streaming down his face, and three times, as he rode away, he looked back towards the church, as if all his heart held dear lay there behind him.
Not long afterwards he was captured, and his captivity at Loches is one of the few inexcusable stains upon Louis XII.’s character.