Catholic ordered that she should be buried on the battlefield of Grenada, wrapped in the broad folds of her royal mantle, as though to preach lessons of valour even after her death. To this day her great soul appears to hold sway in Spain. She was a wonderful mixture of different kinds of heroism. She was brave and resolute without a touch of the virago. After a night spent in dictating orders, she would tranquilly resume a piece of church embroidery, or, like Anne of France, the practical education of her daughters. In her own private affairs she was plain and simple, in public she was all ostentation. She was a conversationalist of the first order, and loved to attack high philosophical questions, here and there dropping into a discussion some original phrase, some bold and clear-cut thought, while her deep blue eyes lit up and darted upon her company a certain glance of warmth and loyalty the renown of which still clings to her name. A strange woman! ardent like Anne of France, guileless, straightforward, somewhat starched perhaps, but all heart for her friends, so fond a mother that she died of the loss of her children, so thorough a woman that she declared she knew only four fine sights in the world: "a soldier in the field, a priest at the altar, a beautiful woman in bed, a thief on the gibbet." No king could ever have exercised the same ascendancy. Spain is too proud a country! A Spaniard to whom you speak of an army will tell you with perfect coolness that it consisted of 3000 Italians, 3000 Germans, and 6000 soldiers, that is to say, 6000 Spaniards. Isabella and Anne of France were of a style which could only succeed in Spain or France. Castiglione himself shrinks in awe before such figures, declaring that he knows nothing like them in Italy. Michelangelo showed himself to be less pessimistic, and has constantly endowed his women with ideal traits of greatness of soul. His Virgin of the Casa Buonarotti, with the profile of a Roman matron, holds herself erect and looks straight before her with the forceful eye of a woman who would dare anything in defence of her treasure, this feeble little man to be, gathered so close to her breast that but little of his back is visible: in very truth, fructus ventris tui. Every lady must have seen the exquisite Pietà in St. Peter's at Rome.1 It is the finest monument ever erected 1 Francis I. regarded this as Michelangelo's masterpiece. to the honour of the sex. Overwhelmed by the tragedy of Savonarola, Michelangelo has given utterance in that picture to the cry of his soul: he makes his appeal to women in the name of Christ. On her knees, with simplicity, without sensible effort, the Mother bears her dead Son-a cruel burden! Her wideflowing drapery, her beautiful form, the purity of the lines of her face, all reveal so great a force of soul that the fact of her appearing as youthful as her son causes no surprise. But the Christ is not, for His part, pressing heavily upon her. Though He is dead, one feels that He still lives, from the love which speaks forth from His wan, worn features: by the power of love He has vanquished divine Death, a death He sought, and almost loved. And the pure, grave mother, filled with a profound compassion, seems yearning to bring Him forth a second time, into a complete imperishable life: hers is an impersonal type, not representing this or that woman, this or that mother: Le corps, enfin vaincu, recule devant l'âme, Et la terre, ayant vu cette Vierge et ce Dieu, Michelangelo exalts the eternal woman, sustaining the Man of Sorrows by the strength of love. He has left us as his final bequest, as it were, the symbol of all the strenuous women of the fifteenth century, who had just run so glorious a race in Italy, and who saw from serene heights the suffering they themselves never felt-the ancestors of Vittoria Colonna and Margaret of France, And yet he had no wish to exaggerate. When he came to paint the Last Judgment, he no longer set woman in the foreground, like the naïve old masters; he placed her respectfully in the rear, giving her an attitude of humility, suppliance, and compassion, because, even for him, woman was before all things the incarnation of sweetness and kindliness, and because, in those dread hours when it is for power and justice to pronounce the final doom, every woman must needs stand in the shade. 1 Emile Trolliet, La Vie silencieuse. The veil of flesh is rent; the spirit's light CHAPTER II MORAL INFLUENCE THE moral purification of society is assuredly one of the conditions of happiness; hence it was one of the chief ends of platonism. The 16th century, unfortunately, was one of the most corrupt periods known to our history, an undisputed fact from which some people have concluded that art was the cause of moral decadence, because art in itself is unmoral, and never acts otherwise than as "a stimulus to debauchery." These good paradoxical souls had ancestors as long ago as the 15th and 16th centuriesancestors who held the same theory and saw in aestheticism a fatal blight to humanity. They refused to acknowledge the idea of the beautiful: and the belief that a careful observation discovers some trace of beauty everywherethat even in the mind of a criminal there are sometimes uncommon, indeed splendid faculties, unhappily turned to evil-seemed to them, as it seems to their successors to-day, a miserable error calculated to lead mankind to perdition. Platonist women and the Roman world saw in it, on the contrary, a pledge of regeneration and civilisation. We have already said that the world needed no further urging on the downward path; love was only understood apart from marriage, and all that remained to settle was whether this love should remain material or might possibly become spiritual. All the contemporaries of platonism who regretted the good old times" (and in France they were many)—Marot, Rabelais, Collerye nicknamed Roger Bontemps, Coquillart the sworn foe of the fashionable world, “bucks as he called them-all these clearly explain their position; they " lamented the disappearance of love "à la française," a whole-hearted love without qualifications and periphrases; a love that was very pleasant if not very moral. And as to the folk who believed that virtue was corrupted by the salons, they had only to stroll through the fairs, look in at the rustic festivities and balls, and chat with one or two tavern wenches or a village "old wife," or even to penetrate into some of the country houses. In Germany, where morals retained their antique savour, it cannot be pleaded that Dr. Faustus, with the little crippled love who waits on him, or the coarse bourgeois Venuses of Wohlgemüth or Albert Dürer, existed only in imagination! The first contact with Italy, so far from purifying these manners, only brought about the exaltation of sensualism; one of the most popular of French writers, Octovien de Saint-Gelais, had no scruple in raising a statue to Sensuality." The French saw in Italy only the pagan side of the Renaissance, that of the Malatestas1 and others, and, as often enough happens when the field of contemplation is so narrow, they perceived nothing but the more striking and startling phenomena—the flash of daggers, the poison bowl; so much that an excellent young man, Louis de Beauvau, who had wedded a young person of humble rank against the wishes of his family, and repented of it, profited by the expedition of Charles VIII. to get together a fine collection of poisons as he went from town to town. Certain Italians who had come to France were regarded as so many jinnish heralds of moral anarchy. "The only way to escape women is not to see them at all," exclaims one of them, Andrelini. In truth, it was not long before Italian society presented a lamentable spectacle of decomposition; observers felt painful heart-burnings and overwhelming disgust. "This is too much," cries Palingenius, dubbed the Star of the Renaissance: "let me flee away to some peaceful, solitary shore." From the year 1515 onwards the court of France advanced boldly along the same path, dragging the country with it. "Paris is a fair city to live in, but not to die in." What a pass things had come to! When five years had 1[The sovereign family of Rimini and Romagna, a race of warriors and cut-throats. Robert, commandant of the troops of Sixtus IV., was poisoned by Riario in 1483.] elapsed, Lemaire, who had been one of the prophets of the new order, paints the situation in terrible colours, demanding as remedy a convocation of the Courts of Love. Charming tribunals, indeed: but what good would they serve? In the forefront of this corrupt and putrid society the official poet shows us his young king, with his coarse sensual lips wrinkled in a hideous smile, " consumed by women" body and soul. Free love flourished. The saying, "In case of love, one dame doth not suffice," answered to the accepted axiom on the fickleness of women. The noblest of ladies declared themselves "lieutenants of Venus." It was love in its basest form, a matter of trade and barter, cold as ice; nothing was wanting to its degradation-diplomatic husbands, women who were merchandise for kings," but a merchandise which proffered itself! It is alleged that Louis XII. in his decrepitude knew not in Italy how to defend the virtue of which he was so tenacious. The excellent Margaret of France was amazed when a young girl of good family did not rush to sacrifice herself to a caprice of her brother. Young or old, it made no difference. Women were known to get up bogus law-suits for the pleasure of corrupting the judges. Others, with greater attractions, flocked to the favourite or the minister of the day; others, more numerous, threw themselves at the moneyed men, as rivers rush to the sea. No one would guess what shameful shifts masked some lives that seemed a brilliant round of music and receptions and play; or what a singular population of waiting-maids, pimps, and procuresses of all ranks, forced their unwelcome services upon a respectable man Piteulx comme ung beau crucifix ! 3 Vice was everywhere the same, except for some trifling shades. If an Italian and a Frenchman told the same story 1 En cas d'amour, c'est trop peu d'une dame, Car si un homme aime une honneste femme, Et s'il ne peut à son aise l'avoir, Il fait très bien d'autre accointance avoir. (Melin de Saint-Gelais). 3 Coquillart. |