Table of Contents

• QUEENS OF THE RENAISSANCE
  • PREFACE
  • LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
  • CATHERINE OF SIENA
  • BEATRICE D’ESTE
  • ANNE OF BRITTANY
  • LUCREZIA BORGIA
  • MARGARET D’ANGOULÊME
  • RENÉE, DUCHESS OF FERRARA
  • INDEX
  • A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY METHUEN AND COMPANY: LONDON 36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
    • CONTENTS
    • Ancient Cities
    • The Antiquary’s Books
    • The Arden Shakespeare
    • The Beginner’s Books
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    • The Westminster Commentaries
    • Part II.—Fiction
    • Methuen’s Shilling Novels
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    • The Novels of Alexandre Dumas
    • Methuen’s Sixpenny Books

QUEENS OF THE RENAISSANCE

BY M. BERESFORD RYLEY

WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

BEATRICE AND LUDOVICO KNEELING
ALTAR-PIECE BY ZENALE

To B——

PREFACE

THERE are no two people who see with the same kind of vision. It is for this reason that, though twenty lives of the six women chosen for this book had been written previously, there would still, it seems to me, be room for a twenty-first. For though the facts might remain identical, there is no possible reiteration of another mind’s exact outlook. Hence I have not scrupled to add these six character studies to the many volumes similar in scope and subject.

The book is called “Queens of the Renaissance,” but Catherine of Siena lived before the Renaissance surged into being, and Anne of Brittany, though her two husbands brought its spirit into France, had not herself a hint of its lovely, penetrating eagerness. They are included because they help, nevertheless, to create continuity and coherence of impression, and the six leading, as they do naturally, one to the other, convey, in the mass, some co-ordinated notion of the Renaissance spirit.

The main object, perhaps, in writing at all lies in the intrinsic interest of any real life lived before us. For every existence is a parti pris towards existence; every character is a personal opinion upon the value of character, feeling, virtue, many things. No personality repeats another, no human drama renews just the same intricate complications of other dramas. In every life and in every person there is some element of uniqueness, some touch of speciality. Because of this even the dullest individuality becomes quickening in biography. It has, if no more, the pathos of its dulness, the didactic warnings of its refusals, the surprise of its individualizing blunders.

All the following lives convey inevitably and unconsciously some statement concerning the opportunity offered by existence. To one, it seemed a place for an ecstasy of joy, success, gratification; to another, a great educational establishment for the soul; to a third, an admirable groundwork for practical domestic arrangements and routine; to Renée of Ferrara, a bewildering, weary accumulation of difficulties and distress; to her more charming relative, an enigma shadowed always by the still greater and grimmer enigma of mortality. And lastly, for the strange, elusive Lucrezia, it is difficult to conceive what it must have meant at all, unless a sequence of circumstances never, under any conditions, to be dwelt upon in their annihilating entirety, but just to be taken piecemeal day by day, reduced and simplified by the littleness of separate hours and moments.

In a book of this kind, where the intention is mainly concerned with character, and for which the reading was inevitably full of bypaths and excursions, a complete bibliography would merely fill many pages, while seeming to a great extent to touch but remotely upon the ladies referred to, but among recent authors a deep debt of gratitude for information received is due to the following: Jacob Burckhardt, Julia Cartwright, Augusta Drane, Ferdinand Gregorovius, R. Luzio, E. Renier, E. Rodoconarchi, and J. Addington Symonds.

Finally, in reference to the portraits included in the life of Beatrice D’Este, a brief statement is necessary. For not only that of Bianca, wife of Giangaleazzo, but also those of Il Moro’s two mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli, are regrettably dubious. The picture of Bianca, however, by Ambrogio da Predis, is more than likely genuinely that of Bianca, though some writers still regard it as a likeness of Beatrice herself. It is to be wished that it were; her prettiness then would have been incontestable and delicious. But in reality there is no hope. One has but to look at the other known portraits of Beatrice to see that her face was podgy, or nearly so, and that her charm came entirely and illusively from personal intelligence. It evaporated the moment one came to fix her appearance in sculpture or on canvas. Nature had not really done much for her. There was no outline, no striking feature, no ravishing freshness of colouring. On a stupid woman Beatrice’s face would have been absolutely ugly. But she, through sheer “aliveness,” sheer buoyant trickery of expression, conveyed in actuality the equivalent of prettiness. But it was all unconscious conjuring,—in reality Beatrice was a plain woman, with sufficient delightfulness to seem a pretty one, while the portrait of Bianca is unmistakably and lovingly good-looking.

As regards the portraits, again, of Il Moro’s two mistresses, Cecilia Gallerani and Lucrezia Crivelli, there is no absolute certainty. The portrait facing page 6 in the life of Beatrice has been recently discovered in the collection of the Right Hon. the Earl of Roden, and in an article published by the Burlington Magazine it has been tentatively looked upon as that of Lucrezia Crivelli. This does not, however, appear probable, because Lucrezia, at the time of Il Moro’s infatuation, was a young girl, and the picture by Ambrogio da Predis is certainly that of a woman, and a woman, moreover, whose experiences have brought her perilously near the verge of cynicism.

At the same time, the portrait is not only beyond doubt that of a woman loved by Il Moro, but was presumably painted while his affection for her still continued, as not only are the little heart-shaped ornaments holding together the webs of her net thought to represent Il Moro’s badge of a mulberry-leaf, but painted exquisitely in a space of ⅜ by ⅝ inch upon the plaque at the waistbelt is a Moor’s head, another of Ludovico’s badges, while the letters L. O. are placed on either side of it, and the two Sforza S. S. at the back. A discarded mistress, if Ambrogio—one of Il Moro’s court painters—had painted her at all, would have had the discretion not to wear symbols obviously intended only for one beloved at that moment.

There seems—speculatively—every reason to suppose that the picture represents Cecilia Gallerani, who was already beyond the charm of youth before Ludovico reluctantly discarded her, and whom he not only cared for very greatly, but for quite a number of years. Cecilia Gallerani, besides, to strengthen the supposition, was an exceptionally intellectual woman, and the portrait in the possession of the Earl of Roden expresses above everything to an almost disheartened intelligence. To think deeply while in the position of any man’s mistress must leave embittering traces, and Cecilia became famous less even for physical attractions than because her mind was so intensely rich and receptive.

The other two—the pictures of “La Belle Ferronière” and the “Woman with the Weasel,”—by Leonardo da Vinci, have both a contested identity. But since the first is now almost universally looked upon as being the portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli, the second must surely represent her also. For in both there is the same beautiful oval, the same youth, the same unfathomable eyes and gentle deceit of expression. Both, besides, represent to perfection the kind of beautiful girl likely to have drawn Ludovico into passionate admiration. He was no longer young when he cared for Lucrezia, and if Leonardo’s paintings are really portraits of her, she was like some emblematical figure of perfect youthfulness,—unique and unrepeatable.

M. B. R.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

QUEENS OF THE
RENAISSANCE

CATHERINE OF SIENA

1347-1380

CATHERINE of Siena does not actually belong to the Renaissance. At the same time she played an indirect part in furthering it, and she represented a strain of feeling which continued to the extreme limits of its duration. During the best period of the desire for culture, a successor—and imitator—of Catherine’s, Sister Lucia, became a craze in certain parts of Italy. Duke Ercole of Ferrara, then old and troubled about his soul, took as deep and personal an interest in enticing her to Ferrara as he did in the details of his son’s marriage to Lucrezia Borgia, just then being negotiated. The atmosphere Catherine created is never absent from the Renaissance. She fills out what is one-sided in the impression conveyed by the women who follow. She was also the contemporary of Petrarch and Boccaccio, the acknowledged forerunners of the intellectual awakening that came after them, and being so, is well within the dawn, faint though it still was, of the coming Renaissance day. Finally, in her own person she contained so much power and fascination that to omit her, when there exists the least excuse for inclusion, would be wilfully to neglect one of the most enchanting characters among the women of Italian history.

The daughter of a well-to-do tradesman, Giacomo Benincasa, Catherine was born in Siena in 1347. Her father possessed several pleasant qualities, and a great reserve of speech, hating inherently all licence of expression. Catherine’s mother, Lapa, on the other hand, belonged to an ordinary type of working woman—laborious, but irritable and narrow. She brought twenty-five children into the world, and her irascibility may have been not unconnected with this heroic achievement. The sons also, after their marriages, continued to live, with their wives—it being the custom at that time—under the parental roof. Even a sociable temperament would easily have found such a community difficult always to handle cordially.

STATUE IN WOOD OF ST. CATHERINE
BY NEROCCIO LANDI

Catherine was Benincasa’s youngest child. As a baby she proved extraordinarily attractive. She was, in fact, so sweet and radiant that the neighbours nicknamed her Euphrosyne, and her little person was much enticed and humoured. Unfortunately, like all children of that period, she became bewilderingly precocious, and with the first development of intelligence, the religious passion revealed itself. With Catherine the desire for spirituality was inborn. At five years old she formed the habit of going upstairs on her knees, reciting the “Hail, Mary,” at every step. She delighted in being taken to churches and places of devotion, and at the age of six years her deliberate and piteous self-martyrdom commenced.

The child, during an errand on which she was sent, believed herself to have seen a holy vision. The incident had nothing extraordinary, for her imagination was keen, and her temperament nervous. In a later century, fed upon fairy stories, she would have seen gnomes, sprites, or golden-haired princesses. Instead, saturated in religious legends, she perceived Jesus Christ in magnificent robes, and with a tiara on His head, while on each side of Him stood a saint, and several nuns in white garments. This unchallenged vision produced colossal consequences. The child went home convinced that God Himself had come to call her to a better life; proud, frightened, and exultant, she set her mind to find out, therefore, how she might best become as good as God wanted her to be.

This beginning of Catherine’s religious life is painful to remember. She decided primarily that she must give up childish amusements; in addition, she determined to eat the least possible amount of food, and to fill up her life with penances in the manner of the grown-up holy men and women about her. She also procured some cord, and, having knotted it into a miniature scourge, formed the habit of secretly scourging herself until her back was lined with weals. Describing these first spiritual struggles of a child of six years old, Cafferini, her contemporary and biographer, says, “Moreover, by a secret instinct of grace, she understood that she had now entered on a warfare with nature, which demanded the mortification of every sense. She resolved, therefore, to add fasting and watching to her other penances, and in particular to abstain entirely from meat, so that when any was placed before her, she either gave it to her brother Stephen, who sat beside her, or threw it under the table to the cats, in such a manner as to avoid notice.”

This pitiable “warfare with nature” continued until she reached the age of twelve. Her parents, so far, had been pleased at her religious fervency. But at twelve years old the girl became marriageable. The comparative freedom of childhood ceased; Catherine was kept secluded in the house, besides being harried with injunctions concerning the arrangement of her hair and her dress.

She had, as a matter of fact, charming, warm brown hair. Unfortunately, a shade of gold was then fashionable, and Lapa, ambitious for a good marriage, insisted that the girl should do like others, and have it dyed that colour. Catherine resisted with all the strength of her frightened soul. But in the end, apparently through the persuasions of a favourite married sister, she allowed her hair to become golden. It was no sooner done than conscience suffered passionate remorse. In fact, to the end of life this one backsliding remained almost the sharpest regret Catherine possessed. She could never refer to it without sobbing, from which it is at least presumable that a canary-coloured head had its attractions for a saint of twelve years old.

Meanwhile, the choice of a husband became imminent. At this Catherine’s semi-passivity turned into actual panic. It was not possible both to marry and to give up one’s life to God. Only, who would listen to the refusals of so young a girl? Following the practice of the Roman Catholic religion, she took her difficulties to her confessor, and was saved through the proposal of a rather questionable trick. She had only to cut her hair off to make marriage impossible: no Italian would marry a woman with a shaven head. Catherine rushed home, and at once did as she was told, covering her work, when she had finished, with a white linen coif. Virgins in Italy wore their hair flowing; the stratagem, therefore, did not exist an hour before discovery took place. Then followed a passionate domestic scene. The whole family appears for once to have unanimously agreed that Catherine’s piety had overstepped the bounds of common sense. The loss of her child’s hair left Lapa infuriated. Exasperation grew so intense that for a time, with the view to breaking her stubborn spirit, Catherine was deliberately ill-treated. A servant had been kept for rough work in the kitchen; she was dismissed, and Catherine made to take her place. But the girl had not a temperament that could be cowed. She was a true Sienese, and Boccaccio, as well as others, speaks of the virile character of the people of Siena. The name Euphrosyne also still expressed her disposition. With a pretty childishness of imagination, she made religious play out of their harshness. Her father, she pretended, was Jesus Christ, Lapa she made the Virgin Mary, and her brothers and sisters the apostles and disciples. The kitchen became the innermost tabernacle of the temple where sacrifices were offered to God. In consequence, she went about diffusing radiance and a sober joy, and bewildering those who wanted to see her crushed and penitent.

In the end Giacomo interfered. He had the instinct of kindness, and was himself sincerely religious. Both the question of marriage and the system of ill-treatment were abandoned. A little later he gave consent to the pursuance of a religious vocation, and Catherine, still a child, became a member of the order of St. Dominic. It was not a strict community. The sisters did not live in retirement, but in their own homes, merely wearing a white veil and a black habit called Mantellate.

Just before this Catherine experienced a very human temptation. She became possessed by the longing to dress herself in the pretty clothes of a rich married woman, and to go out flaunting in silks and extravagance. The wish is more likeable than her physical self-torturings. The latter gain their power to distress, in fact, to some extent because her few temptations show that Catherine had all the average longings of humanity, and was not devoid of the companionable frailties of ordinary men and women.

The temptation was, of course, conquered, and from the glad moment of taking her vows Catherine intensified every austerity of conduct. As a child she had been robust and hardy. But the frightful treatment to which she subjected her system would have ruined any constitution, and from the time she grew up she became more and more delicate, suffering, and neurotic. The desire to suppress her excesses is very great. One could write abundantly and give only a life overflowing in fragrant incidents. But in the case of Catherine, to pass over foolishness would entail not only a falsification of character, but a falsification also of the curious atmosphere from which she drew the principal inspirations of her conduct.

From the age of twelve she forced herself gradually to eat so little, that her stomach became finally incapable of retaining solid food at all. How she kept life in her body for the last half of her existence is difficult to understand. Her bed, from the time she became a nun, consisted of a few planks with a log of wood for pillow. An iron band made part of her wearing apparel, and her discipline—if the one now shown as hers in the sacristy of St. Dominico is genuine—consisted of an iron chain with sharp projections for piercing and tearing the flesh. The idea was monstrous and horrible; nevertheless, its fortitude uplifts it into heroism. To pursue unflinchingly martyrdom such as this may be grotesque and ridiculous, but no invertebrate creature could contemplate it. Of all the violences, however, which Catherine did to her body, the one under which she suffered most acutely was her refusal of proper sleep. It is said, though it is extremely hard to believe, that for a certain length of time she took only half an hour’s sleep in the twenty-four hours, and that—only every other day.

Notwithstanding this, a picture given of her at the time by Father Thomas Antonio Cafferini, also a member of St. Dominic, and an intimate friend of the family, is altogether charming. He asserts that her face was always gay and smiling, more especially if she were called upon to help those troubled or out of health. Other contemporaries bear out this possession of an effulgent gladness. When she spoke her face became illuminated, and her smile was like some living radiance passing into the hearts of those she looked at. The same writer mentions her delight in singing and her love of flowers. A certain Fra Bartolomeo of Siena bears similar witness. He wrote, “She was always cheerful, and even merry.” He mentioned, besides, that she “was passionately fond of flowers, and used to arrange them into exquisite bouquets.” Catherine’s personal writings are strewn with references to plants and blossoms. It was also part of the fulness of a character unusually rich in finer fascinations that she was constantly singing. Melancholy she scarcely knew. The spirituality which did not produce happiness, she could only feel as a spurious effort. Either it lacked love or understanding.

For years she lived as a recluse in her father’s house, but while still in her teens it appeared to her—presumably through a natural wisdom of character—that God needed less personal worship than continuous benefits to others, out of her religious exaltation, and from that time Catherine’s public career commenced. Almost the first result of her belief in being called to an active existence was her constant attendance at the hospitals and among the lepers. One of the prettiest of all the stories told about her deals with her nursing labours. Pity had very small vitality either during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance; it was almost a dead quality of character, and the Sienese were particularly hardened by harsh experiences.

A woman who had lived a notoriously bad life lay dying in one of the hospitals, absolutely and deliberately neglected. A sinner laid low was scum to spit at for most people. Catherine saw no scum on earth. She smiled with all her native inborn softness at the dying woman, listened to her desolate complainings, her maundering reminiscences, gave her the nourishment she liked best, coddled her with sweet attentions, and finally, without any violent denunciations, brought her to repentance and tranquillity. A child might as tenderly have been coaxed out of a phase of naughtiness.

The incident brings one naturally to Catherine’s reputation as a peacemaker. She was still a young girl when tales of her persuasiveness were told to amazed, arrested audiences throughout the country. The Sienese temper was fundamentally savage; nothing, therefore, could touch fancy more than stories of a nature capable of acting as a gentle and cooling balm upon outrageousness. Catherine, as a matter of fact, possessed both the magnetism of intense belief and the power of innate urbanity. The first awed superstition by incomprehensible achievements. Forestalling the Christian Scientists, she had healed the sick by prayer, while her mere enticements brought about the end of many virulent dissensions.

To dabble with mystical methods is an old and universal weakness. The wife of a certain Francesco Tolomei, head of one of the noblest families in Siena, heard of Catherine’s miracles, and being hard pressed by domestic difficulties, turned to the dyer’s daughter for assistance. Madonna Tolomei was herself a profoundly religious woman, but she anguished with the consciousness that the rest of her family were damned. The eldest son, Giacomo, had murdered two men before he was grown up, and his cruelty had now become diabolical, ingenious, and systematic. There were also two daughters, bitten with worldliness to the marrow of their bones. Both were fast, dyed, and painted. Catherine offered to see the girls, but expressed no confidence as to the consequences. She found them with the garish hair that always touched her to the quick, and possibly felt more yearningly because of it. No account has been given of the interview. The two sisters, with the Tolomei blood in their veins, could hardly have been easy natures to lure out of worldliness; but at the end of Catherine’s visit, they were like lambs in the hands of a skilful shepherd. According to Cafferini, they threw their cosmetics into the gutter, cut off their gleaming hair, and in a few days joined the Sisters of St. Dominic. This is the kind of triumph of which Catherine’s life is full. Her personal magnetism was extraordinary, her insight actually a touch of genius. At this time also she was young, and herself a living exponent of how seductively gay goodness could make one. To the end, in truth, she remained less a nun than a woman, and as a woman she was the embodiment of enchanting sympathies and comfort. Merely to see her,—soft, sweet, mysteriously comprehending,—was like a cordial to an aching heart. But the most astounding part of the Tolomei story is still to be told. Giacomo, with his mad and bloody passions, was away when his sisters’ conversion took place. He came home to cow the house with terror. A lunatic let loose would have been less persistently dangerous. Donna Tolomei, shaken now with physical and not spiritual forebodings, immediately sent a messenger to warn Catherine that no danger was too horrible to anticipate; in his present condition he was capable of doing anything. Catherine did not feel a quicker heart-beat. She was steeped in intuitions and spontaneous knowledge. Ostensibly as an act of exquisite courtesy, she sent Fra Bartolomeo—who must have been a brave man—to explain matters, while she prayed with all her heart and soul for the unmanageable sinner. Some hours later Bartolomeo came back. Catherine met him smiling; she knew already the news he brought. Her prayers—so passionately eager—had already been answered. Giacomo—the diabolical, murderous, implacable Giacomo—was already meek as a lamb under the shock of a new and overwhelming emotion. It is not the least curious part of the story that he remained a changed character, and continued to abominate wickedness with the same intensity that in his earlier days he had practised it. Towards the end of his life he even took the habit of a Dominican of the Tertiary Order, the obligations of this third order not being excessive.

There is another story of this earlier period more enchanting still, in its original and tragic graciousness. Only before telling it the question of Catherine’s miracles should, perhaps, be dealt with, for they also commenced when she was scarcely out of childhood, and helped enormously to render her a recognized celebrity. They and her austerities are the unlikeable side of Catherine’s holiness. At the same time no saint of the period could have obtained a hearing without them, and no human system could have endured the strain put upon it by a mediæval religious enthusiast, without producing self-hypnotism and catalepsy. Catherine, at an early age, fell into trances, described by her biographers as “ecstasies at the thought of God.” Describing one of these ecstasies, her friend Raymond wrote “that on these occasions her body became stiff, and raised in the air, gave out a wonderful fragrance.” All the old Catholic writers, to whom miracles were an integral part of saintship, were generous in multiplying supernatural details. A good deal has to be deducted from these statements; but even then there remain a good many so-called miracles attested by other and more critical witnesses. That she was seen raised from the ground while she prayed, is a fact sworn to by a number of people. A man called Francesco Malevolti affirms that he saw her “innumerable times” raised from the ground as she prayed, and remaining suspended in the air more than a cubit above the earth. He mentions, to give weight to his evidence, that in order to test the reality of the occurrence, he and some others passed their hands between her and the floor—a thing perfectly easy to do. As this occurred in broad daylight, modern spiritualistic séances become clumsy in comparison. Catherine could do better in the fourteenth century.

The most important miracle of all was, of course, the stigmatization. That alone definitely assured her position as one with authority from God; it constituted the final and irrefutable sign of Divine and miraculous intervention. At the time of its occurrence Catherine was twenty-eight, and suffered extreme agony from it. The most curious circumstance about the stigmata in Catherine’s case was that they were not properly visible during her lifetime, but became perfectly clear after her death. In this one matter her successor, St. Lucia, the religious celebrity of Lucrezia Borgia’s day, outdid the woman she tried to follow. Her stigmata were always visible—bleeding wounds anybody could look at.

ST. CATHERINE’S HOUSE AT SIENA

Returning to the loveliest of all the stories concerning Catherine’s girlhood, it must be remembered that the prisons of Siena were almost more filled with political prisoners than criminals. During the whole of the Renaissance political prisoners were in themselves almost sufficient in number decently to fill Italian dungeons. Catherine, who had the understanding to love sinners, habitually visited condemned offenders. Those forlorn of any hope in this world she insidiously replenished with winning dreams of hope hereafter. She did more. When the day of execution came, she joined the procession to the scaffold. What it meant, in the unconveyable desolation of that last public outgoing, to have the company of this woman, with her sweet, contagious promises in the name of Christ, would be hard to overestimate. She was at all times embodied comfort to be with, and even a sharp and reluctant death must have been easier when she was there to pour out pity and encouragement.

Among the prisoners at one time was a certain Nicholas di Toledo, who had spoken irreflectively against the Riformatori—the strong Government party. This Riformatori consisted of a council chosen originally at a tense political crisis for purposes of urgent amendments. The nobility had no part in it. Siena, since 1280, when a reconciliation occurred between the Sienese Guelfs and Ghibellines, had been a merchant oligarchy, first governed by the Nove, then by Dodici, and after both these had been swept away, by the Riformatori, into which some members of both the previous Governments had been included. The Riformatori began well and ended badly. The Noveschi and Dodicini members almost immediately worked against it; civil trouble became interminable. The new power, exasperated, fell back upon repressive horrors. People were arrested upon simple suspicion of disapproval, and then publicly tortured in order to appal others. A common habit was to tear a criminal slowly to pieces with red-hot pincers while he was bound upon a cart driven slowly through the principal streets.

ST. CATHERINE PRAYING AT AN EXECUTION
FRESCO BY SODOMA

In the case of Nicholas di Toledo, he had barely gone from the place of his impulsive utterance before he was arrested, and he was barely arrested before he was condemned to death. Such a sentence had never risen in his thoughts for one sickening moment even; it came with so awful an unexpectedness that his mind for an interval whirled to the verge of insanity. Nicholas di Toledo was scarcely more than a boy, and the first warmth of life ran in every pulse. This bitter, inconceivable end unnerved him—he could not make up his mind to die. Suddenly he thought of Catherine, of whom other prisoners may have babbled, and sent a messenger imploring her to come to him. She wrote afterwards to her confessor a full description of the brief drama. Her presence almost immediately calmed and heartened him. Both were young, and Catherine, if not actually pretty, was delicious with overflowing tenderness. For Nicholas, besides the optimism communicated to him by her spiritual promises, there must have been the unconsidered but poignant fact that she was a woman and he a man. It is undeniable that no monk, however good, could have helped his dying to the same extent. Catherine not only rendered it possible to go through with courage, but in the end tinged it with something almost blessed. She was with him, it would seem, most of the time, and not only promised to accompany him to the scaffold when the day of execution came, but previously took him to Mass, and persuaded him to communicate for the first occasion in his life.

Nicholas had been nothing deeper than a young society man, and the wrench of this merciless conclusion was all the greater because of it. Catherine, in her account of the circumstance, went on to say that he grew quite resigned, his only dread being lest his courage should fail him at the supreme moment. He repeated constantly, “Lord, be with me; abandon me not.” To help him she reiterated her assurance that she would be with him at the last. In a moment his face brightened, and he asked her with a boyish impulsiveness how it was so great a sweetness was being vouchsafed to him. With this to look forward to he could face the end, not only with courage, but with something strangely akin to pleasure.

They met, as she had promised, at the scaffold next day. Catherine wrote concerning it that when he saw her his face broke into a smile, and that he begged her to make the sign of the cross upon his forehead. She did so, whispering that soon, very soon, he would have passed to a life that never ends. Then occurred the unforgettable incident of the story. At the best Nicholas was a creature not disciplined to suffering, and the worst moment had yet to come. Leaping to obey an intuition in itself exquisite, Catherine did what the prudery alone of most religious women would have made unthinkable. She took the boy’s head in her thin, soft hands, and herself laid it in position upon the block. The action was like a caress in which his last impressions melted. He murmured the words “Jesus and Catherine.” The knife ripped through the air to his neck, and his head fell into the same trembling hands that had guided it during its last activity.

On its human side Catherine’s spirituality was seldom less than perfect. Character and beauty emanated from her every spontaneous action. Nicholas di Toledo was only one of the many men she fascinated, and the fact renders the question of her personal appearance peculiarly interesting. The triumphs of a plain woman are always more stirring than those achieved by a simple success of feature. The “divine plainness,” immortalized by Lamb, can convey subtleties not possible to the simple regularities of well-cut features. Catherine proved adorable to most people, but from her portraits it is practically impossible to receive any impression save that of dulness. This, at any time, was the last thing she could have been, but the conventions of the Roman Catholic Church in dealing with the portraits of saints opposed any lifelike treatment. The picture of her in the church of St. Domenico at Siena, said to be by Francesco Vanni, might do equally well for any other emaciated sister. There is no temperament in it, no illumination, no visible sweetness. The eyes are half closed, the expression is inert and apathetic. The mouth is small but meaningless, the nose is long and well formed, the oval of the face delightful. Vanni did slightly better on another occasion. There is an engraving by him which is very nearly attractive. The eyes, owing to the religious demand for humility, are again half closed, but the mouth is both delightful and winning, and a half-smile plays about her expression. Given the glamour of vivacity, the kindling changes of life, and Catherine when young must have been delightful to look at. Certainly many men loved her. She had the power of being poignant in recollection, and disturbingly sweet in her bodily presence.

Even the painter Vanni, wicked enough to have been conversion-proof, yielded to the disquieting need she roused in him. He had been a great hater, and the men he hated were assassinated without after-remorse. For some amazing reason—probably that of curiosity—he consented to interview Catherine. She was out when he called, and her Confessor Raymond received him. According to Raymond, who describes the incident, Vanni soon grew bored, and presently remarked bluntly that he had promised to call upon Catherine, but since she was out, and he was a busy man, he could not wait for her any longer.

At that moment Catherine appeared—according to Raymond, much to Vanni’s disgust. But Catherine was all smiles, comfortableness, and simple ease of manner. Vanni’s chances, in fact, of not being converted ended with her entrance. The manner of his surrender was humorously characteristic of the man himself. Catherine—she was always so clever when she was good—presently left the room. No woman ever knew better when another word would have been too much. She had hardly gone when Vanni broke out that, for the sake of courtesy, he could not wholly refuse her some gratification. At the moment he had four virulent hatreds, but to please Catherine he would give up, in the case of one of them, all thoughts of vengeance. He then started to leave the house, but before he reached the door stopped suddenly and declared he could hardly draw his breath, so intense was the sense of peace and ecstasy this one small action of the right kind had given him. Evidently it was useless to hold out against her influence, and he then and there declared himself conquered, and ready to abandon all the vices he could under Catherine’s gentle guidance.

Thus came an end to Vanni’s murders. Catherine held him for the rest of his days. It is only to be regretted that he did not paint her portrait before instead of after his conversion. He would have attended less to her reputation as a saint, and more to what was lovely and pictorial in her person.

Catherine no longer lived at home. She had instituted an informal sisterhood at Siena, where “Mantellate” sisters from every part of Lombardy lived in community. Her work still continued among the sick, the lepers, and prisoners. But rumours of her miracles, and of an almost miraculous gift of persuasion, were spreading to many parts of Italy. Talk of the dyer’s daughter had already reached the ears of the Pope at Avignon, and was paving the way to further political successes. Before Catherine had passed out of her teens she employed four secretaries to cope with the colossal inflow of correspondence that reached her. It was through the urgency of help in answering letters in fact that Catherine made the great friendship of her life, and drew under her influence the man who largely contributed towards keeping natural feelings alive in her.

Stephen Marconi never cast off a cheerful and innate earthliness. He came across Catherine originally, as so many people did, over the matter of a Sienese family feud. Stephen, headstrong and exuberant, had roused ill-feeling in both the Tolomei and Rinaldini families. Torrents of blood loomed as the sole termination. Mutual acquaintances had made useless attempts to produce peace; at the last crisis before violence Stephen’s mother implored him to go to the “Mantellate” sister. The suggestion drew some contemptuous comments. But the woman persisted, and essentially good-natured, Stephen went in order to pacify her. He had every reason subsequently to thank the solicitations that overbore derision. Catherine settled everything with absolute successfulness, Stephen himself speaking of the reconciliation that followed as truly miraculous.

More extraordinary than the reconciliation even was the effect of Catherine’s individuality upon Stephen Marconi. He possessed no natural aptitude for spirituality. Handsome, irresponsible, sought after, he epitomized effervescent worldliness. But, having once seen Catherine, he could not keep away. Excuses were raked together for further interviews, and one day, finding her overburdened with correspondence, he wrote a letter at her dictation. It was the beginning of the end. At first informally, and later explicitly, he became one of her secretaries; presently also a member of what was called her “spiritual family.”

Siena relished as a joke the dandy converted by the ascetic, but Stephen was unconcerned. An irrepressible humourist, he appreciated to the full the oddity of the situation; though if jocose, he was also deeply contented. Catherine had become almost instantly the instigating motive of his life, the one precious thing his heart needed. Catherine, on her side, was known to care for him more than for almost any other person. Her relations with him became those of a deep and exciting friendship. Towards the end of her life she heard a report that Stephen had definitely cast off his semi-worldliness and taken ascetic vows. Catherine should have known an exquisite and glowing comfort. Instead of it, her letter to him on the subject is very nearly petulant. That any action should have been taken without first becoming a matter of confidences between them clearly unspeakably hurt her. She wrote that of course it was a great joy to hear that he desired to lead a better life, but that she was “very surprised” that he should have made any decision without previously having said a word to her about it. She added further that there was something in the matter that she could not understand, though she prayed that whatever he did would prove to be for the benefit of his soul.

There is more sign in this of a woman stung by an unexpected neglect, than any religious exaltation at a soul saved. Stephen had not become a monk, and the misunderstanding swiftly passed over. But the letter is pleasant reading, because it was written at a time when Catherine’s mysticism threatened to overshadow the purely human kindnesses of her earlier years. The idea of Christ as the heavenly Husband had developed from vague symbolism into a definite expression of spiritual familiarity. It was an unrealized element of good fortune that Stephen’s whimsical frivolity kept alive in her a strain of normal sensations. She suffered whenever they were separated, and among the last letters she ever wrote, moreover, was one to Stephen with the pathetic, dependent cry, “When will you come, Stephen? Oh, come soon!”

Another secretary closely associated with Catherine’s life for many years was Neri di Landoccio, a poet belonging to the group of dawning Renaissance writers. He suffered from melancholy, and having once met Catherine, naturally clung to the heartening radiance of her presence. From his letters, his youth appears to have been vicious. He was, at any rate, haunted by the notion that his misdemeanours were greater than God would be likely to forgive. He worried himself into a dangerous dismalness—a gloom perceiving no remedy. Then Catherine wrote him a long letter. She reiterated that God was far more ready to forgive than humanity to offend; that He was the Physician, and mankind His sick and ailing children. She told him that sadness constituted the worst fault of all in a disciple of Christ. To believe in the unplumbable love of God, and still persist in disheartenment, was a form of unrighteousness.

Neri did his best, but a gentle wistfulness penetrated his disposition, and not even Catherine could give him gaiety of thoughts. He and Stephen Marconi—the extreme opposites in temperament—became deeply attached to one another. They corresponded when apart, and Stephen, after Catherine’s death, called Neri “among those whom the Lord has engrafted in the very innermost depths of my heart.” A third man constantly in Catherine’s society was her Confessor Raymond. Two small incidents told by himself, and against himself, suggest a perfectly honest and rather pleasant temperament, but a somewhat limited spiritual capacity. In the first, he confesses that when on their journeys great multitudes thronged to Catherine for confession and comfort, and that the fact of having to go for hours without food or rest greatly annoyed as well as wearied him.