or Mantua, should he care to visit these places.
Pietro was a lover of women, and experience was necessary to him. He was in love at this time with a beautiful woman of Venice named Helena, but the love affair was going the way of all his love affairs, and Pietro, finding it difficult to write under the stress, longed for a quiet refuge. He and Strozzi had been fond of each other since they had met some years before in Ferrara; they admired the same poetry; they were passionately devoted to literature in any form; and they shared a detestation of the commonplace.
“I feel angry with Helena,” said Strozzi. “I fancy she is the cause of your long stay in Venice.”
“I am thinking,” said the poet, significantly, “of leaving Venice.” Strozzi was pleased to hear this.
“I have been buying fine materials here in Venice,” he said. “Such silks, such tabbies! You never saw the like.”
“Silks and tabbies? What do you want with such fripperies?”
“I have been buying them on behalf of a lady—the new Duchess of Ferrara.”
“Ah! Lucrezia Borgia. Tell me, is she a monster?”
Strozzi laughed. “She is the daintiest, most sensitive creature I ever set eyes on. Exquisite. Golden-haired, eyes that are so pale they take their color from her gowns. Delicate. Quite charming. And a lover of poetry.”
“One hears such tales!”
“False. All false. It is an ill fate which has married her to that boor Alfonso.”
“She feels it to be an ill fate?”
Strozzi’s eyes were thoughtful. “I do not entirely understand her. She has learned to mask her thoughts. It would seem that Alfonso perturbs her little; and when I think of him—uncouth, ill-mannered—and her—so sensitive, so delicate—I shudder. Yet there is a strength within her.”
“You are bewitched by your Duchess.”
“As you would be, had you seen her.”
“I admit a certain curiosity as to the Borgia.”
“Perhaps one day you will meet.”
The poet was thoughtful. “A delicate goddess married to Alfonso d’Este! One would say Poor Lucrezia, if one did not know Lucrezia.”
“You do not know Lucrezia. Nor do I. I am not certain that Lucrezia knows herself.”
“You are cryptic.”
“She makes me thus.”
“I see she absorbs you. I have never known you so absentminded before. I declare you are longing to go back to Ferrara with your silks and tabbies.”
Strozzi smiled. “But let us talk of you. You are restless. You weary of Helena. Why do you not go to my Villa at Ostellato?”
“What should I do there?”
“Be at peace to write your poetry.”
“You would come and see me there?”
“I would. Mayhap I would induce Lucrezia to ride that way. It is not far from Ferrara.”
The poet smiled, and Strozzi saw that the exquisitely lovely Duchessa of such evil reputation, whom he had described as sensitive and unformed, was catching at Pietro’s imagination as she had caught at his.
Strozzi was pleased. He wished to mold those two. He wished to put them together in his great villa at Ostellato and watch the effect they had on each other.
When Strozzi returned to Ferrara he found that the heat of the summer was proving very trying to Lucrezia. She was suffering a great deal of discomfort in her pregnancy, and her relations with Duke Ercole had worsened.
She was delighted with the velvets, silks and tabbies which Strozzi had brought her, and they did lift her spirits for a while. She was interested too in his account of the poet, Pietro Bembo, and she gave a party during which Strozzi read the young man’s newest verses.
But these were isolated incidents, and Strozzi saw that she was suffering too much discomfort to feel really interested in either fine materials or absent poets.
She ordered a handsome cradle to be made in Venice so that she could have it well before the baby was due. “It is a great extravagance,” she said, “and I know full well that the Duke will be shocked when he sees it. But I care not. I have come to think that the only pleasure I have in this heat is from shocking the Duke.”
Alexander had now heard of Duke Ercole’s offer of 10,000 ducats as his daughter’s annual income, and he was incensed.
“My daughter cannot be expected to live on a pittance,” he cried, and reminded that old Duke of the 100,000 ducats he had received as dowry, besides all other benefits.
The Duke retorted that marriage into aristocratic families could not be attained by those of lower status without high costs; this infuriated Alexander, and all benefits from the