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I went to see her in her cool little town house, that house so typical of her, so untouched by Grimshaw. And, looking at me with steady eyes, she said: "I'm sorry Cecil isn't here. He's writing again a play for Esther Levenson, who was Simonetta, you remember?" I promised you a ghost story.
Simonetta had been borne like a dead goddess through the streets of the city to burial; Lorenzo was already busy with those carnival songs which, as some thought, were written to corrupt the people: the Renaissance had come. "Gladius Domini super terram cite et velociter," thought Savonarola, unable to understand that life from which he had fled into the cloister.
He put the panel away and looked about for something else, the sketch he had made of Simonetta on that last day. When he had found it, he rolled it straight and set it on his easel. It was not the first charcoal study he had made from life, but a brush drawing on dark paper, done in sepia-wash and the lights in white lead. He stood looking into it with his hands clasped.
The names we have given these shadowy beautiful figures are but names, that Grace who looks so longingly and sadly at Hermes is but the loveliest among the lovely, though we call her Simonetta and him Giuliano. Here in the garden of the world is Venus's pleasure-house, and there the gods in exile dream of their holy thrones.
In that piece of lapidary work, "How Sandro Botticelli Saw Simonetta in the Spring," is a bit of heart psychology which, I believe, has never been surpassed in English. Simonetta, of the noble house of Vespucci, was betrothed to Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Simonetta was tall, stately beautiful as Venus, wise as Minerva and proud as Juno.
The same figure tradition connects it with Simonetta, the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici-appears again as Judith, returning home across the hill country, when the great deed is over, and the moment of revulsion come, when the olive branch in her hand is becoming a burthen; as Justice, sitting on a throne, but with a fixed look of self-hatred which makes the sword in her hand seem that of a suicide; and again as Veritas, in the allegorical picture of Calumnia, where one may note in passing the suggestiveness of an accident which identifies the image of Truth with the person of Venus.
Now at length, he adds, she will be able to visit Milan and see her beloved mother once more in peace and safety. And her husband's uncle, Pope Sixtus IV., himself wrote to congratulate both duke and duchess on the arrest of Simonetta and the restoration of peace and tranquillity.
He made a snatch at a carbon and raised his other hand with a kind of command "Holy Virgin! what a line! Stay as you are, I implore you: swerve not one hair's breadth and I have you for ever!" There was conquest in his voice. So Simonetta stood very still, hiding her bosom with her hand, but never took her watch off the enemy.
Scandalized society flocked to his drawing-room, there to be received by Simonetta herself, wearing the blanched draperies and tragic pearls of the labyrinth he had made for her. Grimshaw offered no apologies. He was the uncrowned laureate and kings can do no wrong.
After the mould for the bas-relief was cleaned and fixed, the cast-maker invited Caesar and Kennedy to have a glass of wine in a wine-shop near by. "How's this, are you leaving already, father?" said Simonetta, as he went through the shop to get to the street. "I'm coming back, I'm coming back right away."
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