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Updated: June 18, 2025
"That letter you have written Gian Maria," was the gruff, uncompromising answer, for Ercole reeked nothing of diplomatic issues. Gonzaga's mouth jerked itself open, and his upper lip shuddered against his teeth. "What Wha "
"He offers a thousand gold florins," he muttered, "in addition to Gonzaga's liberty and advancement. Why, then, I have said no more than was true when I assured the men that Gian Maria was but idly threatening us with bombardment. Keep this matter secret, Peppe." "But you will watch Messer Gonzaga?" quoth the fool. "Watch him? Why, where is the need?
He stood still, and leaning with both hands upon his partisan, he sought to make out the courtier's features in the dim light of the rising moon. "Do you mean," he asked, and in his voice sounded the surprise with which Gonzaga's odd speech had filled him, "that we are foolish to have listened to Messer Francesco, and that we should be better advised to march out of Roccaleone?"
Isabella herself was burning with eager desire to join Lodovico and Beatrice in these hunting-parties, and have a share in the thrilling adventures which they narrated in their letters, But her husband the marquis was away all the spring and early summer; first at Bologna, where he attended his brother Giovanni Gonzaga's wedding, and afterwards with his sister the Duchess Elizabeth at Urbino.
On one occasion a piece called La Fatica was acted at the house of Antonio Maria Sanseverino, whose wife, Margherita of Carpi, was the sister of Elizabeth Gonzaga's beloved companion, Emilia Pia, and herself a learned and cultivated princess. On another a representation described as La Pazienza was given before the court, in honour of a visit which Cardinal Federigo Sanseverino paid to Milan.
She shuddered, and with strange inconsistence: "No," she said, in a choking voice, her lip twisting oddly at the corner. "I do not wish to see his face again." A light gleamed in Gonzaga's eye, and was extinguished on the instant. "Best make certain," he suggested, rising. "I have ordered Fortemani to bring Lanciotto here. He will be waiting now, without. Shall I admit them?"
Responsive to that gesture, Gonzaga faced the pinioned captain truculently. "You know your offence, knave," he bawled at him. "Have you aught to urge that may deter us from hanging you?" Fortemani raised his brows a moment in surprise at this ferocity from one whom he had always deemed a very woman. Then he uttered a laugh of such contempt that the colour sprang to Gonzaga's cheek.
His entreaties to the emperor had met with no response, whilst his appeal to Francesco Gonzaga of Mantua whose sister, it will be remembered, had been his first wife had resulted in the Marquis's sending him a hundred men under an Albanian, named Giacopo. What Giovanni was to do with a hundred men it is difficult to conceive, nor are the motives of Gonzaga's action clear.
A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga's hospitality is also illustrative of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise.
Valentina turned to Francesco with eyes that beamed admiration and a singular tenderness. "Oh, what had I done without you, Messer Francesco?" she cried, for surely the twentieth time since his coming. "I tremble to think how things had gone without your wit and valour to assist me." She never noticed the malicious smile that trembled on Gonzaga's pretty face.
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