to which Francis fell a victim, and he brought about a speedy meeting.  At first Bianca repulsed him; but when she found that her husband was unworthy of her, she returned the Prince’s affection. (I am telling her story from the pro-Bianca point of view:  there are plenty of narrators on the other side.) Meanwhile, Francis’s official life going on, he married that archduchess Joanna of Austria for whom the Austrian frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio were painted; but his heart remained Bianca’s and he was more at her house than in his own.  At last, Bianca’s husband being killed in some fray, she was free from the persecution of her family and ready to occupy the palace which Francis hastened to build for her, here, in the Via Maggio, now cut up into tenements at a few lire a week.  The attachment continued unabated when Francis came to the throne, and upon the death of his archduchess in 1578 Bianca and he were almost immediately, but privately, married, she being then thirty-five; and in the next year they were publicly married in the church of S. Lorenzo with every circumstance of pomp; while later in the same year Bianca was crowned.

Francis remained her lover till his death, which was both dramatic and suspicious, husband and wife dying within a few hours of each other at the Medici villa of Poggia a Caiano in 1587.  Historians have not hesitated to suggest that Francis was poisoned by his wife; but there is no proof.  It is indeed quite possible that her life was more free of intrigue, ambition and falsehood, than that of any one about the court at that time; but the Florentines, encouraged by Francis’s brother Ferdinand I, who succeeded him, made up their minds that she was a witch, and few things in the way of disaster happened that were not laid to her charge.  Call a woman a witch and everything is possible.  Ferdinand not only detested Bianca in life and deplored her fascination for his brother, but when she died he refused to allow her to be buried with the others of the family; hence the Chapel of the Princes at S. Lorenzo lacks one archduchess.  Her grave is unknown.

The whole truth we shall never know; but it is as easy to think of Bianca as a harmless woman who both lost and gained through love as to picture her as sinister and scheming.  At any rate we know that Francis was devoted to her with a fidelity and persistence for which Grand Dukes have not always been conspicuous.

S. Spirito is one of Brunelleschi’s solidest works.  Within it resembles the city of Bologna in its vistas of brown and white arches.  The effect is severe and splendid; but the church is to be taken rather as architecture than a treasury of art, for although each of its eight and thirty chapels has an altar picture and several have fine pieces of sculpture—­one a copy of Michelangelo’s famous Pieta in Rome—­there is nothing of the highest value.  It was in this church that I was asked alms by one of the best-dressed men in Florence; but the Florentine beggars are not importunate:  they ask, receive or are denied, and that is the end of it.