“Poison” was the word which ran through the palace and soon through Florence from blanched lips to blanched lips.  Some said it was the Cardinal who had done the deed; others whispered stories of a poisoned tart designed by Bianca for the Cardinal, who refused to be tempted.  Whereupon the Grand Duke had eaten of it, and Bianca, “seeing that her plot had so tragically miscarried, seized the tart from her husband’s hand and ate what was left of it.”

The truth will never be known.  What we do know is that within a few hours of the last joke and the last drained glass of that fatal banquet the bodies of Francesco and Bianca were lying in death side by side in an adjacent room, the door of which was locked against the eyes of the curious—­even against the physicians.

In the solemn lying-in-state that followed Bianca had no place.  Francesco alone, by his brother’s orders, wore his crown in death.  As for Bianca, her body was hurried away and flung into the common vault of San Lorenzo, with the light of two yellow wax torches to bear it company, and the jibes and jeers of Florence for its only requiem.

CHAPTER XVII

RICHELIEU, THE ROUE

In the drama of the French Court many a fine-feathered villain “struts his brief hour” on the stage, dazzling eyes by his splendour, and shocking a world none too easily shocked in those days of easy morals by his profligacy; but it would be difficult among all these gilded rakes to find a match for the Duc de Richelieu, who carried his villainies through little less than a century of life.

Born in 1696, when Louis XIV. had still nearly twenty years of his long reign before him, Louis Francois Armand Duplessis, Duc de Richelieu, survived to hear the rumblings which heralded the French Revolution ninety-two years later; and for three-quarters of a century to be known as the most accomplished and heartless roue in all France.  Bearer of a great name, and inheritor of the splendours and riches of his great-uncle, the Cardinal, who was Louis XII.’s right-hand man, and, in his day, the most powerful subject in Europe, the Duc was born with the football of fortune at his feet; and probably no man who has ever lived so shamefully prostituted such magnificent opportunities and gifts.

As a boy, still in his teens, he had begun to play the role of Don Juan at the Court of the child-King, Louis XV.  The most beautiful women at the Court, we are told, went crazy over the handsome boy, who bore the most splendid name in France; and thus early his head was turned by flatteries and attentions which followed him almost to the grave.

The young Duchesse de Bourgogne, the King’s mother, made love to him, to the scandal of the Court; and from Princesses of the Blood Royal to the humblest serving-maid, there was scarcely a woman at Court who would not have given her eyes for a smile from the Duc de Fronsac, as he was then known.