ster, sent her the following
pathetic account of their meeting--

"Last night the Duchess Isabella arrived in Milan, and our duchess went
to meet her, two miles outside the town, and directly they met, our
duchess got out of her chariot and entered that of Duchess Isabella,
both of them weeping bitterly, and so they rode together towards the
Castello, where the Duke of Milan met them on horseback at the gate of
the garden. He took off his cap, and accompanied them to the Castello,
where they all three alighted, and placing Duchess Isabella between
them, our duke and duchess accompanied her to her old rooms. When they
reached these rooms they sat down together, and the Duchess Isabella
could do nothing but weep, until at last the duke spoke to her, and
begged her to calm herself, and be comforted, with many other similar
words. Dear friend, the hardest heart would have been melted with
compassion at the sight of her, with her three children, looking so thin
and altered by her grief, wearing a long black robe like a friar's
habit, made of rough cloth, worth fourpence the yard, and her eyes
hidden by a thick black veil. Certainly I, for one, could not help
crying, and if I had not restrained myself, I should have wept still
more."[55]

Until the death of Beatrice, Isabella of Aragon and her children
occupied the rooms in the Castello where she and her husband had
formerly resided, and spent the spring and summer in the Castello of
Pavia, but the widowed duchess lived in complete retirement during the
next two years, and her name seldom appears in contemporary records. Her
mother-in-law Bona, retained her rooms until the following January, when
the duke desired her to move to the old palace near the Duomo, known as
the Corte Vecchia, partly because the use of her apartments was required
by the court officials, and partly owing to the intrigues which she
secretly practised. Only lately Lodovico's envoys at Antwerp had
informed him of the bitter words which Bona wrote against him to her
daughter Bianca, words which the empress's secretary thought it wiser to
pass over when he read her mother's letters aloud, taking care, he adds,
to see that they were burnt before they could do further mischief. A
year afterwards, Bona left Milan for good and returned to France, where
she lived at Amboise until the end of 1499, when she came back to her
native land of Savoy, and died at Fossano on the 8th of January, 1504.

Meanwhile Maffe