have gratified the Dominican
friars or the Italian princes in his train. The painter was not present
on this occasion. His master had fled, the works upon which he was
engaged were all interrupted, and on the approach of the French he had
left Milan for one of his favourite country retreats in the hills of
Bergamo or the mountains of Como, where he could study Nature and pursue
his scientific researches in peace. And the French king and Caesar
Borgia, whose genuine appreciation of fine art was well known, did not
fail to admire Bramante's fair chapel and that latest masterpiece of
Lombard sculpture, the noble tomb which the Moro had raised to be an
eternal memorial of his love and sorrow. There were others in his train
that day who could hardly look unmoved on the sleeping form of the young
duchess with the child-like face and the brocade robes which _Il Gobbo_
had fashioned with such exquisite skill. There was her brother-in-law,
Francesco Gonzaga, and Niccolo da Correggio, in whose heart that fair
face and bright eyes, he tells us, were for ever enshrined; there were
her brothers, Alfonso and Ferrante; above all, there was her father, the
aged Duke Ercole. The sight of that marble figure, with the soft curling
hair and the long fringe of eyelashes and quietly folded hands, must
have vividly recalled the memory of his dead child, and of all the joy
and brightness that had vanished in the grave with Beatrice. For him at
least that must have been a bitter moment.

And there was yet another, young Baldassare Castiglione, that courtly
and handsome boy who had been sent to Milan a few years before to finish
his education, and had now followed his master, the Marquis of Mantua,
to wait upon the French king. He had been present many a time at those
brilliant _fetes_ in the Castello, and had seen Duchess Beatrice in her
most radiant and triumphant hour, had talked with Leonardo and Bramante,
and looked on Messer Galeaz as the mirror of chivalry. Now he came back
to find the scene changed and that gay company all dead or gone. And the
next day he sat down to write home to Mantua and tell his mother of all
the pomp and splendour of the scenes which he had witnessed. He
described the king's triumphal entry, and the great procession in which
he had taken part, with all a boy's enthusiasm; but he could not refrain
from a sigh over the melancholy change in the Castello, when he told her
how these halls and courts, that had once been