r came on and the Duchess was confined to
her apartments in the palace, suffering from continual fever and nausea.
Maestro Brassavola--of good report as a specialist in feminine
ailments--treated her unsuccessfully. Unhappy Lucrezia--no mother to
console her, no friend to speak to her, all alone in the big palace with
unkindly attendants--nearly sobbed herself to death. Daily bleedings and
cuppings further diminished her strength. Some say that Don Francesco,
her brother, was urged, by his mother, to pay Lucrezia a visit, but the
bad terms upon which he stood with Duke Alfonso was an effectual bar to
his mission. Whether from craven fear or premeditated cruelty, the Duke
never entered the sick-room, and seemed entirely indifferent to his poor
young wife. Indeed, he continued his life of prodigality and
self-indulgence unrebuked, as we must suppose, by his conscience.

At last the Duchess' condition became so critical that the physicians
could no longer disguise the danger, and they intimated to the Duke the
approach of death. Then, and then only, Alfonso found his way to his
wife's bedside. With a sorrowful, stricken face she greeted him
affectionately, and remorse seemed, at length, to have brought him to
his senses. He became the most tender of nurses and watched by his dying
wife day and night--but the _poison_ had worked its cause!

At midnight, 21st April 1561, after months of cruel suffering,
neglected, affronted, and wronged, the innocent soul of poor young
Lucrezia, Duchess of Ferrara, passed into another world. She was not yet
seventeen years old--in bitter experience of life's hardships she was
seventy. At the autopsy of her body Maestro Pasquali of Florence
declared that death was caused by putrid fever! Thus was the Duke's
duplicity preserved.

Funeral honours due to her rank were rendered, and her shrunken little
body was buried in the Estensi chapel of the convent church of Corpus
Domini. A marble slab before the high altar reads thus:

"_Lucretia de' Medici--moglie di Alfonso II., Duca di Ferrara_"--and
that is all--as curt and as cruel as possible. The Duke's show of grief
was as insincere and hypocritical as could be. He shut himself up in his
palace with a few chosen cronies for seven days; meanwhile sending off
Bishop Rossetto, a court chaplain, to Florence, to communicate the sad
tidings to Duke Cosimo and Duchess Eleanora.

Very soon after the death of Lucrezia the Marchese Creole de' Contrari,