but she was laden with
costly presents by Duke Cosimo, and ten thousand gold florins found
their way into Carlo's empty pockets!

This timely arrangement was made on 20th July, and Carlo and Eleanora
became man and wife the following month. Duke Cosimo on the same day
caused little Giovanni to be legitimatised, and he was entered in the
Register of Baptisms as "Giovanni de' Medici, undoubted son of Cosimo I.
Duke of Florence and Siena." An ample provision was made for the child's
maintenance by the Duke, and Carlo de' Panciatichi agreed to his being
an inmate in his house along with his mother.

The marriage was celebrated privately in the presence of the two Dukes,
in the chapel of the Pitti Palace, and the young couple at once took up
their residence at the Panciatichi Palace in the Via Larga. Upon Carlo
was conferred the order of "Knight of San Stefano," and Messer
Bartolommeo, his father, was enrolled as a senator for life.

It would appear that Eleanora abandoned herself to her new life with
exemplary fortitude and resignation. She certainly had exchanged "new
lamps for old," and she made the best of an honourable marriage, in
spite of the violent and arrogant manner of her husband, whose fame as a
violent _braggadocio_ was a safeguard against the advances of young
Piero de' Medici. Three years after the marriage a child was born, to
whom the name of Cosimo was given, a laconic compliment to the old
libertine! A second son appeared in 1571, Bartolommeo, but he died
within a twelvemonth of his birth, and then, in 1577, came a third child
to the Panciatichi mansion, another Bartolommeo, so Eleanora decreed.
This boy, however, brought with him ineffaceable trouble, for Cavaliere
Carlo refused to acknowledge him, and angrily pointed to Don Piero de'
Medici as his putative father!

Piero made light of this charge--he was well used to that sort of thing,
but, with rare effrontery, he held the infant at the font, whilst
Panciatichi absented himself, and Eleanora made a tacit avowal of his
parentage. The relations between Carlo and his wife had quite naturally
never been of the best, and as gradually fears of death, upon the
scaffold faded, or by a retributive d'Antonio hand, and he found himself
the untrammelled master of his actions, he began to resent the
callousness of the arrangement with Duke Cosimo, after 1570, Grand Duke
of Tuscany.

Eleanora's intrigue with Don Piero clenched the matter of her
cohabitation w