y to occupy
the palace which Francis hastened to build for her, here, in the Via
Maggio, now cut up into tenements at a few lire a week. The attachment
continued unabated when Francis came to the throne, and upon the death
of his archduchess in 1578 Bianca and he were almost immediately,
but privately, married, she being then thirty-five; and in the next
year they were publicly married in the church of S. Lorenzo with every
circumstance of pomp; while later in the same year Bianca was crowned.

Francis remained her lover till his death, which was both dramatic
and suspicious, husband and wife dying within a few hours of each
other at the Medici villa of Poggia a Caiano in 1587. Historians
have not hesitated to suggest that Francis was poisoned by his wife;
but there is no proof. It is indeed quite possible that her life
was more free of intrigue, ambition and falsehood, than that of any
one about the court at that time; but the Florentines, encouraged by
Francis's brother Ferdinand I, who succeeded him, made up their minds
that she was a witch, and few things in the way of disaster happened
that were not laid to her charge. Call a woman a witch and everything
is possible. Ferdinand not only detested Bianca in life and deplored
her fascination for his brother, but when she died he refused to allow
her to be buried with the others of the family; hence the Chapel of
the Princes at S. Lorenzo lacks one archduchess. Her grave is unknown.

The whole truth we shall never know; but it is as easy to think of
Bianca as a harmless woman who both lost and gained through love as
to picture her as sinister and scheming. At any rate we know that
Francis was devoted to her with a fidelity and persistence for which
Grand Dukes have not always been conspicuous.

S. Spirito is one of Brunelleschi's solidest works. Within it resembles
the city of Bologna in its vistas of brown and white arches. The
effect is severe and splendid; but the church is to be taken rather
as architecture than a treasury of art, for although each of its
eight and thirty chapels has an altar picture and several have fine
pieces of sculpture--one a copy of Michelangelo's famous Pieta in
Rome--there is nothing of the highest value. It was in this church
that I was asked alms by one of the best-dressed men in Florence;
but the Florentine beggars are not importunate: they ask, receive or
are denied, and that is the end of it.

The other great church in the Pitti qu