Alfonso’s long absences from home, and his disinclination for his wife’s society, left Lucrezia to seek necessary consolations elsewhere.  She did not fail of admirers in that giddy Court:  the wonder is that she maintained her dignity as well as she did.  The Duke became jealous, of course, of his neglected wife—­all faithless husbands are the same.  He paid spies to report to him the daily occupations of the Duchess, with the names of her visitors and friends.  Thus evil eyes and ears were opened, and evil tongues began to wag, until they caused the utter undoing of the innocent young Duchess.

Alfonso, in vain, tried to fix the lovers of his wife—­she was as tactful as they were prudent—­but he was not without means to his end.  The Duchess early gave symptoms of ill-health.  In Florence she was the strongest of all her father’s family, but at Ferrara she became delicate and a victim to incessant sickness.  What could it be?

The Court physician hinted at pregnancy, but the Duke knew that was impossible, so far as he was personally concerned, nevertheless it served its purpose.  The winter 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: