Alas! Poor Renée must have valued these good gifts far more highly than even those of her sex most rich in such are wont to do, if she would not in her own heart have bitterly denied the value of any such compensation! Lucrezia with a dower of infamy "compensated" by beauty, became the happy wife of an affectionate husband. Renée with her store of virtues, and rich intellectual qualities, found but a state prison, heart–ache, and an unloving lord in this exile from her native France.
And then that "elevated intelligence," which was to compensate for crookedness, was but little likely to contribute to the happiness of one in the position of Renée of France at the court of Ferrara. Elevated intelligence was a dangerous commodity just about that time in Italy! For we have already seen the tendency of men's minds in those days to think of things that it was far better not to think about at all; a tendency which it very soon became necessary to extinguish and trample out at whatever cost. Thus we find that Renée, not content with having studied "the learned tongues, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and even astrology," and "unable to bridle her fervid intellect, gave herself over to the study of theology, and to complete her misfortune selected for her instructor one of the most celebrated of the new–fangled teachers who then infested Europe,"[36] no other than one John Calvin. And the result was, that, whereas the beautiful and catholic Lucrezia was able,—juvenile indiscretions and ardour of pulse happily moderated and past—to spend her mornings in orthodox devotion performed _secundum artem_, and her evenings in embroidery, to such purpose as to have secured the good word of Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, and learned Doctors, and the final general approval of Mnemosyne in her official surplice and rochet,—poor Duchess Renée with her "elevated intellect," and unhappy improprieties in the matter of theological inquiry, is marked as a moral leper by the same consistent ecclesiastical Muse, and finally consigned to a worse limbo than that of their own sulphureous pages.
But it is not to be supposed that Renée came to her husband's court branded as a heretic; though we find that she forthwith established in her own apartments "a literary academy," or meeting of men of letters, which, we are told,[37] was "much for the honour of literature, but not at all for that of the catholic religion." Nor, though almost all of those learned men, whom she patronised, turned out later to be, as the historian says, tarred with the same brush, was the delicate orthodoxy of her husband Hercules offended by any ill savour of heresy at that time. For the Church–in–danger alarm bell had not yet rung in Italy. Clement VII. having quite enough to do to hold his own among the clashing of the perfectly material interests of quite satisfactorily catholic, but very unscrupulous princes, thought of nothing less than the smelling out of traces of heretical taint. And it needed something more appreciable by the ducal mind than speculations about justification by faith to stimulate its orthodoxy into activity.