Close to the Palazzo Roelli stood the Palazzo del Cimiero, where Francesco degli Atti, a merchant of noble birth, lived in sufficient state and splendour with his young son and his motherless daughter Isotta.
A strange girl this neighbour of Sigismond’s. Not beautiful, according to the busts and medals that record her features—an imperious, resolute, tenacious creature, imposing her personality like a yoke upon all who knew her. Hard-featured, long-necked, and thin, with perhaps in the large eyes burning under the tense raised eyebrows, a certain feverish, eager beauty to excuse the general panegyric of her contemporaries. An expression of patience, of great constancy, and endurance in the long-lipped, close-shut mouth, with the strong lines round it, in the long square of the face, in the beautiful resolute chin. The face expresses character rather than genius; we behold in it far-seeing resolve, and patience. The reputation of great learning remains with Isotta, despite the modern authorities who, on somewhat insufficient evidence, assure us that she could not write. By some means, at all events, by reading and writing, or by learned conversation and lonely thought, this Isotta gained an eminence among the women of her age for learning and talent, for prudence, and the faculty of government.
_Fœmina belligera et fortis_: thus the chronicle of Rimini describes her. A nature not immoral, but unscrupulous, a woman in whom will, passion, and intellect were strong enough each to balance the other. Isotta gained an influence over the perverse, defiant, passionate Gismondo which raised her to a position in the state far superior to that of the lawful wife; a position in which the lax morality of her age saw little disgraceful or revolting.
That Isotta felt it there is ample evidence. Taking Battaglini’s date (1438) as the true commencement of her relations with Gismondo she must have been young, certainly under twenty, when she took the first fatal all-involving step on that road of dishonour she was so long to tread. Young in age, she was younger probably by circumstance; this silent, sequestered, thoughtful girl, with neither mother nor sister to confide in. Her father raved and stormed, and then forgave her: I think, remembering a certain beseeching, miserable, unfortunate letter of hers written fifteen years later, that she did not forgive herself. Not the public union of her cipher with Gismondo’s, not the corps of courtly poetasters occupied in chanting _Isottæ_ to her glory, not the medals struck in her honour, nor the eternal monument prepared, could make this stern proud woman forget that she was her lover’s mistress only, after all. Nay, would she not silently, bitterly resent in her inmost heart this blazoning of her shame? “Voliatte avere chompasione a mi poveretta, diate vero spozamento piui presto che viui posette—Take pity on me, poor me,” she cries; “give me true marriage as quickly as you can. Ah, put an end to this thing, which always keeps me enraged. Sempre me tene arabiatta.” So she cries in her flat, soft dialect; and must cry long enough, poor Isotta.