This intimation that Francesca also had suffered from the displeasure of the Court of Ferrara, at the same time that Olympia had fallen into disgrace, would seem to add probability to the supposition, that the same cause, their common Protestantism, was the motive of the Court hostility in either case. Olympia's French biographer[113] thinks that this period of her life at Schweinfurth, was "one of sacrifice," and that "isolation and obscurity were now her lot." It does not seem to me that this Schweinfurth home is thus fairly described, or that Olympia so regarded it. I think that it included a fair proportion of the elements of happiness, and that she was perfectly capable of appreciating those elements. If only the simple home, with its quiet round of congenial duties and congenial pleasures could have been preserved to the physician and his wife, their story might have ended more in the idyllic than the tragic tone. From lyric girlhood to idyllic matronhood the progress is normal, and need excite no pity for its "isolation and obscurity." But the sequel of the tale, which remains to be told, renders it indeed a tragedy. CHAPTER IX. The makers of history.—The flight from Schweinfurth. Happy times, and prosperous people, it has been said, afford but small materials for history. But great events, which were to shape the history of Europe for centuries to come, were convulsing Germany in those middle years of the sixteenth century. And the amount of misery suffered by the hod–men and day–labourers in this history–building business, was in proportion to the greatness of the work in hand. That "great man" Charles V. was a notable provider of "fine subjects" for history. Poor, gouty, narrow–minded specimen of humanity as he was, rising up early, and late taking rest, at his weary kingcraft and history–making, with a very unsound mind in a scarcely sounder body; with "vast views," analogous to those of the sailor, who having expended the first of his fairy–granted wishes on "as much rum as ever he could drink," could only utilise the third of them by asking for "a little more rum;" and with a "large intelligence," equal to the most extended application of the theory of that wise monkey who drew the chestnuts from the fire at the cost of other paws than his own: this "great figure in history" was a scourge to mankind, useful after the fashion of many other such scourges, to admonish men of the folly, meanness, and absurdity of permitting earth to be harassed by such. [Sidenote: CHARLES V. IN 1552.]