But while they were thus courting obscurity the story of their flight was making much noise in Italy. The abduction of a Venetian noble's heiress was a serious thing. All Venice felt the insult; and the reward for Bonaventuri's head was published in every city. It thus came to pass, that Francesco, Duke Cosmo's eldest son, the heir apparent to the throne of Tuscany, heard the story, and, at the same time, that the fugitives were then in Florence. And as rumour was also saying extraordinary things of Bianca's beauty, he conceived a strong desire to see the heroine of the story. All the contemporary writers speak much of this same beauty and fascination; but it must be admitted, that the portraits and medals, which remain to show us what she really was, do not by any means confirm their praises. It is true, that these representations of her show her to us at a later period of her life, and that the coarse strongly marked features may well have been less repulsive at sixteen. Montaigne, in the course of his tour in Italy, saw her at the Tuscan court, and has written that she was "handsome, according to the taste of the Italians, having a cheerful and plump face, considerable stoutness of person, and a bosom such as they admire." This description of her face tallies very well with the portraits, and specially with a medal which must have been struck in her later years. It is a face well calculated to express jovial, convivial cheerfulness, but coarse, vulgar, and insolent in the extreme. And to this must be added, hair, which only a courtier's flattery could term "auburn," and an ungracefully stout person. This, however, as Montaigne hints, is not in Italy thought as incompatible with beauty as on this side of the Alps; and hair, that we should term decidedly red, is often much admired among the Italians. [Sidenote: A MEDICEAN TRAGEDY.] Francesco was at the time of Bianca's arrival in Florence, in his twenty–third year, and, as far as can be judged from the reports of the contemporary writers, had up to that time distinguished himself rather as a reader and student than in any less creditable way. The Court of Cosmo, however, was by no means a favourable school for the education of his children. Some of the scenes recorded by contemporary writers as having been witnessed there are of a nature wholly irreproducible here. And in the last year before that of Bianca's arrival at Florence, the year 1562, had occurred one of those horrible domestic tragedies, which seem to have been a peculiar specialty of the Medicean race.