Remained the three younger ladies, the ornaments of Francesco's court, the cynosure of Florentine eyes, the promoters and centre of all festivities, and the devisers of all sorts of diversions and frolic schemes. The general licence of the manners of the time, the high social position of the fair bevy, and the special dissoluteness and neglect of their natural protectors, permitted them to push their sport unchecked very considerably beyond the boundary line, which separates venial levity from conduct that leaves permanent and ineffaceable stains behind it. Isabella had long since "thrown her cap over the roofs," to use the classic French phrase—aye, over the topmost cupola of the _Duomo_. Paolo Giordano Orsini was pursuing his own not very dissimilar course at Rome, and took but little heed of the almost unknown wife, who was off his hands under the care of her own family; and Isabella had ingratiated herself with her brother Francesco in the manner most acceptable to him, by taking kindly to Bianca from the first;[158] the more so as she was the only one of his family who had ever done so. Pietro's young wife, Eleonora, showed every disposition to follow to the full extent the example he set her. And Bianca, though her doings do not appear to have at any time taken such a shape as to give Francesco any cause for jealousy, was ready to go all lengths with the others of the trio as far as lavish extravagance, festivities of which the details were more or less unfit to meet the scrutiny of the public eye, and general "emancipation" from "prejudice," were concerned. So that the Grand Duke Francesco found himself at the head of a somewhat skittish court; a Capua of the _renaissance_, which was beginning to attract unfavourable notice from the other courts of Italy. When the pot chances to be a shade blacker than usual, the kettle, we know, is ever loudest in abuse of it. Besides, the disorders of the Tuscan court seem to have had a certain Tom–and–Jerry flavour about them, which greatly scandalised and disgusted many Highnesses, Eminences, and Excellencies of different degrees of Illustriousness and Serenity, who would not have minded a few decently veiled assassinations or any amount of respectably quiet poisonings. And Francesco, who flattered himself, very mistakenly, that by dint of a certain dose of Louis–Onze–like devoutness, he had contrived to keep character enough for one, was painfully conscious of the fact that he assuredly had not any to spare for covering the deficiencies of others.