The ceremony began on the appointed day in the great hall of the _Palazzio Vecchio_—the same hall in which Capponi had persuaded the Florentines to elect Jesus Christ for their king, and Savonarola had instructed the great council of the nation to abstain from debating, in order the more swiftly to act on his suggestion. In that famous old hall, once the very cradle of Italian freedom, and the heart of the popular life, a throne was built for the prince by right divine;—right truly and absolutely divine of those eternal laws, which make such princes the natural result of the lack of wisdom and worth, and excess of evil and unruly passions which had been exhibited in the councils of that council–chamber. The ungainly irregularity in the form of the enormous hall may have in some measure marred the symmetry of the upholstery magnificences. But Francesco and Bianca should have been well content to pardon any such eyesore. For the fashion all awry of that home of the old Republic, in which no wall makes a right angle with its neighbour, commemorates literally, as well as typically, the implacable internecine party hatreds of the Florentines.[195] And had that stone embodiment of the spirit of the old Italian commonwealths been able to be built straight, Florence would not have had that day to stand abject, vicious, and degraded to bow before a despot and his ... _cosa_. [Sidenote: THE CEREMONY.] When the prince was seated, and all his military, legal and clerical flunkeys in their proper liveries, duly ranged around him, Bianca was led in by the ambassadors of Venice; and floods of speechifying, easy to be imagined, but intolerable to read, were uttered by the various functionaries of either nation. Probably if might be difficult for the strictest analysis to detect one particle of truth in all that was said. To Grimani, the old patriarch of Aquileia, it fell to make an oration "on the utility of this marriage and the value of the daughtership of St. Mark." The two ambassadors did their crowning; but in some way or other failed to do it to the satisfaction of the Senate. For when they, in accordance with Venetian law, asked permission to keep the present of a ring worth fifteen hundred dollars, given to each of them by Francesco, it was refused.[196] When the business had been got through thus far, Bianca was carried,—chaired, it should seem like a newly elected M.P.,—with the crown on her head to the cathedral; and there were done "sacred sacrifices," "divine services," and other such unbounded lying of an intensified, infinite, and yet more pernicious sort than that previously perpetrated in the lay part of the business. And so Bianca was made a Duchess—nay Grand Duchess; and stepped triumphantly on her _excelsior_ path, rewarded by success for her long efforts, patient endurance, sleepless astute vigilance, courageous battling with danger and difficulty, and unscrupulous daring.