Meanwhile, careless apparently of the future, Italy continued her wild dance of pleasure. In Milan, gaiety and licence reigned supreme. Yet there are many signs that a sense of sin and of a reckoning at hand had begun to awaken. The sonnets of il Pistoia grew grave with prophecies to laughing Italy of the much weeping which time would soon draw from her, and of the shortness of the hours between her and her immense, irreparable sorrow. The superstitious Moro himself must have been shaken by the blind friar who is said to have appeared in the Piazza of Milan at the time of his negotiations with the French King, crying—_Prince, show him not the way, else thou wilt repent it_. From Florence came the echo of Savonarola’s annunciation, _Gladius Domini super terram cito et velociter_. More poignant still to ears that could hear was the tremulous voice of the octogenarian King of Naples, warning Pope and Moro, again and again, of the peril clear to the terrible prevision of the dying—_He who will may begin a war, but stop it, no!_ But the voices cried in the wilderness. King Ferrante’s was spent by death early in 1494, and in the following autumn Charles appeared at last at the head of a splendid host, and was welcomed with immense pomp and revelry by Lodovico and Beatrice at Pavia. There in the Castle the young Duke lay dying. The King visited him, and the piteous spectacle roused the sympathy of the monarch and his followers, for whom the person of legitimate sovereignty had a sacredness unfelt by the Italians. Charles was, however, much embarrassed by the Duchess Isabella, who besought him to have mercy on her father, the King of Naples. _She had better have prayed for herself, who was still a young and fair lady_, observes Commines.