If merely to save appearances, or to conceal his real intention, the new Grand Duke ordered the body of the Grand Duchess to be placed beside that of her husband in the Cappella Medici of the church. For six brief hours it was suffered to remain, and then, at midnight, agents of Ferdinando, well paid for their profanity, deported all that was mortal of the brilliant "woman whom he hated" to an unknown grave in the paupers' burial plot beyond the city boundary! "For," said he, "we will have none of her among our dead!" Such was the end of the beautiful and accomplished Bianca Cappello--"Bianca, so richly endowed," as wrote one of her panegyrists, "by nature, and so refined by discipline, able to sympathise with and help all who approached her--her fame for good will last for ever!" The wiles of the serpent and his cruel coils had crushed the "Daughter of Venice": it was the triumph of an unworthy man over a lovable woman. She was not the only victim Ferdinando's poison overpowered--Giovanni de' Pucci, whom the Pope was about to advance to the Cardinalate, an inoffensive ecclesiastic, incurred Cardinal Ferdinando's displeasure by his sympathy with the Grand Duchess. He died mysteriously after drinking a glass of wine which Ferdinando had poured out for him![A] [Footnote A: In 1857, when the Medici graves at San Lorenzo were opened, the bodies of the Grand Duke Francesco and the Grand Duchess Giovanna were easily identified. The bodies also of Maria, the unhappy victim of her father, Cosimo, with the fatal wound; of Eleanora de Garzia de Toledo, Piero's murdered wife; and of Isabella, Duchess of Bracciano, were also recognised. All five were in wooden chests, but robbed of the costly grave-clothes and jewels. _There was no trace of the body of the Grand Duchess Bianca!_] Bianca had not been many days buried when ominous reports began to be rife all over Florence and along the countryside. People asked each other why the body of the Grand Duchess had been snatched. "Was it," they said, "to hide the real culprit and to stifle awkward questions?" The tongues of the night-birds, who had thrown that precious body aside contemptuously, and had not been permitted to mark the grave in any way, were loosened, they gave the name of their employer--Ferdinando's major-domo. That was quite enough to fix preferentially the guilt upon the guilty party, but when the medical advisers of the new Grand Duke admitted reluctantly that neither Francesco nor Bianca had died from malarial causes, the chitter-chatter of the villa and the palace became unmuzzled, and first one and then another domestic--more or less personal--contributed his piece of private knowledge of the facts of the double tragedy.