Then too there was Jeanne of Aragon, that beautiful sunny-haired woman, with features of rare distinction and sweetness, in her day the idol of Nifo and the prototype of beauty. She had married Ascanio Colonna, a soldier of fortune who had brought his affairs to a desperate pass. Poor woman! On every side she saw blank desolation. She had just lost her eldest son by a sudden death when creditors began to harass her and drive her second son to ruin; and from the magnificent windows of the Colonna palace, where she was imprisoned by order of Pope Paul IV., she saw the pontifical troops marching by on the way to seize her castles. She could endure it no longer. One morning she disappeared, no one knows how, but probably in disguise: at one of the gates of Rome she found a horse ready saddled, and she performed the astonishing feat of riding to Naples without drawing rein. At Naples she became the centre of a cruel strife: her husband had her son arrested, and the son denounced the father. Ascanio fell, struck by an unknown dagger. And when his charming wife, whose golden hair had never a fleck of grey, came in her turn to die, they must bury her with her husband, and could find for the shuddering tomb no inscription but the touching words: “A great-hearted woman, a very loving wife.” In a higher sphere even Margaret of Austria was but a genuine woman, an admirable mother who never had any children. Compelled by family duty to rule the Netherlands during the long minority of her nephew Charles the Fifth, through all those years of toil and difficulty she set but one aim before her, the preservation of peace. She was good, benevolent, intelligent, but not happy: “Twice married and yet a maid,”[280] as she said, then the widow of the handsome Philibert of Savoy, she would have preferred the ‘tiniest grain’ that satisfied her heart’s craving to the dignities that were poisoning her life; and she made no secret of it. On her tomb she ordered to be set this striking emblem of disillusionment: ‘_Fortune, Infortune!_’[281] And the great Anne of France, ‘the lady of Beaujeu,’ condemned to an attitude of ‘knitted brows’ and drawn sword as a means of reassuring her good subjects and keeping the bad in awe, that haughty, ambitious, close-fisted, masculine woman, as she was called by those whom she had reduced to a proper sense of the duty of prompt obedience—no one was in reality less like the cold statue she appeared in official life. It was enough to watch her features in the hour of strife, and of triumph even; they twitched and quivered, and were only controlled by a visible effort.[282] A modest, it might almost be said a humble woman, she was constantly a prey to self-distrust, never acting without advice, almost heart-broken at her victories, for her one dream was of quenching animosities; caring for nothing but peace, justice, and a well-ordered State, and carrying her loathing of extreme ideas to the point of appearing obtuse.