It was in company no less enviable than this author's that I revisited
the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first
time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of
the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the
Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes
amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of
their line, Alessandro de' Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the
bastard of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the
inscription below his adoptive arms, "Under one Faith and one Law, one
Lord," and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked
Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy's mother.
Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner
the father's murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact,
that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should
like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to
the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but
perhaps I had better not.
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