The inconstancy of fortune’s various sway means that it must present us with all kinds of faces. Is there any more express act of justice than this? The Duke of Valentinois, having resolved to poison Adrian, Cardinal de Cornete, with whom Pope Alexander the Sixth, his father, and he were to dine at the Vatican, sent ahead some poisoned wine, and ordered the sommelier to keep it carefully. The Pope having arrived before the son and having asked for a drink, the sommelier, who thought that the wine had only been recommended to him for his kindness, served it to the Pope; and the Duke himself, arriving just as they were about to eat, and trusting that his bottle would not be touched, took his turn: so that the father died suddenly; and the son, after being tormented by illness for a long time, was reserved for another worse fate.
Sometimes it seems that it is played out for us. The Lord of Estrée, under the banner of Monsieur de Vandome, and the Lord of Liques, lieutenant of the company of the Duke of Ascot, both being servants of the sister of the Sieur de Foungueselles, although from different parties (as happens to neighbors on the border), the Sieur de Licques won; but, on the very day of the wedding, and, what is worse, before bedtime, the groom, wanting to break a wood in favor of his new bride, went out to skirmish near Sainct Omer, where Sieur d’Estrée, finding himself the stronger, took him prisoner; and, to assert his advantage, he still falsified that the damsel,
I knew that the neck of the spouses, forced before, would be released, When, coming one after the other, winter again had satisfied avid love in long nights. (Catullus)
She herself made him the request out of courtesy to return her prisoner, as he did: the French nobility never refusing anything to the ladies. Does it not seem to be an artist’s fate? Constantine, son of Helen, founded the empire of Constantinople; and, so many centuries later, Constantine, son of Helen, ended it. Sometimes he likes to envy our miracles. We believe that King Clovis, besieging Angoulême, the walls fell by divine favor: and Bouchet borrows from some author that King Robert, besieging a city, and having escaped from the siege to go to Orleans to solemnize the feast of Saint Aignan, as he was devoted to it, at a certain point in the mass, the walls of the besieged city crumbled to ruin without any effort. It was the opposite in our wars of Milan. For Captain Rense, besieging the city of Eronne for us, and having set a mine under a large section of the wall, and the wall being suddenly removed from the ground, nevertheless ended up all lopsided, so right in its foundation that the besiegers did not scale it any less.
Sometimes it acts as a medicine. Jason Phereus, having been abandoned by the doctors for a stye he had on his chest, wanting to get rid of it, at least by dying, threw himself into a battle, body and soul, in the midst of the enemies, where he was wounded right through the body, so precisely, that his stye died and healed. Did she surpass the painter Protogenes in the science of his art? This one, having perfected the image of a tired and shaggy dog, to his satisfaction in all other respects, but unable to represent the foam and drool as he wished, in despair of his task, took his sponge and, as it was soaked in various paints, threw it against it to erase everything: Fortune struck the blow right where the dog’s mouth was, and there completed what art had failed to achieve.
Does it not sometimes take our advice and correct us? Isabel, Queen of England, having to return from Zealand to her Kingdom with an army in favor of her son against her husband, would have been lost if she had arrived at the port she had planned, where she was expected by her enemies; but fortune threw her against her will elsewhere, where she made landfall in complete safety. And was not this old man, who, by throwing a stone at a dog, wounded and killed his stepmother, right in uttering this verse:
“Chance decides matters better than ourselves.” (Menander)
Has fortune better advice than we? Icetes had hired two soldiers to kill Timoleon, staying in Adrane, in Sicily. They took advantage of the fact that he was about to make some sacrifice; and, mingling among the crowd, as they signaled to each other that the opportunity was right for their needs: here is a third who, with a great blow of his sword, struck one of them in the head, and left him dead on the ground, and fled. The companion, thinking himself discovered and lost, resorted to the altar, requesting forgiveness, with the promise of telling the whole truth. As he was recounting the conspiracy, here was the third man who had been caught, who, as a murderer, the people pushed and shoved through the crowd, towards Timoleon and the most prominent members of the assembly.
There he cried for mercy and claimed to have justly killed his father’s murderer, immediately verifying, through witnesses that his good fortune provided him with just at that moment, that in the city of Leontini his father had in fact been killed by the man on whom he had taken revenge. He was ordered ten Attic minae for having had this good fortune, taking advantage of the death of his father, to have taken the common father of the Sicilians from the dead. This fortune surpasses in regularity the rules of human prudence.
To conclude: In this matter is there not a very clear application of his favor, of kindness and singular piety? Ignatius Pere and his son, outlawed by the Triumvirs in Rome, resolved on this generous act of surrendering their lives into each other’s hands, and thwarting the cruelty of the tyrants: they ran at each other, sword in hand; she raised the points of the sword and dealt two equally fatal blows, and gave to the honor of such a beautiful friendship, that they had just enough strength to remove the wounds from their bloody and armed arms, to embrace in this state of such a strong embrace, that the executioners cut off their two heads together, leaving the bodies still caught in this noble knot, and the wounds joined, lovingly smelling the blood and the remains of each other’s life.