18 COUNT BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE

hrst public occasion on which he was required to
attend his lord was in October, 1499, when the French
King, Louis XII., made his triumphal entry into
Milan. During the same month of April in which
Baldassare was recalled to Mantua by his fathers
death, the treaty between France and Venice, which
sealed the fate of Lodovico Sforza, was signed at Blois.
After this a series of disasters brought about the
Moro's ruin, and by the end of August the French
armies were at the gates of Milan. Lodovico and his
children bed to Innsbruck, and the Castello—that
impregnable citadel of the Sforzas—was treacherously
surrendered to the enemy. Louis XII. now hastened
to take possession of his new dominions, and the
exiled Dukes nearest relatives, trembling for their
own safety, lost no time in making peace with the
victorious monarch. On October 2 Duke Ercole of
Ferrara and his son-in-law, the Marquis of Mantua,
met King Louis at Pavia, and four days later entered
Milan with him in state. Castiglione, who had by
this time almost completed his twenty-hrst year, rode
through the streets in his master s suite, and wrote
a letter to his brother-in-law, Jacopo Boschetto, in
which he describes this triumphal progress, not with-
out a pang of natural regret for the lost glories of
Lodovico s court:
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cAc//0 &/ Go7?X<3gY7, 77/7/ 7G'7Z.S7/ZU7/ U7/z/ 7707/07/7T//
T?7*0/AC7'.
' MAGNIFICENT AND HONOURED BROTHER,
' If I were not sure that your kindness and
indulgence were not far greater than my culpable
neglect, I should fear that my conduct might have
excited your displeasure. But the certainty that I