Lorenzo de' Medici to the Duchess Eleanora d'Aragona d'Este at Ferrara:
"The duty I owe Your Excellency compels me to communicate to you the terrible and disastrous blow that has today befallen me through the death of my most beloved mother Madonna Lucrezia. This leaves me utterly desolate as Your Excellency can think, for I have lost, not only a mother, but the only person I could turn to in many vexations and who aided me in many troubles. It is true that we ought to submit patiently to the will of God, but in this case my heart refuses to be comforted. I pray He may perhaps send me patience and comfort, and grant her peace and happiness. Your excellency to whom I thus pour out my grief for such a loss, and to whom I turn for comfort in such sorrow, will understand the state in which your attached servant, who commends himself to you with all his heart, finds himself, Florence, March 25, 1482." Your Excellency’s Servant, Laurentius de Medicis
. . . and to Duke Ercole D’Este, Lorenzo wrote much the same letter, adding, “I am more full of sorrow than I can say, as besides losing a mother, at the mere thought of whom my heart breaks, I have lost the counsellor who took many a burden from off me.”
The text is from Jane Ross's translation of the Lives of the Early Medici, as Told in Their Correspondence, published in 1910.
The book cover is a recently published book, which I am lusting after . . . perhaps I can get my local library to order it, if they haven't already.
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