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Sforza's departure must have taken place early in June, for on the eleventh of that month a letter from Ascanio was sent to his brother in Milan informing him that the lord of Pesaro with his wife and Madonna Giulia, the Pope's mistress, together with the mother of the Duke of Gandia, and Giuffrè, had set out from Rome for Pesaro, and that his Holiness had begged Madonna Giulia to come back soon.

"Oh! if you despair of the means, Giulia," said the marquis, "I must fly from Florence I must exile myself forever from the city of my birth, and which is still more endeared to me because," he added, sinking his voice to a tender tone, "because, my well-beloved, it contains thee!"

THE Via Giulia, which runs in a straight line over a distance of five hundred yards from the Farnese palace to the church of St. John of the Florentines, was at that hour steeped in bright sunlight, the glow streaming from end to end and whitening the small square paving stones.

This beauty Kheyr-ed-dīn destined for the Sultan's harem, and so secret were the Corsairs' movements that he almost surprised the fair Giulia in her bed. She had barely time to mount a horse in her shift and fly with a single attendant, whom she afterwards condemned to death, perhaps because the beauty revealed that night had made him overbold.

Thereupon Madonna Giulia thanked me warmly and said I had made her very happy. She answered that such a trifle deserved no thanks. She hopes to be of still greater help to me, and says I shall find her so at the right time.

The Via Giulia interested him, for he knew how splendid it had been in the time of Julius II, who had dreamt of lining it with sumptuous palaces. Horse and foot races then took place there during the carnival, the Palazzo Farnese being the starting-point, and the Piazza of St. Peter's the goal.

How profound then was his astonishment, when Giulia, with the calm and tranquil demeanor which innocence usually wears, but with the least, least curl of the upper lip, as if in haughty triumph, leisurely and deliberately drew the jewel-case from beneath the cushion of the ottoman whereon she was seated, and, handing it to him, said, "Your lordship perceives that I had not forgotten the reception which his highness holds to-morrow, since I ere now brought my diamonds hither to select those which it is my intention to wear."

"Can your lordship suppose for an instant that I should appear in the ducal presence otherwise than is meet and fitting for her who has the honor to bear your name?" said Giulia, partially recovering her presence of mind, as the conversation appeared to have taken a turn no longer painful to her feelings for, oh! cannot the reader conceive the anguish, the mortal anguish, she had ere now endured when her husband was heaping ashes on the reputation of her lover!

For her surpassing beauty this Giulia Farnese has been surnamed La Bella and as Giulia La Bella was she known in her day and she has been immortalized by Pinturicchio and Guglielmo della Porta.

Girolama Farnese, Giulia 's sister, wrote to her husband, Puccio, from Casignano, October 21, 1493, "You will have received letters from Florence before mine reaches you and have learned what benefices have fallen to Lorenzo, and all that Giulia has secured for him, and you will be greatly pleased."