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"Well, what happened when the opera was over?" Eugenie inquired, forcing herself to hide her emotion. "They went away together! I saw them I was watching them from behind a column. What a scandal!" "And your conclusion on all this, Monsieur Desvanneaux?" "It is that the General is deceiving you, dear Mademoiselle." "With that young girl?" "A bold hussy, I tell you! A Messalina!
What? a word against the spotless Messalina? What an unfavourable view of human nature! What? King Cheops was not a perfect monarch? Oh, you railer at royalty and slanderer of all that is noble and good!
For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls up a tragedy of shades.
It was a moment of great anxiety and suspense. He soon, however, came strongly to the conclusion that though it would be very dangerous for him to act, yet that not to act would be certain destruction; since if Messalina were allowed to live it would be absolutely certain that they all must die.
In subject it was similar to the renowned Gonzaga Cameo now the property of the Czar of Russia a male and a female head with imperial insignia; but in this case supposed to represent Tiberius Claudius and Messalina.
In spite of the principles insisted upon with so much vigour by Augustus and Tiberius, public finances had, thanks to the weak Claudius and the extravagant Messalina, already gone through a period of great waste and disorder. These contradictions, and the psychological disorder that followed, explain the discords and struggles very soon raging around the young Emperor.
Scarcely had the funeral of Messalina occurred, when there was a pretty scramble among the eligible to see who should solace the stricken widower. Among other matrimonial candidates was Agrippina, a beautiful widow, twenty-nine in June, rich in her own right, and with only a small encumbrance in the way of a ten-year-old boy, Nero by name.
Petersburg, where she had relatives, but more frequently at her village of Mitishtchi, which stood some three versts from ours. Yet the neighbourhood had taken to circulating such horrible tales concerning her mode of life that Messalina was, by comparison, a blameless child: which was why my mother had requested her name never to be mentioned.
That Messalina was a wicked and abandoned woman is most probable; that she was as bad as history represents her, may be doubted, especially when we remember she was calumniated by a rival, who succeeded in taking her place as wife. It is easier to believe she was the victim of Agrippina and the freedmen, who feared as well as hated her, than to accept the authority of Tacitus and Juvenal.
A legend comes into existence, becomes blacker and blacker, and culminates in the atrocious accusations made against her by Hébert before the Revolutionary Tribunal; Messalina and Semiramis are rolled into one to supply a fit basis of comparison.
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