United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It suffices to consider that, according to the only evidences available the Casanatense Codices and the dispatches of that same Valori whom M. Yriarte so confidently cites, Roderigo Borgia's election was unanimous. Who, then, were these cardinals who refused his bribes?
Yriarte not only repeats the tale with all the sober calm of one utterly destitute of a sense of the ridiculous, but he improves upon it by a delicious touch, worthy of Guicciardini himself, when he assures us that Cesare took these forty women for his harem! It is a nice instance of how Borgia history has grown, and is still growing.
M. Yriarte does not hesitate to say: "We know to-day, by the dispatches of Valori, the narrative of Girolamo Porzio, and the Diarium of Burchard, the Master of Ceremonies, each of the stipulations made with the electors whose votes were bought."
Still, there are writers in every nation in Europe, who afford examples of this vulgar feeling. It is this which led Yriarte to caricature them in the thirty-third of his charming Literary Fables. His two best known works are a didactic poem, entitled La Musica, and the Fables here quoted, which satirize the peculiar foibles of literary men.
Lord Acton in his essay upon this subject has not been content to rest the imputation of simony upon such grounds as satisfied M. Yriarte. He has realized that the only testimony of any real value in such a case would be the actual evidence of such cardinals as might be willing to bear witness to the attempt to bribe them.
This is what Yriarte means by the first lines of his twenty-eighth Fable, where he declares that the ignorant rabble always sets equal value on the good and the bad: Siempre acostumbra hacer el vulgo necio De lo bueno y lo malo igual aprecio.
Yriarte is interesting, inasmuch as he deals with the apparition of Goya in Rome, an outlaw, but a blithe one, who, notebook in hand, went through the Trastevere district sketching with ferocious rapidity the attitudes and gestures of the vivacious population. A man after Stendhal's heart, this Spaniard. And in view of his private life one is tempted to add and after the heart, too, of Casanova.
The whole night was spent in this manner; let your lordship decide whether well or ill." Is not that sufficient to stop the foul mouth of inventive slander? What need to suggest happenings unspeakable? But what comedies of that age were not? It was an age which had not yet invented modesty, as we understand it. M. Yriarte on this same subject is not only petty, but grotesque.
Yriarte, mixing his facts throughout with a liberal leaven of fiction, tells us that "this is the precise moment in which Cesare Borgia, fixing his eyes upon the Roman Caesar, takes him definitely for his model and adopts the device 'Aut Caesar, aut nihil." Cesare Borgia never adopted that device, and never displayed it.
See Yriarte, Vie d'un Gentilhomme de Venise, p. 439, for a process instituted by the Inquisition against Paolo Veronese. He calls it "un chiavaquore di argento, il quale era in quei tempi chiamato cosi. Questo si era una cintura di tre dita larga, che alle spose novelle s' usava di fare." "Si come un toro invelenito."
Word Of The Day