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Updated: September 13, 2025
An audience familiar with Italian novels through Belleforest and Painter, inflamed by the long struggle of the Reformation against the scarlet abominations of the Papal See, outraged in their moral sense by the political paradoxes of Machiavelli, horror-stricken at the still recent misdoings of Borgias and Medici and Farnesi, alarmed by that Italian policy which had conceived the massacre of S. Bartholomew in France, and infuriated by that ecclesiastical hypocrisy which triumphed in the same; such an audience were at the right point of sympathy with a poet who undertook to lay the springs of Southern villany before them bare in a dramatic action.
"Life then must have been more intense than now," said Caesar. "Who knows? Perhaps it was the same as now," replied Kennedy. "And what does history, exact history, say of these Borgias?"
The most terrible of the Borgias now appropriated the place left vacant by the Duke of Gandia, to which he had long aspired, and only for the sake of appearances did he postpone casting aside the cardinal's robe.
In the night-time when the narrow ancient side-streets of Florence, with their ponderous prison-like palaces with iron-barred windows are so ill-lit and cavernous, the place seems a city of evil deeds, as indeed it was in the days of the Medici and of the Borgias. As I trod those streets between the Porta Romana and Santa Maria Novella, I confess that I became apprehensive of a nervous breakdown.
Ludovico, the worthy contemporary of the Borgias, once an intimate friend of Alexander VI, hated the Pope when he turned his face away from him and France, and he was especially embittered by the treacherous capture of his brother Ascanio.
"Rome lives on Jesuitism. Indubitably, without Loyola, Catholicism would have rotted away much sooner. It is obvious that this would have been better, but we are not talking about that. A good general is not one who defends just causes, but one who wins battles. "The Borgias, Luther, and Saint Ignatius, between them, killed the predominance of the Latin race.
In the task of tracing the annals of the Borgias, the honest seeker after truth is compelled to proceed axe in hand that he may hack himself a way through the tangle of irresponsible or malicious statements that have grown up about this subject, driving their roots deep into the soil of history.
The second act opens in the public square of Ferrara, with the palace of the Borgias on the right. In the next scene Genarro, who has been taunted by his friends with being a victim of Lucrezia's fascinations, recklessly rushes up to the palace door and strikes off the first letter of her name with his dagger.
I saw enough in it to remind me that the Borgias selected and laid down rare poisons in their cellars with as much thought as they gave to their vintage wines. Extraordinary! but the Romans do not seem to have thought so. An invitation to dine at the Palazzo Borghese was accounted the highest social honour.
For the purpose of honoring the King of France, the protector of Ferrara and of the Borgias, Lucretia had summoned the French ambassador, Philipp della Rocca Berti, to ride at her left, near her, but not under the baldachin. This was intended to show that it was owing to this powerful monarch that the bride was entering the palace of the Este.
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