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He grew weaker and weaker, and it became impossible to nourish him upon anything but woman's milk. Towards the end came, Infessura tells us, a Hebrew physician who claimed to have a prescription by which he could save the Pope's life.
M. Yriarte, however, goes a step further, and prefers to translate it as "corsage," which at once, and unpleasantly, falsifies the picture; and he adds matter to dot the I's to an extent certainly not warranted even by Infessura.
Infessura, Eccardus, vol. ii. p. 1941: 'Panis vero qui ex dicto frumento fiebat, erat ater, foetidus, et abominabilis; e ex necessitate comedebatur, ex quo sæpenumero in civitate morbus viguit. But Christendom beheld in Sixtus not merely the spectacle of a Pope who trafficked in the bodies of his subjects and the holy things of God, to squander basely gotten gold upon abandoned minions.
At last Innocent VIII. feared lest the orthodox faith should suffer by this new cult of a heathen corpse. Julia was buried secretly and at night by his direction, and naught remained in the Capitol but her empty marble coffin. The tale, as told by Infessura, is repeated in Matarazzo and in Nantiporto with slight variations.
The chronicler Infessura, who must have been acquainted with Vannozza, relates that Alexander VI, wishing to make his natural son Cæsar a cardinal, caused it to appear, by false testimony, that he was the legitimate son of a certain Domenico of Arignano, and he adds that he had even married Vannozza to this man.
Popes and princes, captains of adventure and peasants, noble ladies and the leaders of the demi-monde alike became scholars. There is a story told by Infessura which illustrates the temper of the times with singular felicity. On April 18, 1485, a report circulated in Rome that some Lombard workmen had discovered a Roman sarcophagus while digging on the Appian Way.
It is amazing that the veil which Infessura drew with those words should have been pierced not indeed by the cold light of fact, but by the hot eye of prurient imagination; amazing that he should be quoted at all he who was not present considering that we have the testimony of what did take place from the pen of an eye-witness, in a letter from Gianandrea Boccaccio, the ambassador of Ferrara, to his master.
Burchard's narrative is interrupted on the death of Innocent VIII, on July 12, and not resumed until December 2, when it is not retrospective. There is, it is true, the Diarium of Infessura. But that is of no more authority on such a matter than the narrative of Porzio or the letters of Valori.
He was gradually dozing off into his last long sleep, and Franceschetto was planning how to carry off his ducats. While the Holy Father still hovered between life and death, a Jewish doctor proposed to reinvigorate him by the transfusion of young blood into his torpid veins. Three boys throbbing with the elixir of early youth were sacrificed in vain. Each boy, says Infessura, received one ducat.
Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name 'Julia, daughter of Claudius. On opening the coffer they found within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer's skill from corruption and the decay of time.
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