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There was Gandia, who rose hurriedly at his approach, and came to meet him; there was Cesare, Cardinal of Valencia, who was to go to Naples to-morrow as papal legate, yet dressed tonight in cloth of gold, with no trace of his churchly dignity about him; there was their younger brother Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, a handsome stripling, flanked by his wife, the free-and-easy Donna Sancia of Aragon, swarthy, coarse-featured, and fleshy, despite her youth; there was Giovanni's sometime wife; the lovely, golden-headed Lucrezia, the innocent cause of all this hate that festered in the Lord of Pesaro's soul; there was their mother, the nobly handsome Giovanozza de Catanei, from whom the Borgias derived their auburn heads; and there was their cousin, Giovanni Borgia, Cardinal of Monreale, portly and scarlet, at Madonna's side.
Don Varnier, a man of much frankness and intelligence, was my principal source of information. I asked him one day whether the king was fond of Gregorio Squillace only because he had been once his wife's lover. "That's an idle calumny," he replied. "If the epithet of 'chaste' can be applied to any monarch, Charles III. certainly deserves it better than any other.
There is the Cardinal of Valencia, there is Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, and there is my wife, Lucrezia, of whom he has robbed me. There is, you see, an ample heel to our Achilles. The question is, where shall we begin?" "And also, how," Pico reminded him. Fate was to answer both those questions, and that soon.
The same reply would be given in towns and villages without number throughout the length of Italy. I had seen poverty enough, and squalid conditions of life, but the most ugly and repulsive collection of houses I ever came upon was the town of Squillace.
The clerks, constables, and hangers-on, hearing that the hated Squillace, who would have been stoned to death if it had not been for the king's protection, was the poor abbe's only patron, began to beat him violently, much to the poor Sicilian's astonishment.
One, the Duke of Gandia, was also in the pay of Venice, and was expected from Spain to take command of four hundred men which his lieutenant, Alovisio Bacheto, had enlisted for him. The other, Don Giuffrè, had, as we have seen, gone to Naples in 1494, where he had married Donna Sancia and had been made Prince of Squillace.
I interposed, however, and after some trouble I succeeded in rescuing the priest, who was then allowed to pass, as I believe, as a set-off against the blows he had received. Squillace was sent to Venice as Spanish ambassador, and in Venice he died at an advanced age. He was a man designed to be an object of intense hatred to the people; he was simply ruthless in his taxation.
While waiting for supper and the train to Cotrone, I strolled along the beach, and soon found myself sitting beside the bleached anatomy of some stranded leviathan, and gazing at the mountains of Squillace that glowed in the soft lights of sunset.
Then the pope allowed the cardinal to have his food brought as before, and he died of poison on the 22nd of February that is, two days after his accounts had been set right. That same night the Prince of Squillace set off to take possession, in the pope's name, of the lands of the deceased.
Or did its beauty lie in the eyes of Cassiodorus, who throughout his long life of statesmanship in the north never forgot this Bruttian home, and who sought peace at last amid the scenes of his childhood? At windings of the way I frequently caught sight of Squillace itself, high and far, its white houses dull-gleaming against the lurid sky.
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