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I am aware that in recent books of Italian history there has been a tendency to whiten the Borgias' characters. But I myself hold to the old romantic black way of looking at the Borgias.
It was not for him to take the world into his confidence in matters with which the world was not concerned. Let the scandalmongers draw what inferences they pleased. It was a lofty and dignified procedure, but one that was fraught with peril; and the Borgias have never ceased to pay the price of that excessive dignity of reserve.
Moreover, Bianca Sforza was Maximilian's wife, and at the German court there were other members and retainers of the overthrown house all bitter enemies of the Borgias. In August the Emperor despatched letters to Ferrara in which he warned Ercole against any marital alliance between his house and that of Alexander.
I shall turn out trumps: I shall prove myself stronger than Tendency, World-Genius, Providence, Currents of Fate, White Power, Black Power, or whatever is the name for it. No more Clodaghs, Lucrezia Borgias, Semiramises, Pompadours, Irish Landlords, Hundred-Years' Wars you see? She kept her left eye obliquely cocked like a little fool, wondering, no doubt, what I was saying.
A childless widow in delicate health, whose paternal family had been for the most part cruelly robbed, exiled, or destroyed by the reigning Pope and his family, she felt her own situation a most unprotected and precarious one, since the least jealousy or misunderstanding might bring upon her, too, the ill-will of the Borgias, which had proved so fatal to the rest of her race.
Religious reformation was necessary as much as intellectual revival. Greek books brought with them the vice, as well as the art, of the East. Renaissance without Reformation produced the Borgias and their unspeakable wickedness. Erasmus without Luther would never have saved Europe from ruin.
Of those who were sent to Guiana and the Seychelles, scarce twenty saw France again. Bonaparte's conduct with respect to plots deserves close attention. Never since the age of the Borgias have conspiracies been so skilfully exploited, so cunningly countermined.
Stupefied by all these things, Pierre did not follow the others, but lingered for a moment in the sunlit dining-room with Don Vigilio. What! poison? Poison as in the time of the Borgias, elegantly hidden away, served up with luscious fruit by a crafty traitor, whom one dared not even denounce!
1 Istoria d'Italia. Now, bastards were by canon law excluded from the purple, and it is probably upon this circumstance that both Infessura and Guicciardini have built the assumption that some such means as these had been adopted to circumvent the law, and as so often happens in chronicles concerning the Borgias the assumption is straightway stated as a fact.
Looking in their dark, haughty eyes, one seemed to pass back through the terrible picturesqueness of mediaeval Italy, with its Borgias and Bella Donnas, its Lorenzos and Fornarinas, to the Rome of Nero, Augustus, Scipio, and Tarquin.
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