Then Lucrezia was recalled to Rome, and the old wayward existence at her palace near the Vatican was taken up once more. From this time onwards the Borgia scandals thickened with extraordinary rapidity, becoming the interested gossip of every other court in Italy. Alexander’s youngest son, Jofre, had married a Spanish girl several years older than himself, and upon the return of political quietude brought her back with him to Rome. This Madonna Sancia alone piled up a staggering accumulation of scandals for Italy to gasp at. She had a passion, in her most innocent moments, for the less tranquil pleasures of life. Her arrival whipped up the gaiety of social Rome into an extremity of worldliness. She was openly flagrant: the word “wickedness” seemed to have no more unpleasant meaning to her than another. Both her husband’s brothers, Giovanni and Cæsar Borgia, were said to be among her lovers. Giovanni Borgia’s subsequent murder, in fact, was looked upon by many people as the outcome of her lack of moral reasonableness, Cæsar’s jealousy, it was thought, driving him to thrust the other prematurely upon eternity. Between the gorgeous wickedness of Sancia and Julia Farnese, Lucrezia was trailed like some insignificant and unconsidered appendage. She is mentioned constantly as in the society of Sancia, but no impropriety is even suggested concerning her, until the divorce with Giovanni involved her in the hate universally nourished against the rest of the family.
This divorce had been shaping ever since the French invasion had rendered the Sforzas politically useless to Alexander. One day Giovanni Sforza was bluntly requested to abandon Lucrezia. Should he refuse, extreme measures were threatened, and no man so intimate with the family could possibly have been unacquainted with the kind of coercion likely to be employed should he maintain obduracy. For a few days he went about hoarding rather more bitterness than he knew how to deal with. Then a dramatic urgency brought indecision to an abrupt conclusion. According to most accounts of the story, Jacomino, camerière to Giovanni Sforza, was in Lucrezia’s room one day when they heard Cæsar Borgia’s footsteps outside. Lucrezia had already been made cognizant of the pending divorce. Alexander and Cæsar never regarded the soft and pliant creature as likely to need concealments. She was to them obviously the perfect tool, childlike, flighty, inherently docile, and moved by the least enticement to new anticipations. But Lucrezia even then had some instincts her people did not know of, and to deprive a man of the delight of living was not endurable to her. She must have suspected some sinister communication, for on hearing Cæsar’s footsteps she thrust Jacomino behind some tapestry. In the course of conversation, Cæsar stated that the order to assassinate her husband had already been given. It sounds incredible, but then the whole Borgia history has the same quality of impossible melodrama. The moment he had gone Lucrezia rushed to the curtains: the man must go at once and save his master. Twenty-four hours later Giovanni Sforza reached Pesaro. His horse fell dead as he arrived.
Gregorovius states that Lucrezia was not agreeable to the divorce. It fits in pleasantly with one’s conception of her to believe that this was true. The Lucrezia of recent discovery would have been bound by a light and gentle affection to any one not unkind to her, and all her instincts would have been against giving pain to anybody. Certainly, after Giovanni’s escape, she felt the weight of some unpleasantness at the Vatican. And shortly afterwards she either went, or was sent in disgrace, to the convent of San Sisto on the Appian Way. In a letter written that June by Donati Aretino to Cardinal Hippolyte D’Este, he says: “Madonna Lucrezia has left the palace insalutato hospite, and has gone to stay at a convent called San Sisto, where she still is. It is rumoured by some that she desires to become a nun herself, but there are a number of other rumours as well, of a nature not possible to trust to a letter.”
These “other rumours” are presumably the scandals which leapt into belief after the divorce, and which Giovanni, embittered to the marrow of his bones, is credited with having started.
But the divorce obtained, a new marriage was instantly negotiated for the girl, whose ideas of customary conduct must have been so piteously topsy-turvy. The new match contemplated was solely intended to benefit Cæsar—in it Lucrezia became purely a means of assistance. Cæsar, having renounced the priesthood after the mysterious murder of his elder brother, which had taken place while Lucrezia was in the convent, had conceived the scheme of marrying Charlotte of Aragon, and through this marriage of becoming King of Naples. Since the French invasion the present reigning dynasty crumbled visibly. Cæsar had already asked for Princess Charlotte’s hand, and had been emphatically refused. It was hoped at the Vatican that Lucrezia’s marriage to Charlotte’s brother, Don Alphonso, would pave the way for the other and more important wedding. Lucrezia was eighteen at the time of her second marriage, and, according to the ambassador of Mantua, really in love with the handsome boy who made her Duchess of Biselli.
Unfortunately they remained in Rome, in the undesirable set Lucrezia had belonged to from babyhood, and from this time horrible scandals grew as thickly round Lucrezia as the rest of her family. According to one of them, she had given birth to an illegitimate son, by a certain favourite of Alexander’s, Perotto. This unfortunate is another person whom Cæsar is credited with having murdered. He did it apparently in the Pope’s very presence, and splashed the blood all over the old man’s garments. The existence of a child by Perotto is not corroborated, and the truth of later scandals, since discussed with bated breath, is less ascertainable still. At the same time, that Lucrezia should have given birth to an illegitimate baby is very feasible. In a society where lovers were more normal than husbands, it is difficult to conceive that she should have escaped with flawless, untarnished innocence—probably took a lover because she was young, affectionate, and nobody she knew thought it grievous behaviour. Nevertheless, though there is every reason for this individual scandal to have had roots in truth, the evidence for its genuineness is equally flimsy and unsupported.
For a year the Biselli marriage wore an air of ordinary successfulness. Then the politics of the Vatican veered once more, and tragically and brutally, Lucrezia’s fate changed with them. Louis XII. had started the second Italian campaign, and Alexander was now upon the side of the French. Once more, therefore, the awkward factor in the situation became Lucrezia’s husband. It seemed, indeed, as if she was to have a knack of possessing awkward spouses. In this second crisis Lucrezia, however, did not wait to be warned of danger, and one day Alphonso disappeared. A Venetian writer in Rome remarks: “The Duke of Biseglia, husband of Madonna Lucrezia, has secretly fled, and is gone to Genazzano, to the Colonnas. He has left his wife six months enceinte, and she does nothing but cry.” The statement is at last a lifting of the veil for a second from the girl’s character. She loved this second husband; at the hint of danger she sent him away, but once gone she cried for him all day. This is the whole conduct-sheet of any normal, tender woman.
Alphonso wrote and urged her to follow him, but Alexander, it is said, forced her to beg Alphonso to return instead. There is some confusion at this point. Certainly, in the end, Lucrezia was sent away into the country—to Spoleto—and here, after a little while, Alphonso joined her. It was dangerous, but they were at the age when evil anticipations are sustained with an effort. It is not natural in one’s teens to hold for ever a problematical foreboding. Death in fulness of physical well-being is a dark midnight possibility, not a permanent obsession for broad and cheerful daylight. Foolishly, and yet so naturally, their fears gradually fell away, and Cæsar Borgia being at Forli, fighting, by the following October they were back in Rome, where Lucrezia gave birth to a son, and where, for another year, they lived undisturbed, while Michelangelo was at work upon his Pieta Copernicus, and Pintorricchio continued to make pictures round the walls of the Vatican.
