“You have been so long our lady here,” he answered. “You may well have forgotten the world, Madonna, beyond Ferrara.”
“You are a Roman?”
“Yes, Madonna.”
She put out her right hand and clasped his arm.
“Oh, for an hour of Rome!–in the old days!”
Her whole face, with its artificial beauty and undisguisable look of age, was close to his; he felt the sense of her as the sense of something evil.
She was no longer the honoured Duchess of Ferrara, but Lucrezia, the Borgia’s lure, Cesare’s sister, Alessandro’s daughter, the heroine of a thousand orgies, the inspiration of a hundred crimes.
The force with which this feeling came over him made him shiver; he shrank beneath her hand.
“Have you heard things of me?” she asked in a piercing voice.
“There is no one in Italy who has not heard of you, Madonna.”