Until he be Death’s treasure, can you pounce,
Holiness, on his treasure? Can you feed
The troops that press the verge of Tuscany?
ALEXANDER.
True, true: our Duke requires his requiem, true!
Ah, Sinigaglia; ah, the wondrous net!
And these Orsini—
A brood of enemies, the murderers
It may be of Giovanni.... Ho! what cold!...
Well, well!
A cruel kindred, a most wicked race,
Our enemies, our enemies, and worthy
Of death’s extinguishing. [Reading again.
The postscript? Show me
This cantarella. [Pincione gives him a phial.
Ha! It is like a sugar
Of pearl; like the rare dust that Cleopatra
Drank of a dis-orbed pearl. Its facture? Tell me
The elements, how braised and how compounded?
PINCIONE.
Eh, eh—your Blessèdness.
A boar being killed, and arsenic-poison salted
About the entrails thrown to putrefaction,
From thence at last a liquid is withdrawn
In thrice-stilled deadliness.
ALEXANDER.
The action?
PINCIONE.
Slow,
But sure in death....