“What ruffians!” exclaimed Cæsar, smiling.
The Englishman continued with the history of Borgia, his intrigues with the King of France, the death of Lucrezia’s husband, the assassinations attributed to the Pope’s son, the mysterious execution of Ramiro del Orco, which made Machiavelli say that Cæsar Borgia was the prince who best knew how to make and unmake men, according to their merits; finally the coup d’état at Sinigaglia with the condottieri.
By this time Cæsar Moncada was very anxious to know more. These Borgias interested him. His sympathies went out toward those great bandits who dominated Rome and tried to get all Italy into their power, leaf by leaf, like an artichoke. Their purpose struck him as a good one, almost a moral one. The device, Aut Cæsar, aut nihil, was worthy of a man of energy and courage.
Kennedy seeing Cæsar’s interest, then recounted the scene at Cardinal Adrian Corneto’s country-house; Alexander’s intention to give a supper there to various Cardinals and poison them all with a wine that had been put into three bottles, so as to inherit from them, the superstitiousness of the Pope, who sent Cardinal Caraffa to the Vatican for a golden box in which he kept his consecrated Host, from which he was never separated; and the mistake of the chamberlain, who served the poisoned wine to Cæsar and his father.
“Here, to this very room, they brought the dying Pope,” said Kennedy, and pointed to a door, on whose marble lintel one may read: Alexander Borgia Valentín P. P. “They say he passed eight days here between life and death, before he did die, and that when his corpse was exposed, it decomposed horribly.”
Then Kennedy related the story of Cæsar’s trying to cure himself by the strange method of being put inside of a mule just dead; his flight from Rome, sick on a litter, with his soldiers, as far as the Romagna; his imprisonment in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; his capture by the Great Captain; his efforts to escape from his prison at Medina del Campo; and his obscure death on the Mendavia road, near Viana in Navarre, through one of the Count of Lerin’s soldiers, named Garcés, a native of Agreda, who gave Borgia such a blow with a lance that it broke his armour and passed all the way through his body.
Cæsar was stirred up. Hearing the story of the people who had lived there, in those very rooms, gave him an impression of complete reality.
When they went out again by the Gallery of Inscriptions, they looked from a window.
“It must have been here that he fought bulls?” said Cæsar.
“Yes.”