Infessura writes of what he heard, and he writes venomously, as he betrays by the bitter sarcasm with which he refers to the fifty silver cups filled with sweetmeats which the Pope tossed into the laps of ladies present at the earlier part of the celebration. “He did it,” says Infessura, “to the greater honour and glory of Almighty God and the Church of Rome.” Beyond that he ventures into no great detail, checking himself betimes, however, with a suggested motive for reticence a thousand times worse than any formal accusation. Thus: “Much else is said, of which I do not write, because either it is not true, or, if true, incredible.”(1)
1 “Et multa alia dicta sunt; que hic non scribo, que aut non sunt; vel
si sunt, incredibilia” (Infessura, Diarium).
It is amazing that the veil which Infessura drew with those words should have been pierced—not indeed by the cold light of fact, but by the hot eye of prurient imagination; amazing that he should be quoted at all—he who was not present—considering that we have the testimony of what did take place from the pen of an eye-witness, in a letter from Gianandrea Boccaccio, the ambassador of Ferrara, to his master.
At the end of his letter, which describes the proceedings and the wedding-gifts and their presentation, he tells us how the night was spent. “Afterwards the ladies danced, and, as an interlude, a worthy comedy was performed, with much music and singing, the Pope and all the rest of us being present throughout. What else shall I add? It would make a long letter. The whole night was spent in this manner; let your lordship decide whether well or ill.”
Is not that sufficient to stop the foul mouth of inventive slander? What need to suggest happenings unspeakable? Yet it is the fashion to quote the last sentence above from Boccaccio’s letter in the original—“totam noctem comsumpsimus; judicet modo Ex(ma.) Dominatio vestra si bene o male”—as though decency forbade its translation; and at once this poisonous reticence does its work, and the imagination—and not only that of the unlettered—is fired, and all manner of abominations are speculatively conceived.
Infessura, being absent, says that the comedies performed were licentious (“lascive”). But what comedies of that age were not? It was an age which had not yet invented modesty, as we understand it. That Boccaccio, who was present, saw nothing unusual in the comedy—there was only one, according to him—is proved by his description of it as “worthy” (“una degna commedia.”)
M. Yriarte on this same subject(1) is not only petty, but grotesque. He chooses to relate the incident from the point of view of Infessura, whom, by the way, he translates with an amazing freedom,(2) and he makes bold to add regarding Gianandrea Boccaccio that: “It must also be said that the ambassador of Ferrara, either because he did not see everything, or because he was less austere than Infessura, was not shocked by the comedies, etc.” (“soit qu’il n’ait pas tout vu, soit qu’il ait été moins austère qu’Infessura, n’est pas choqué....”)
1 La Vie de César Borgia.
2 Thus in the matter of the fifty silver cups tossed by the Pope into
the ladies’ laps, “sinum” is the word employed by Infessura—a word
which has too loosely been given its general translation of “bosom,”
ignoring that it equally means “lap” and that “lap” it obviously means
in this instance. M. Yriarte, however, goes a step further, and prefers
to translate it as “corsage,” which at once, and unpleasantly, falsifies
the picture; and he adds matter to dot the I’s to an extent certainly
not warranted even by Infessura.
M. Yriarte, you observe, does not scruple to opine that Boccaccio, who was present, did not see everything; but he has no doubt that Infessura, who was not present, and who wrote from “hearsay,” missed nothing.
Alas! Too much of the history of the Borgias has been written in this spirit, and the discrimination in the selection of authorities has ever been with a view to obtaining the more sensational rather than the more truthful narrative.