But the plot merely thickens. There comes a nice point in here on which historians comment variously. Incest is the basis. It was one time assumed that Alexander, the father, during all these various shifts treated his daughter as his mistress. Her brother Cæsar also bore the same relation to her. Father and son were rivals, then, for the affections and favors of the daughter-sister. To offset the affections of the son the father has the daughter lure her husband, Bisceglie, back to Rome. From all accounts he was very much in love with his wife who was beautiful but dangerous because of her charms and the manner in which she was coveted by others. In 1499, when he was twenty and Cæsar twenty-three, he was lured back and the next year, because of Cæsar’s jealousy of his monopoly of his own wife (Cæsar being perhaps denied his usual freedom) Bisceglie was stabbed while going up the steps of the papal palace by Cæsar Borgia, his brother-in-law, and that in the presence of his father-in-law, Alexander VI, the pope of Rome. According to one account, on sight of Cæsar, jumping out from behind a column, Alphonso sought refuge behind Alexander, the pope, who spread out his purple robe to protect him, through which Cæsar drove his knife into the bosom of his brother-in-law. The dear old father and father-in-law was severely shocked. He was quite depressed, in fact. He shook his head dismally. The wound was not fatal, however. Bisceglie was removed to the house of a cardinal near-by, where he was attended by his wife, Lucrezia, and his sister-in-law, Sancha, wife of Giuffré, both of whom he apparently feared a little, for they were compelled first to partake of all food presented in order to prove that it was not poisoned. In this house—in this sick-chamber doorway—suddenly and unexpectedly one day there appears the figure of Cæsar. The ensuing scene (Lucrezia and Sancha present) is not given. Bisceglie is stabbed in his bed and this time dies. Is the crime avenged? Not at all. This is Papa Alexander’s own dominion. This is a family affair, and father is very fond of Cæsar, so the matter is hushed up.

Witness the interesting final chapters. Cæsar goes off, October, 1500, to fight the princes in Romagna once more, among whom are Giovanni, and Sforza, one of Lucrezia’s ex-husbands. July, 1501, Alexander leaves the papal palace in Rome to fight the Colonna, one of the two powerful families of Rome, with the assistance of the other powerful family, the Orsini. In his absence Lucrezia, his beloved, is acting-pope! January first (or thereabouts), 1501, Lucrezia is betrothed to Alphonso, son and heir to Ercole d’Este, whose famous villa near Rome is still to be seen. Neither Alphonso nor his father was anxious for this union, but Papa Alexander, Pope of Rome, has set his heart on it. By bribes and threats he brings about a proxy marriage—Alphonso not being present—celebrated with great pomp at St. Peter’s. January, 1502, Lucrezia arrives in the presence of her new husband who falls seriously in love with her. Her fate is now to settle down, and no further tragedies befall on account of her, except one. A certain Ercole Strozzi, an Italian noble, appears on the scene and falls violently in love with her. She is only twenty-three or four even now. Alphonso d’Este, her new husband, becomes violently jealous and murders Ercole. Result: further peace until her death in 1511 in her thirty-ninth year, during which period she had four children by Alphonso—three boys and one girl.

As for brother Cæsar he was, unfortunately, leading a more checkered career. On December 21, 1502, when he was only twenty-six, as a general fighting the allied minor princes in Romagna, he caused to be strangled in his headquarters at Senigallia, Vitellozzo Viletti and Oliveralto da Fermo, two princelings who with others had conspired against him some time before at Perugia. Awed by his growing power, they had been so foolish as to endeavor to placate him by capturing Senigallia for him from their allies and presenting it to him and allowing themselves to be lured to his house by protestations of friendship. Result: strangulation.

August 18, 1503, Father Borgia, Pope Alexander VI, charming society figure, polished gentleman, lover of the chase, patron of the arts, for whom Raphael, Michelangelo and Brabante had worked, breathes his last. He and Cæsar had fallen desperately sick at the same time of a fever. When Cæsar recovers sufficiently to attend to his affairs, things are already in a bad way. The cardinals are plotting to seat a pope unfriendly to the Borgias. The Spanish cardinals on whom he has relied do not prove friendly and he loses his control. The funds which Papa Borgia was wont to supply for his campaigns are no longer forthcoming. Pope Julius II succeeding to the throne, takes away from Cæsar the territories assigned to him by his father “for the honor of recovering what our predecessors have wrongfully alienated.” In May, 1504, having gone to Naples on a safe conduct for the Spanish governor of that city, he is arrested and sent to Spain, where he is thrown into prison. At the end of two years he manages to escape and flees to the court of his brother-in-law, the King of Navarre, who permits him to aid in besieging the castle of a refractory subject. Here, March 12, 1507, while Lucrezia elsewhere is peacefully residing with her spouse, he is killed.

I have given but a feeble outline of this charming Renaissance idyl. Mixed in with it are constant murders or poisonings of wealthy cardinals and the confiscation of their estates whenever cash for the prosecution of Cæsar’s wars or the protection of papal properties are needed. The uxorious and child-loving old pope was exceedingly nonchalant about these little matters of human life. When he died there was a fight over his coffin between priests of different factions and mercenaries belonging to Cæsar Borgia. The coffin being too short, his body was jammed down in it, minus his miter, and finally upset. Think of so much ambition coming to such a shameful end! He achieved his desire, however. He wrote his name large, if not in fame, at least in infamy. He lived in astonishing grandeur and splendor. By his picturesque iniquities he really helped to bring about the Reformation. He had a curious affection for his children and he died immensely rich—and, pope. The fair Lucrezia stands out as a strange chemical magnet of disaster. To love her was fear, disappointment, or death. And it was she and her brother Cæsar, who particularly interested Mrs. Q., although the aged Alexander amused her.

During her vigorous recital I forgot the corner drug store and modern street cars of Rome, enthralled by the glamour of the ancient city. It was a delight to find that we had an intellectual affinity in the study of the vagaries of this strange phantasmagoria called human life, in which to be dull is to be a bond-slave, and to be wise is to be a mad philosopher, knowing neither right from wrong nor black from white.

Together Mrs. Q. and I visited the Borghese and Barberini Palaces, the Villa Doria, the Villa Umberto, the Villa d’Este and the Appian Way. We paid a return visit to the Colosseum and idled together in the gardens of the Pincian, the paths of the Gianicolo, the gardens of the Vatican and along the Tiber. It was a pleasure to step into some old court of a palace where the walls were encrusted with fragments of monuments, inscriptions, portions of sarcophagi and the like, found on the place or in excavating, and set into the walls to preserve them—and to listen to this clever, wholesome woman comment on the way the spirit of life builds shells and casts them off. She was not in the least morbid. The horror and cruelties of lust and ambition held no terrors for her. She liked life as a spectacle.

CHAPTER XXXIII
THE ART OF SIGNOR TANNI

The first Sunday I was in Rome I began my local career with a visit to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, that faces the Via Cavour not far from the Continental Hotel where I was stopping, and afterwards San Prassede close beside it. After Canterbury, Amiens, Pisa and St. Peter’s, I confess churches needed to be of great distinction to interest me much; but this church, not so divinely harmonious, exteriorly speaking, left me breathless with its incrustations of marbles, bronzes, carvings, and gold and silver inlay. There is a kind of beauty, or charm, or at least physical excitation, in contemplating sheer gorgeousness which I cannot withstand, even when my sense of proportion and my reason are offended, and this church had that. Many of the churches in Rome have just this and nothing more. At least, what else they may have I am blind to. It did not help me any to learn as I did from Mrs. Barfleur, that it was very old, dating from 352 A. D., and that the blessed Virgin herself had indicated just where this basilica in her honor was to be built by having a small, private fall of snow which covered or outlined the exact dimensions of which the church was to be. I was interested to learn that they had here five boards of the original manger at Bethlehem inclosed in an urn of silver and crystal which is exposed in the sacristy on Christmas Eve and placed over the high altar on Christmas Day, and that here were the tombs and chapels of Sixtus V and Paul V and Clement VIII of the Borghese family and, too, a chapel of the Sforza family. Nevertheless the hodge-podge of history, wealth, illusion and contention, to say nothing of religious and social discovery, which go to make up a church of this kind, is a little wearisome, not to say brain-achey, when contemplated en masse. These churches! Unless you are especially interested in a pope or a saint or a miracle or a picture or a monument or an artist—they are nothing save intricate jewel-boxes; nothing more.