Hark! she speaks.
“He was my son, my hope, my comfort. He would have saved me. Where now is hope? All lost. All lost. Heaven hath turned from me.”
Her head fell and her cheek lay against her child’s.
They went to lift her. And then they learnt that she was dead.
So, destroyed by the only godlike evidence she ever had, the love she bore her child, lay Lucrezia Borgia, cold upon the palace floor.
[Note.—The general notion of Lucrezia Borgia seems to partake of the nature of a popular error. Though the sister to the great Cesare was not, perhaps, the most discreet lady in the world, and though drama, opera, and tale have represented her as “the great poisoner of the fifteenth century,” no authentic account of a crime of this nature has yet appeared. It is true that she married thrice, and that tradition gives her a hand in the deaths of two of her husbands, but no criminal charge has been really substantiated against her. It is well that the truth be told of so famous a historical personage, even though a whole library of fine fiction be thereby destroyed. She lived in a profligate court, and was doubtless witness to many flagitious scenes, but that is all that can be said against her. On the other side of the picture we have her charities, her beauty, her wisdom, and her devotion, in the latter years of her life, to virtue and religion.—Ed.]