Rome was on the alert. Duke Orsini is admitted to offer his obeisance to the Pontiff Sixtus V. amid the solemn assembly of cardinals, foreign envoys, and Roman princes and senators; the expression of his liege words, his prostration at the sovereign’s throne, and his courtly homage meet with the simple response of a look from Sixtus. That look gave rise to the most clashing interpretations in the observing minds of the beholders; it was a look of benignity, weighty with authority, crushing with power, such as to subdue at once the haughty and defiant princely ruffian. From that moment Paolo Orsini never raised his head; his day was gone. Within a few days a sovereign decree, worded as only Sixtus V. knew how to pen them, in terms at which no one would dare to cavil, Orsini was forbidden to shelter outlaws. The duke solicited an audience; of what occurred at that meeting no one could ever surmise; but Orsini found no more charm in what he could heretofore call his Rome. Accordingly, within two months after the inauguration of Sixtus’ pontificate, he left the papal city. In sooth, he was an exile, voluntary, as if by courtesy. Great was the bitterness galling Vittoria’s heart, and she was pitied by all—the victim of a mother’s rash ambition, she had to flee that Rome where she could still have reigned the queen of society for her beauty, her great gifts, and close relationship to the sovereign. Donna Camilla reigned in her stead. Nor was this all. The handsome, youthful, accomplished niece of Sixtus was then the slavish, unhappy wife of a cumbrous quinquagenarian prince, covered with loathsome blotches from the sole of his feet to the crown of his head, the penalty of his dissipations; one of his legs so ulcered with cancer that it had swollen to the size of a man’s waist, and had to be kept bandaged (the chronicler says), with slices of some other animal’s meat, that the acrid humor would not eat into his own live flesh—a fretful old debauchee, overbearing, universally loathed for his lecherous habits, hated for his cruelties, and made intractable by a conscience gnawed by despair.
Poor Vittoria! On their way to Salò, near the lake of Garda in Lombardy, her husband, consumed by ulcers and tortures of soul, died suddenly whilst being bled in his arm!
Forlorn Vittoria! the first paroxysm of grief being over, raised a pistol to her head, but it was happily snatched from her in time by her brother Giulio, and she was spared a violent, unprepared, and cowardly death! Thus left alone, unprotected in her beauty and youth, she was at the mercy of Ludovico Orsini, her husband’s cousin, who despised her on account of the great disparity of their birth. Her late husband had indeed bequeathed to her one hundred thousand crowns, besides silver plate, horses, carriages, and jewelry without stint. All this Ludovico coveted, and stepped forward under pretence of protecting the rights of Flaminio Orsini, Giordano’s son by his former wife; but unable to break the will, he summoned one Liverotto Paolucci of Camerino to come to Padua—whither Vittoria had repaired immediately, and, aided by such as he might chose, to murder Vittoria and her brother! The bloody ruffian answered the summons, and entering the princess’ apartment through a window, in the depth of the night, his men fell at first upon Giulio, and into his breast discharged the contents of three muskets. The victim crawled to his sister’s room and crouched under her bed. There he was finished with seventy-three thrusts of white arms, encouraged all the time by Vittoria, anxiously repeating—“Forgive, Giulio; beg God’s mercy, and willingly accept death for his sake.”
It is recorded in the life of her sainted brother, the Bishop of Fossombrone, that, upon the death of the duke, he without delay wrote to his sister, exhorting her to amend her life, and devote herself to works of atonement and piety; for, said he, “your days will not be many.” And we have it from authenticated records of those times that she did truly repent of her worldliness, and, having placed herself under the protection of the Republic of Venice, retired to Padua, where she lived in great retirement, dividing her time between practices of devotion in the church, deeds of charity, and protracted orisons at home. She also begged of the Pope leave to repair to Rome, the asylum of the wretched, and spend the remainder of her life in a convent, for which purpose her generous uncle had signed a remittance of five hundred gold crowns on the very day he received the sad account of her death. Her brother, the bishop, had so strong a presentiment, some say a revelation from above, of the impending catastrophe, that on the 22d of December he ordered special prayers to be offered by the clergy of his diocese in her behalf.
And she did fall a victim to Ludovico’s dagger on the 22d of that month!
After Giulio had breathed his last, bathed in his own blood, Count Paganello, one of Liverotto’s band, took hold of the devoted woman by both arms, and holding her in the kneeling posture in which she had been found at her prayers, bade one of his bravoes to tear open her dress on the right side, whereupon she indignantly protested that she should be allowed to die in her dress, as it became an honest woman and the wife of Giordano Orsini! The brute plunged a stiletto into her bosom, and kept trepanning towards the left side in search of the heart. She offered no resistance, but during the horrid butchery of her form she ceased not repeating, “I pardon you, even as I beg of God to forgive me.… Jesus!… Jesus!… Mercy and forgiveness!” And with these words of forgiveness dying on her lips she fell lifeless on the floor.
Thus ended, by a cruel death, yet heroically met, one of the most remarkable women of her time—a woman renowned for her admirable beauty, talents, and misguided ambition. Having been the pet of European society, she died almost an outlaw; the niece of Pope Sixtus V., she died without a home of her own; a lamentable instance of the ignominious end awaiting those who have been endowed by a kind Providence with the noblest of gifts, but have made a wrong use of them.