lute strings throbbed under the touch of the fair-haired stripling in green and gold. His fresh young voice was singing Messer Francesco Petrarca's madrigal:
At this point, and inspired perhaps by the poet's words, Cardinal Farnese—that handsome voluptuary—leaned over the Princess of Squillace, sighing furiously and whispering things which none might overhear.
The scene was the spacious Pontifical Chamber of the Vatican—the Sala dei Pontefici—with its wide semi-circular colonnade overlooking the beautiful gardens of the Belvedere, and its wonderfully frescoed ceiling where panels recording the deeds of popes hung amid others depicting the gods of pagan fable. There was Jupiter wielding his thunderbolts; there Apollo driving the chariot of the Sun; there Venus and her team of doves, Diana and her nymphs, Ceres and her wheat sheaves; and there Mercury in his winged cap, and Mars in all the panoply of battle. Inter-wrought were the signs of the Zodiac and the emblems of the seasons.
The time was early autumn,when cooler breezes begin to waft away the pestilential humours that overhang the plain of Rome during the sweltering period of Sol in Leo.
A vast concourse thronged the noble apartment—an ever shifting kaleidoscope of gorgeous human fragments—the purple of prelates, the grey steel of soldiers, the silks of rustling courtiers of both sexes, as many-hued as the rainbow itself, and here and there the sober black of clerks and of ambassadors.
At the chamber s farthest end, on a low dais, sat the imposing figure of Roderigo Borgia, Ruler of the World, Father of Fathers, under the title of Alexander VI. He was robed in the pontifical white, the white house-cap upon his great head. Although in his seventy-second year, he retained a vigour that was miraculous, and seemed a man still in his very prime. There was a fire in the dark, Spanish eyes—eyes that still retained much of that erstwhile dangerous magnetism whereof Gasparino da Verano wrote so eloquently some years ago—a ring in the rich voice and an upright carriage in the tall, full figure that argued much youth still lingering in this amazing septuagenarian. g
Near him, on the stools upon which the Teutonic Master of Ceremonies had, with his own hands, placed cushions covered with cloth of gold, sat the lovely, golden-headed Lucrezia Borgia, and the no less lovely, no less golden Giulia Farnese, named by her contemporaries Giulia La Bella.
Lucrezia, in a stomacher stiff with gold brocade and so encrusted with gems of every colour as to lend her a splendour almost barbaric, watched the scene before her and listened to the boy's song with a rapt expression in her blue eyes, her fan of ostrich plumes moving slowly in her jewelled fingers. She was in her twenty-second year, divorced of one husband and widowed of the other yet preserving a singular and very winsome childishness of air.
In the corner of the room, on the far right hand of the dais, her brother Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, a slim, graceful, pale-faced youth, stood gnawing his lip, his brows contracted in a frown as he watched his Aragonese wife, who, in the distance, was shamelessly wantoning with Farnese.
A certain bold beauty was this Donna Sancia's endowment, despite the sallowness of her skin, a tint that was emphasized by the ruddiness of her henna-dyed hair. She was something fleshy, with full red lips and large liquid eyes of deepest brown, low-lidded and languorous, which of themselves betrayed her wanton nature and justified her husband's constant torture of jealousy.
But with all this our concern is slight. It is no more than the setting of another tragi-comedy of jealousy that was being played that afternoon in the Sala dei Pontefici.
Over by the colonnade, Beltrame Severino, a tall, black-browed gentleman of Naples, was leaning against one of the pillars, apparently concerned with the singing-boy and the company in the chamber, in reality straining his jealous ears to catch what was passing between a youth and a maid who stood apart from the rest, in the loggia that overlooked the gardens.
The youth was one Messer Angelo d'Asti, a fair-headed son of Lombardy, who had come to Rome to seek his fortune, and was installed as secretary to the Cardinal Sforza-Riario. He had a lively wit, and he was a scholar and something of a poet; and the Cardinal, his master, who, to a desire to be known as a patron of the arts, added an undeniable taste for letters, treasured him the more on that account.