It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of Lucrezia Borgia in the library of the University of Ferrara. I had already seen in a little glass case at Milan, in the Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious yellow hair, and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of its fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic. For the document was—of all things in the world—a washing list! The lurid lady—the heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo’s drama—checked, perhaps mended, her household linen! It has been sufficiently washed in public since her day. But this list alone should serve to cleanse her character. Indeed Pope Alexander’s daughter does not lack modern whitewashers—what ancient disrepute is safe from them? Roscoe, Gilbert and Gregorovius defend her, and even in her lifetime she had her circle of court laureates that included Ariosto himself. Her platonic friendship with Cardinal Bembo is rather in her favour. The copiously grey-bearded ecclesiast in cap and robe, whose portrait may be seen at Florence in the corridor between the Pitti and the Uffizi, does not look like a man who would consort with the legendary Lucrezia. Yet even a man of letters of Bembo’s status is liable to colour-blindness when the Scarlet Woman is a reigning duchess. Bembo, we know, was afraid to read the Epistles of St. Paul, for fear of contaminating his Latin; we are less certain that any fear of contaminating his character would keep him from reading the epistles of Lucrezia. But it seems fairest to accept the view that once freed by her third marriage from the vicious influences of the Vatican and the company of the Pope’s concubines, she became _rangée_, steadying herself into an admirable if pleasure-loving consort of the ruler of Ferrara! Nevertheless even in Ferrara rumour connected her with the murder of the poet Ercole Strozzi, and the guides used to count among their perquisites the blood-flecked wall of the Palace in which, by way of revenge for her extrusion from a respectable Venetian ball-room, she poisoned off at a supper-party eighteen noble Venetian youths, including a natural son of her own whom she poignarded in the frenzy of the discovery.