throat he could find. He began his work at once; and very few days
elapsed before he had obtained most satisfactory results: more than a
hundred persons were robbed or assassinated, and among the last the son
of Cardinal de St. Malo, who was en his way back to France, and on whom
Michelotto found a sum of 3000 crowns.

For himself, Caesar reserved the Swiss; for it was the Swiss in
particular who had despoiled his mother's house. The pope had in his
service about a hundred and fifty soldiers belonging to their nation, who
had settled their families in Rome, and had grown rich partly by their
pay and partly in the exercise of various industries. The cardinal had
every one of them dismissed, with orders to quit Rome within twenty-four
hours and the Roman territories within three days. The poor wretches had
all collected together to obey the order, with their wives and children
and baggage, on the Piazza of St. Peter, when suddenly, by Cardinal
Valentino's orders, they were hemmed in on all sides by two thousand
Spaniards, who began to fire on them with their guns and charge them with
their sabres, while Caesar and his mother looked down upon the carnage
from a window. In this way they killed fifty or perhaps sixty; but the
rest coming up, made a charge at the assassins, and then, without
suffering any loss, managed to beat a retreat to a house, where they
stood a siege, and made so valiant a defense that they gave the pope
time--he knew nothing of the author of this butchery--to send the captain
of his guard to the rescue, who, with a strong detachment, succeeded in
getting nearly forty of them safely out of the town: the rest had been
massacred on the piazza or killed in the house.

But this was no real and adequate revenge; for it did not touch Charles
himself, the sole author of all the troubles that the pope and his family
had experienced during the last year. So Caesar soon abandoned vulgar