Lucretia, a bastard of Alexander VI, the Tiberius of Christian
Rome. This modern Lucretia might have assumed with more
propriety the name of Messalina, since the woman who can be
guilty, who can even be accused, of a criminal intercourse with a
father and two brothers must be abandoned to all the
licentiousness of a venal love.


That, if the phrase may be pardoned, is swatting a butterfly with
a sledge-hammer! Poor little Lucretia, described by the
excellent M. Moinet as a ``bon petit coeur,'' is enveloped in the
political ordure slung by venal pamphleteers at the masterful men
of her race. My friend Rafael Sabatini, than whom no man living
has dug deeper into Borgia history, explains the calumniation of
Lucretia in this fashion: Adultery and promiscuous intercourse
were the fashion in Rome at the time of Alexander VI. Nobody
thought anything of them. And to have accused the Borgia girl,
or her relatives, of such inconsiderable lapses would have been
to evoke mere shrugging. But incest, of course, was horrible.
The writers paid by the party antagonistic to the Borgia growth
in power therefore slung the more scurrile accusation. But there
is, in truth, just about as much foundation for the charge as
there is for the other, that Lucretia was a poisoner. The answer
to the latter accusation, says my same authority, may take the
form of a question: WHOM DID LUCRETIA POISON? As far as history
goes, even that written by the Borgia enemies, the reply is,
NOBODY!

Were one content, like Gibbon, to take one's history like snuff
there would be to hand a mass of caliginous detail with which to