Chapter VI: Part ONE: Rome (5)

In company with Cortés and the German with the green hat with the cock’s feather, Cæsar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn’t seem any better to Cæsar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers’, but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortés took them to a cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing it.

“Is this the Velázquez portrait?” asked Cæsar.

“This is it.”

Cæsar looked at it carefully. “That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted,” said Cæsar; “his face is congested.”

“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortés. “It is something to see, the way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap, the curtains in the background.... What a man!”

The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.

“What sort of man was this?” asked Cæsar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.

“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”

“The great thing is,” murmured Cæsar, “how the painter has left him here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is curious.”

“Not curious,” exclaimed Cortés, “but admirable.”

“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only corks float.”

_LEGEND AND HISTORY_

Cæsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.

“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’ as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”

“That’s what it is. It is truth,” agreed Cortés.

“Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself, and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn’t ask for reality?”

“Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture,” said Cortés; “he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces.”

“He found it bad, no doubt.”

“Very bad?”

“Was this Stendhal English?”

“No, French.”

“Ah, then, you needn’t be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to understand anything that’s not French.”

“Nevertheless he was an intelligent man.”

“Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?”

“No, he boasted of not having any.”

“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad thing among a lot of good ones?”

The German with the green hat, who understood something of the conversation, was indignant at Cæsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and Cæsar told him no, and then, in a strange gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts, dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.

The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.

The data of the befeathered German were too much for Cæsar, and he took his leave of the painters.

XVII. EVIL DAYS

Accompanied by Kennedy, Cæsar called repeatedly on the most auspicious members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural, nobody gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his putting his financial talents to the proof.

“Something must turn up,” he used to say to himself, “and at the least opening we will dive into the work.”

Cæsar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father Herreros, despite his uncle’s prohibition, and succeeded in getting the monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no means of making Cæsar Moneada, Cardinal Fort’s nephew, Conservative Deputy for her district.

The Marquesa wrote back that it was impossible; the Conservative Deputy for the district was very popular and a man with large properties there.

When Holy Week was over, Laura and the Countess Brenda and her daughter decided to spend a while at Florence, and invited Cæsar to accompany them; but he was quite out of harmony with the Brenda lady, and said that he had to stay on in Rome.

A few days later Mme. Dawson and her daughters left, and the San Martinos and the Marchesa Sciacca; and an avalanche of English people and Germans, armed with their red Baedekers, took the hotel by storm. Susanna Marchmont had gone to spend some days at Corfu.

In less than a week Cæsar remained alone, knowing nobody in the hotel, and despite his believing that he was going to be perfectly indifferent about this, he felt deserted and sad. The influence of the springtime also affected him. The deep blue sky, cloudless, dense, dark, made him languish. Instead of entertaining himself with something or other, he did scarcely anything all day long but walk.

_TWO ABSURD MEN_

“I have continually near me in the hotel,” wrote Cæsar to Alzugaray, “two absurd fellows: one is one of those stout red Germans with a square head; the other a fine slim Norwegian. The German, who is a captain in some service or other, is a restless man, always busy about what the devil I don’t know. He is constantly carrying about trunks and boxes, with the aid of a sorrowful valet, dressed in black, who appears to detest his position. The captain must devote the morning to doing gymnastics, for I hear him from my room, which is next to his, jumping and dropping weights on the floor, each of which must weigh half a ton, to judge by the noise they make.

“He does all this to vocal commands, and when some feat doesn’t go right he reprimands himself.

“This German isn’t still a moment; he opens the salon door, crosses the room, stands at the window, takes up a paper, puts it down. He is a type that makes me nervous.

“The Norwegian at first appeared to be a reasonable man, somewhat sullen. He looked frowningly at me, and I watched him equally frowningly, and took him for a thinker, an Ibsenite whose imagination was lost among the ice of his own country. Now and then I would see him walking up and down the corridor, rubbing his hands together so continuously and so frantically that they made a noise like bones.

“Suddenly, this gentleman is transformed as if by magic; he begins to joke with the servants, he seizes a chair and dances with it, and the other day I saw him alone in the salon marching around with a paper hat on his head, like children playing soldiers, and blowing on a cornet, also made of paper.” I stared at him in amazement, he smiled like a child, and asked if he was disturbing me.

“‘No, no, not in the least,’ I told him.

“I have asked in the hotel if this man is crazy, and they have told me that he is not, but is a professor, a man of science, who is known to have these strange fits of gaiety.

“Another of the Norwegian’s doings has been to compose a serenade, with a vulgar melody that would disgust you, and which he has dedicated ‘_A la bella Italia_.’ He wrote the Italian words himself, but as he knows no music, he had a pianist come here and write out his serenade. What he especially wants is that it should be full of sentiment; and so the pianist arranged it with directions and many pauses, which satisfied the Norwegian. Almost every night the serenade ‘_A la bella Italia_’ is sung. Somebody who wants to amuse himself goes to the piano, the Norwegian strikes a languid attitude and chants his serenade. Sometimes he goes in front of the piano, sometimes behind, but invariably he hears the storm of applause when it ends, and he bows with great gusto.

“I don’t know whether it’s the other people who are laughing at him, or he who is laughing at the others.

“The other day he said to me in his macaronic Italian:

“‘Mr. Spaniard, I have good eyesight, good hearing, a good sense of smell, and... lots of sentiment.’

“I didn’t exactly understand what he meant me to think, and I didn’t pay any attention to him.

“It seems that the Norwegian is going away soon, and as the day of his departure approaches, he grows funereal.”

_THE SADNESS OF LIFE_

“I don’t know why I don’t go away,” Cæsar wrote to his friend another time. “When I go out in the evening and see the ochre-coloured houses on both sides and the blue sky above, a horrible sadness takes me. These spring days oppress me, make me want to weep; it seems to me it would be better to be dead, leaving no tomb or name or other ridiculous and disagreeable thing, but disappearing into the air or the sea. It doesn’t seem natural; but I have never been so happy as one time when I was in Paris sick, alone and with a fever. I was in an hotel room and my window looked into the garden of a fine house, where I could see the tops of the trees; and I transformed them into a virgin forest, wherein marvellous adventures happened to me.

“Since then I have often thought that things are probably neither good nor bad, neither sad nor happy, in themselves; he who has sound, normal nerves, and a brain equally sound, reflects the things around him like a good mirror, and feels with comfort the impression of his conformity to nature; nowadays we who have nerves all upset and brains probably upset too, form deceptive reflections. And so, that time in Paris, sick and shut in, I was happy; and here, sound and strong, when toward nightfall, I look at the splendid skies, the palaces, the yellow walls that take an extraordinary tone, I feel that I am one of the most miserable men on the planet....”

_ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON_

His lack of tranquillity led Cæsar to make absurd resolutions which he didn’t carry out.

One Sunday in the beginning of April, he went out into the street, disposed to take a walk outside of Rome, following the road anywhere it led. A hard, fine rain was falling, the sky was grey, the air mild, the streets were full of puddles, the shops closed; a few flower merchants were offering branches of almond in blossom.

Cæsar was very depressed. He went into a church to get out of the rain. The church was full; there were many people in the centre of it; he didn’t know what they were doing. Doubtless they were gathered there for some reason, although Cæsar didn’t understand what. Cæsar sat down on a bench, worn out; he would have liked to listen to organ music, to a boy choir. No ideas occurred to him but sentimental ones. Some time passed, and a priest began to preach. Cæsar got up and went into the street.

“I must get rid of these miserable impressions, get back to noble ideas. I must fight this sentimental leprosy.”

He started to walk with long strides through the sad, empty streets.

He went toward the river and met Kennedy, who was coming back, he told him, from the studio of a sculptor friend of his.

“You look like desolation. What has happened to you?”

“Nothing, but I am in a perfectly hellish humour.”

“I am melancholy too. It must be the weather. Let’s take a walk.”

They went along the bank of the Tiber. Full of clay, more turbid than ever, and very high between the white embankments hemming it in, the river looked like a big sewer.

“This is not the ‘coeruleus Tibris’ that Virgil speaks of in the Aeneld, which presented itself to Aeneas in the form of an ancient man with his head crowned with roses,” said Kennedy.

“No. This is a horrible river,” Cæsar opined.

They followed the shore, passed the Castel Sant’ Angelo and the bridge with the statues.

From the embankment, to the right, they could now see narrow lanes, sunk almost below the level of the river. On the other bank a new, white edifice towered in the rain.

They went as far as the Piazza d’Armi, and then came back at nightfall to Rome. The rain was gradually ceasing and the sky looked less threatening. A file of greenish gaslights followed the river-wall and then crossed over the bridge.

They walked to the Piazza del Popólo and through the Via Babuino to the Piazza di Spagna.

“Would you like to go to a Benedictine abbey tomorrow?” asked Kennedy.

“All right.”

“And if you are still melancholy, we will leave you there.”

_THE ABBEY_

The next day, after lunch, Kennedy and Cæsar went to visit the abbey of Sant’ Anselmo on the Aventine. The abbot, Hildebrand, was a friend of Kennedy’s, and like him an Englishman.

They took a carriage and Kennedy told it to stop at the church of Santa Sabina.

“It is still too early to go to the abbey. Let us look at this church, which is the best preserved of all the old Roman ones.”

They entered the church; but it was so cold there that Cæsar went out again directly and waited in the porch. There was a man there selling rosaries and photographs who spoke scarcely any Italian or French, but did speak Spanish. Probably he was a Jew.

Cæsar asked him where they manufactured those religious toys, and the pedlar told him in Westphalia.

Kennedy went to look at a picture by Sassoferrato, which is in one of the chapels, and meanwhile the rosary-seller showed the church door to Cæsar and explained the different bas-reliefs, cut in cypress wood by Greek artists of the V Century, and representing scenes from the Old and New Testaments.

Kennedy came back, they got into the carriage again, and they drove to the Benedictine abbey.

“Is the abbot Hildebrandus here?” asked Kennedy.

Out came the abbot, a man of about fifty, with a gold cross on his breast. They exchanged a few friendly words, and the superior showed them the convent.

The refectory was clean and very spacious; the long table of shining wood; the floor made of mosaic. The crypt held a statue, which Cæsar assumed must be of Sant’ Anselmo. The church was severe, without ornaments, without pictures; it had a primitive air, with its columns of fine granite that looked like marble. A monk was playing the harmonium, and in the opaque veiled light, the thin music gave a strange impression of something quite outside this life.

Afterwards they crossed a large court with palm-trees. They went up to the second story, and down a corridor with cells, each of which had on the lintel the name of the patron saint of the respective monk. Each door had a card with the name of the occupant of the room.

It looked more like a bath-house than a monastery. The cells were comfortable inside, without any air of sadness; each held a bed, a divan, and a small bookcase.

By a window at the end of the passage, one could see, far away, the Alban Hills, looking like a blue mountain-range, half hidden in white haze, and nearby one could see the trees in the Protestant cemetery and the pyramid of Caïus Cestius close to them.

Cæsar felt a sort of deep repugnance for the people shut up here, remote from life and protected from it by a lot of things.

“The man who is playing the harmonium in this church with its opaque light, is a coward,” he said to himself. “One must live and struggle in the open air, among men, in the midst of their passions and hatreds, even though one’s miserable nerves quiver and tremble.”

After showing them the monastery, the abbot Hildebrand took them to his study, where he worked at revising ancient translations of the Bible. He had photographic copies of all the Latin texts and he was collating them with the original.

They talked of the progress of the Church, and the abbot commented with some contempt on the worldly success of the Jesuit churches, with their saints who serve as well to get husbands and rich wives as to bring winning numbers in the lottery.

Before going out, they went to a window, at the other end of the corridor from where they had looked out before. Below them they could see the Tiber as far as the Ripa harbour; opposite, the heights of the Janiculum, and further, Saint Peter’s.

When they went out, Kennedy said to Cæsar:

“What devilish effect has the abbey produced in you, that you are so much gayer than when we went in?”

“It has confirmed me in my idea, which I had lost for a few days.”

“What idea is that?”

“That we must not defend ourselves in this life, but attack, always attack.”

“And now you are contented at having found it again?”

“Yes.”

_PIRANESI’S GARDEN_

“I am glad, because you have such a pitiable air when you are sad. Would you like to go to the Priory of Malta, which is only a step from here?”

“Good.”

They went down in the carriage to the Priory of Malta. They knocked at the gate and a woman came out who knew Kennedy, and who told them to wait a moment and she would open the church.

“Here,” said Kennedy, “you have all that remains of the famous Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. That anti-historic man Bonaparte rooted it out of Malta. The Order attempted to establish itself in Catania, and afterwards at Ferrara, and finally took refuge here. Now it has no property left, and all that remains are its memories and its archives.”

“That is how our descendants will see our Holy Mother the Church. In Chicago or Boston some traveller will find an abandoned chapel, and will ask: ‘What is this? ‘And they will tell him: ‘This is what remains of the Catholic Church.’”

“Don’t talk like an Homais,” said Kennedy.

“I don’t know who Homais is,” retorted Cæsar.

“An atheistical druggist in Flaubert’s novel, _Madame Bovary_. Haven’t you read it?”

“Yes; I have a vague idea that I have read it. A very heavy thing; yes, ... I think I have read it.”

The woman opened the door and they went into the church. It was small, overcharged with ornaments. They saw the tomb of Bishop Spinelli and Giotto’s Virgin, and then went into a hall gay with red flags with a white cross, on whose walls they could read the names of the Grand Masters of the Order of Malta. The majority of the names were French and Polish. Two or three were Spanish, and among them that of Cæsar Borgia.

“Your countryman and namesake was also a Grand Master of Malta,” said Kennedy.

“So it seems,” replied Cæsar with indifference. “I see that you speak with contempt of that extraordinary man. Is he not congenial to you?”

“The fact is I don’t know his history.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“How strange! We must go tomorrow to the Borgia Apartment in the Vatican.”

“Good.”

They saw the model of an ancient galley which was in the same hall, and went out through the church into the garden planned by Piranesi. The woman showed them a very old palm, with a hole in it made by a hand-grenade in the year ‘49. It had remained that way more than half a century, and it was only a few days since the trunk of the palm had broken.

From the garden they went, by a path between trees, to the bastion of Paul III, a little terrace, from which they could see the Tiber at their feet, and opposite the panorama of Rome and its environs, in the light of a beautiful spring sunshine....

XVIII. CÆSAR BORGIA’S MOTTO, “AUT CÆSAR, AUT NIHIL”

_THE BORGIAS_

The next day was one of the days for visiting the Borgia Apartment. Cæsar and Kennedy met in the Piazza di San Pietro, went into the Vatican museum, and walked by a series of stairs and passageways to the Gallery of Inscriptions.

Then they went down to a hall, at whose door there were guards dressed in slashed clothes, which were parti-coloured, red, yellow, and black. Some of them carried lances and others swords.

“Why are the guards here dressed differently?” asked Cæsar.

“Because this belongs to the Dominions of the Pope.”

“And what kind of guards are these?”

“These are pontifical Swiss guards.”

“They look comic-opera enough,” said Cæsar.

“My dear man, don’t say that. This costume was designed by no one less than Michelangelo.”

“All right. At that time they probably looked very well, but now they have a theatrical effect.”

“It is because you have no veneration. If you were reverential, they would look wonderful to you.”

“Very well, let us wait and see whether reverence will not spring up in me. Now, you go on and explain what there is here.”

“This first room, the Hall of Audience, or of the Popes, does not contain anything notable, as you see,” said Kennedy; “the five we are coming to later, have been restored, but are still the same as at the time when your countryman Alexander VI was Pope. All five were decorated by Pinturicchio and his pupils, and all with reference to the Borgias. The Borgias have their history, not well known in all its details, and their legend, which is more extensive and more picturesque. Really, it is not easy to distinguish one from the other.”

“Let’s have the history and the legend mixed.”

“I will give you a résumé in a few words. Alfonso Borja was a Valencian, born at Játiba; he was secretary to the King or Aragon; then Bishop of Valencia, later Cardinal, and lastly Pope, by the name of Calixtus III. While Calixtus lives, the Spaniards are all-powerful in Rome. Calixtus protects his nephews, sons of his sister Isabel and a Valencian named Lanzol or Lenzol. These nephews drop their original name and take their mother’s, Italianizing its spelling to Borgia. Their uncle, the Pope, appoints the elder, Don Pedro Luis, Captain of the Church; the second, Don Rodríguez....”

“Don Rodríguez?” said Cæsar. “In Spanish you can’t say Don Rodríguez.”

“Gregorovius calls him that.”

“Then Gregorovius, no doubt, knew no Spanish.”

“In Latin he is called Rodericus.”

“Then it should be Don Rodrigo.”

“All right, Rodrigo. Well, this Don Rodrigo, also from Játiba, his uncle makes a Cardinal, and at the death of Pedro Luis, he calls him to Rome. Rodrigo has had several children before becoming a Cardinal, and apparently he feels no great enthusiasm for ecclesiastical dignities; but when he finds himself in Rome, the ambition to be Pope assails him, and at the death of Innocent VIII, he buys the tiara? Is it legend or history that he bought the tiara? That is not clear. Now we will go in and see the portrait of Rodrigo Borgia, who in the series of Popes, bears the name Alexander VI.”

_ALEXANDER VI AND HIS BROTHER_

Kennedy and Cæsar entered the first room, the Hall of the Mysteries, and the Englishman stopped in front of a picture of the Resurrection. “Here you have Alexander VI, on his knees, adoring Christ who is leaving the tomb. He is the type of a Southerner; he has a hooked nose, a long head, tonsured, a narrow forehead, thick lips, a heavy beard, a strong neck, and small chubby hands. He wears a papal robe of gold, covered with jewels; the tiara is on the ground beside him. Of the soldiers, it is supposed that the one asleep by the sepulchre and the one who is waking and rising up, pulling himself to his knees by the aid of his lance, are two of the Pope’s sons, Cæsar and the Duke of Gandia. I rather believe that the little soldier with the lance is a woman, perhaps Lucrezia. How does your countryman strike you, my friend?”

“He is of Mediterranean race, a dolichocephalic Iberian; he has the small melon-shaped head, the sensual features. He is leptorrhine. He comes of an intriguing, commercial, lying, and charlatan race.”

“To which you have the honour to belong,” said Kennedy, laughing.

“Certainly.”

“They say this man was a great enthusiast about his countrymen and the customs of his country. These tiles, which are remains of the original floor, and the plates you see here, are Valencian. A Spanish painter told me that several letters of Alexander VI’s are preserved in the archives of the cathedral at Valencia, one among them asking to have tiles sent.”

Kennedy walked forward a little and planted himself before an Assumption of the Virgin, and said:

“It is supposed that this gloomy man dressed in red, with a little fringe of hair on his brow, is a brother of the Pope’s.”

“A bad type to encounter in the Tribunal of the Inquisition,” said Cæsar; “imagine what this red-robed fellow would have done with that Jew at the Excelsior, Señor Pereira, if he had happened to have him in his power.”

“In the soffits,” Kennedy went on, “as you see, are repetitions of the symbols of Iris, Osiris, and the bull Apis, doubtless because of their resemblance to the Christian symbols, and also because the bull Apis recalls the bull in the Borgia arms.” “Their arms were a bull?”

“Yes; it was a ‘scutcheon invented by some king-at-arms or other, a symbol of ferocity and strength.”

“Were they of a noble family, these Borgias?”

“No, probably not. Though I believe some people suppose that they were descended from the Aragonese family of Atares. Now that we know Alexander VI, let us take a glance at his court. It has often been said, and is no doubt taken from Vasari’s book, that in the Borgia Apartment Pinturicchio painted Pope Alexander VI adoring the Virgin represented under the likeness of his beloved, Julia Farnese. The critic must have been confused, because none of these madonnas recalls the face of _Giulia la bella_, whom people used to call the Bride of Christ. The picture that Vasari refers to must be one in the museum at Valencia.”

_THE HALL OF THE SAINTS_

They went into another room, the Hall of the Saints, and Kennedy took Cæsar in front of the fresco called, _The Dispute of Saint Catherine with the Emperor Maximian_.

“The place of this scene,” said Kennedy, “Pinturicchio has set in front of the Arch of Constantine. The artist has added the inscription _Pacis Cultori_, and below he has embossed the Borgia bull. The subject is the discussion between the Emperor and the saint. Maximian, seated on a throne under a canopy, is listening to Saint Catherine, who counts on her fingers the arguments she has been using in the dispute. Who was it served as model for the figure of Maximian? At first they imagined it was Cæsar Borgia; but as you may observe, the appearance of the Emperor is that of a man of twenty odd years, and when Pinturicchio painted this, Cæsar was about seventeen. So it is more logical to suppose that the model must have been the Pope’s eldest son, the Duke of Gandia. A chronicler of the period says that this Duke of Gandia was good among the great, as his brother Cæsar was great among the wicked. Also, legend or history, whichever it be, says that Cæsar procured his elder brother’s murder in a corner of the Ghetto, and that the Pope on learning of it, became as if crazy, and went into the full Consistory with his garments torn and ashes on his head.”

“What love for traditional symbolism!” said Cæsar.

“Everybody is not so anti-traditional as you. I will go on with my explanation,” added Kennedy. “Saint Catherine has Lucrezia’s features. She is small and slender. She wears her hair down, a little cap with a pearl cross which hangs on her forehead, and a collar also of pearls. She has large eyes, a candid expression. Cagnolo da Parma will say of her, when she goes to Ferrara, that she has ‘_il naso profilato e bello, li capelli aurei, gli occhi bianchi, la bocea alquanto grande con li denti candiaissimi._’ Literature will portray this sweet-faced little blond girl as a Messalina, a poisoner, and incestuous with her brothers and her father. At this time Lucrezia had just married Giovanni Sforza, although as a matter of fact the two never lived together. Giovanni Sforza is the little young man who appears there in the back of the picture riding a spirited horse. Sforza wears his hair like a woman, and has a broad-brimmed hat and a red mantle. A little later Cæsar Borgia will try several times to assassinate him.”

“What for?” asked Cæsar.

“No doubt he found him in the way. The man who is in the foreground, next to the Emperor’s throne, is Andrew Paleologos,” Kennedy continued. “He is the one wearing a pale purple cloak and looking so melancholy. It used to be supposed that he was Giovanni Borgia. Now they say that it is Paleologos, whom the death of the Emperor Constantine XIII, about this time, had caused to lose the crown of Byzance.

“Here at the right, riding a Barbary horse, is Prince Djem, second son of Muhammad II, whom Alexander VI kept as a hostage. Djem, as you see, has an expressive face, a prominent nose, lively eyes, a long pointed beard, a shock of hair, and a big turban. He rides Moorish fashion, with his stirrups very short, and wears a curved cutlass in his belt. He is a great friend of Cæsar Borgia’s, which does not prevent Cæsar and his father, according to public rumour, from poisoning him at a farewell banquet in Capua. And here is Giovanni Sforza again, on foot. Are those two children the younger sons of Alexander VI? Or are they Lucrezia and Cæsar again? I don’t know. Behind Paleologos are the Pope’s domestic retainers, and among them Pinturicchio himself.”

_THE LIFE OF CÆSAR BORGIA_

After explaining the picture in detail, Kennedy went into the next room, followed by Cæsar. This is called the Hall of the Liberal Arts, and is adorned with a large marble mantel.

“Is there no portrait here of Cæsar Borgia?” asked Cæsar.

“No. Here I have a photograph of the one by Giorgione,” said Kennedy, showing a postal card.

“What sort of man was he? What did he do?”

Kennedy seated himself on a bench near the window and Cæsar sat beside him.

“Cæsar Borgia,” said Kennedy, “came to Rome from the university of Pisa, approximately at the time when they made his father Pope. He must then have been about twenty, and was strong and active. He broke in horses, was an expert fencer and shot, and killed bulls in the ring.”

“That too?”

“He was a good Spaniard. In a court that cannot be seen from here, on account of those thick panes, but on which these windows look, Cæsar Borgia fought bulls, and the Pope stood here to watch his son’s dexterity with the sword.”

“What ruffians!” exclaimed Cæsar, smiling.

The Englishman continued with the history of Borgia, his intrigues with the King of France, the death of Lucrezia’s husband, the assassinations attributed to the Pope’s son, the mysterious execution of Ramiro del Orco, which made Machiavelli say that Cæsar Borgia was the prince who best knew how to make and unmake men, according to their merits; finally the _coup d’état_ at Sinigaglia with the _condottieri_.

By this time Cæsar Moncada was very anxious to know more. These Borgias interested him. His sympathies went out toward those great bandits who dominated Rome and tried to get all Italy into their power, leaf by leaf, like an artichoke. Their purpose struck him as a good one, almost a moral one. The device, _Aut Cæsar, aut nihil_, was worthy of a man of energy and courage.

Kennedy seeing Cæsar’s interest, then recounted the scene at Cardinal Adrian Corneto’s country-house; Alexander’s intention to give a supper there to various Cardinals and poison them all with a wine that had been put into three bottles, so as to inherit from them, the superstitiousness of the Pope, who sent Cardinal Caraffa to the Vatican for a golden box in which he kept his consecrated Host, from which he was never separated; and the mistake of the chamberlain, who served the poisoned wine to Cæsar and his father.

“Here, to this very room, they brought the dying Pope,” said Kennedy, and pointed to a door, on whose marble lintel one may read: _Alexander Borgia Valentín P. P._ “They say he passed eight days here between life and death, before he did die, and that when his corpse was exposed, it decomposed horribly.”

Then Kennedy related the story of Cæsar’s trying to cure himself by the strange method of being put inside of a mule just dead; his flight from Rome, sick on a litter, with his soldiers, as far as the Romagna; his imprisonment in the Castel Sant’ Angelo; his capture by the Great Captain; his efforts to escape from his prison at Medina del Campo; and his obscure death on the Mendavia road, near Viana in Navarre, through one of the Count of Lerin’s soldiers, named Garcés, a native of Agreda, who gave Borgia such a blow with a lance that it broke his armour and passed all the way through his body.

Cæsar was stirred up. Hearing the story of the people who had lived there, in those very rooms, gave him an impression of complete reality.

When they went out again by the Gallery of Inscriptions, they looked from a window.

“It must have been here that he fought bulls?” said Cæsar.

“Yes.”

The court was large, with a fountain of four streams in the middle. “Life then must have been more intense than now,” said Cæsar.

“Who knows? Perhaps it was the same as now,” replied Kennedy.

“And what does history, exact history, say of these Borgias?”

“Of Pope Alexander VI it says that he had his children in wedlock; that he was a good administrator; that the people were content with him; that the influence of Spain was justifiable, because he was Spanish; that the story of the poisonings does not seem certain; and that he himself could hardly have died of poison, but rather of a malarial fever.”

“And about Lucrezia?”

“Of Lucrezia it says that she was a woman like those of her period; that there are no proofs for belief in her incests and her poisonings; and that her first marriages, which were never really consummated, were nothing more than political moves of her father and her brother’s.”

“And about Cæsar?”

“Cæsar is the one member of the family who appears really terrible. His device, _Aut Cæsar, aut nihil_, was not a chance phrase, but the irrevocable decision to be a king or to be nothing.”

“That, at least, is not a mystification,” murmured Cæsar.

_IN FRONT OF THE CASTEL SANT’ ANGELO_

They left the Vatican, crossed the Piazza di San Pietro, and drew near the river.

As they passed in front of the Castel Sant’ Angelo, Kennedy said:

“Alexander VI shut himself up in this castle to weep for the Duke of Gandia. From one of those windows he watched the funeral procession of his son, whom they were carrying to Santa Maria del Popolo. According to old Italian custom they bore the corpse in an open casket. The funeral was at night, and two hundred men with torches lighted the way. When the cortège set foot on this bridge, the Pope’s retinue saw him draw back with horror, and cover his face, crying out sharply.”

XIX. CÆSAR’S REFLECTIONS

“I have had the curiosity,” Cæsar wrote to his friend Alzugaray, “to inform myself about the life of the Borgias, and going on from one to another, I reached Saint Francis Borgia; and from Saint Francis I have gone backwards to Saint Ignatius Loyola.

“The parallelism between the doings of Cæsar Borgia and of Iñigo de Loyola surprised me; what one tried to do in the sphere of action, the other did in the sphere of thought. These twin Spanish figures, both odious to the masses, have given its direction to the Church; one, Loyola, through the impulse to spiritual power; the other, Cæsar Borgia, through the impulse to temporal power.

“One may say that Spain gave Papal Rome its thought and activity, as it gave the Rome of the Cæsars also its thought and activity, through Seneca and Trajan.

“Really it is curious to see the traces that remain in Rome of that Basque, Iñigo. That half farceur, half ruffian, who had the characteristics of a modern anarchist, was a genius for organization. Bakunin and Mazzini are poor devils beside him. The Church still lives through Loyola. He was her last reformer.

“The Society of Jesus is the knot of the whole Catholic scaffolding; the Jesuits know that on the day when this knot, which their Society forms, is cut or pulled open, the whole frame-work of out-of-date ideas and lies, which defends the Vatican, will come down with a terrible noise.

“Rome lives on Jesuitism. Indubitably, without Loyola, Catholicism would have rotted away much sooner. It is obvious that this would have been better, but we are not talking about that. A good general is not one who defends just causes, but one who wins battles.

“The Borgias, Luther, and Saint Ignatius, between them, killed the predominance of the Latin race.

“The Borgias threw discredit on the free Renaissance life, before the face of all nations; Luther removed the centre of spiritual life and philosophy to Germany and England; Saint Ignatius prevented Roman Catholicism from rotting away; he put iron braces on the body that was doubling over with weakness, and inside his braces the body has gone on decomposing and has poisoned the Latin countries.

“On hearing this opinion here, they asked me:

“‘Then you think Catholicism is dead?’

“‘No, no; as to having any civilizing effect, it is dead; but as to having a sentimental effect, it is very much alive... and it will still unfortunately keep on being alive. All this business of the Virgin del Pilar and the Virgin del Carmen, and saints, and processions, and magnificent churches, is a terrible strength.... If there were an emancipated bourgeoisie and a sensible working class, Catholicism would not be a peril; but there are not, and Catholicism will have, not perhaps an overpowering expansion, but at least moments of new growth. While we have a lazy rich class and a brutalized poor class, Catholicism will be strong.’

“Leaving the utilitarian and moral questions aside, and considering merely the amount of influence and the traces left by this influence, one can see that Rome is living on Loyola’s work and still dreaming of Borgia’s. Those pilgrims in the Piazza di San Pietro who enthusiastically yell, _Viva il Papa-re!_ are acclaiming the memory of Cæsar Borgia. Thus you have the absurd result, people who speak with horror of an historic figure and still hold his work in admiration.

“This Spanish influence that our country gave to the Church in two ways, spiritual and material,--to the Church which now is an institution not merely foreign but contrary to our nature,--Spain ought today to try to use in her own behalf. Spain’s work ought to be to organize extra-religious individualism.

“We are individualists; therefore what we need is an iron discipline, like soldiers.

“This discipline established, we ought to spread it through the contiguous countries, especially through Africa. Democracy, the Republic, Socialism, have not, essentially, any root in our land. Families, cities, classes, can be united in a pact; isolated men, like us, can be united only by discipline.

“Moreover, as for us, we do not recognize prestige, nor do we cheerfully accept either kings or presidents or high priests or grand magi.

“The only thing that would suit us would be to have a chief... for the pleasure of eating him alive.

“A Loyola of the extra-religious individualism is what Spain needs. Deeds, always deeds, and a cold philosophy, realistic, based on deeds, and a morality based on action. Don’t you agree?

“I think, and I am becoming more confirmed in my opinion, that the only people who can give a direction, found a new civilization with its own proper characteristics, for that old Iberian race, which probably sprang from the shores of the Mediterranean... is we Spaniards.

“‘Why only you Spaniards?’ my friend Kennedy asked me; and I told him:

“‘To me it seems indubitable. France is leaning constantly more towards the North. In Italy the same is true; Milan and Turin, where the Saxon and the Gaul predominate, are the real capitals of Italy. In Spain, however, this does not happen. We are separated from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees, and joined to Africa by the sea and climate. Our plan ought to be to construct a great European Empire, to impose our ideas on the peninsula, and then to spread them everywhere.’”

XX. DON CALIXTO AT SAINT PETER’S

_DON CALIXTO UNDERSTANDS_

Kennedy was anxious that Cæsar should turn into the good road. The good road, for him, was art.

“At heart,” the Englishman informed him, “I am one of those Brothers of the Esthetic Doctrine who irritate you, and I must instruct you in the faith.”

“I am not opposed to your trying to instruct me.”

The two went several times to see museums, especially the Vatican museum.

One day, on leaving the Sistine Chapel, where they had had a long discussion on the merits of Michelangelo, Cæsar met the painter Cortés, who came to speak to him.

“I am here with a gentleman from my town, who is a Senator,” said Cortés. “A boresome old boy. Shall I introduce him?”

“All right.”

“He is an old fool who knows nothing about anything and talks about everything.”

Cortés presented Cæsar to Don Calixto García Guerrero, a man of some fifty-odd, Senator and boss of the province of Zamora.

Don Calixto invited Cæsar and Kennedy to dine with him. The Englishman expressed regrets, and Cæsar said he would go. They took leave of Cortés and Don Calixto, and went out to the Piazza di San Pietro.

“I imagine you are going to be bored tomorrow dining with that old countryman of yours,” said Kennedy. “Oh, surely. He has all the signs of a soporific person; but who knows? a type like that sometimes has influence.”

“So you are dining with him with a more or less practical object?”

“Why, of course.”

The next evening, Cæsar, in his evening clothes, betook himself to an hotel in the Piazza di Spagna, where Don Calixto García Guerrero was staying. Don Calixto received him very cordially. He doubtless knew that Cæsar was nephew to Cardinal Fort and brother to a marchioness, and doubtless that flattered Don Calixto.

Don Calixto honoured Cæsar with an excellent dinner, and during dessert became candid with him. He had come to Rome to put through his obtaining a Papal title. He was a friend of the Spanish Ambassador to the Vatican, and it wouldn’t have cost him any more to be made a prince, a duke, or a marquis; but he preferred the title of count. He had a magnificent estate called La Sauceda, and he wanted to be the Count de la Sauceda.

Cæsar comprehended that this gentleman might be fortune coming in the guise of chance, and he set himself to making good with him, to telling him stories of aristocratic life in Rome, some of which he had read in books, and some of which he had heard somewhere or other.

“What vices must exist here!” Don Calixto kept exclaiming. “That is why they say: _‘Roma veduta, fede perduta.’_”

Cæsar noted that Don Calixto had a great enthusiasm for the aristocracy; and so he took pains, every time he talked with him, to mix the names of a few princes and marquises into the conversation; he also gave him to understand that he lived among them, and went so far as to hint the possibility of being of service to him in Rome, but in a manner ambiguous enough to permit of withdrawing the offer in case of necessity. Fortunately for Cæsar, Don Calixto had his affairs all completely arranged; the one thing he desired was that Cæsar, whom he supposed to be an expert on archeological questions, should go about with him the three or four days he expected to remain in Rome. He had spent a whole week making calls, and as yet had seen nothing.

Cæsar had no other recourse but to buy a Baedeker and read it and learn a lot of things quite devoid of interest for him.

The next day Don Calixto was waiting for him in a carriage at the door, and they went to see the sights.

Don Calixto was a man that made phrases and ornamented them with many adverbs ending in -ly.

“Verily,” he said, after his first archeological walk in Rome, “verily, it seems strange that after more than two thousand years have passed, all these monuments should still remain.”

“That is most true,” replied Cæsar, looking at him with his impassive air.

“I understand why Rome is the real school for learning, integrally, both ancient and modern history.”

“Most certainly,” agreed Cæsar.

Don Calixto, who knew neither Italian nor French, found a source of help, for the days he was to spend in Rome, in Cæsar’s friendship, and made him accompany him everywhere. Cæsar was able to collect and preserve, though not precisely cut in brass, the phrases Don Calixto uttered in front of the principal monuments of Rome.

In front of the Colosseum, his first exclamation was: “What a lot of stone!” Then recalling his role of orator, he exclaimed: “The spirits are certainly daunted and the mind darkened on thinking how men could have sunk to such abysses of evil.”

“Don Calixto is referring to those holes,” thought Cæsar, looking at the cellars of the Circo Romano.

From the Colosseum the carriage went to the Capitol, and then Don Calixto asserted with energy:

“One cannot deny that, say what you will, Rome is one of the places most fertile in memories.”

Don Calixto was an easy traveller for his _cicerone_. He far preferred talking to being given explanations; Cæsar had said to him: “Don Calixto, you understand everything, by intuition.” And being thus reassured, Don Calixto kept uttering terrible absurdities.

One day Don Calixto went to see the Pope, in evening clothes and with his abdomen covered with decorations, and he asked Cæsar if a photographer couldn’t take his picture in the act of leaving the carriage, so that the photograph would have Saint Peter’s as a background.

“Yes, I think so. Why not? The only thing will be that the photographer will charge you more.”

“I don’t mind that. Could you arrange it for me?”

“Yes, man.”

What Don Calixto desired was done.

“How did the Pope impress you?” Cæsar asked him as he came out

“Very favourably, very favourably indeed.”

“He has a stupid face, hasn’t he?”

“No, man, not at all. He is like a nice country priest. His predecessor was no doubt more of a diplomat, more intelligent.”

“Yes, the other seemed more of a rogue,” said Cæsar, laughing at the precautions Don Calixto took in giving his opinion.

The proofs of the photographs came in the evening, and Don Calixto was enchanted with them. In one of them you could see the Swiss guard at the door, with his lance. It was splendid. Don Calixto would not permit Cæsar to go to his hotel, but invited him for dinner; and after dinner told him he was so indebted that he would be delighted to do anything Cæsar asked him.

“Why don’t you make me a Deputy?” said Cæsar, laughing.

“Do you want to be one?”

“Yes, man.”

“Really?”

“I should think so.”

“But you would have to live in Madrid.”

“Certainly.”

“Would you leave here?”

“Yes, why not?”

“Then, not another word, we will say no more about it. When the time comes, you will write to me and say: ‘Don Calixto, the moment has arrived for you to remember your promise: I want to be a Deputy.’”

“Very good. I will do it, and you shall present me as candidate for Castro... Castro... what?”

“Castro Duro.”

“You will see me there then.”

“All right. And now, another favour. There is a Canon from Zamora here, a friend of mine, who came on the pilgrimage and who desires nothing so much as to see Saint Peter’s and the Catacombs rather thoroughly. I could explain everything to him, but I am not sure about the dates. Will you come with us?”

“With great pleasure.”

“Then we shall expect you here at ten.”

“That will be fine.”

Sure enough, at ten Cæsar was there. Don Calixto and his friend the Canon Don Justo, who was a large gentleman, tall and fleshy and with a long nose, were waiting. The three got into the carriage.

“I hope this priest isn’t going to be one of those library rats who know everything on earth,” thought Cæsar, but when he heard him make a couple of mistakes in grammar, he became tranquil.

_THEODORA AND MAROZIA_

As they passed the Castel Sant’ Angelo, Cæsar began to tell the story of Theodora and her daughter Marozia, the two women who lived there and who, for forty odd years, changed the Popes as one changes cooks.

“You know the history of those women?” asked Cæsar.

“I don’t,” said the Canon.

“Nor I,” added Don Calixto.

“Then I will tell it to you before we get to Saint Peter’s. Theodora, an influential lady, fell in love with a young priest of Ravenna, and had him elected Pope, by the name of John X. Her daughter Marozia, a young girl and a virgin, gave herself to Pope Sergius III, a capricious, fantastic man, who had once had the witty idea of digging up Pope Formosus and subjecting him, putrefied as he was, to the judgment of a Synod. By this eccentric man Marozia had a son, and afterwards was married three times more. She exercised an omnipotent sway over the Holy See. John X, her mother’s lover, she deposed and sent to die in prison. With his successor, Leo VI, whom she herself had appointed Pope, she did the same. The following Pope, Stephen VII, died of illness, twenty months after his reign began, and then Marozia gave the Papal crown to the son she had had by Sergius III, who took the name of John XI. This Pope and his brother Alberic, began to feel their mother’s influence rather heavy, and during a popular revolt they decided to get Marozia into their power, and they seized her and buried her alive in the _in pace_ of a convent.”

“But is all this authentic?” asked the Canon, completely stupefied.

“Absolutely authentic.”

The Canon made a gesture of resignation and looked at Don Calixto in astonishment.

While Cæsar was telling the story, the carriage had passed down a narrow and rather deserted street, called Borgo Vecchio, in whose windows clothes were hanging out to dry, and then they came out in the Piazza di San Pietro. They drove around one edge of this enormous square. The sky was blue. A fountain was throwing water, which changed to a cloud in the air and produced a brilliant rainbow.

“One certainly wonders,” said Cæsar, “if Saint Peter’s is not one of the buildings in the worst taste that exist in the world.”

They got out in front of the steps.

“Your friend is probably well up on archeological matters?” asked Cæsar.

“Who? Don Justo? Not in the least.”

Cæsar began to laugh, went up the steps ahead of the others, lifted the leather curtain, and they all three went into Saint Peter’s. _THERE IS NO PERFORMANCE_

Cæsar began his explanations with the plan of the church. The Canon passed his hand over all the stones and kept saying:

“This is marble too,” and adding, “How expensive!”