to heaven with the groans of the assassinated, which
will the Eternal believe?" The fiend bowed himself to the earth, and was
silent.

In order to crown the festivities of the marriage, Alexander and his
daughter commanded a spectacle which must for ever stand unparalleled in
the annals of human infamy. The Pope sat, with his daughter, upon a
couch, in a vast illuminated hall. Faustus, the Devil, and others who
had been invited to this scene, stood around them. Suddenly the doors
opened, and in rushed fifty nude courtesans,--more beautiful than the
houris in Mahomet's paradise,--and performed, to the voluptuous sound of
flutes and other instruments, a dance which decency forbids us to
describe, although it was a Pope who designed the figure. When the dance
was ended, his Holiness gave the signal for a combat which we are still
less permitted to depict,--he himself holding the prize of victory. They
proclaimed Faustus to be the conqueror. Lucretia overwhelmed him with
kisses, and crowned him with laurels; while the Pope delivered to him the
prize,--a golden goblet, on which Lucretia had caused to be engraven the
School of Pleasure. Faustus gave it the very next day to a Venetian
monk, in whose possession Aretino saw it a long time afterwards, and
illustrated some of its incidents in his sonnets.

The Pope, on the day of his daughter's marriage, had made an election of
cardinals, choosing only the richest prelates for that dignity. Caesar
Borgia, being in want of large sums of money for the next campaign,
determined to send some of the newly-elected into the other world, at a
festival which his father intended to give at one of his villas. [The
details of these marriage-festivities are omitted; inasmuch as the
grossness of the spectacle renders it unfit for the general reader. The
conduct of Lucretia Borgia has been the subject of much obloquy, which
her defenders maintain rests chiefly on inferences from her living in a
flagitious court, where she witnessed the most profligate scenes. It is
asserted that some of the accusations have no better foundation than the
epigrams of Pontano, and other Neapolitan poets, the natural enemies of
her family.--_Transl_.] The Pope went in a coach, with his daughter, the
Devil, Faustus, Borgia, and the wife of the Venetian general. Here,
after witnessing a gross spectacle, Lucretia retired with Faustus; and
Borgia went with the Venetian; and the Pope remained alone with the