how to earn the affections of every one." Unfortunately, there
was one important exception, as the cardinal was forced to add: "The
damsel, either out of her own contrariness, or because so induced by
others, which is easier to believe, constantly refuses to hear of the
wedding."

Della Rovere was quite justified in finding it easier to believe that
Carlotta was acting upon instructions from others, for, when hard
pressed to consent to the alliance, she demanded that the Neapolitan
ambassador should himself say that her father desired her to do so--a
statement which, it seems, the ambassador could not bring himself to
make.

Baffled by the persistence of that refusal, Cesare all but returned a
bachelor to Italy. So far, indeed, was his departure a settled matter
that in February of 1489, at the Castle of Loches, he received the
king's messages for the Pope. Yet Louis hesitated to let him go without
having bound his Holiness to his own interests by stronger bonds.

In the task of tracing the annals of the Borgias, the honest seeker
after truth is compelled to proceed axe in hand that he may hack himself
a way through the tangle of irresponsible or malicious statements that
have grown up about this subject, driving their roots deep into the
soil of history. Not a single chance does malignity, free or chartered,
appear to have missed for the invention of flagitious falsehoods
concerning this family, or for the no less flagitious misinterpretation
of known facts.

Amid a mass of written nonsense dealing with Cesare's sojourn in France
is the oft-repeated, totally unproven statement that he withheld from
Louis the dispensation enabling the latter to marry Anne of Brittany,
until such time as he should have obtained from Louis all that he
desired of him--in short, that he sold him the dispensation for the
highest price he could extract. The only motive served by this statement
is once more to show Alexander and his son in the perpetration of
simoniacal practices, and the statement springs, beyond doubt, from a
passage in Macchiavelli's Extracts from Dispatches to the Ten. Elsewhere
has been mentioned the confusion prevailing in those extracts, and their
unreliability as historical evidences. That circumstance can be now
established. The passage in question runs as follows:

"This dispensation was given to Valentinois when he went to France
without any one being aware of its existence, with orders to sell it
dearly to th