able burst of
venomous fury by the noble Este alliance, so valuable to Cesare in that
it gave him a friend upon the frontier of his Romagna possessions.

The appalling publication, which is given in full in Burchard, was
fictitiously dated from Gonzola de Cordoba's Spanish camp at Taranto
on November 25. A copy of this anonymous pamphlet, which is the most
violent attack on the Borgias ever penned, perhaps the most terrible
indictment against any family ever published--a pamphlet which
Gregorovius does not hesitate to call "an authentic document of the
state of Rome under the Borgias"--fell into the hands of the Cardinal of
Modena, who on the last day of the year carried it to the Pope.

Before considering that letter it is well to turn to the entries in
Burchard's diary under the dates of October 27 and November 11 of that
same year. You will find two statements which have no parallel in the
rest of the entire diary, few parallels in any sober narrative of facts.
The sane mind must recoil and close up before them, so impossible does
it seem to accept them.

The first of these is the relation of the supper given by Cesare in the
Vatican to fifty courtesans--a relation which possibly suggested to
the debauched Regent d'Orleans his fetes d'Adam, a couple of centuries
later.

Burchard tells us how, for the amusement of Cesare, of the Pope, and of
Lucrezia, these fifty courtesans were set to dance after supper with
the servants and some others who were present, dressed at first and
afterwards not so. He draws for us a picture of those fifty women on all
fours, in all their plastic nudity, striving for the chestnuts flung to
them in that chamber of the Apostolic Palace by Christ's Vicar--an old
man of seventy--by his son and his daughter. Nor is that all by
any means. There is much worse to follow--matter which we dare not
translate, but must leave more or less discreetly veiled in the decadent
Latin of the Caerimoniarius:

"Tandem exposita dona ultima, diploides de serico, paria caligarum,
bireta ed alia pro illis qui pluries dictas meretrices carnaliter
agnoscerent; que fuerunt ibidem in aula publice carnaliter tractate
arbitrio presentium, dona distributa victoribus."

Such is the monstrous story!

Gregorovius, in his defence of Lucrezia Borgia, refuses to believe
that she was present; but he is reluctant to carry his incredulity any
further.

"Some orgy of that nature," he writes, "or something similar may very