quare of St. Peter's, some servants of the Pope's ran
out and cut the cords so that the timber was loosened and the beasts
relieved of their burden; they were then led to a courtyard within the
precincts of the palace, where four stallions were loosed upon them.
"Ascenderunt equas et coierunt cum eis et eas graviter pistarunt et
leserunt," whilst the Pope at a window above the doorway of the Palace,
with Madonna Lucrezia, witnessed with great laughter and delight, the
show which it is suggested was specially provided for their amusement.

The improbabilities of the saturnalia of the fifty courtesans pale
before the almost utter impossibility of this narrative. To render it
possible in the case of two chance animals as these must have been
under the related circumstances, a biological coincidence is demanded so
utterly unlikely and incredible that we are at once moved to treat the
story with scorn, and reject it as a fiction. Yet not one of those many
writers who have retailed that story from Burchard's Diarium as a truth
incontestable as the Gospels, has paused to consider this--so blinded
are we when it is a case of accepting that which we desire to accept.

The narrative, too, is oddly--suspiciously--circumstantial, even to the
unimportant detail of the particular gate by which the peasants entered
Rome. In a piece of fiction it is perfectly natural to fill in such
minor details to the end that the picture shall be complete; but they
are rare in narratives of fact. And one may be permitted to wonder how
came the Master of Ceremonies at the Vatican to know the precise gate by
which those peasants came. It is not--as we have seen--the only occasion
on which an excess of detail in the matter of a gate renders suspicious
the accuracy of a story of Burchard's.

Both these affairs find a prominent place in the Letter to Silvio
Savelli. Indeed Gregorovius cites the pamphlet as one of the authorities
to support Burchard, and to show that what Burchard wrote must have been
true; the other authority he cites is Matarazzo, disregarding not only
the remarkable discrepancy between Matarazzo's relation and that of
Burchard, but the circumstance that the matter of that pamphlet became
current throughout Italy, and that it was thus--and only thus--that
Matarazzo came to hear of the scandal.(1)

1 The frequency with which the German historian cites Matarazzo as an
authority is oddly inconsistent, considering that when he finds