taken to Venice, but
Louis XII claimed them, and they were given up. Thus the King of France
found himself master of Ludovico Sforza and of Ascania, of a legitimate
nephew of the great Francesco Sforza named Hermes, of two bastards
named Alessandro and Cortino, and of Francesco, son of the unhappy Gian
Galeazza who had been poisoned by his uncle.

Louis XII, wishing to make an end of the whole family at a blow, forced
Francesco to enter a cloister, shut up Cardinal Ascanio in the tower of
Baurges, threw into prison Alessandro, Cartino, and Hermes, and
finally, after transferring the wretched Ludovico from the fortress of
Pierre-Eucise to Lys-Saint-George he relegated him for good and all to
the castle of Loches, where he lived for ten years in solitude and utter
destitution, and there died, cursing the day when the idea first came
into his head of enticing the French into Italy.

The news of the catastrophe of Ludovica and his family caused the
greatest joy at Rome, for, while the French were consolidating their
power in Milanese territory, the Holy See was gaining ground in the
Romagna, where no further opposition was offered to Caesar's conquest.
So the runners who brought the news were rewarded with valuable
presents, and it was published throughout the whole town of Rome to the
sound of the trumpet and drum. The war-cry of Louis, France, France, and
that of the Orsini, Orso, Orso, rang through all the streets, which in
the evening were illuminated, as though Constantinople or Jerusalem had
been taken. And the pope gave the people fetes and fireworks, without
troubling his head the least in the world either about its being Holy
Week, or because the Jubilee had attracted more than 200,000 people
to Rome; the temporal interests of his family seeming to him far more
important than the spiritual interests of his subjects.

CHAPTER XI

One thing alone was wanting to assure the success of the vast projects
that the pope and his son were founding upon the friendship of Louis and
an alliance with him--that is,--money. But Alexander was not the man
to be troubled about a paltry worry of that kind; true, the sale of
benefices was by now exhausted, the ordinary and extraordinary taxes
had already been collected for the whole year, and the prospect of
inheritance from cardinals and priests was a poor thing now that the
richest of them had been poisoned; but Alexander had other means at his
disposal, which were none the