sprung eight years
of happiness, Rosa Vanozza also left Spain, and while he was going to
Rome, she betook herself to Venice, accompanied by two confidential
servants, and under the protection of a Spanish gentleman named Manuel
Melchior.

Fortune kept the promises she had made to Roderigo: the pope received
him as a son, and made him successively Archbishop of Valencia,
Cardinal-Deacon, and Vice-Chancellor. To all these favours Calixtus
added a revenue of 20,000 ducats, so that at the age of scarcely
thirty-five Roderigo found himself the equal of a prince in riches and
power.

Roderigo had had some reluctance about accepting the cardinalship, which
kept him fast at Rome, and would have preferred to be General of the
Church, a position which would have allowed him more liberty for seeing
his mistress and his family; but his uncle Calixtus made him reckon with
the possibility of being his successor some day, and from that moment
the idea of being the supreme head of kings and nations took such hold
of Roderigo, that he no longer had any end in view but that which his
uncle had made him entertain.

From that day forward, there began to grow up in the young cardinal that
talent for hypocrisy which made of him the most perfect incarnation of
the devil that has perhaps ever existed; and Roderigo was no longer the
same man: with words of repentance and humility on his lips, his head
bowed as though he were bearing the weight of his past sins, disparaging
the riches which he had acquired and which, according to him, were the
wealth of the poor and ought to return to the poor, he passed his life
in churches, monasteries, and hospitals, acquiring, his historian tells
us, even in the eyes of his enemies, the reputation of a Solomon for
wisdom, of a Job for patience, and of a very Moses for his promulgation
of the word of God: Rosa Vanozza was the only person in the world who
could appreciate the value of this pious cardinal's conversion.

It proved a lucky thing for Roderiga that he had assumed this pious
attitude, for his protector died after a reign of three years three
months and nineteen days, and he was now sustained by his own merit
alone against the numerous enemies he had made by his rapid rise to
fortune: so during the whole of the reign of Pius II he lived always
apart from public affairs, and only reappeared in the days of Sixtus
IV, who made him the gift of the abbacy of Subiaco, and sent him in
the capacity of a