idow's favor. On the night of
December 22, however, forty men, disguised in black and fantastically
tricked out to elude detection, surrounded her palace. Through the long
galleries and chambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing
torches, in search of Vittoria and her brothers. Marcello escaped,
having fled the house under suspicion of the murder of one of his own
followers. Flaminio, the innocent and young, was playing on his lute and
singing _Miserere_ in the great hall of the palace. The murderers
surprised him with a shot from one of their harquebusses. He ran,
wounded in the shoulder, to his sister's room. She, it is said, was
telling her beads before retiring for the night. When three of the
assassins entered, she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed
her in the left breast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking
her with savage insults if her heart was pierced. Her last words were,
'Jesus, I pardon you.' Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him
pierced with seventy-four stiletto wounds.

The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria and Flaminio,
and sent at once for further instructions to Venice. Meanwhile it
appears that both corpses were laid out in one open coffin for the
people to contemplate. The palace and the church of the Eremitani, to
which they had been removed, were crowded all through the following day
with a vast concourse of the Paduans. Vittoria's dead body, pale yet
sweet to look upon, the golden hair flowing around her marble shoulders,
the red wound in her breast uncovered, the stately limbs arrayed in
satin as she died, maddened the populace with its surpassing loveliness.
'_Dentibus fremebant_.' says the chronicler, when they beheld that
gracious lady stiff in death. And of a truth, if her corpse was actually
exposed in the chapel of the Eremitani, as we have some right to assume,
the spectacle must have been impressive. Those grim gaunt frescoes of
Mantegna looked down on her as she lay stretched upon her bier, solemn
and calm, and, but for pallor, beautiful as though in life. No wonder
that the folk forgot her first husband's murder, her less than comely
marriage to the second. It was enough for them that this flower of
surpassing loveliness had been cropped by villains in its bloom.
Gathering in knots around the torches placed beside the corpse, they
vowed vengeance against the Orsini; for suspicion, not unnaturally, fell
on Prince Lodovico.