The Borgias | Page 2

it should be remembered, was closely
allied to France by education and marriage, and the French never
forgave Elizabeth the part she played in the tragedy.
The fourth volume comprises three widely dissimilar tales. One of the
strangest stories is that of Urbain Grandier, the innocent victim of a

cunning and relentless religious plot. His story was dramatised by
Dumas, in 1850. A famous German crime is that of Karl-Ludwig Sand,
whose murder of Kotzebue, Councillor of the Russian Legation, caused
an international upheaval which was not to subside for many years.
An especially interesting volume is number six, containing, among
other material, the famous "Man in the Iron Mask." This unsolved
puzzle of history was later incorporated by Dumas in one of the
D'Artagnan Romances a section of the Vicomte de Bragelonne, to
which it gave its name. But in this later form, the true story of this
singular man doomed to wear an iron vizor over his features during his
entire lifetime could only be treated episodically. While as a special
subject in the Crimes, Dumas indulges his curiosity, and that of his
reader, to the full. Hugo's unfinished tragedy,'Les Jumeaux', is on the
same subject; as also are others by Fournier, in French, and Zschokke,
in German.
Other stories can be given only passing mention. The beautiful
poisoner, Marquise de Brinvilliers, must have suggested to Dumas his
later portrait of Miladi, in the Three Musketeers, the mast celebrated of
his woman characters. The incredible cruelties of Ali Pacha, the
Turkish despot, should not be charged entirely to Dumas, as he is said
to have been largely aided in this by one of his "ghosts," Mallefille.
"Not a mere artist"--writes M. de Villemessant, founder of the
Figaro,--"he has nevertheless been able to seize on those dramatic
effects which have so much distinguished his theatrical career, and to
give those sharp and distinct reproductions of character which alone
can present to the reader the mind and spirit of an age. Not a mere
historian, he has nevertheless carefully consulted the original sources of
information, has weighed testimonies, elicited theories, and . . . has
interpolated the poetry of history with its most thorough prose."

THE BORGIAS
PROLOGUE
On the 8th of April, 1492, in a bedroom of the Carneggi Palace, about
three miles from Florence, were three men grouped about a bed
whereon a fourth lay dying.
The first of these three men, sitting at the foot of the bed, and half
hidden, that he might conceal his tears, in the gold-brocaded curtains,

was Ermolao Barbaro, author of the treatise 'On Celibacy', and of
'Studies in Pliny': the year before, when he was at Rome in the capacity
of ambassador of the Florentine Republic, he had been appointed
Patriarch of Aquileia by Innocent VIII.
The second, who was kneeling and holding one hand of the dying man
between his own, was Angelo Poliziano, the Catullus of the fifteenth
century, a classic of the lighter sort, who in his Latin verses might have
been mistaken for a poet of the Augustan age.
The third, who was standing up and leaning against one of the twisted
columns of the bed-head, following with profound sadness the progress
of the malady which he read in the face of his departing friend, was the
famous Pico della Mirandola, who at the age of twenty could speak
twenty-two languages, and who had offered to reply in each of these
languages to any seven hundred questions that might be put to him by
the twenty most learned men in the whole world, if they could be
assembled at Florence.
The man on the bed was Lorenzo the Magnificent, who at the
beginning of the year had been attacked by a severe and deep-seated
fever, to which was added the gout, a hereditary ailment in his family.
He had found at last that the draughts containing dissolved pearls
which the quack doctor, Leoni di Spoleto, prescribed for him (as if he
desired to adapt his remedies rather to the riches of his patient than to
his necessities) were useless and unavailing, and so he had come to
understand that he must part from those gentle-tongued women of his,
those sweet-voiced poets, his palaces and their rich hangings; therefore
he had summoned to give him absolution for his sins--in a man of less
high place they might perhaps have been called crimes-- the Dominican,
Giralamo Francesco Savonarola.
It was not, however, without an inward fear, against which the praises
of his friends availed nothing, that the pleasure-seeker and usurper
awaited that severe and gloomy preacher by whose word's all Florence
was stirred, and on whose pardon henceforth depended all his hope far
another world.
Indeed, Savonarola was one of those men of stone, coming, like the
statue of the