The pitiful story of Eufrosina, who for a brief period was mistress of Palliano, is a sad blot upon the Champion's otherwise honourable career. Some authorities maintain that she was of good family, and that Marcantonio had killed her husband for love of her; others that she was a slave girl whom he had brought back from the Orient. All agree that she was beautiful, but Colonna had not made her his duchess. Strangely enough he offered the tiara of the murdered Violante to Felice Orsini, daughter of the very man who had striven in vain to win Palliano by force of arms. It was a tempting marriage, for it united the two great rival houses of Rome, and Eufrosina was heartlessly cast aside. Her after-history is a tragedy beside which the story just related pales to an idyl. [Illustration: Court of the Massimi Palace] That she was a woman of extraordinary powers of fascination is proved by the fact that, though it was notorious that she had been abandoned by Marcantonio, Lelio Massimi, then the representative of one of the proudest patrician families of Rome, did not hesitate to make her his wife. Massimi was an old man and a widower, whose first wife, Gerolema Savelli, had given him six sons, notable for their herculean strength and arrogance and their father's remarriage to such a woman was an insult to their mother's memory which they could not condone. They entered Massimi's apartment upon his wedding night and shot his bride to death in his arms. The old man cursed his sons excepting only the youngest, Pompeo, who had taken no part in the assassination, and shortly afterward died broken-hearted, foretelling that Pompeo alone would continue the line as all of his brothers would die violent deaths.[9] The record of the hearts of flame which have burned themselves out in the old nest of the phoenix might be indefinitely prolonged, for though battered by many sieges Palliano was never totally destroyed, and formed the background of many a sinister drama. Marie Mancini Colonna, Principessa di Palliano, writes that fear of imprisonment in the dungeon of her titular castle was the principal motive of her flight from her husband in 1672. She had been threatened with such a fate and the threat was not without precedent. As a prison the Castle of Palliano exists at the present day. Has its symbol of the phoenix attained a new meaning, and is it possible that erring souls issue from its gates, their stains burned clean by purgatorial flame? [Illustration: Marie Mancini Colonna, Principessa di Palliano, by Mignard Photographische Gesellschaft, Berlin] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX THE LURE OF OLD ROME ANTINOUS