Being an adept in copying and reckless of consequences, she rewrote the list, counterfeiting the Pope’s handwriting, and placed the name of her brother first on the roll. On the morrow, she put on all her seducing charms and detained her paramour in his bed until messengers came to inform him that the concistory was assembled and only waited his presence. Clara had foreseen that, if he were called in haste, he would have no time to look over his papers. In fact, he entered the concistory and gave the list to the secretaries without looking it over. His surprise was great when the name of Farnese was read out; but he preferred silence to the exposure of his senile debaucheries. It is not our purpose to go over the long career of Farnese. While yet a youth he had been imprisoned in Sant Angelo for counterfeiting a brief, and Alexander VI. would have beheaded him if he had not contrived to escape from prison. We shall not repeat the errors of his contemporary historians, that he united the black act to his astronomical learning, and that he thus, through intercourse with demons, learned many secrets and became skilled in political intrigues. It is enough to say that, on arriving at the pontifical throne, he devoted all his efforts to the aggrandizement of his family; and, not content with obtaining the duchy of Camerino for his bastard son Pierluigi, intrigued to elevate him to the government of Parma and Piacenza, and even raised his eyes to that of Milan. It was not then a reproach, says Segni,[37] that a Pope had illegitimate children and sought by every means to confer upon them wealth and dignities; on the contrary, the Pontiff who aspired to temporal grandeur was in repute as a man of prudence and sagacity. Paul III. intrigued for a long time with the emperor to acquire the duchy of Milan for Pierluigi, though he well knew that Charles, in occupying Lombardy, had protested that he did not wish to hold it for his own advantage but for that of Italy. In these intentions he was confirmed by the influence of the Venitians, the marquis Vasto and the king of France. The Spanish monarch had already disappointed the ambition of the duke of Orleans, who aspired to the duchy, and he also refused it to Pierluigi. But the Pope, after long intrigues to overcome the scruples of the cardinals, gave his son the investiture of Parma and Piacenza, making them tributary to the church in the sum of nine thousand ducats.