You will remember, for instance, that the Venetian Paolo Capello (though not in Rome at the time) was one of those who was best informed in the matter of the murder of the Duke of Gandia. And it was Capello again who was possessed of the complete details of the scarcely less mysterious business of Alfonso of Aragon. Another who on the subject of the murder of Gandia “had no doubts”--as he himself expressed it--was Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, in Spain at the time, whence he wrote to inform Italy of the true circumstances of a case that had happened in Italy. It is again Pietro Martire d’Anghiera who, on November 10, 1503, writes from Burgos in Spain to inform Rome of the true facts of Alexander’s death--for it is in that letter of his that the tale of the flask of wine, as here set down, finds place for the first time. It is unprofitable to pursue the matter further, since at this time of day even the most reluctant to reject anything that tells against a Borgia have been compelled to admit that the burden of evidence is altogether too overwhelming in this instance, and that it is proved to the hilt that Alexander died of the tertian fever then ravaging Rome. And just as the Pope’s death was the subject of the wildest fictions which have survived until very recent days, so too, was Cesare’s recovery. Again, it was the same Pietro Martire d’Anghiera who from Burgos wrote to inform Rome of what was taking place in the privacy of the Duke of Valentinois’s apartments in the Vatican. Under his facile and magic pen, the jar of ice-cold water into which Cesare was believed to have been plunged was transmuted into a mule which was ripped open that the fever-stricken Cesare might be packed into the pulsating entrails, there to sweat the fever out of him. But so poor and sexless a beast as this seeming in the popular mind inadequate to a man of Cesare’s mettle, it presently improved upon and converted it into a bull--so much more appropriate, too, as being the emblem of his house. Nor does it seem that even then the story has gone far enough. Facilis inventis addere. There comes a French writer with an essay on the Borgias, than which--submitted as sober fact--nothing more amazingly lurid has been written. In this, with a suggestive cleverness entirely Gallic, he causes us to gather an impression of Cesare in the intestinal sudatorium of that eventrated bull, as of one who is at once the hierophant and devotee of a monstrous, foul, and unclean rite of some unspeakable religion--a rite by comparison with which the Black Mass of the Abbé Gribourg becomes a sweet and wholesome thing. But hear the man himself: “Cet homme de meurtres et d’inceste, incarné dans l’animal des hécatombes et des bestialités antiques en évoque les monstrueuses images. Je crois entendre le taureau de Phalaris et le taureau de Pasiphaë répondre, de loin, par d’effrayants mugissements, aux cris humains de ce bucentaure.”