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118 Alexander VI.; to-day they have ceased to exist. Cæsar Borgia was a monster, but he was a great man; it was his aim to expel the barbarians from Italy, and had his father lived, perhaps he might have succeeded in accomplishing that grand design. Ah! would that Heaven might grant us a tyrant like Borgia to deliver us from these human despots who are reducing us to the level of the brutes."

When Don Ottavio once took his flight into the regions of politics there was no such thing as stopping him. When we had reached the Place du Peuple his panegyric upon enlightened despotism was still running its course, but we were a hundred leagues away from my Lucrèce.

On a certain evening when I had gone at a very late hour to pay my respects to the marquise, she told me that her son was indisposed and requested me to go upstairs to his room. I found him lying upon his bed, fully dressed, and reading a French newspaper that I had sent him that morning carefully concealed in a volume of the Fathers of the Church. For sometime past the collection of the Fathers had served as a vehicle for those communications that had to be kept from the eyes of the abbé and the marquise. On those days when the French mail was due a servant would bring me a folio volume, and I would return another into which I had slipped a newspaper that had been loaned me by the secretary of the embassy. It was the means of giving the marquise and her director an exalted idea of my piety, and now and then they tried to induce me to talk theology.

After I had conversed with Don Ottavio for a while, noticing that he was greatly agitated and that even