sign of the Bear, 'The
Orsini Arms,' as an English innkeeper would christen it, should have
been the principal resort of the kind in a quarter which was
three-fourths the property and altogether the possession of the great
house that overshadowed it, from Monte Giordano on the one side, and
from Pompey's Theatre on the other.

The temporary fall of the Orsini at the end of the sixteenth century
came about by one of the most extraordinary concatenations of events to
be found in the chronicles. The story has filled more than one volume
and is nevertheless very far from complete; nor is it possible, since
the destruction of the Orsini archives, to reconstruct it with absolute
accuracy. Briefly told, it is this.

Felice Peretti, monk and Cardinal of Montalto, and still nominally one
of the so-called 'poor cardinals' who received from the Pope a daily
allowance known as 'the Dish,' had nevertheless accumulated a good deal
of property before he became Pope under the name of Sixtus the Fifth,
and had brought some of his relatives to Rome. Among these was his well
beloved nephew, Francesco Peretti, for whom he naturally sought an
advantageous marriage. There was at that time in Rome a notary, named
Accoramboni, a native of the Marches of Ancona and a man of some wealth
and of good repute. He had one daughter, Vittoria, a girl of excessive
vanity, as ambitious as she was vain and as singularly beautiful as she
was ambitious. But she was also clever in a remarkable degree, and seems
to have had no difficulty in hiding her bad qualities. Francesco Peretti
fell in love with her, the Cardinal approved the match, though he was a
man not easily deceived, and the two were married and settled in the
Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of
Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains
to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and
to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome
and her lovely face was one of the city's sights. The Cardinal,
devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter's young wife
and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever
men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having been deceived in
his judgment of a girl's character. So far, there is nothing not
commonplace about the tale.

At that time Paolo Giordano Orsini, the head of the house, Duke of
Bracciano and lord of a hundred