f him at this time in
connection with his sister's wedding. Apparently, then, he was not
present, although it is impossible to suggest where he might have been
at the time.

Boccaccio draws a picture of him in that letter, which is worthy of
attention, "On the day before yesterday I found Cesare at home in
Trastevere. He was on the point of setting out to go hunting, and
entirely in secular habit; that is to say, dressed in silk and armed.
Riding together, we talked a while. I am among his most intimate
acquaintances. He is man of great talent and of an excellent nature; his
manners are those of the son of a great prince; above everything, he is
joyous and light-hearted. He is very modest, much superior to, and of a
much finer appearance than, his brother the Duke of Gandia, who also is
not short of natural gifts. The archbishop never had any inclination for
the priesthood. But his benefice yields him over 16,000 ducats."

It may not be amiss--though perhaps no longer very necessary, after what
has been written--to say a word at this stage on the social position of
bastards in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to emphasize the fact
that no stigma attached to Cesare Borgia or to any other member of his
father's family on the score of the illegitimacy of their birth.

It is sufficient to consider the marriages they contracted to perceive
that, however shocking the circumstances may appear to modern notions,
the circumstance of their father being a Pope not only cannot have been
accounted extraordinarily scandalous (if scandalous at all) but, on the
contrary, rendered them eligible for alliances even princely.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we see the bastard born of
a noble, as noble as his father, displaying his father's arms without
debruisement and enjoying his rank and inheritance unchallenged on the
score of his birth, even though that inheritance should be a throne--as
witness Lucrezia's husband Giovanni, who, though a bastard of the house
of Sforza, succeeded, nevertheless, his father in the Tyranny of Pesaro
and Cotignola.

Later we shall see this same Lucrezia, her illegitimacy notwithstanding,
married into the noble House of Este and seated upon the throne of
Ferrara. And before then we shall have seen the bastard Cesare married
to a daughter of the royal House of Navarre. Already we have seen the
bastard Francesco Cibo take to wife the daughter of the great Lorenzo
de'Medici, and we have se