teries, and all the women taken were given in prey to the
greatest cruelty. The total number of the slain is estimated at four
thousand."

D'Auton, too, bears witness to this wholesale violation of the women,
"which," he adds, "is the very worst of all war's excesses." He informs
us further that "the foot-soldiers of the Duke of Valentinois acquitted
themselves so well in this, that thirty of the most beautiful women went
captive to Rome," a figure which is confirmed by Burchard.

"What an opportunity was not this for Guicciardini! The foot-soldiers
of the Duke of Valentinois acquitted themselves so well in this, that
thirty of the most beautiful women went captive to Rome."

Under his nimble, malicious, unscrupulous pen that statement is
re-edited until not thirty but forty is the number of the captured
victims taken to Rome, and not Valentinois's foot, but Valentinois
himself the ravisher of the entire forty! But hear the elegant
Florentine's own words:

"It was spread about [divulgossi]" he writes, "that, besides other
wickednesses worthy of eternal infamy, many women who had taken refuge
in a tower, and thus escaped the first fury of the assault, were found
by the Duke of Valentinois, who, with the title of King's Lieutenant,
followed the army with no more people than his gentlemen and his
guards.(1) He desired to see them all, and, after carefully examining
them [consideratele diligentemente] he retained forty of the most
beautiful."

1 This, incidentally, is another misstatement. Valentinois had with
him, besides the thousand foot levied by the Pope and the hundred lances
under Morgante Baglioni, an army some thousands strong led for him by
Yves d'Allegre.

Guicciardini's aim is, of course, to shock you; he considers it
necessary to maintain in Cesare the character of ravenous wolf which he
had bestowed upon him. The marvel is not that Guicciardini should have
penned that utterly ludicrous accusation, but that more or less serious
subsequent writers--and writers of our own time even--instead of being
moved to contemptuous laughter at the wild foolishness of the story,
instead of seeking in the available records the germ of true fact from
which it was sprung, should sedulously and unblushingly have carried
forward its dissemination.

Yriarte not only repeats the tale with all the sober calm of one utterly
destitute of a sense of the ridiculous, but he improves upon it by a
delicious touch, worthy o