la had carried out his master's orders, including the seizure
of the Pope's treasure. And Burchard tells us how some of Valentinois's
men entered the Vatican--all the gates of which were held by the ducal
troops--and, seizing Cardinal Casanova, they demanded, with a dagger
at his throat and a threat to fling his corpse from the windows if
he refused them, the Pope's keys. These the cardinal surrendered, and
Corella possessed himself of plate and jewels to the value of some
200,000 ducats, besides two caskets containing about 100,000 ducats in
gold. Thereafter the servants of the palace completed the pillage by
ransacking the wardrobes and taking all they could find, so that nothing
was left in the papal apartments but the chairs, a few cushions, and the
tapestries of the walls.

All his life Alexander had been the victim of the most ribald calumnies.
Stories had ever sprung up and thriven, like ill weeds, about his name
and reputation. His sins, great and scandalous in themselves, were
swelled by popular rumour, under the spur of malice, to monstrous and
incredible proportions. As they had exaggerated and lied about the
manner of his life, so--with a consistency worthy of better scope--they
exaggerated and lied about the manner of his death, and, the age being
a credulous one, the stories were such that writers of more modern
and less credulous times dare not insist upon them, lest they should
discredit--as they do--what else has been alleged against him.

Thus when, in his last delirium, the Pope uttered some such words as: "I
am coming; I am coming. It is just. But wait a little," and when those
words were repeated, it was straightway asserted that the Devil was the
being he thus addressed in that supreme hour. The story grew in detail;
that is inevitable with such matter. He had bargained with the devil,
it was said, for a pontificate of twelve years, and, the time being
completed, the devil was come for him. And presently, we even have a
description of Messer the Devil as he appeared on that occasion--in the
shape of a baboon. The Marquis Gonzaga of Mantua, in all seriousness,
writes to relate this. The chronicler Sanuto, receiving the now
popularly current story from another source, in all seriousness gives it
place in his Diarii, thus:

"The devil was seen to leap out of the room in the shape of a baboon.
And a cardinal ran to seize him, and, having caught him, would have
presented him to the Pope; but the Pope