came
the fashion. She exercised an irresistible influence over all who saw
her, and many were the offers of marriage she refused. At length a
suitor appeared whose condition and connection with the Roman
ecclesiastical nobility rendered him acceptable in the eyes of the
Accoramboni. Francesco Peretti was welcomed as the successful
candidate for Vittoria's hand. His mother, Camilla, was sister to
Felice, Cardinal of Montalto; and her son, Francesco Mignucci, had
changed his surname in compliment to this illustrious relative. The
Peretti were of humble origin. The cardinal himself had tended swine
in his native village; but, supported by an invincible belief in his
own destinies, and gifted with a powerful intellect and determined
character, he passed through all grades of the Franciscan Order to its
generalship, received the bishoprics of Fermo and S. Agata, and
lastly, in the year 1570, assumed the scarlet with the title of
Cardinal Montalto. He was now upon the high way to the Papacy,
amassing money by incessant care, studying the humours of surrounding
factions, effacing his own personality, and by mixing but little in
the intrigues of the court, winning the reputation of a prudent,
inoffensive old man. These were his tactics for securing the Papal
throne; nor were his expectations frustrated; for in 1585 he was
chosen Pope, the parties of the Medici and the Farnesi agreeing to
accept him as a compromise. When Sixtus V. was once firmly seated on
S. Peter's chair, he showed himself in his true colours. An implacable
administrator of severest justice, a rigorous economist, an
iconoclastic foe to paganism, the first act of his reign was to
declare a war of extirpation against the bandits who had reduced Rome
in his predecessor's rule to anarchy.

It was the nephew, then, of this man, whom historians have judged the
greatest personage of his own times, that Vittoria Accoramboni married
on the 28th of June 1573. For a short while the young couple lived
happily together. According to some accounts of their married life,
the bride secured the favour of her powerful uncle-in-law, who
indulged her costly fancies to the full. It is, however, more probable
that the Cardinal Montalto treated her follies with a grudging
parsimony; for we soon find the Peretti household hopelessly involved
in debt. Discord, too, arose between Vittoria and her husband on the
score of a certain levity in her behaviour; and it was rumoured that
even