nvulsions
supervened, and a froth deadly and abundant ran out from his jaws; it was
this froth, collected into a silver vessel and transferred into a bottle
hermetically sealed, that made the liquid poison.]

Towards evening Alexander VI walked from the Vatican leaning on Caesar's
arm, and turned his steps towards the vineyard, accompanied by Cardinal
Caraffa; but as the heat was great and the climb rather steep, the pope,
when he reached the top, stopped to take breath; then putting his hand on
his breast, he found that he had left in his bedroom a chain that he
always wore round his neck, which suspended a gold medallion that
enclosed the sacred host. He owed this habit to a prophecy that an
astrologer had made, that so long as he carried about a consecrated
wafer, neither steel nor poison could take hold upon him. Now, finding
himself without his talisman, he ordered Monsignors Caraffa to hurry back
at once to the Vatican, and told him in which part of his room he had
left it, so that he might get it and bring it him without delay. Then,
as the walk had made him thirsty, he turned to a valet, giving signs with
his hand as he did so that his messenger should make haste, and asked for
something to drink. Caesar, who was also thirsty, ordered the man to
bring two glasses. By a curious coincidence, the butler had just gone
back to the Vatican to fetch some magnificent peaches that had been sent
that very day to the pope, but which had been forgotten when he came
here; so the valet went to the under butler, saying that His Holiness and
Monsignors the Duke of Romagna were thirsty and asking for a drink. The
under butler, seeing two bottles of wine set apart, and having heard that
this wine was reserved for the pope, took one, and telling the valet to
bring two glasses on a tray, poured out this wine, which both drank,
little thinking that it was what they had themselves prepared to poison
their guests.

Meanwhile Caraffa hurried to the Vatican, and, as he knew the palace
well, went up to the pope's bedroom, a light in his hand and attended by
no servant. As he turned round a corridor a puff of wind blew out his
lamp; still, as he knew the way, he went on, thinking there was no need
of seeing to find the object he was in search of; but as he entered the
room he recoiled a step, with a cry of terror: he beheld a ghastly
apparition; it seemed that there before his eyes, in the middle of the
room, between the door and the