e Borgia,
and the extraordinary success which followed him all his days.
Alexander's moral character is, however, so incomprehensible that even
the keenest psychologists have failed to fathom it.

In him neither ambition nor the desire for power, which, in the majority
of rulers, is the motive of their crimes, was the cause of his evil
deeds. Nor was it hate of his fellows, nor cruelty, nor yet a vicious
pleasure in doing evil. It was, however, his sensuality and also his
love for his children--one of the noblest of human sentiments. All
psychological theory would lead us to expect that the weight of his sins
would have made Alexander a gloomy man with reason clouded by fear and
madness, like Tiberius or Louis XI; but instead of this we have ever
before us the cheerful, active man of the world--even until his last
years. "Nothing worries him; he seems to grow younger every day," wrote
the Venetian ambassador scarcely two years before his death.

It is not his passions or his crimes that are incomprehensible, for
similar and even greater crimes have been committed by other princes
both before and after him, but it is the fact that he committed them
while he was Pope. How could Alexander VI reconcile his sensuality and
his cruelty with the consciousness that he was the High Priest of the
Church, God's representative on earth? There are abysses in the human
soul to the depths of which no glance can penetrate. How did he overcome
the warnings, the qualms of conscience, and how was it possible for him
constantly to conceal them under a joyous exterior? Could he believe in
the immortality of the soul and the existence of a divine Being?

When we consider the utter abandon with which Alexander committed his
crimes, we are forced to conclude that he was an atheist and a
materialist. There is a time in the life of every philosophic and
unhappy soul when all human endeavor seems nothing more than the
despairing, purposeless activity of an aggregation of puppets. But in
Alexander VI we discover no trace of a Faust, nothing of his supreme
contempt of the world, of his Titanic skepticism; but we find, on the
contrary, that he possessed an amazingly simple faith, coupled with a
capacity for every crime. The Pope who had Christ's mother painted
with the features of the adulteress Giulia Farnese believed that he
himself enjoyed the special protection of the Virgin.

[Illustration: CARDINAL BEMBO.

From an engraving by G. Benaglia.