turned into the room, and found their friend convulsively
clutching in his arms a magnificent crucifix which he had just taken
dawn from the bed-head. In vain did they try to reassure him with
friendly words. Lorenzo the Magnificent only replied with sobs; and one
hour after the scene which we have just related, his lips clinging to
the feet of the Christ, he breathed his last in the arms of these three
men, of whom the most fortunate--though all three were young--was not
destined to survive him more than two years. "Since his death was to
bring about many calamities," says Niccolo Macchiavelli, "it was the
will of Heaven to show this by omens only too certain: the dome of the
church of Santa Regarata was struck by lightning, and Roderigo Borgia
was elected pope."

CHAPTER I

Towards the end of the fifteenth century--that is to say, at the epoch
when our history opens the Piazza of St. Peter's at Rome was far from
presenting so noble an aspect as that which is offered in our own day to
anyone who approaches it by the Piazza dei Rusticucci.

In fact, the Basilica of Constantine existed no longer, while that of
Michael Angelo, the masterpiece of thirty popes, which cost the labour
of three centuries and the expense of two hundred and sixty millions,
existed not yet. The ancient edifice, which had lasted for eleven
hundred and forty-five years, had been threatening to fall in about
1440, and Nicholas V, artistic forerunner of Julius II and Leo X, had
had it pulled down, together with the temple of Probus Anicius which
adjoined it. In their place he had had the foundations of a new temple
laid by the architects Rossellini and Battista Alberti; but some years
later, after the death of Nicholas V, Paul II, the Venetian, had not
been able to give more than five thousand crowns to continue the project
of his predecessor, and thus the building was arrested when it had
scarcely risen above the ground, and presented the appearance of a
still-born edifice, even sadder than that of a ruin.

As to the piazza itself, it had not yet, as the reader will understand
from the foregoing explanation, either the fine colonnade of Bernini,
or the dancing fountains, or that Egyptian obelisk which, according to
Pliny, was set up by the Pharaoh at Heliopolis, and transferred to Rome
by Caligula, who set it up in Nero's Circus, where it remained till
1586. Now, as Nero's Circus was situate on the very ground where St.
Peter's now stands,