Ciappon,
Ciappon, voi siete un mal Ciappon!_ The secretaries beat down his terms.
All he cared for was to get money.[1] He agreed to content himself with
120,000 florins. A treaty was signed, and in two days he quitted
Florence.

Hitherto Charles had met with no serious obstacle. His invasion had
fallen like the rain from heaven, and like rain, as far as he was
concerned, it ran away to waste. Lombardy and Tuscany, the two first
scenes in the pageant displayed by Italy before the French army, had
been left behind. Rome now lay before them, magnificent in desolation;
not the Rome which the Farnesi and Chigi and Barberini have built up
from the quarried ruins of amphitheaters and baths, but the Rome of the
Middle Ages, the city crowned with relics of a pagan past, herself still
pagan, and holding in her midst the modern Antichrist. The progress of
the French was a continued triumph. They reached Siena on the second of
December. The Duke of Urbino and the lords of Pesaro and Bologna laid
down their arms at their approach. The Orsini opened their castles:
Virginio, the captain-general of the Aragonese army and grand constable
of the kingdom of Naples, hastened to win for himself favorable terms
from the French sovereign. The Baglioni betook themselves to their own
rancors in Perugia. The Duke of Calabria retreated. Italy seemed bent on
proving that cowardice and selfishness and incapacity had conquered her.
Viterbo was gained: the Ciminian heights were traversed: the Campagna,
bounded by the Alban and the Sabine hills, with Rome, a bluish cloud
upon the lowlands of the Tiber, spread its solemn breadth of beauty at
the invader's feet. Not a blow had been struck, when he reached the
Porta del Popolo upon the 31st of December 1494. At three o'clock in the
afternoon began the entry of the French army. It was nine at night
before the last soldiers, under the flaring light of torches and
flambeaux, defiled through the gates, and took their quarters in the
streets of the Eternal City. The gigantic barbarians of the cantons,
flaunting with plumes and emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France,
splendid with silk mantles and gilded corselets, the Scotch guard in
their wild costume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the
German lanz-knechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons,
stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South. On this
memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday, marched