Ave Roma Immortalis Volume Ii Part 4

Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the G.o.d of their fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of the Messiah.

And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews concerning the future--even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to save Christian souls from the h.e.l.l which no Jew could escape save by conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization.

They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome, or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies since t.i.tus destroyed the Temple and brought thousands of them, in the train of Pompey's thousands, to build the Colosseum; and the wisest among them, if they be faithful and believing Jews, as many are, ask themselves whether this great change, which looks so like improvement, is really for good, or whether it is the beginning of the end of the oldest nation of us all.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

REGION XII RIPA

In Italian, as in Latin, Ripa means the bank of a river, and the Twelfth Region took its name from being bounded by the river bank, from just below the island all the way to the Aurelian walls, which continue the boundary of the triangle on the south of Saint Sebastian's gate; the third side runs at first irregularly from the theatre of Marcellus to the foot of the Palatine, skirts the hill to the gas works at the north corner of the Circus Maximus, takes in the latter, and thence runs straight to the gate before mentioned. The Region includes the Aventine, Monte Testaccio, and the baths of Caracalla. The origin of the device, like that of several others, seems to be lost.

The Aventine, ever since the auguries of Remus, has been especially the refuge of opposition, and more especially, perhaps, of religious opposition. In very early times it was especially the hill of the plebeians, who frequently retired to its heights in their difficulties with the patricians, as they had once withdrawn to the more distant Mons Sacer in the Campagna. The temple of Ceres stood in the immediate neighbourhood of the Circus, on the line of approach to the Aventine, and contained the archives of the plebeian aediles. In the times of the Decemvirs, much of the land on the hill was distributed among the people, who probably lived within the city, but went out daily to cultivate their little farms, just as the inhabitants of the hill villages do today.

If this were not the case, it would be hard to explain how the Aventine could have been a solitude at night, as it was in the time of the Bacchic orgies, of which the discovery convulsed the republic, and ended in a religious persecution. That was when Scipio of Asia had been accused and not acquitted of having taken a bribe of six thousand pounds of gold and four hundred and eighty pounds of silver to favour Antiochus. It was in the first days of Rome's corruption, when the brilliant army of Asia first brought the love of foreign luxury to Rome; when the soldiers, enriched with booty, began to have bra.s.s bedsteads, rich coverlets and curtains, and other things of woven stuff in their magnificent furniture, and little Oriental tables with one foot, and decorated sideboards; when people first had singing-girls, and lute-players, and players on the sharp-strung 'triangle,' and actors, to amuse them at their feasts; when the feasts themselves began to be extravagant, and the office of a cook, once mean and despised, rose to be one of high estimation and rich emolument, so that what had been a slave's work came to be regarded as an art. It was no wonder that such changes came about in Rome, when every triumph brought hundreds and thousands of pounds of gold and silver to the city, when Marcus Fulvius brought back hundreds of crowns of gold, and two hundred and eighty-five bronze statues, and two hundred and thirty statues of marble, with other vast spoils, and when Cnaeus Manlius brought home wealth in bullion and in coin, which even in these days, when the value of money is far less, would be worth any nation's having.

And with it all came Greek corruption, Greek wors.h.i.+p, Greek vice. For years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Maenads were celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol, from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first come to Rome from Etruria, and had then turned Greek, as it were, in the days of the Asian triumphs; and first it was an orgy of drunken women only, as in most ancient times, but soon men were admitted, and presently a rule was made that no one should be initiated who was over twenty years of age, and that those who refused to submit to the horrid rites after being received should perish in the deepest cave of the hill, while the noise of drums and clas.h.i.+ng cymbals and of shouting drowned their screams. And many boys and girls were thus done to death; and the conspiracy of the orgies was widespread in Rome, yet the secret was well kept.

Now there was a certain youth at that time, whose father had died, and whose mother was one of the Maenads and had married a man as bad as herself. He and she were guardians of her son's fortune, and they had squandered it, and knew that when he came of age they should not be able to give an account of their guardians.h.i.+p. They therefore determined to initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to pieces by the Maenads, and they might escape the law in their fraud. His mother called him, and told him that once, when he had been ill, she had promised the G.o.ds that she would initiate him in the Baccha.n.a.lia if he recovered, and that it was now time to perform her vow. And doubtless she delighted his ignorance with an account of a beautiful and solemn ceremony.

But this youth was dearly loved by a woman whose faith to him covered many sins. She had been a slave when a girl, and with her mistress had been initiated, and knew what the rites were, and how evil and terrible; and since she had been freed she had never gone to them. So when her lover told her he was to go, thinking it good news, she was terrified, and told him that it were better that both he and she should die that night, than that he should be so contaminated. When he knew the truth, he went home and told his mother and his stepfather boldly that he would not go; and they, being beside themselves with anger and disappointment, called four slaves and threw him out into the street. For which deed they died. For the young man went to his father's sister, and told all; and she sent him to the Consul to tell his story, who called the woman that loved him, and promised her protection, so that at last she told the truth, and he brought the matter before the Senate. Then there was great horror at what was told, and the people who had been initiated fled in haste by thousands, and the city was in a turmoil, while the Senate made new and terrible laws against the rites. Many persons were put to death, and a few were taken and imprisoned on suspicion, and many, being guilty, killed themselves. For it was found that more than seven thousand men and women had conspired in the orgies, and the contamination had spread throughout Italy.

As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for him, the Senate and the people made a n.o.ble and generous decree. For him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever furnis.h.i.+ng a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and praetors in the future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not, no one knows.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLaeUS

From a print of the last century]

This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint Achillaeus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines, beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great, once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.

Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies; and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third--a famous chronicler in his day--and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between Colonna and Orsini.

It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine.

So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had taken their t.i.tle, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose name was 'of the oak'--for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one please.

Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days there were strange superst.i.tions and ceremonies connected with the bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May,--the fifteenth of that month,--when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes s.e.xtus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Cra.s.sus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark superst.i.tions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE]

Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went back to their daily life in silence.

But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope, while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment--a right perhaps asked for by him, as one of the brothers, and granted for his sake. Baracconi has discovered an account of the ceremony. At the first meeting in August, the governor of the confraternity appointed three brethren to visit all the prisons of Rome and note the names of the prisoners condemned to death, drawing up a precise account of each case, but ascertaining especially which ones had obtained the forgiveness of those whom they had injured. At the second meeting in August, the reports were read, and the brethren chose the fortunate man by ballot.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTO SAN SEBASTIANO]

Then the whole dark company went in procession to the prison. The beadle of the order marched first, bearing his black wand in one hand, and in the other a robe of scarlet silk and a torch for the pardoned man; two brothers followed with staves, others with lanterns, more with lighted torches, and after them was borne the crucifix, the sacred figure's arms hanging down, perhaps supposed to be in the act of receiving the pardoned man, and a crown of silvered olive hung at its feet--then more brothers, and last of all the Governor and the chaplain. The prison doors were draped with tapestries, box and myrtle strewed the ground, and the Governor received the condemned person and signed a receipt for his body. The happy man prostrated himself before the crucifix, was crowned with the olive garland, the Te Deum was intoned, and he was led away to the brotherhood's church, where he heard high ma.s.s in sight of all the people. Last, and not least, if he was a pauper, the brethren provided him with a little money and obtained him some occupation; if a stranger, they paid his journey home.

But the Roman rabble, says the writer, far preferred an execution to a pardon, and would follow a condemned man to the scaffold in thousands.

If he was to be hanged, the person who touched the halter was the most fortunate, and much money was often paid for bits of the rope; and at night, when the wretched corpse was carried away to the church by the brethren, the crowd followed in long procession, mumbling prayers, to kneel on the church steps at last and implore the dead man's liberated spirit to suggest to them, by some accident, numbers to be played at the lottery--custom which recalls the incantations of the witches by the crosses of executed slaves on the Esquiline.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

REGION XIII TRASTEVERE

All that part of Rome which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and a standard of its own.

The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language.

There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese, which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country.

It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality, cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old fas.h.i.+oned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region, has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's traditional skill in modelling stucco has covered vast surfaces of unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the existence of a quant.i.ty of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather.

It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and never to be inhabited--landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant to be the homes of a rich middle cla.s.s, and given over at derisory rents to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage.

But Trastevere escaped, being despised by the builders on account of its distance from the chief centres. It has even preserved something of the ancient city in its looks and habits. Then, as now, the wine shops and cook shops opened directly upon the street, because they were, as they still often are, mere single, vaulted chambers, having no communication with the inner house by door or stairway. The little inner court, where the well is, may have been wider in those days, but it must always have been a cool, secluded place, where the women could wrangle and tear one another's hair in decent privacy. In the days when everything went to the gutter, it was a wise precaution to have as few windows as possible looking outward. In old Rome, as in Trastevere, there must have been an air of mystery about all dwelling-houses, as there is everywhere in the East. In those days, far more than now, the head of the house was lord and despot within his own walls; but something of that power remains by tradition of right at the present time, and the patriarchal system is not yet wholly dead. The business of the man was to work and fight for his wife and children, just as to fight and hunt for his family were the occupations of the American Indian. In return, he received absolute obedience and abject acknowledgment of his superiority. The government-fed Indian and the Roman father of today do very little fighting, working, or hunting, but in their several ways they still claim much of the same slavish obedience as in old times. One is inclined to wonder whether nowadays the independence of women is not due to the fall in value of men, since it is no longer necessary to pursue wild beasts for food, since fighting is reduced to a science, taught in three months, and seldom needed for a long time, and since work has become so largely the monopoly of the nimble typewriter. Women ask themselves and others, with at least a show of justice, since man's occupation is to sit still and think, whether they might not, with a little practice, sit quite as still as he and think to as good a purpose. In America, for instance, it was one thing to fell big trees, build log huts, dam rivers, plough stony ground, kill bears, and fight Indians; it is altogether another to sit in a comfortable chair before a plate-gla.s.s window, and dictate notes to a dumb and skilful stenographer.

But with the development of women's independence, the air of privacy, not to say of mystery, disappears from the modern dwelling. In Trastevere things have not gone as far as that. One cannot tread the narrow streets without wondering a little about the lives of the grave, black-haired, harsh-voiced people who go in and out by the dark entrances, and stand together in groups in Piazza Romana, or close to Ponte Sisto, early in the morning, and just before midday, and again in the cool of the evening.

It seems to be a part of the real simplicity of the Italian Latin to put on a perfectly useless look of mystery on all occasions, and to a.s.sume the air of a conspirator when buying a cabbage; and more than one gifted writer has fallen into the error of believing the Italian character to be profoundly complicated. One is too apt to forget that it needs much deeper duplicity to maintain an appearance of frankness under trying circ.u.mstances than to make a mystery of one's marketing and a profound secret of one's cookery. There are few things which the poor Italian more dislikes than to be watched when he is buying and preparing his food, though he will ask any one to share it with him when it is ready; but he is almost as p.r.o.ne to hide everything else that goes on inside his house, unless he has fair warning of a visit, and full time to make preparation for a guest. In the feeling there is great decency and self-respect, as well as a wish to show respect to others.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PONTE GARIBALDI]

To Romans, Trastevere suggests great names--Stefaneschi, Anguillara, Mattei, Raphael, Ta.s.so. The story of the first has been told already.

Straight from the end of the new bridge that bears the name of Garibaldi, stands the ancient tower of the great Guelph house of Anguillara that fought the Orsini long and fiercely, and went down at last before them, when it turned against the Pope. And when he was dead the Orsini bought the lands and strongholds he had given to his so-called nephew, and set the eel of Anguillara in their own escutcheon, in memory of a struggle that had lasted more than a hundred years. The Anguillara were seldom heard of after that; nor does anything remain of them today but the melancholy ruins of an ancient fortress on the lake of Bracciano, not far from the magnificent castle, and the single tower that bears their name in Rome.

But Baracconi has discovered a story or a legend about one of them who lived a hundred years later, and who somehow was by that time lord of Caere, or Ceri, again, as some of his ancestors had been. It was when Charles the Fifth came to Rome, and there were great doings; for it was then that the old houses that filled the lower Forum were torn down in a few days to make him a triumphal street, and many other things were done. Then the Emperor gave a public audience in Rome, and out of curiosity the young t.i.tta dell' Anguillara went in to see the imperial show. There he saw that a few of the n.o.bles wore their caps, and he, thinking himself as good as they, put on his own. The Grand Chamberlain asked him why he was covered. 'Because I have a cold,' he answered, and laughed. He was told that only Grandees of Spain might wear their caps in the Emperor's presence. 'Tell the Emperor,' said the boy, 'that I, too, am a Grandee in my house, and that if he would take my cap from my head, he must do it with his sword,' and he laid his hand to the hilt of his own. And when the Emperor heard the story, he smiled and let him alone.

Many years ago, before the change of government, the Trasteverine family, into whose possession the ancient tower had come, used to set out at Christmas-tide a little show of lay figures representing the Nativity and the Adoration of the Kings, in the highest story of the strange old place, and almost in the open air. It was a pretty and a peaceful sight. The small figures of the Holy Family, of the Kings, of the shepherds and their flocks, were modelled and coloured with wonderful skill, and in the high, bright air, with the little landscape as cleverly made up as the figures, it all stood out clearly and strangely lifelike. There were many of these Presepi, as they were called, in Rome at that season, but none so pretty as that in the gloomy old tower, of which every step had been washed with blood.

Of all tales of household feud and vengeance and murder that can be found in old Rome, one of the most terrible is told of the Mattei, whose great palace used to stand almost opposite the bridge of Saint Bartholomew, leading to the island, and not more than two hundred yards from the Anguillara tower. It happened in the year 1555, about the time when Paul the Fourth, of inquisitorial memory, was elected Pope, thirty years before the sons of the Ma.s.simo murdered their father's unworthy wife, and Orsini married Victoria Accoramboni; and the deeds were done within the walls of the old house of which a fragment still remains in the Lungaretta, with a door surmounted by the chequered s.h.i.+eld of the Mattei.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PALAZZO MATTEI

From a print of the last century]

At that time there were four brothers of the name, Marcantonio, Piero, Alessandro, and Curzio; and the first two quarrelled mortally, wherefore Piero caused Marcantonio to be murdered by hired a.s.sa.s.sins. Of these men, Alessandro, who dearly loved both his murdered brother and his younger brother Curzio, slew one with his own hand, but the rest escaped, and he swore a blood feud against Piero. Yet, little by little, his anger subsided, and there was a sort of armed peace between the two.

Then it happened that Piero, who was rich, fell in love with his own niece, the beautiful Olimpia, the dowerless daughter of his other brother Curzio; and Curzio, tempted by the hope of wealth, consented to the match, and the dispensation of the Church was obtained for the marriage. It is not rare, even nowadays, for a man to marry his niece in Europe, whether they be Catholics or Protestants, but the Italians are opposed to such marriages; and Alessandro Mattei, pitying the lovely girl, whose life was to be sold for money, and bitterly hating the murderer bridegroom, swore that the thing should not be. Yet he could not prevent the wedding, for Piero was rich and powerful, and of a determined character. So Piero was married, and after the wedding, in the evening, he gave a great feast in his house, and invited to it all the kinsmen of the family, with their wives.

And Alessandro Mattei came also, with his son, Girolamo, and bringing with him two men whom he called his friends, but whom no one knew. These were hired murderers, but Piero smiled pleasantly and made a pretence of being well satisfied. The company feasted together, and drank old wine, with songs and rejoicings of all sorts. Then Alessandro rose to go home, for it was late, and Piero led him to the door of the hall to take leave of him courteously, so that all the kinsfolk might see that there was peace, for they were all looking on, some sitting in their places and some standing up out of respect for the elder men as they went to the door. Alessandro stood still, exchanging courtesies with his brother, while his servants brought him his cloak, and the arquebuse he carried at night for safety; for he had his palace across the Tiber, where it stands today. Then taking the hand-gun, he spoke no more words, but shot his brother in the breast, and killed him, and fled, leaving his son behind, for the young man had wished to stay till the end of the feast, and the two hired a.s.sa.s.sins had been brought by his father to protect him, though he did not know it.

When they heard the shot, the women knew that there was blood, so they sprang up and put out the lights in an instant, that the men might not see to kill one another; therefore Curzio, the bride's father, did not see that his brother Alessandro had gone out after the killing. He crept about with a long knife, feeling in the dark for the embroidered doublet which Alessandro wore, and when he thought that he had found it, he struck; but it was Girolamo who was dressed like his father, and the two who were to watch him were on each side of him, and one of them feeling that Curzio was going to strike, and knowing him also by the touch of what he wore, killed him quietly before his blow went home, and dragged out Girolamo in haste, for the door was open, and there was some light in the stairs, whence the servants had fled. But others had sought Alessandro, and other blows had been dealt in the dark, and the bride herself was wounded, but not mortally.

Girolamo and the man who had killed Curzio came to the Bridge of Saint Bartholomew, where Alessandro was waiting, very anxious for his son; and when he saw him in the starlight he drew a long breath. But when he knew what had happened and how the murderer had killed Curzio to save the boy, Alessandro was suddenly angry, for he had loved Curzio dearly. So he quickly drew his dagger and stabbed the man in the breast, and threw his body, yet breathing, over the bridge into the river. But that night he left Rome secretly and quickly, and he lived out his days an outlaw, while Girolamo, who was innocent of all, became the head of the Mattei in Rome.