I had a thought to call this book Pale Hands or Fair Hands Imbrued--so
easy it is to fall into the ghastly error of facetiousness.
Apart, however, from the desire to avoid pedant or puerile humour,
re-examination of my material showed me how near I had been to crashing
into a pitfall of another sort. Of the ladies with whose encounters with
the law I propose to deal several were assoiled of the charges
against them. Their hands, then--unless the present ruddying of female
fingernails is the revival of an old fashion--were not pink-tipped,
save, perhaps, in the way of health; nor imbrued, except in soapsuds. My
proposed facetiousness put me in peril of libel.
Interest in the criminous doings of women is so alive and avid among
criminological writers that it is hard indeed to find material which has
not been dealt with to the point of exhaustion. Does one pick up in a
secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in
which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter oneself that
the find is unique, and therefore providing of fresh fields, it is
almost inevitable that one will discover, or rediscover, that the case
has already been put to bed by Mr Roughead in his inimitable manner.
What a nose the man has! What noses all these rechauffeurs of crime
possess! To use a figure perhaps something unmannerly, the pigs of
Perigord, which, one hears, are trained to hunt truffles, have snouts no
keener.
Suppose, again, that one proposes to deal with the peccancy of women
from the earliest times, it is hard to find a lady, even one whose name
has hitherto gleamed lurid in history, to whom some modern writer has
not contrived by chapter and verse to apply a coat of whitewash.
Locusta, the poisoner whom Agrippina, wanting to kill the Emperor
Claudius by slow degrees, called into service, and whose technique Nero
admired so much that he was fain to put her on his pension list, barely
escapes the deodorant. Messalina comes up in memory. And then one
finds M. Paul Moinet, in his historical essays En Marge de l'histoire,
gracefully pleading for the lady as Messaline la calomniee--yes, and
making out a good case for her. The Empress Theodora under the pen of
a psychological expert becomes nothing more dire than a clever little
whore disguised in imperial purple.
On the mention of poison Lucretia Borgia springs to mind. This is the
lady of whom Gibbon writes with the following ponderous falsity:
In the next generation the house of Este was sullied by a sanguinary and
incestuous race in the nuptials of Alfonso I with Lucretia, a bastard of
Alexander VI, the Tiberius of Christian Rome. This modern Lucretia might
have assumed with more propriety the name of Messalina, since the woman
who can be guilty, who can even be accused, of a criminal intercourse
with a father and two brothers must be abandoned to all the
licentiousness of a venal love.
That, if the phrase may be pardoned, is swatting a butterfly with a
sledge-hammer! Poor little Lucretia, described by the excellent M.
Moinet as a "bon petit coeur," is enveloped in the political ordure
slung by venal pamphleteers at the masterful men of her race. My friend
Rafael Sabatini, than whom no man living has dug deeper into Borgia
history, explains the calumniation of Lucretia in this fashion: Adultery
and promiscuous intercourse were the fashion in Rome at the time of
Alexander VI. Nobody thought anything of them. And to have accused the
Borgia girl, or her relatives, of such inconsiderable lapses would have
been to evoke mere shrugging. But incest, of course, was horrible. The
writers paid by the party antagonistic to the Borgia growth in power
therefore slung the more scurrile accusation. But there is, in truth,
just about as much foundation for the charge as there is for the other,
that Lucretia was a poisoner. The answer to the latter accusation, says
my same authority, may take the form of a question: WHOM DID LUCRETIA
POISON? As far as history goes, even that written by the Borgia enemies,
the reply is, NOBODY!
Were one content, like Gibbon, to take one's history like snuff there
would be to hand a mass of caliginous detail with which to cause
shuddering in the unsuspecting reader. But in mere honesty, if in
nothing else, it behoves the conscientious writer to examine the
sources of his information. The sources may be--they too frequently
are--contaminated by political rancour and bias, and calumnious
accusation against historical figures too often is founded on mere envy.
And then the rechauffeurs, especially where rechauffage is made from
one language to another, have been apt (with a mercenary desire to
give their readers as strong a brew as possible) to attach the darkest
meanings to the words they translate. In this regard, and still apropos
the Borgias, I draw once again on Rafael Sabatini for an example of what
I mean. Touching the festivities celebrating Lucretia's wedding in the
Vatican, the one eyewitness whose writing remains, Gianandrea Boccaccio,
Ferrarese ambassador, in a letter to his master says that amid singing
and dancing, as an interlude, a "worthy" comedy was performed. The
diarist Infessura, who was not there, takes it upon himself to describe
the comedy as "lascivious." Lascivious the comedies of the time commonly
were, but later writers, instead of drawing their ideas from the
eyewitness, prefer the dark hints of Infessura, and are persuaded that
the comedy, the whole festivity, was "obscene." Hence arises the
notion, so popular, that the second Borgia Pope delighted in shows which
anticipated those of the Folies Bergere, or which surpassed the danse du
ventre in lust-excitation.
A statue was made by Guglielmo della Porta of Julia Farnese, Alexander's
beautiful second mistress. It was placed on the tomb of her brother
Alessandro (Pope Paul III). A Pope at a later date provided the lady,
portrayed in 'a state of nature,' with a silver robe--because, say
the gossips, the statue was indecent. Not at all: it was to prevent
recurrence of an incident in which the sculptured Julia took a static
part with a German student afflicted with sex-mania.
I become, however, a trifle excursive, I think. If I do the blame lies
on those partisan writers to whom I have alluded. They have a way of
leading their incautious latter-day brethren up the garden. They hint at
flesh-eating lilies by the pond at the path's end, and you find nothing
more prone to sarcophagy than harmless primulas. In other words, the
beetle-browed Lucretia, with the handy poison-ring, whom they promise
you turns out to be a blue-eyed, fair-haired, rather yielding little
darling, ultimately an excellent wife and mother, given to piety and
good works, used in her earlier years as a political instrument by
father and brother, and these two no worse than masterful and ambitious
men employing the political technique common to their day and age.