صفحة 326 من 490

Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,

and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some

curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured

the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and

weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who

slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her

lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro

Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second, who sought in his

vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and whose tiara, valued

at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of a

terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase

living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a

harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with

Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the

blood of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of

Florence, child and minion of Sixtus IV., whose beauty was

equalled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of

Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with

nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the

feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be

cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for

red blood, as other men have for red wine-the son of the Fiend,

as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when

gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in

mockery took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the

blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo

Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose

effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who

strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra

d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a shameful passion

built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had

so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned him

of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain

had sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen

cards painted with the images of love and death and madness; and,

in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls,

Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and

Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as

he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated

him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him,

blessed him.