which after his removal from Rome seems to have made progress.  Yet though this malady may well have cut his life short, suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quite unreasonable.  The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsini family were all interested in his death.  Anyhow, he had time to make a will in Vittoria’s favour, leaving her large sums of money, jewels, goods, and houses—­enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity with splendour.  His hereditary fiefs and honours passed by right to his only son, Virginio.

Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court of Bracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joined by Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini.  Lodovico Orsini assumed the duty of settling Vittoria’s affairs under her dead husband’s will.  In life he had been the Duke’s ally as well as relative.  His family pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him an ignoble, as it was certainly an unequal, marriage.  He now showed himself the relentless enemy of the Duchess.  Disputes arose between them as to certain details, which seem to have been legally decided in the widow’s favour.  On the night of the 22nd of December, however, forty men disguised in black and fantastically tricked out to elude detection, surrounded her palace.  Through the long galleries and chambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing torches, in search of Vittoria and her brothers.  Marcello escaped, having fled the house under suspicion of the murder of one of his own followers.  Flaminio, the innocent and young, was playing on his lute and singing Miserere in the great hall of the palace.  The murderers surprised him with a shot from one of their harquebuses.  He ran, wounded in the shoulder, to his sister’s room.  She, it is said, was telling her beads before retiring for the night.  When three of the assassins entered, she knelt before the crucifix, and there they stabbed her in the left breast, turning the poignard in the wound, and asking her with savage insults if her heart was pierced.  Her last words were, ’Jesus, I pardon you.’  Then they turned to Flaminio, and left him pierced with seventy-four stiletto wounds.

The authorities of Padua identified the bodies of Vittoria and Flaminio, and sent at once for further instructions to Venice.  Meanwhile it appears that both corpses were laid out in one open coffin for the people to contemplate.  The palace and the church of the Eremitani, to which they had been removed, were crowded all through the following day with a vast concourse of the Paduans.  Vittoria’s wonderful dead body, pale yet sweet to look upon, the golden hair flowing around her marble shoulders, the red wound in her breast uncovered, the stately limbs arrayed in satin as she died, maddened the populace with its surpassing loveliness. ‘Dentibus fremebant,’ says the chronicler, when they beheld that gracious lady stiff in death.  And of a truth, if her corpse was actually exposed in the