Sabatini's "Cesare Borgia".
Behold how easy it is to dispense with evidence. So that your tale be well-salted and well-spiced, a fico for evidence! If it hangs not overwell together in places, if there be contradictions, lacunae, or openings for doubt, fling the Verdict of History into the gap, and so strike any questioner into silence.
So far have matters gone in this connection that who undertakes to set down-to-day the history of Cesare Borgia, with intent to do just and honest work, must find it impossible to tell a plain and straightforward tale--to present him not as a villain of melodrama, not a monster, ludicrous, grotesque, impossible, but as a human being, a cold, relentless egoist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: a splendid soldier, an unrivalled administrator, a man pre-eminently just, if merciless in that same justice.
- Rafael Sabatini, "The Life of Cesare Borgia"
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/928926.html and has
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So far have matters gone in this connection that who undertakes to set down-to-day the history of Cesare Borgia, with intent to do just and honest work, must find it impossible to tell a plain and straightforward tale--to present him not as a villain of melodrama, not a monster, ludicrous, grotesque, impossible, but as a human being, a cold, relentless egoist, it is true, using men for his own ends, terrible and even treacherous in his reprisals, swift as a panther and as cruel where his anger was aroused, yet with certain elements of greatness: a splendid soldier, an unrivalled administrator, a man pre-eminently just, if merciless in that same justice.
- Rafael Sabatini, "The Life of Cesare Borgia"
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/928926.html and has
comments.