On Lucrezia - Part One
This post will be the first to recount the various memorable quotes form Lucrezia Cesare Borgia, A Novel, by John Faunce. This post includes all smaller quotes (non-Cesare) throughout the novel. Three or so additional posts will deal with the longer sections (aka Cesare-related items). Guest references include assorted Julio-Claudians, Savonarola, Hadrian/Antinous, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Judas.
P7 - (Vanita on the Borgias) - No law that I know of has ever interfered with a Borgia’s inclination
P9 - (Roderigo on the death of the previous Pope) - The great pimp is dead.
P11 - (on Roderigo and Vanita’s “1st time”) - She first made love to young Father Roderigo Borgia, she told me, “in fluttering candlelight and shadow below a statue of Saint Christopher, carrying Baby Jesus across the Jordan,” in the sacristy behind the chapel’s altar at sunset that day.
P12 - I recall how everyone these days always raves about what a perfect model of modern man a “courtier” is. Someone ought write a book, so we may finally shut up about courtiers. But “courtesan” is only a female courtier. Why is stigma attached to the feminine syllables, while honor and fashion accrue to the masculine?
P14 - … the Pope’s private Chapel, the Sistine,…It’s called “Sistine” some say because Sixtus built it; but the truth is, because it “holds firm”, sistere, the tottering world.
P23 - (Lucrezia on her father being named Pope) - I knew who Christ was, but what would it signify, that Papa’d become Him? Was the Pope actually Christ? Uncle Callixtus hadn’t looked like Christ; neither did Papa. It’d be spectacular news for Papa, I imagined. I remembered Jesus had been a bachelor. Was that why Mama couldn’t come, too? But hadn’t the courtesan Magdalen
P29 - (the funniest moments of the book involved Lucrezia’s description of the Camerlengo - here is the first) - The octogenarian Camerlengo swayed in a weaving meander with the solid-gold triple tiara up the steps toward my father, halting for an occasional labored and phlegm-clotted wheeze. He looked like Sisyphus, bearing his rock in his eternal climb, and further looked as unconfident as Sisyphus of ever reaching the summit. Cesare and I could just about hear his antediluvian bones creak with painful effort. We glanced at one another, my giggles held within only by the greatest effort and by my hands clasped for dear life over my mouth. I remember thinking that this would be the first Sacred Miracle of my father’s reign, a manifestation of Almighty Approval, if and when Costa would only make it to the top stop.
P30 - As the slips burnt, the Cardinal of Warning whispered in Latin into my father’s ear, just as had long ago been whispered into Caesar’s at his triumphs, “Ricordari memoria custodire, Papa, sic transit Gloria mundi.” “Remember, Holy Father, thus pass the glories of this world.”
P41: (advise to Lucrezia re: marriage)
“Oh, he’ll be a great nobleman and he won’t stand for a wife who doesn’t know how to tidy his castle and dust his antiquities,” they’d said, to my intense annoyance. “Bleccha,” I’d responded. “What’re servants for, after all?”
P81 (the Camerlengo returns) - I remember the chanting of a hundred nuns as I was escorted to my cushion by the miraculously still-alive Cardinal Camerlengo Costa. I kept him more or less upright as we stumbled together down the enormous aisle…. “This ia a longer walk than to Calvary,” Costa mumbled, halfway home…
P99: (Roderigo/Alexander on Savonarola)
Papa didn’t care much about Savonarola... “Will the Medicis not toast me this quarrelsome priest?” Papa’d said casually over bruschetta to the Florentine Ambassador.
“It would help our lawyers, Holiness, if you’d excommunicate him.”
And, of course, he did. So they did, subjecting Savonarola to the “Trial by Fire,” in which he was burnt at the stake. The “Trial” part being that if he were truly innocent, the fire shouldn’t burn him, of course. This seem fair and satisfied everyone, including the subsequently incinerated monk himself.
P105: (on a previous Pope) “Innocent III’s nickname was ‘The Wicked’. I think you’d agree he was more wicked than innocent.”
P112: (the re-appearance of the Camerlengo) In the middle of the flock was Camerlengo Costa, who’d survived - another stupendous miracle, praise God - yet more years of influenza-threatening decrepitude. He now looked a red-sheeted ghost. …The other Cardinals began pushing him toward me up the aisle.
“All right, all right, brothers,” he complained. ‘Do not push. I know my duty. I am going. Why this unseemly haste?”
Haste? I thought, as he shuffled endlessly up the freezing aisle toward me. The Almighty has been hastier delivering Judgment Day….
He smiled momentarily, the smile quickly fading back to senescent bewilderment.
P127 - (Lucrezia anticipates her wedding gift) He was to present his personal gift to me, as when ..Giovanni had presented me with a silver coin with the face of Herod Antipas, said to be one of the original “thirty pieces of silver.” [ed: where can I find a man to give me such a wedding gift???]
P155 - We made love with more passion than Hadrian could’ve ever expressed to Aninous, however legendary their intimacy might’ve been.
P161 (Roderigo ventures into the art world) - His former obsession with his books, library and literary pursuits was replaced by an even stronger one for oily tints and marble. He was especially fond, as in his reading, of the strictly Classical, with no use at all for art of the unlit millennium between the fall of the Roman Empire and the thirteenth century. “Dark Age trash,” he sniffed at the thousand years of pigment and chisel. “Fashioned by men with zero confidence in their own capacities and who thought the world dominated by trolls and spiky demons, instead of by God, expressed in His Perfect, Supple Image, which is man himself.”But quickly realizing all the real Classical artists were for a thousand years shades in Hades, he latched on to alive ones, those in particular working in the strictly modern, neo-Classical style. He commanded that every artist of that ilk in Italy to appear before him, where he’d grill each for hours on the minutiae of his craft, much to my fascination as well as Alphonso’s desperate boredom and Cesare’s oft-expressed itch to kill them.
P161-2 (the arrival of an artist) A barely-out-of-his-teens, bratty, bowlegged midget named Buonarroti showed up. This Buonarroti was hot as a harquebus allover town because of some stumpy baby-Bacchus he’d carved with grapes in his hair. How original. He arrived before Papa covered with white chiseling dust, convinced him that Constantine’s Saint Peter’s Basilica, the most sacred church in Christendom, was an out-of-date piece of “Dead, Gothic, Vandal junk” and should be “tossed onto history’s holy garbage heap” and replaced, before any new tints were wasted on it. Papa was temperamentally receptive to this and I heard him mutter “Vandal junk" under his breath for days in agreement. This Michelangelo brought a model of design for the new Basilica. A piece of madness….
P164 (Roderigo lecturing Michelangelo regarding the proposal for the Sistine Chapel) “And, Classicism aside, what you engage in on your own time is none more of Our business, Master Buonarroti,” Papa continued. “On the other hand, We don’t want the ceiling of such a sacrosanct edifice as Sixtus IV’s Sistine to wind up encrusted with colorful fantasies of your perverse persuasion. We don’t want to look up one day to see some stark-naked God the Father all covered with homosexual muscles, his universe-engendering pecker dangling about for all to gawk at and cavorting with some mathematically and perfectly butted Adam above the sacred Altar.
P171 (Alphonso & Roderigo requesting the midwife for Lucrezia)
“I swear to Christ I will kill everyone here if a midwife doesn’t appear in two minutes!!” And he drew his sword and wounded an armchair.
Papa was no better. “And I will excommunicate anyone he kills, just to be sure you go to Hell!”
P204 - (Alphonso was injured and near death so the Borgias requested the Shroud be sent from Turin to help heal Lucrezia’s husband. Alphonso has now just recovered with Lucrezia at his side)
A: How long have I been asleep
L: Twenty-three days….
A: What’s the dirty sheet in our window?
L: It’s Jesus’ Shroud. Papa carvanned it from Turin for you.
A: What for?
L: To heal you.
A: It took Jesus’ laundry hanging in the window?
P271 (Botticelli paints Lucrezia [ed comment - like I really believe she inspired the Birth of Venus *facepalm*])
(L)“You artists look at a thing and see what beauty you will….The rest of us are condemned to see only the truth.”
Master Botticelli chuckled. “Pilate asked, ‘What is truth?’ my Lady, and could not stay for an answer.”
And finally…the most significant quote….the Virgin Mary speaks to Lucrezia (p255)
Perphaps it is time you forgave Roderigo and Cesare. I would guess even your mother has…the Pope and his son, like the Father and His Son before them, have chosen to be themselves, as well. They love you and have the most overwhelming ambition to make you an empress. Is that a sin against you? Judas had ambitions to make my Son the Savior and Lord of the Universe. Was that a sin? Judas had to betray Him to the Crucifixion to achieve his ambition. That turned out well. Wait till the denouement to damn. Wait for Eternity’s Judgment to sentence them to Hell; then decide. My Boy did. Now Iscariot sits not in the Ninth Circle, as in the myth of Dante, but enthroned at Jehovah’s Left Hand. He’s almost made a Quartet of the Trinity and hosts of archangels sing praises of him to the last of the Heavenly Spheres. Think of your father and brother as Vicars of Judas, if it helps you forgive.