me.

"Let us go, then," I answered with alacrity, and so confident was I that
the interview to which he bade me was the first step along the road to
better fortune, that I permitted myself a momentary return to the Fool's
estate from which I thought myself on the point of being for ever freed.

"I shall use the interview to induce his Excellency to submit a tenth
beatitude to the approval of our Holy Father: Blessed are the bearers of
good tidings. Come on, Messer the seneschal."

I led the way, in my impatience forgetful of his great paunch and little
legs, so that he was sorely tried to keep pace with me. Yet who would
not have been in haste, urged by such a spur as had I? Here, then, was
the end of my shameful travesty. To-morrow a soldier's harness should
replace the motley of a jester; the name by which I should be known again
to men would be that of Lazzaro Biancomonte, and no longer Boccadoro--the
Fool of the golden mouth.

Thus much had Madonna Lucrezia's promises led me to expect, and it was
with a soul full of joyous expectation that I entered the great man's
closet.

He received me in a manner calculated to set me at my ease, and yet there
was about him a something that overawed me. Cesare Borgia, Cardinal of
Valencia, was then in his twenty-third year, for all that there hung
about him the semblance of a greater age, just as his cardinalitial robes
lent him the appearance of a height far above the middle stature that was
his own. His face was pale and framed in a silky auburn beard; his nose
was aquiline and strong; his eyes the keenest that I have ever seen; his