The Daughter of an Empress

Lorenzo made no answer; he could not speak for tears.

Ganganelli cast a long and silent glance around him, greeting with his

eyes the trees and flowers, the green earth and the blue sky.

"Farewell, farewell, thou beautiful Nature!" he whispered low. "We take

our leave of each other. I shall never again see these trees or this

grassy seat. But you, Lorenzo, will I establish as the guardian of this

place, and when you sometimes sit here in the still evening hour, then

will you think of me! Now come, we must away. Feel you not this cool and

gentle air? Oh, how refreshingly it fans and cools, but I dare not enjoy

it--not I! This cooling cuts off a day from my life!"

And with the haste of a youth, Ganganelli ran down the alley. Bathed

with perspiration, breathless with heat, he arrived at the palace.

"Now give me furs, bring pans of coals, Lorenzo, shut all the doors and

windows. Procure me a heat that will shut out death--!"

But death nevertheless came; the furs and coverings, the steaming

coal-pans with which the pope surrounded himself, the glowing atmosphere

he day and night inhaled, and which quite prostrated his friends and

servants, all that could only keep off death for some few weeks, not

drive it away. More dreadful yet than this blasting heat with which

Ganganelli surrounded himself, yet more horrible, was the fire that

consumed his entrails and burned in his blood.

Finally, withered and consumed by these external and internal fires, the

pope greeted Death as a deliverer, and sank into his arms with a smile.

But no sooner had he respired his last breath, no sooner had the

death-rattle ceased in this throat, and no sooner had death extinguished

the light in his eyes, than the cold corpse exhibited a most horrible

change.

The thin white hair fell off as if blown away by a breath of air, the

loosened teeth fell from their sockets, the formerly quietly smiling

visage became horribly distorted, the nose sank in and the eyes fell

out, the muscles of all his limbs became relaxed as if by a magic

stroke, and the rapidly putrefying members fell from each other.

The pope's two physicians, standing near the bed, looked with terror

upon the frightful spectacle.

"He was, then, right," murmured the physician Barbi, folding his hands,

"he was poisoned. These are the effects of the Acqua Tofana!"

Salicetti, the second physician, shrugged his shoulders with a

contemptuous smile. "Think as you will," said he, "for my part I shall

prove to the world that Pope Clement XIV. died a natural death."

Thus saying, Salicetti left the chamber of death with a proud

step, betaking himself to his own room, to commence his history of

Ganganelli's last illness, in which, despite the arsenic found in the

stomach of the corpse and despite the fact that all Rome was convinced

of the poisoning of the pope, and named his murderer with loud curses,

he endeavored to prove that Ganganelli died of a long-concealed

scrofula!