“But his vows, then?” I exclaimed at last.
“Ah! His vows!” said the Cardinal-legate. “True, there were his vows. I had forgotten that. No doubt he did the same.” And he smiled sardonically, sniffing at his pomander-ball.
From that beginning in a fresh branch of knowledge much followed quickly. Under my questionings, Messer Gambara very readily made me acquainted through his unsparing eyes with that cesspool that was known as the Roman Curia. And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every word he said.
I learnt from him that Pope Paul III was no exception to the rule, no such scandal as I had imagined; that his own elevation to the purple was due in origin to the favour which his sister, the beautiful Giulia, had found in the eyes of the Borgia Pope, some fifty years ago. Through him I came to know the Sacred College as it really was; not the very home and fount of Christianity, as I had deemed it, controlled and guided by men of a sublime saintliness of ways, but a gathering of ambitious worldlings, who had become so brazen in their greed of temporal power that they did not even trouble to cloak the sin and evil in which they lived; men in whom the spirit that had actuated those saints the study of whose lives had been my early delight, lived no more than it might live in the bosom of a harlot.
I said so to him one day in a wild, furious access of boldness, in one of those passionate outbursts that are begotten of illusions blighted.
He heard me through quite calmly, without the least trace of anger, smiling ever his quiet mocking smile, and plucking at his little, auburn beard.
“You are wrong, I think,” he said. “Say that the Church has fallen a prey to self-seekers who have entered it under the cloak of the priesthood. What then? In their hands the Church has been enriched. She has gained power, which she must retain. And that is to the Church's good.”
“And what of the scandal of it?” I stormed.
“O, as to that--why, boy, have you never read Boccaccio?”
“Read him, then,” he urged me. “He will teach you much that you need to know. And read in particular the story of Abraam, the Jew, who upon visiting Rome was so scandalized by the licence and luxury of the clergy that he straightway had himself baptized and became a Christian, accounting that a religion that could survive such wiles of Satan to destroy it must indeed be the true religion, divinely inspired.” He laughed his little cynical laugh to see my confusion increased by that bitter paradox.