“What fear you?” he asked.  “Why should I harm you?  None can say that I ever injured any one for any cause but my own advantage, and to injure your Holiness now would be to obstruct a design which I have particularly at heart.”

“I crave your Holiness’s forgiveness,” rejoined the Eighth Alexander, “but you must be aware that you left the world with a reputation which disqualifies you for the society of any Pope in the least careful of his character.  It positively compromises me to have so much as the ghost of a person so universally decried as your Holiness under my roof, and you would infinitely oblige me by forthwith repairing to your own place, which I take to be about four thousand miles below where you are sitting.  I could materially facilitate and accelerate your Holiness’s transit thither if you would be so kind as to hand me that little book of exorcisms.”

“How is the fine gold become dim!” exclaimed Alexander the Sixth.  “Popes in bondage to moralists!  Popes nervous about public opinion!  Is there another judge of morals than the Pope speaking ex cathedra, as I always did?  Is the Church to frame herself after the prescriptions of heathen philosophers and profane jurists?  How, then, shall she be terrible as an army with banners?  Did I concern myself with such pedantry when the Kings of Spain and Portugal came to me like cats suing for morsels, and I gave them the West and the East?”

“It is true,” Alexander the Eighth allowed, “that the lustre of the Church hath of late been obfuscated by the prevalence of heresy.”

“It isn’t the heretics,” Borgia insisted.  “It is the degeneracy of the Popes.  A shabby lot!  You, Alexander, are about the best of them; but the least Cardinal about my Court would have thought himself bigger than you.”

Alexander’s spirit rose.  “I would suggest,” he said, “that this haughty style is little in keeping with the sordid garb wherein your Holiness, consistent after death as in your life, masquerades to the scandal and distress of the faithful.”

“How can I other?  Has your Holiness forgotten your Rabelais?”

“The works of that eminent Doctor and Divine,” answered Alexander the Eighth, “are seldom long absent from my hands, yet I fail to remember in what manner they elucidate the present topic.”

“Let me refresh your memory,” rejoined Borgia, and, producing a volume of the Sage of Meudon, he turned to the chapter descriptive of the employments of various eminent inhabitants of the nether world, and pointed to the sentence: 

“LE PAPE ALEXANDRE ESTOYT PRENEUR DE RATZ.” [*]

[Footnote:  Pantagruel, Book XI. ch. 30.]

“Is this indeed sooth?” demanded his successor.