A chronic illness from which Bracciano had lately suffered furnished a sufficient pretext.  This seems to have been something of the nature of a cancerous ulcer, which had to be treated by the application of raw meat to open sores.  Such details are only excusable in the present narrative on the ground that Bracciano’s disease considerably affects our moral judgment of the woman who could marry a man thus physically tainted, and with her husband’s blood upon his hands.  At any rate, the Duke’s lupa justified his trying what change of air, together with the sulphur waters of Abano, would do for him.

The Duke and Duchess arrived in safety at Venice, where they had engaged the Dandolo palace on the Zueca.  There they only stayed a few days, removing to Padua, where they had hired palaces of the Foscari in the Arena and a house called De’Cavalli.  At Salo, also, on the Lake of Garda, they provided themselves with fit dwellings for their princely state and their large retinues, intending to divide their time between the pleasures which the capital of luxury afforded and the simpler enjoyments of the most beautiful of the Italian lakes.  But la gioia dei profani e un fumo passaggier.  Paolo Giordano Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, died suddenly at Salo on November 10, 1585, leaving the young and beautiful Vittoria helpless among enemies.  What was the cause of his death?  It is not possible to give a clear and certain answer.  We have seen that he suffered from a horrible and voracious disease, which after his removal from Rome seems to have made progress.  Yet though this malady may well have cut his life short, suspicion of poison was not, in the circumstances, quite unreasonable.  The Grand Duke of Tuscany, the Pope, and the Orsini family were all interested in his death.  Anyhow, he had time to make a will in Vittoria’s favor, leaving her large sums of money, jewels, goods, and houses—­enough, in fact, to support her ducal dignity with splendor.  His hereditary fiefs and honors passed by right to his only son, Virginio.

Vittoria, accompanied by her brother, Marcello, and the whole court of Bracciano, repaired at once to Padua, where she was soon after joined by Flaminio, and by the Prince Lodovico Orsini.  Lodovico Orsini assumed the duty of settling Vittoria’s affairs under her dead husband’s will.  In life he had been the duke’s ally as well as relative.  His family pride was deeply wounded by what seemed to him an ignoble, as it was certainly an unequal, marriage.  He now showed himself the relentless enemy of the Duchess.  Disputes arose between them as to certain details, which seem to have been legally decided in the widow’s favor.  On the night of December 22, however, forty men, disguised in black and fantastically tricked out to elude detection, surrounded her palace.  Through the long galleries and chambers hung with arras, eight of them went, bearing torches, in search of Vittoria and her brothers.  Marcello escaped, having fled the house under suspicion