[Footnote 146:  A full account of them is given by Bianchi Giovini in his Biografia, chap. xvii.]

Indeed, it may be said that he now passed his days in continual expectation of poison or the dagger.  This appears plainly in Fulgenzio’s biography and in the pages of his private correspondence.  The most considerable of these later conspiracies, of which Fra Fulgenzio gives a full account, implicated Cardinal Borghese and the General of the Servite Order.[147] The history seems in brief to be as follows.  One Fra Bernardo of Perugia, who had served the Cardinal during their student days, took up his residence in Rome so soon as Scipione Borghese became a profitable patron.  In the course of the year 1609, this Fra Bernardo dispatched a fellow-citizen of his, named Fra Giovanni Francesco, to Padua, whence he frequently came across to Venice and tampered with Sarpi’s secretary, Fra Antonio of Viterbo.  These three friars were all of them Servites; and it appears that the General looked with approval on their undertaking.  The upshot of the traffic was that Fra Antonio, having ready access to Sarpi’s apartments and person, agreed either to murder him with a razor or to put poison in his food, or, what was finally determined on, to introduce a couple of assassins into his bedchamber at night.  An accident revealed the plot, and placed a voluminous cyphered correspondence in the hands of the Venetian Inquisitor of State.  Fra Fulgenzio significantly adds that of all the persons incriminated by these letters, none, with the exception of the General of the Servites, was under the rank of Cardinal.  The wording of his sentence is intentionally obscure, but one expression seems even to point at the Pope.[148]

[Footnote 147:  Vita di F. Paolo, pp. 67-70.]

At the close of this affair, so disgraceful to the Church and to his Order, Fra Paolo besought the Signory of Venice on his bended knees, as a return for services rendered by him to the State, that no public punishment should be inflicted on the culprits.  He could not bear, he said, to be the cause of bringing a blot of infamy upon his religion, or of ruining the career of any man.  Fra Giovanni Francesco afterwards redeemed his life by offering weighty evidence against his powerful accomplices.  But what he revealed is buried in the oblivion with which the Council of Ten in Venice chose to cover judicial acts of State-importance.

It is worth considering that in all the attempts upon Sarpi’s life, priests, friars, and prelates of high place were the prime agents.[149] Poor devils like Poma and Parrasio lay ready to their hands as sanguinary instruments, which, after work performed, could be broken if occasion served.  What, then, was the religious reformation of which the Roman Court made ostentatious display when it secured its unexpected triumph in the Council of Trent?

[Footnote 148:  Vita di F. Paolo, p. 68:  ’Le cose che vennero a pubblica notizia e certe sono:  che molte persone nominate in quella cifra, di Padre, fratelli, e cugini, per le contracifre consto, dal Generale de’ Servi in fuori, niuna esser di dignita inferiore alia Cardinalizia.’]