Then this noble courtesan, much afflicted, returned to Rome, there to weep for her poor daughter.  She set out in the thirty-ninth year of her age, which was, according to some authors, the summer of her magnificent beauty, because then she had obtained the acme of perfection, like ripe fruit.  Sorrow made her haughty and hard with those who spoke to her of love, in order to dry her tears.  The pope himself visited her in her palace, and gave her certain words of admonition.  But she refused to be comforted, saying that she would henceforth devote herself to God, because she had never yet been satisfied by any man, although she had ardently desired it; and all of them, even a little priest, whom she had adored like a saint’s shrine, had deceived her.  God, she was sure, would not do so.

This resolution disconcerted many, for she was the joy of a vast number of lords.  So that people ran about the streets of Rome crying out, “Where is Madame Imperia?  Is she going to deprive the world of love?” Some of the ambassadors wrote to their masters on the subject.  The Emperor of the Romans was much cut up about it, because he had loved her to distraction for eleven weeks; had left her only to go to the wars, and loved her still as much as his most precious member, which according to his own statement, was his eye, for that alone embraced the whole of his dear Imperia.  In this extremity the Pope sent for a Spanish physician, and conducted him to the beautiful creature, to whom he proved, by various arguments, adorned with Latin and Greek quotations, that beauty is impaired by tears and tribulation, and that through sorrow’s door wrinkles step in.  This proposition, confirmed by the doctors of the Holy College in controversy, had the effect of opening the doors of the palace that same evening.  The young cardinals, the foreign envoys, the wealthy inhabitants, and the principal men of the town of Rome came, crowded the rooms, and held a joyous festival; the common people made grand illuminations, and thus the whole population celebrated the return of the Queen of Pleasure to her occupation, for she was at that time the presiding deity of Love.  The experts in all the arts loved her much, because she spent considerable sums of money improving the Church in Rome, which contained poor Theodora’s tomb, which was destroyed during that pillage of Rome in which perished the traitorous constable of Bourbon, for this holy maiden was placed therein in a massive coffin of gold and silver, which the cursed soldiers were anxious to obtain.  The basilic cost, it is said, more than the pyramid erected by the Lady Rhodepa, an Egyptian courtesan, eighteen hundred years before the coming of our divine Saviour, which proves the antiquity of this pleasant occupation, the extravagant prices which the wise Egyptians paid for their pleasures, and how things deteriorate, seeing that now for a trifle you can have a chemise full of female loveliness in the Rue du Petit-Heulen, at Paris.  Is it not abomination?