Quum sit filia, Paule, sit tibi aurum
Quantum Pontifices habere raros
Vidit Roma prius, pater vocari
Sanctus non potes, ac potes beatus.
“Thou hast a daughter, and golden store
Greater than Pontiff e’er had before.
Scarce art thou holy therefore; rather,
Paul, let us title thee blessed Father.”
Papal simony is branded in the persons of Alexander VI., Julius II. and many more:
Vendit Alexander claves, altaria, Christum;
Emerat ille prius, vendere jure potest.
Keys, altars, Christ are sold by Borgia; well,
What he has bought he has a right to sell.
Fraude capit totum mercator Julius orbem;
Vendit enim cœlos, non habet iste tamen.
World-cheating chapman Julius gets his price
For what he has no right to, Paradise.
Pasquin was a great writer of epitaphs; he never let a Pope be laid in his tomb without speaking out his mind about the departed. Whose fault was it that he had not a good word to bestow on any one of them? This is the tribute he pays to the memory of Clement VII.:—
Nutrix Roma fuit, genetrix Florentia: flevit
Nec tua te nutrix, nec tua te genetrix.
Mors tua lætitiam tulit omnibus, unica mœret
Quæ te regnavit principe, dira fames.
Florence, thy mother, Rome, thy nurse, have shed
No tear for thee. Clement, that thou art dead
Gives joy to all. One mourner hast thou solely—
Famine, the partner of thy reign unholy.
Dr. Curti, Clement’s physician, is extolled in an epigram for having physicked a bad pope to death, and cured the state. Again, among a long string of Scriptural texts applied more pointedly than reverently to sundry public characters, this one is allotted to Curti for having rid the earth of an incarnation of all wickedness, “Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world!” The epitaph on Clement VII. is mildness itself in comparison with that on Paul IV. (Carafa):—
Hic Carapha jacet superis invisus et imis:
Styx animam, tellus putre cadaver habet.
Invidit pacem terris, et vota precesque,
Impius et clerum perdidit et populum.
Hostibus infensis supplex, infidus amicis.
Scire cupis paucis cætera? Papa fuit.
Carafa’s soul, of God and man the foe,
Is with the damned; his carcase rots below.
Clergy and lay undone, could he have barred
Our secret prayers, his joy had been unmarred.
Judas and craven without heart or hope,
To sum all in one word, he was a Pope.
Paul IV. revived the dormant powers of the Inquisition, and made it so violent that when he died in 1599, the people broke into the prisons of the Holy Office, and rescued four hundred victims, sacked the palace of the inquisitors, burned their books and papers, pulled down the statue of the deceased Pope, and dragged the head about the streets. It was with the greatest difficulty that the corpse itself was saved from their fury. Such was the execration in which Carafa’s memory was held amongst them, that for a long time they would not suffer the street hawkers to cry bicchieri e caraffe (glasses and carafes).
The three following epigrams are addressed to Paul III. (Farnese).
Nescio si verum est jam te faciente per urbem
Quod sal vendatur carius omnis ait.
O bene consultum, nil hoc perfectius uno:
Jam fœtes, æquum est sit tibi cura salis.
All curse the grievous price of salt,
And murmur, Paul, it is thy fault.
I blame thee not of salt for thinking,
All rotten as thou art and stinking.
Ut canerent data multa olim sunt vatibus æra:
Ut taceam quantum tu mihi, Paule, dabis?
Poets, ’tis known, in days of old,
To make them sing, were given gold;
But how much will you give me, Paul,
To stop my singing once for all?
Pasquin would accept a cardinal’s hat as the price of his silence—
Tandem, maxime Pontifex, galerum
Pasquillo tribuas tuo roganti.
Si sensu sine sum, rude atque marmor,
Complures quoque episcopos videmus
Ipso me mage saxeos creari.
Grant, Holy Father, to thy Pasquin,
The hat for which he has long been asking.
I’m but a block of stone; what matter!
’Twill make no difference to the hatter.
Far duller blocks, all must acknowledge,
Are plenteous in the Sacred College.
The argument with which Pasquin supports his pretensions on this occasion appears to have had its grain of truth. Cornelio Masso, a cordelier, went to the court of Paul III. to solicit the cardinal’s hat. The Pope told him one day he had been given to understand that he, Masso, was a bastard. The latter, nothing daunted, replied, “Your Holiness has made cardinals of so many asses that you may well make one mule a cardinal.”
The following pasquinade appeared during the occupation of Rome by the French in 1810:—
Marforio.—Is it true, Pasquin, that all the French are robbers?
Pasquin.—Not all of them, but a good part—(Buona parte).
Early in the present pontificate, when the Pope returned to Rome after an excursion to Bologna and Loretto, Pasquin’s statue displayed these three lines:—
Pio nono
Justo e buono
Mastaï.
Mastaï was the Pope’s name before his election. He was Count Cardinal Mastaï-Feretti. Hence the pun which gave point to the inscription, its sense being—“Pius IX., you are just and good, but you halt on the way (ma stai).”
On a subsequent occasion of the same kind Pasquin exhibited a placard containing only these three figures: 610. Six hundred and ten, or in Italian, sei cento dieci, what could that mean? Everybody hastened to Marforio for the solution of the enigma, and found it in the words Sei un zero, “Thou art a cypher.” Name the figures separately and you have 6=sei, 1=un, 0=zero. Now sei is a word of double meaning; it may stand either for “six” or “thou art,” and thus 610 may signify “Thou art a cypher.” How superior after all, to the sly hits of Transalpine jokers, are the witticisms which move us in these northern latitudes!
