The legend which made her a poison-brewing Maenad has been proved a lie--but only at the expense of the whole society in which she lived.

The simple northern folk, familiar with the tales of Chriemhild, Brynhild, and Gudrun, who helped to forge this legend, could not understand that a woman should be irresponsible for all the crimes and scandals perpetrated in her name.

Yet it seems now clear enough that not hers, but her father's and her brother's, were the atrocities which made her married life in Rome a byword.

She sat and smiled through all the tempests which tossed her to and fro, until she found at last a fair port in the Duchy of Ferrara.

Nursed in the corruption of Papal Rome, which Lorenzo de' Medici described to his son Giovanni as 'a sink of all the vices,' consorting habitually with her father's concubines, and conscious that her own mother had been married for show to two successive husbands, it is not possible that Lucrezia ruled her conduct at any time with propriety.