SOCIAL LIFE OF THE BORGIAS Lucretia certainly must have been pleased by her brother's long absence; the Vatican was less turbulent.

Besides herself only Don Giuffre and Donna Sancia, who had effected her return, maintained a court there.
We might avail ourselves of this period of quiet to depict Lucretia's private life, her court, and the people about her; but it is impossible to do this, none of her contemporaries having left any description of it.

Even Burchard shows us Lucretia but rarely, and when he does it is always in connection with affairs in the Vatican.

Only once does he give us a fleeting view of her palace--on February 27, 1496--when Giovanni Borgia, Juan de Castro, and the recently created Cardinal Martinus of Segovia were calling upon her.
None of the foreign diplomatists of that time, so far as we may learn from their despatches, made any reports regarding Lucretia's private life.

We have only a few letters written by her during her residence in Rome, and there is not a single poem dedicated to her or which mentions her; therefore it is due to the malicious epigrams of Sannazzaro and Pontanus that she has been branded as the most depraved of courtesans.
If there ever was a young woman, however, likely to excite the imagination of the poet, Lucretia Borgia in the bloom of her youth and beauty was that woman.