NEPOTISM--GIULIA FARNESE--LUCRETIA'S BETROTHALS It is not difficult to imagine what emotions were aroused in Lucretia when she first became aware of the real condition of her family.

Her mother's husband was not her father; she discovered that she and her brothers were the children of a cardinal, and the awakening of her conscience was accompanied by a realization of circumstances which--frowned on by the Church--it was necessary to conceal from the world.

She herself had always hitherto been treated as a niece of the cardinal, and she now beheld in her father one of the most prominent princes of the Church of Rome, whom she heard mentioned as a future pope.
The knowledge of the great advantages to be derived from these circumstances certainly must have affected Lucretia's fancy much more actively than the conception of their immorality.

The world in which she lived concerned itself but little with moral scruples, and rarely in the history of mankind has there been a time in which the theory that it is proper to obtain the greatest possible profit from existing conditions has been so generally accepted.

She soon learned how common were these relations in Rome.