Yet none can calculate how far the scandal and indignation of Christendom might have gone, before they became a source of pressing danger to Alexander.'He would,' says Panvinio elsewhere, 'have put all the other rich cardinals and prelates out of the way, to get their property, had he not, in the midst of his great plans for his son, been struck down by death.' And what might not Cesare have achieved if, at the moment when his father died, he had not himself been laid upon a sickbed! What a conclave would that have been, in which, armed with all his weapons, he had extorted his election from a college whose numbers he had judiciously reduced by poison--and this at a time when there was no French army at hand! In pursuing such a hypothesis the imagination loses itself in an abyss.
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