‘I think not all at the same time, Your Holiness.’īlood and Beauty ends with Lucrezia about to depart for her third marriage. A house of men besieged by women’s tears: it is a novel form of warfare. He has seen the Pope buried under a ton of rubble, but never have his master’s nerves been quite so frayed. ‘Either the duchess or some of her ladies.’ His chamberlain is anxious. ‘Is she still crying?’ he says one morning, though the question is surely rhetorical. ( Dunant hints at sexual tension between them.) She is even capable of besting her father when he comes to visit her shortly after the death of her second husband, the Pope is appalled by the grief. She grows, over the course of the novel, from a lovely teenager to a powerful matron, possibly a match for her brother Cesare. But Dunant has always had a strong feminist bent and this Lucrezia is no mere marital pawn. So the basic story arc is the struggle for power. (That would be syphilis, naturally blamed on the French.) The King of France invades, bringing the new and lethal “French disease” with his troops.

Which is important, because Italy, as the fifteenth century becomes the sixteenth, is a collection of warring states controlled by powerful families with names like Este and Sforza and, of course, Borgia.

There are almost 550 pages in Blood and Beauty and other central characters include the charismatic, brilliant, fatally charming Cesare Borgia, cardinal at eighteen, military commander thereafter. Oh, am I giving too much away? No, I’m really not.

Blood and beauty sarah dunant