Download The Borgias: Celebrated Crimes, Book 1 AudioBook Free
To paraphrase the take note from the translator, The Celebrated Crimes of Alexandre Dumas père had not been written for children. The novelist has spared no words - has minced no words - to describe violent scenes of violent times. In such a, the first of the series, Dumas instructs the luridly captivating, incredibly violent, and strikingly amoral report of the three most well-known members of the Borgia family - Pope Alexander VI, Lucrezia, and above all Cesare. Never one to allow only fact to stand in the form of a good report, Dumas puts all the most sensational accusations made against the Borgias - mostly by their enemies - to the fullest use, which certainly distorts record, but produces a great tale. Also, he often will take the novelist's strategy, giving us details of scenes that there is absolutely no historical record - we are given, for example, a wonderful description of the appearance on Cesare Borgia's face as he breaks out of his Spanish jail, something not Cesare himself could have seen, and he was by themselves at the time. Again, as the translator records, "The careful, mature reader, for whom the books are meant, will recognize, and allow for, this fact." We're reading Dumas here, not Tuchman or Toynbee. Dumas offers us a sweeping tale of simony, betrayal, connivance, conquest both military services and intimate, and above all fatality - on the battlefield in conflict, on the streets in brutal murder, at night by strangulation, at the stand by poison. It really is a tale of incidents and personalities that shook European countries and created the present day misconception of the Renaissance prince, so well explained by Machiavelli. Enjoy! Be aware: The modern listener will hear that one passages in the book are marked by unmistakable anti-Semitism. Since it is both unproductive to deny, and worthwhile to keep in mind, that anti-Semitism was a ethnic norm in Dumas' times, those passages have been kept as written.
