Victor Hugo was a writer of rare gifts, a fertile romancer and a great poet, and it may be unjust to censure him for having taken the fullest advantages of the licences conceded to both.

But it would be difficult to censure him too harshly for having--in his Lucrezia Borgia--struck a pose of scholarliness, for having pretended and maintained that his work was honest work founded upon the study of historical evidences.

With that piece of charlatanism he deceived the great mass of the unlettered of France and of all Europe into believing that in his tragedy he presented the true Lucrezia Borgia.
"If you do not believe me," he declared, "read Tommaso Tommasi, read the Diary of Burchard." Read, then, that Diary, extending over a period of twenty-three years, from 1483 to 1506, of the Master of Ceremonies of the Vatican (which largely contributes the groundwork of the present history), and the one conclusion to which you will be forced is that Victor Hugo himself had never read it, else he would have hesitated to bid you refer to a work which does not support a single line that he has written.
As for Tommaso Tommasi--oh, the danger of a little learning! Into what quagmires does it not lead those who flaunt it to impress you! Tommasi's place among historians is on precisely the same plane as Alexandre Dumas's.

His Vita di Cesare Borgia is on the same historical level as Les Borgias, much of which it supplied.

Like Crimes Celebres, Tommasi's book is invested with a certain air of being a narrative of sober fact; but like Crimes Celebres, it is none the less a work of fiction.
This Tommaso Tommasi, whose real name was Gregorio Leti--and it is under this that such works of his as are reprinted are published nowadays--was a most prolific author of the seventeenth century, who, having turned Calvinist, vented in his writings a mordacious hatred of the Papacy and of the religion from which he had seceded.