The Kneeling Cupid

by Rafael Sabatini

 

The Kneeling Cupid

 

In Which a Great Secret of Particular Interest to Patrons of Art Is Paid Bare

 

By Rafael Sabatini

THE lisping young exquisite in sulphur-colored silk smiled his tolerant disdain, and from the group behind him came sounds of a titter ill suppressed.

“And so you pronounce yourself an artist, eh?” he said. “An artist!”

The irony of his tone was not to be mistaken. At its sting, a faint color crept into the gaunt cheeks of the victim, a young man of not more than three and twenty, tall and vigorous, whose face, though bony and rugged, was yet hand some in a rough masterful way. A thick mane of lustrous black hair curled about his brow and fell in short waves to the nape of his powerful neck; his great eyes, deep-set under a massive brow, glowed with the ever-smoldering fires of a nature passionate in all things. He was dressed in black, but with an elegance which proclaimed that his presence here in the great cardinal’s antechamber was by no means his first experience of courts. Rich fur trimmed his close-fitting doublet and lined the ample surcoat so loosely worn; a chain of silver, massively wrought and of exquisite workmanship, served him for a girdle, carrying the heavy Pistoja dagger which hung upon his hip.

He would willingly have drawn it now, and sheathed the blade in the windpipe of that smiling young gentleman in yellow. But he dissembled the ferocious lust. Though passionate, he could yet be patient. He answered quietly:

“Others have so pronounced me already—generously. But not perhaps more generously than my work deserved, Messer Gianluca.”

Gianluca Sforza-Riario, the fair youth in yellow, led a burst of laughter, which drew the attention of other clients thronging the long pillared gallery.

“You were well advised, Messer Buonarroti, to come to Rome,” he mocked. “Here you will certainly succeed. No artistic reticence will restrain you from bawling your wares in the marketplace, and here success comes to him who bawls loudest, and so attracts the vulgar, undiscriminating herd. Oh, you will find men enough in Rome, who, to their shame, are growing fat on art. The patronage of the ignorant enriches them. So may it fare with you, my friend.”

Still the young artist kept his temper, though his hands were itching.

“Sir, you mistake my quality. Let me tell you that so far I have had no patron but one, and he was not a man whom any could call ignorant—Lorenzo, the great Lorenzo de’ Medici. Had he lived, I should never have left Florence.”

“Lorenzo!” Gianluca’s eyebrows rose until they almost joined the yellow thatch above his shallow brow. “You will not tell me that Lorenzo de’ Medici knew anything of art?”

Young Buonarroti gasped for breath. “How, sir?” he faltered.

“Ser Michelangelo, I desire to think well of you; but if you praise me the artistic perceptions of Duke Lorenzo you will render that impossible. A man of crude taste, leaning to the meretricious, to—to trivial things designed to trap the senses of—of just such men.”

That was but the beginning. Continuing, the esthetic Messer Gianluca delivered himself at great length and in very elegant and imposing language of an address upon art, under which young Michelangelo felt his mind to be reeling. Such great contemporaries as Pinturicchio and Verrocchio were tolerantly commended, which is to say that they were damned with faint praise; others as great were contemptuously dismissed—especially the prosperous ones, prosperity being in the eyes of Messer Gianluca the seal of worthlessness. Of the younger men the only one in whom he admitted possibilities was Leonardo da Vinci; but he confessed to grave misgivings; he doubted if the young man’s talents would mature along commendable lines; he feared that he might succumb to work for profit, and thereby damn himself eternally as an artist.

 

NAUSEATED, Michelangelo fled the gallery and the palace, and began to ask himself should he not flee Rome as well, cursing the evil hour in which he had entered this city of self-sufficient fools.

You know the story of his boyhood: how at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed for a term of three years to the great Florentine painter, Domenico Ghirlandajo; how before the end of that term he had been drawn from painting to sculpture, and how he had fashioned a laughing faun which had caught the discerning eye of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The Duke had haled the boy out of the workshops of Messer Ghirlandajo and had installed him in the ducal palace. And young Buonarroti, uplifted and stimulated by this splendid patronage, had justified his noble patron.

He was barely twenty when Lorenzo died. Piero de’ Medici, who succeeded him, found in crude materialism all that he required of life. There was an end to the patronage of artists. Michelangelo was out of employment. Casting about him, he lent an ear to the tales of the great opportunities afforded by the papal court under the prodigal and lavish Borgia pontiff, and of the great interest in art that was being quickened in Rome by the excavations which were daily bringing treasures of antiquity to light.

Lured by these stories, Buonarroti set out for the eternal city, armed with a letter of introduction from Piero de’ Medici to Cardinal Sforza-Riario, who was widely famed as a dilettante, a collector, and a patron of the arts. Through the good offices of this exalted prince of the Church, Michelangelo hoped that he might even reach the foot of the papal throne.

So far, however, he had spent a month in vain solicitings, daily cooling his heels in the great man’s antechamber whilst hoping ever more desperately for the audience in which he might present his letter, nauseated meanwhile by the atmosphere of the place and discussions upon art akin to that into which he had just been drawn. He began to realize that he was moving in a world of posturing dilettanti, of affected witlings, to whom mere performance in art was naught.

Meanwhile, idleness and the wasted days began to fret him. Also he perceived that at this rate his meager store of money would soon be exhausted. Therefore of late he had been turning his attention to immediate needs. He had modeled a dancing nymph, a thing of infinite grace and liveliness, although the subject was not perhaps one to which at that age he would naturally have turned. It afforded no scope for the vigorous anatomy which he loved to reproduce. The choice was entirely meretricious. He conceived that he fashioned something calculated to please these lascivious Romans, whose esthetic perceptions had been emasculated by their excessive worship of smooth antiquities, particularly the Greek. He bore it—still in the clay, since in those days he had no workshop in which to effect the transmutation—to one Baldassare della Balza, who kept a shop on the Ripa Vecchia, overlooking Tiber.

Many times he had passed the shop, on his way to the Sforza-Riario palace, in the Rione di Ponte, and invariably he had paused to study the sculptures exhibited, ancient and modern, in marble, in bronze, in lead and some in baked clay. But this was the first time that he ventured to cross the threshold in his quality as a sculptor.

He was well received, his nymph commending him to one as shrewd and critical as the dealer. This Baldassare, an untidy, elderly man with long, greasy locks of grizzled hair, straggling beard and a pendulous nose that betrayed his Semitic origin, avoided confinement to the ghetto by proclaiming himself a Christian, and was left in peace to pursue his trade by the tolerant Roman government of Borgia days.

 

“THE work is good—very, very good,” Baldassare deliberately and generously pronounced. “I do not know a sculptor working now who could do better. And that is much to say, particularly to so young a man. But if I buy”—he spread his hands, and looked up pathetically—“where shall I find me a buyer in my turn?”

It seemed to Michelangelo a foolish question.

“Surely among your patrons there will be some who know good work and desire to possess it. How else could you live and drive your trade?”

The little dealer answered him by a cackle of sardonic laughter. Then he swung round. From a shelf behind him he snatched a marble Hermes, standing some two feet high, and placed it on the table before the young artist.

“Is not that a thing of beauty?” he demanded. “Is it not good work?”

It was good work indeed, a figure not only of entrancingly graceful proportions but so full of arrested movement as to seem almost alive. Michelangelo’s admiring eyes devoured it, his long delicate fingers caressed it lovingly.

“Superb,” he murmured. “The work of a master, my friend.”

“Of one who will become a master,” the dealer corrected. “At present he is young, like yourself, able and eager, gifted with eyes to see and fingers to reproduce—a great artist, a great craftsman. His name is Torrigiano. If he lives that name will be famous one day.”

“If he lives?” quoted Michelangelo.

“I mean if he does not die of starvation, as well he may. This lovely thing has stood in my shop eleven months. To each of my patrons in turn have I shown it—to the great Cardinal Ascanio, to the Princess of Squillace, to the Lord of Mirandola, who has great taste and knowledge, to the young Duke of Gandia, to Cardinal Sforza-Riario, who prides himself upon his judgment and whose collection of sculpture is the greatest in Rome. I have implored them to offer me any price in reason. But—this thing of beauty remains to grace my shop, while a hundred inferior things are sold, simply because they are old—antiquities dug out of the earth.”

Contempt increased in Baldassare’s voice. “The truth is, they know nothing of art, these people, and their ignorance leers foolishly through their pretense of knowledge. I am sorry, my young sir. Your nymph is worthy to stand beside this Hermes; but having discovered that I cannot sell the one, I am assured that I could not sell the other.”

Michelangelo departed sick at heart and rather angry: angry with these empty, pretentious Romans; angry with himself that he should have left Florence merely to be lectured upon art by those fools who thronged the antechamber of the illustrious Sforza—Riario, the cardinal who set up for a great patron of art, a great dilettante, and yet could pass by such a piece of work as the Hermes of Torrigiano. Clearly this man upon whose patronage Michelangelo had been depending was no better than the rest, no better than those posturing apes who chattered so glibly in his antechamber. What hope then remained for him?

On that thought he suddenly checked, there in the narrow unpaved street. And then upon a second thought that followed swiftly, he swung round, and went in great strides back to the shop of Baldassare.

“Sir,” he asked, “has it never occurred to you in the pursuit of this trade of yours, that fools were born into the world to be turned to account by men of worth?”

Baldassare smiled knowingly and rubbed his plump hands. “What, then?” he asked, realizing that what he had heard was no more than a prelude.

Instinctively Michelangelo drew nearer and lowered his voice. Anger and contempt vibrated in his every word. But of those emotions Baldassare took no heed. Emotion he knew to be unprofitable. His mind was entirely given to the matter of the young artist’s utterance, and as he listened he continued to smile and rub his hands, occasionally nodding his approval.

 

“WHAT a dealer you would have made had you not been born a sculptor!” Baldassare commended him at parting, and than this the little Jew could hardly have bestowed higher praise upon him.

Despite the praise, Michelangelo did not exchange the precarious pursuit of art for the more secure ways of trade; and as week succeeded week, he was still daily to be seen in the antechamber of Cardinal Sforza-Riario awaiting that interview which it seemed would never be vouchsafed him. And almost daily was he baited by the Cardinal’s nephew and the other loungers. But he had grown inured to their veiled taunts and open sneers. He smiled, and rarely troubled to strike back, nor was anger ever more than momentarily kindled in those great dark eyes of his.

One day a life-sized Antinous made its appearance—a new acquisition of the Cardinal’s of which he was so inordinately proud that he proposed for a season to leave it in his anteroom, where it could be more generally seen and admired than in the gallery set apart for his collection.

Michelangelo came to admire it with the rest, but soberly, without transports such as all were indulging. Messer Gianluca delivered to the young artist, and to all the others who stood respectfully listening, a lengthy and learned dissertation upon the esthetics of the work.

In the end he turned to Buonarroti.

“And what,” he asked, with that faint sneering superior smile of his, “is your own judgment, Messer the Sculptor?”

“It is very beautiful,” was the quiet answer. “Indeed, its fault is that it is too beautiful.”

“Its fault?” Gianluca’s voice grew shrill. “Can excess of perfection be a fault?”

“Excess of perfection is always a fault,” Michelangelo answered him contemptuously. “There is no vice so horrible as excess of virtue.”

“You deliver the treasures of your judgment in the form of paradoxes whose meaning perhaps eludes such humble wits as ours.” An approving purr commended the subtlety of Messer Gianluca’s sarcasm.

“I’ll endeavor to be plain. This thing is beautiful, but as a woman is beautiful rather than a man. It is of an exceeding smoothness. The delineation of the anatomy is too vague. The face is perfect; too perfect for significance; a man with so lovely a countenance may be a beast, or a fool, or both; he can hardly be aught else. Is that what the sculptor intended? I doubt it. The limbs lack vigor; almost they lack shape; they are a woman’s limbs.”

“Ah, but listen, listen all, I beg!” shrilled Gianluca. “An artistic Daniel is delivering judgment. And his canon, it seems, is that art is to express only brawn and muscles.”

A roar of laughter from the sycophantic crowd utterly drowned Michelangelo’s reply, and drove him in anger from the place. Violence, he swore, was the only argument to use with these imbeciles, never suspecting how well Gianluca’s mockery was serving him at that very moment. For the young man, flushed with victory, went with the tale of it to his illustrious uncle. Into the Cardinal’s ready ear he poured the absurd story of this young Florentine who for three months now had haunted the cardinalitial antechambers, awaiting audience. He spoke almost hotly of the man’s egregious vanity, of his effrontery, so great that he dared to pronounce an adverse judgment upon a matchless Antinous. Together uncle and nephew laughed over the man’s ridiculous pretensions—as interpreted by Gianluca.

“Decidedly,” said the Cardinal, “I must receive this fellow. He may afford me amusement, and it is possible that I may afford him artistic salvation.”

And so next day, when in accordance with his habit the young Florentine lounged into that now too familiar antechamber, a chamberlain in black velvet advanced to meet him, to inquire was he Messer Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence, bearer of a letter to the illustrious Cardinal Sforza-Riario from Duke Piero. And when young Buonarroti, a little taken aback by this sudden conclusion of that purgatorial term, replied in the affirmative, he was respectfully ushered into a small room with gilded walls and an ultramarine ceiling, lighted by a single window beside which there was a richly carved writing pulpit. At this was seated the illustrious cardinal—a tall, thin, white-faced man, whose narrow eyes looked with assumed benignity upon the young sculptor who bent the knee to him. He held out a white emaciated hand, on which glowed the sapphire of his rank, and Buonarroti humbly kissed it as his duty was.

 

“I HAVE but learnt from my nephew Gianluca of the long trial of your patience here,” said a cold, level voice. “I should earlier have been informed of your presence.”

Michelangelo mumbled amiabilities, proffering his letter. The prelate took it, broke the seal, and spread the parchment, motioning his visitor to rise. He reclined in his capacious, high-backed chair to read the commendations of Duke Piero, and as he read his thin lips curled a little. Lastly he looked over the top of the sheet at the young artist.

“His Magnificence here speaks of you as a young man of whose great talents his exalted father Lorenzo had a very high opinion.”

“I had the honor to work in the ducal palace for three years, illustrious.”

The Cardinal smiled a little and sighed. “You realize that from Florence—the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici—to curial Rome it is a far cry in matters of art; that what there may be accounted masterly, is here often considered elementary, especially in these days when the antiquities that are being brought to light are serving us as a school for the education of our sense of beauty.”

Michelangelo’s lips writhed in a sneer, despite himself. Here was the same cant that came to nauseate him on every hand. Here indeed, as he should have known, was one of the very fountains of that cant. He attempted no answer, but waited for the Cardinal to proceed.

“The Duke here tells me that you are both painter and sculptor.”

“As a painter,” the youth replied abruptly “I may not be of much account. I do not think I am. There are many better.”

“Ah!” A catlike smile distended the thin lips in that white face which Michelangelo was finding odious. “And as a sculptor?”

“As a sculptor I am not ashamed of what I do, and I am artist enough to know of what I should be ashamed. It is as a sculptor that I offer myself to your Magnificence, whose discrimination in art is so well and widely known. If here at the court of the Holy Father—”

A white hand waved him into silence.

“I have warned you, young sir, that the standards here are high. You are still very young and must lack experience.”

“Artists, illustrious, are created by God, not by experience. By this I mean that the artist is born.”

“The assertion has been made before. Poeta nascitur, non fit. Perhaps you remember. But come.” The tall figure, clad from head to heel in flowing scarlet, rose. “Even though it may not lie in my power to find you employment, yet you shall not be utterly at the loss of the time you have spent here. I will show you my collection of statuary. It is the most perfect and ample collection in Rome and probably in the world. To behold it is an education in art, my friend. Come.”

Familiarly he took the young man by the arm, and conducted him to a door at the opposite end of the room, where an usher waited. The man opened the door, and they passed out into a long gallery lighted along its length by tall windows that opened upon the inner courtyard of the palace. Facing these windows stood ranged along the gallery from end to end the treasures of sculpture which the Cardinal had assembled at the price of several princely fortunes. In all that collection there was little that was modern. It was made up almost entirely of pieces brought from Greece and of others excavated in Rome, in which Greek influence was strong.

 

SLOWLY they moved along the gallery, the Cardinal discharging the office of showman, and discoursing at length on the beauty of each work in turn. Here it was the fall of draperies, there the vigor of limb, there again the beauty of a face and there the general liveliness of the conception, that he desired his guest to observe. And Michelangelo observed faithfully as he was bidden, swallowed his resentment of this patronage of himself, an artist, by one who in the world of art held no place save as a buyer, and spoke no word the while in answer. Observing this, the Cardinal began to assume that the young man’s arrogance was being properly humbled.

“You are silent, my friend,” he said at last.

“I am listening to your Magnificence,” answered Michelangelo, striving to exclude the irony from his voice.

“Oh, and something more. Confess that you stand abashed before such works as these. You realize that there is no man living today capable of producing any single piece that adorns this gallery.”

“There are certainly not many.”

“There is none, my friend. None. Believe me. I know. I have devoted my life to the study and contemplation of art. What I tell you of art, you may believe.”

 

THEY had come midway down the gallery, and they were standing before a slim boyish figure in old marble that was stained and darkened by the salts of the earth in which it must have lain for centuries. It was less than life size, presenting a stripling of ten or eleven whose limbs were just beginning to assume virility and strength. The figure was curiously poised, one knee touching the ground, the head tilted aside, and the hands widely apart, the right hand high above the head. About the lovely face—almost too virile for so young a body—the hair clustered in thick short curls.

Michelangelo’s eyes had quickened with sudden interest the moment that they beheld it, and this the Cardinal had observed.

“Aha!” he laughed. “You begin to profit, I see. You begin to discern the admirable for yourself.”

The artist wheeled to face him, his eyes glowing, his face flushed. The dilettante’s insolence was almost incredible. Yet Michelangelo controlled himself.

“What—what does it represent?” was all he asked.

“It is a kneeling Cupid. Not Cupid as any of your moderns would represent him, round, shapeless and chubby; but a clean limbed, active Cupid, a miracle of grace and vigor. He is kneeling, you see, in the act of taking aim. The bow has gone—lost. But it is not missed; almost, indeed, can you see it, so perfect is the poise of the arms.”

“And your Magnificence says that it is old, this—an antiquity?” quoth Michelangelo in a voice that was small as if awed.

The Cardinal stared at him, amazed by his stupidity. A faint smile of disdain overspread his white face.

“Look at it,” he commanded. “And take your answer from the figure itself. As your experience widens in your art you will come to understand, as I do, that no sculptor since Phidias could have wrought so beautiful a thing. Observe it, examine it closely. I promise you that it will bear inspection.” Sighing, he placed a hand upon the young man’s shoulder. “When you, my young friend, can make something that is even remotely comparable with this, you may depend upon me to set your feet upon the road to fortune.”

Again the young sculptor swung to confront the great patron. And his handsome rugged face was pale.

“Your Magnificence makes me that promise?” he cried.

The Cardinal smiled his tolerance of this impetuosity. “I have made it.”

“Then by your gracious leave I shall claim its fulfilment this very day.”

The Cardinal looked down his nose. The artist explained himself.

“I have at home a piece of clay that your Magnificence will confess to be no whit inferior to this marble.”

His Magnificence exploded into laughter. “You have in abundance the modern quality of effrontery, young sir,” he said. “But I’ll indulge you. Bring me your clay, and let us see this art of which you boast so confidently.”

Michelangelo departed in haste. The Cardinal went to laugh first to himself and later with his nephew over the audacity of this young Florentine.

“I had thought,” he said, “to chasten and educate him by a display of those treasures. Instead—”

“They are all the same, these moderns,” answered Gianluca. “Ignorant, crude in their work, and self-sufficient in their estimate of it. They need humbling, chastising.”

The Cardinal nodded. “It is a duty, and a duty that I shall perform today.”

“Let me be present,” pleaded Gianluca. But the Cardinal, having considered, shook his head. “That were too uncharitable.”

And so when the sculptor returned, staggering into the Cardinal’s presence under the burden of a figure swathed in sackcloth, the Cardinal was alone to receive him. Michelangelo begged, and the Cardinal indulgently consented, that he should uncover his figure in the gallery itself, alongside of the Cupid with which it challenged comparison.

 

SMILING, the Cardinal accompanied him. Smiling, he stood by while Michelangelo removed the sackcloth. Then suddenly, as the clay figure was revealed, and the sculptor stepped aside and half round to face his host, the smile perished on the Cardinal’s white face. He craned his neck; his brows were drawn together, and some three or four times his narrow eyes glanced from clay to marble and from marble to clay in uncomprehending anger. For saving that the material of which each was fashioned was different, no other slightest difference was discernible between the two. In every line and lineament the marble was the very counterpart of the clay.

In Sforza-Riario’s eyes bewilderment became mingled with anger. A dull flush suffused his pallid sunken cheeks.

“What imposture is here?” he demanded harshly.

Michelangelo laughed, no whit abashed.

“The imposture that was necessary to make you dilettanti believe that at least one artist lives who may measure himself against antiquity, who need not fear comparison with Phidias. It was Phidias your Magnificence named, I think. No sculptor since Phidias, you said, could have fashioned so beautiful a thing. And yet, with these two hands I fashioned it.” And again he laughed as he thrust forward those strong nervous hands of his for the great man’s inspection.

 

“YOU fashioned it?” The Cardinal’s voice shrilled upward, while his shaking hand pointed to the marble. “You—you" fashioned that kneeling Cupid? Buffoon! Impostor! What are you saying? That Cupid has lain in the earth perhaps a thousand years. It was excavated—”

“From Baldassare della Balza’s garden, where I had buried it less than a thousand hours before. All the demand in Rome is for antiquities. There is no beauty save in antiquities. To live, therefore, it was necessary that I should supply antiquities. And I supplied them. There are dyes and salts that in a few days will act upon marble as would mother earth in the course of centuries. The Cupid’s missing bow I broke off when the modeling was completed. Does your Magnificence still doubt? Then look at this.” He tilted the clay figure and pointed to an inscription on the base—a single word in Greek characters. “Aggelos—the Greek for Angelo: Michael-Angelo. My signature for this occasion. You’ll find that, too, upon the base of the marble if your Magnificence will look.”

But his Magnificence did not need to look. Evidence enough did he behold already, and such was his shame and mortification that he appeared to shrink under the artist’s smiling eyes. Nor was this yet the end.

“It is not the only piece in this collection that my own hands have fashioned. It is but one of three antiques that in the last two months I have supplied to Baldassare, and all of which your Magnificence has purchased. All of which your Magnificence has widely praised in Rome, and by the possession of all of which your Magnificence’s reputation as a collector has been enhanced.”

Sforza-Riario found his voice at last. “I have been swindled,” he choked, “swindled by that infamous Baldassare.”

“Swindled, indeed. But not by Baldassare. By your own excessive predilection for the old to the contempt of the new.” Then Michelangelo paused, and meeting the venomous glance of the prelate’s eyes he continued gently in another tone: “Yet there is no need to publish abroad your error and expose you to the ridicule of the world. Considering the merit of the work, it is not extraordinary that your Magnificence should have been deceived. And none need ever know of it. Your great reputation as a collector and a dilettante in art need not suffer. There was a promise that your Magnificence made me. If I could fashion anything remotely comparable with this kneeling Cupid, you said—”

“I would make your fortune. Yes.” The Cardinal clutched him by the wrist. “And so I will, if you can hold your tongue.”

Michelangelo bowed low, not without a suspicion of mockery.

“Should I forget to practise discretion where my gracious patron is concerned? If your Magnificence will but fulfil your promise—”

“Tomorrow,” said Sforza-Riario, “I present you to his Holiness the Pope.”

“And the recommendation of so exalted an art critic makes it certain that his Holiness will give me employment?”

“As you say,” the Cardinal answered him through writhing lips.

The Florentine bowed again. Baldassare was right. There was a great dealer lost to the world when Michelangelo turned his wits to art.

 

ONE last thing, my lord. Would you tell me how much you paid Baldassare for this and the other two pieces you lately bought from him?”

The Cardinal told him. He swore a little under his breath, which restored to Sforza-Riario some of his lost humor.

“I gather,” said he, “that I am not the only one whom Baldassare has swindled.”

“That is true,” said Michelangelo. “But to take permanent advantage of me, one must be exceedingly alert.”

“I can well believe it,” the great man sighed, and on that they parted, if not exactly friends, most certainly accomplices.

And that evening Michelangelo took his way to the little shop in the Rione di Ponte,

“Olá, Baldassare! You rogue, I have found you out,” he greeted him. “The Kneeling Cupid, the nymph and the faun were sold by you to Cardinal Sforza-Riario for fifteen thousand ducats. Don’t perjure yourself in denials, you scoundrel. I have it from himself. Peace, man! Our compact was that we should share equally, and you swore to me that you sold each of those pieces for a thousand ducats. I might strangle you. But you’re not worth it. Instead I’ll trouble you for six thousand ducats, the rest of my share, and two thousand more as compensation for the swindle.”

“Oho!” crowed Baldassare. “Oho! My fine Florentine cockerel! And if I refuse?”

“If you refuse I shall go straight to the Cardinal and confess the imposture that we have jointly practised. The Cardinal will compel you to disgorge all the money, and will then have you jailed, if not hanged.”

And Baldassare, because with all his astuteness he did not gauge human vanity as accurately as Michelangelo, nor perceive that this vanity afforded him a safe shield from any such reprisals, at once gave way to this young man whose wit had already planted his feet firmly upon the road to that fortune which his talents deserved.