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Book FirstPart XVII
Part XVII
Among the magistrates were some Radical fellows with turned-up hoods,
who had been influenced by the entreaties and the calumnies of my opponents,
because they all belonged to the party of Fra Girolamo; and these men would
have had me sent to prison and punished without too close a reckoning. ^1 But
the good Prinzivalle put a stop to that. So they sentenced me to pay four
measures of flour, which were to be given as alms to the nunnery of the
Murate. ^2 I was called in again; and he ordered me not to speak a word under
pain of their displeasure, and to perform the sentence they had passed. Then,
after giving me another sharp rebuke, they sent us to the chancellor; I
muttering all the while, "It was a slap and not a blow," with which we left
the Eight bursting with laughter. The chancellor bound us over upon bail on
both sides; but only I was punished by having to pay the four measures of
meal. Albeit just then I felt as though I had been massacred, I sent for one
of my cousins, called Maestro Annibale, the surgeon, father of Messer
Librodoro Librodori, desiring that he should go bail for me. ^3 He refused to
come, which made me so angry, that, fuming with fury and swelling like an asp,
I took a desperate resolve. At this point one may observe how the stars do not
so much sway as force our conduct. When I reflected on the great obligations
which this Annibale owed my family, my rage grew to such a pitch that, turning
wholly to evil, and being also by nature somewhat choleric, I waited till the
magistrates had gone to dinner; and when I was alone, and observed that none
of their officers were watching me, in the fire of my anger, I left the
palace, ran to my shop, seized a dagger and rushed to the house of my enemies,
who were at home and shop together. I found them at table; and Gherardo, who
had been the cause of the quarrel, flung himself upon me. I stabbed him in the
breast, piercing doublet and jerkin through and through to the shirt, without
however grazing his flesh or doing him the least harm in the world. When I
felt my hand go in, and heard the clothes tear, I thought that I had killed
him; and seeing him fall terror-struck to earth, I cried: "Traitors, this
day is the day on which I mean to murder you all." Father, mother, and
sisters, thinking the last day had come, threw themselves upon their knees,
screaming out for mercy with all their might; but I perceiving that they
offered no resistance, and that he was stretched for dead upon the ground,
thought it too base a thing to touch them. I ran storming down the staircase;
and when I reached the street, I found all the rest of the household, more
than twelve persons; one of them had seized an iron shovel, another a thick
iron pipe, one had an anvil, some of them hammers, and some cudgels. When I
got among them, raging like a mad bull, I flung four or five to the earth, and
fell down with them myself, continually aiming my dagger now at one and now at
another. Those who remained upright plied both hands with all their force,
giving it me with hammers, cudgels, and anvil; but inasmuch as God does
sometime mercifully intervene, He so ordered that neither they nor I did any
harm to one another. I only lost my cap, on which my adversaries seized,
though they had run away from it before, and struck at it with all their
weapons. Afterwards, they searched among their dead and wounded, and saw that
not a single man was injured.
[Footnote 1: Cellini calls these magistrates arronzinati cappuccetti, a term
corresponding to our Roundheads. The democratic or anti-Medicean party in
Florence at that time, who adhered to the republican principles of Fra
Girolamo Savonarola, distinguished themselves by wearing the long tails of
their hoods twisted up and turned round their heads. Cellini shows his
Medicean sympathies by using this contemptuous term, and by the honourable
mention he makes of Prinzivalle della Stufa.]
[Footnote 2: A convent of closely immured nuns.]
[Footnote 3: The word I have translated massacred above is assassinato. It
occurs frequently in Italian of this period, and indicates the extremity of
wrong and outrage.]
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