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.
Note 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
Note 2. A convent of closely immured nuns.
Note 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.