will you follow me to hell?" cried Benvenuto at sight of Catherine.
"Alas! master," said Scozzone, in her softest voice, "I assure you I am
not a serpent. I confess that rather than part from you I would joyfully
follow you to hell if necessary, and I come here because it is the only
place where I can speak to you in secret."
"Very well! make haste! What have you to say to me?"
"O mon Dieu! Benvenuto," exclaimed Scozzone, spying the outlined statue,
"what an admirable figure! It is your Hebe. I had no idea it was so far
advanced; how lovely it is!"
"Is it not?" said Benvenuto.
"Ah, yes! very lovely, and I understand that you would not want me to
pose for such a subject. But who is your model?" inquired Scozzone,
anxiously. "I have not seen any woman go in or out."
"Hush! Come, my dear girl, you surely did not come here to talk of
sculpture."
"No, master it's about our Pagolo. I did as you bade me, Benvenuto. He
took advantage of your absence last evening to annoy me with his eternal
love, and, as you commanded, I listened to him to the end."
"Aha! the traitor! What did he say to you?"
"Oh! it's enough to make one die with laughing, and I would have given
anything in the world could you have been there. Please understand that,
in order not to arouse suspicion, the hypocrite finished the clasp you
had given him to make, while he was speaking to me, and the file that he
held in his hand added not a little to the pathos of his speech.
"'Dear Catherine,' said he, 'I am dying for love of you; when will you
take pity on my martyrdom? One word, I only ask for one word. Just see
to what I expose myself for your sake! if I had not finished this clasp,
the master might suspect something, and if he suspected anything he
would kill me without mercy; but I defy everything for your lovely eyes.
Jésu! this accursed work doesn't advance at all. After all, Catherine,
what good does it do you to love Benvenuto? He doesn't thank you for it;
he is always indifferent to you. And I would love you with a love which
would be so ardent and so circumspect at the same time! No one would
discover it, you would never be compromised, and you could rely on my
discretion, whatever might happen. Look you,' he added, made bold by my
silence, 'I have already found a safe retreat, hidden from every eye,
where I could take you without fear.'--Ha! ha! you would never guess the
place the sly rascal had selected, Benvenuto. I give you a hundred, a
thousand guesses; none but men with hang-dog looks, and eyes on the
ground discover such out of the way corners. He proposed to quarter
me,--where do you suppose?--in the head of your great statue of Mars.
'We can go up,' he said, 'with a ladder.' He assured me that there is a
very pretty apartment there, out of every one's sight, and with a
magnificent view of the surrounding country."
"Faith, it's not a bad idea," said Benvenuto, with a laugh; "and what
reply did you make, Scozzone?"
"I replied with a great burst of laughter, which I could not keep back,
and which sorely disappointed Mons. Pagolo. He undertook then to be very
pathetic, to reproach me with having no heart, and with wishing to cause
his death, and so forth, and so forth. All the time working away with
hammer and file, he talked to me in that strain for a full half-hour,
for he's a loquacious rascal when he gives his mind to it."
"What reply did you give him finally, Scozzone?"
"What reply? Just as you knocked at the door, and he placed his clasp,
finished at last, upon the table, I took his hand, and said to him very
soberly, 'Pagolo, you have talked like a jewel!' That was why you found
him looking so like an idiot when you came in."
"You were wrong, Scozzone; you should not have discouraged him so."
"You told me to listen to him and I listened. Do you think it's so very
easy for me to listen to handsome boys? Suppose something should happen
some fine day?"
"You should not only listen to him, my child, but you must give him an
answer: it is indispensable to my plan. Speak to him at first without
anger, then indulgently, and then encouragingly. When you have reached
that point, I will tell you what else you must do."
"But that may have results you do not intend, do you know? At least you
should be there."
"Never fear, Scozzone, I will appear at the right moment. You have only
to rely upon me, and follow my instructions to the letter. Go now,
little one, and leave me to my work."
Catherine tripped lightly away, laughing in pleased anticipation of the
fine trick Cellini proposed to play upon Pagolo, of the nature of which,
however, she could not form the least conception.
Benvenuto, when she had left him, did not resume his work, as he had
said; he rushed to the window which looked obliquely upon the garden of
the Petit-Nesle, and stood there in rapt contemplation. A knock at the
door rudely aroused him from his reverie.
"Hail and tempest!" he cried in a rage, "who is there now? can I not be
left in peace? Ten thousand devils!"
"Forgive me, master," said Ascanio's voice; "if I disturb you, I will go
away."
"What! is it you, my child? No, no, surely not; you never disturb me.
What is it, pray? what do you want with me!"
Benvenuto lost no time in opening the door for his beloved pupil.
"I interfere with your solitude and your work," said Ascanio.
"No, Ascanio, you are always welcome."
"Master, I have a secret to confide to you, a service to ask of you."
"Speak. Will you have my purse? do you need my arm or my thoughts?"
"I may have need of them all, dear master."
"So much the better! I am yours body and soul, Ascanio. I have a
confession to make to you, too: yes, a confession, for although I have
committed no sin, I think, still I shall have some remorse until I am
absolved by you. But do you speak first."
"Very well, master.--But, great Heaven! what is that cast?" cried
Ascanio, interrupting himself.
His eye had just fallen upon the statue of Hebe, and in the statue he
recognized Colombe.
"It is Hebe," replied Benvenuto, with glistening eyes; "it is the
goddess of youth. Do you think it beautiful, Ascanio?"
"Oh, wonderful! But those features: I know them, I cannot be mistaken!"
"Rash boy! Since you raise the veil half-way, I must needs snatch it
away altogether, and so, after all, your confidence will come after
mine. Sit down, Ascanio; you shall have my heart spread out before you
like an open book. You need me, you say: I, too, need that you should
hear me. I shall be relieved of a great weight when you know all."
Ascanio sat down, paler than the culprit about to listen to the reading
of the death sentence.
"You are a Florentine, Ascanio, and I do not need to ask you if you know
the story of Dante Alighieri. One day he saw a child named Beatrice
passing along the street, and he loved her. The child died and he loved
her still, for it was her soul that he loved and souls do not die; but
he crowned her with a crown of stars, and placed her in paradise. That
done, he set about analyzing human passions, sounding the depths of
poetry and philosophy; and when, purified by suffering and
contemplation, be readied the gates of heaven, where Virgil, that is,
Wisdom, was to leave him, he was not obliged to stop for lack of a
guide, because he found Beatrice, that is, Love, awaiting him on the
threshold.
"Ascanio, I have my Beatrice, dead like the other, and adored as she
was. This has been hitherto a secret between God and her and myself. I
am weak to resist temptation; but my adoration for her has remained
intact amid all the impure passions to which I have yielded. I had
placed my light too high for corruption to reach it. The man plunged
heedlessly into dissipation, the artist remained true to his mysterious
betrothal; and if I have done anything creditable, Ascanio,--if inert
matter, silver or clay, has been made to assume form and life under my
fingers, if I have sometimes succeeded in imparting beauty to marble and
life to bronze,--it has been because my resplendent vision has given me
counsel, support, and instruction for twenty years past.
"But I know not how it is, Ascanio: perhaps there is a distinction
between the poet and the goldsmith, between the moulder of ideas, and
the moulder of gold. Dante dreams: I need to see. The name of Maria is
all-sufficient to him; I must have before me the face of the Madonna. We
divine his creations; we touch mine. That perhaps is why my Beatrice was
not enough, or rather was too much for me, a sculptor. Her mind was ever
present with me, but I was compelled to seek the human form. The angelic
woman who shed a bright light upon my life had been beautiful, most
certainly, beautiful above all in the qualities of her heart, but she
did not realize the type of undying beauty upon which my imagination
dwelt. I found myself constrained therefore to seek elsewhere, to
invent.
"Now, tell me this, Ascanio; do you think that, if my sculptor's ideal
had presented itself to me living on this earth, and if I had bestowed a
share of my admiration upon it, I should have been ungrateful and
faithless to my poetic ideal? Do you think that my celestial apparition
would in that case have ceased to visit me, that the angel would be
jealous of the woman? Do you think it? I ask you the question, Ascanio,
and you will know some day why I ask it of you rather than of
another,--why I tremble as I await your reply, as if you were my
Beatrice herself."
"Master," said Ascanio gravely and sadly, "I am too young to have an
opinion upon such lofty subjects: I think, however, in my heart, that
you are one of the chosen men whom God leads, and that what you find
upon your path has been placed there by God, not by chance."
"That is really your belief, is it not, Ascanio? You are of opinion that
the terrestrial angel, the realization of my longing, would be sent by
God, and that the other celestial angel would not be angry at my
desertion? In that case, I may venture to tell you that I have found my
ideal, that it is living, that I can sec it, and almost touch it.
Ascanio, the model of all beauty, of all purity, the type of infinite
perfection to which we artists aspire, is near at hand, it breathes, and
I can admire, it every day. Ah! all that I have done hitherto is as
nothing compared with what I will do. This Hebe, which you think
beautiful, and which is, in very truth, my _chef-d'œuvre_, does not
satisfy me as yet: my living dream stands beside its image, and seems to
me a hundred times more glorious; but I will attain it! I will attain
it! Ascanio, a thousand white statues, all of which resemble it, are
already forming and rising in my brain. I see them, I feel their
presence, and some day they will come forth.
"And now, Ascanio, would you like me to show you my lovely inspiration?
it should be close by us. Every morning, when the sun rises, it shines
upon me from below. Look."
Benvenuto drew the curtain aside from the window, and pointed to the
garden of the Petit-Nesle.
In her leafy avenue Colombe was walking slowly along, her head resting
upon her hand.
"How fair she is, is she not?" said Benvenuto ecstatically. "Phidias and
old Michel-Angelo created nothing purer, and the ancients, if they
equal, do not surpass that graceful young head. How beautiful she is!"
"Ah! yes, beautiful indeed!" murmured Ascanio, who had resumed his seat,
without strength to move or to think.
There was a moment's pause, while Benvenuto feasted upon his joy, and
Ascanio brooded over his pain.
"But, master," the apprentice timidly ventured to say, "where will this
artist's passion lead you? What do you mean to do?"
"Ascanio," replied Cellini, "she who is dead is not and cannot be mine.
God simply showed her to me, and did not implant any human love for her
in my heart. Strangely enough, he did not even lead me to feel what she
was to me until he had taken her from the world. She is naught but a
memory in my life, a vague, indistinct image. But if you have understood
me, Colombe more nearly touches my existence, my heart: I dare to love
her: I dare to say to myself, 'She shall be mine!'
"She is the daughter of the Provost of Paris," said Ascanio, trembling.
"And even if she were a king's daughter, Ascanio, you know what my will
is capable of. I have attained whatever object I have sought to attain,
and I never longed for aught more ardently. I know not as yet by what
means I shall gain my end, but she must be my wife."
"Your wife! Colombe your wife!"
"I will apply to my mighty sovereign," continued Benvenuto. "I will
people the Louvre and Chambord with statues if he wishes. I will cover
his tables with ewers and candelabra, and when I ask no other price than
Colombe he will not he François I. if he refuses. O Ascanio, I am
hopeful, I am hopeful! I will seek him in the midst of his whole court.
See, three days hence, when he starts for Saint-Germain, you will come
with me. We will carry the silver salt-box, which is completed, and the
designs for a gateway at Fontainebleau. Every one will admire them, for
they are fine, and he will admire them, and will marvel more than the
others. I will give him a similar surprise every week. I have never been
conscious of a more fruitful creative power. My brain is boiling night
and day: this love of mine, Ascanio, has increased my power and renewed
my youth. When François sees all his wishes gratified as soon as they
are formed,--ah! then I will no longer request, but demand. He will make
me great, and I will make myself rich, and the Provost of Paris, for all
his provostship, will be honored by the alliance. Upon my soul, Ascanio,
I am going mad! Such thoughts make me lose control of myself. She mine!
Dreams of heaven! Do you realize what it means, Ascanio? Colombe mine!
Embrace me, my child; since I have confessed it all to you, I dare to
listen to my hopes. My heart is calmer now; you have in a measure
legalized my happiness. You will understand some day what I mean by
that. Meanwhile, it seems to me that I love you more dearly since you
have received my confidence: it was good of you to listen. Embrace me,
dear Ascanio!"
"But you do not seem to think, master, that perhaps she doesn't love
you."
"Oh, hush, Ascanio! I have thought of it, and then I have envied your
youth and beauty. But what you say of the far-seeing designs of God
reassures me. She is waiting for me to come to her. Whom should she
love? some courtier fop, altogether unworthy of her! Furthermore,
whoever he may be for whom she is destined, I am as nobly born as he,
and I have more genius."
"Comte d'Orbec, they say, is hex _fiancé_."
"Comte d'Orbec? so much the better! I know him. He is the king's
treasurer, and I go to him for the gold and silver to be used in my
work, and for the sums which his Majesty's bounty allots to me. Comte
d'Orbec is a crabbed, worn out old curmudgeon! He doesn't count, and
there will be little glory in supplanting such an animal. Go to,
Ascanio; it is I whom she will love, not for my sake, but for her own,
because I shall be the demonstration of her loveliness, so to speak,
because she will be appreciated, adored, immortalized. Moreover, I have
said, 'I wish it!' and, I say again, I never have used that phrase that
I have not succeeded. There is no human power which can hold out against
the energy of my passion. I shall, as always, go straight to my goal,
with the inflexibility of destiny. She shall be mine, I tell you, though
I have to turn the whole kingdom topsy-turvy. And if perchance any rival
should block my way--Demonio! let him beware! You know me, Ascanio: I
will kill him with this hand now grasping thine. But forgive me,
Ascanio, in God's name! Egotist that I am, I forget that you have a
secret to confide to me, and a service to ask at my hands. I shall never
pay my debt to you, dear child, but say on, say on. For you, as well as
myself, I can do what it is my will to do."
"You are wrong, master: there are things which God alone can do, and I
know that I must rely upon Him and none other. I will leave my secret,
therefore, between my feebleness and His might."
Ascanio left the room.
He had hardly closed the door when Cellini drew the green curtain, and,
placing his table by the window, began to model his Hebe, his heart
filled with joy in the present, and a sense of security for the future.
END OF VOL. I.
[ILLUSTRATION 05]
THE SYDNEY LIBRARY EDITION
THE ROMANCES OF
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Volume XI.
ASCANIO
_PART SECOND_
NEW YORK
GEORGE D. SPROUL
Publisher
1898
_Copyright, 1896_,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.
CONTENTS
Chapter
I. The Trafficker in his own Honor
II. Four Varieties of Brigands
III. An Autumn Night's Dream
IV. Stefana
V. Domiciliary Visits
VI. Charles the Fifth at Fontainebleau
VII. The Ghostly Monk
VIII. What One sees at Night from the Top
of a Poplar
IX. Mars and Venus
X. The Rivals
XI. Benvenuto at Bay
XII. Of the Difficulty which an Honest
Man experiences in Procuring his
own Committal to Prison
XIII. In which Jacques Aubry rises to Epic
Proportions
XIV. Of the Difficulty which an Honest
Man experiences in Securing his
Release from Prison
XV. An Honest Theft
XVI. Wherein it is proved that a Grisette's
Letter, when it is burned, makes as
much Flame and Ashes as a Duchess's
XVII. Wherein it is proved that True Friendship
is capable of carrying devotion
to the Marrying Point
XVIII. The Casting
XIX. Jupiter and Olympus
XX. A Prudent Marriage
XXI. Resumption of Hostilities
XXII. A Love Match
XXIII. Mariage de Convenance
ASCANIO
I
THE TRAFFICKER IN HIS OWN HONOR
It was the day on which Colombe was to be presented to the queen.
The whole court was assembled in one of the state apartments at the
Louvre. After hearing mass the court was to depart for Saint-Germain,
and they were awaiting the coming of the king and queen to go to the
chapel. Except a few ladies who were seated, everybody was moving about
from place to place, laughing and talking. There was the rustle of silks
and brocades, and the clash of swords; loving and defiant glances were
exchanged, together with arrangements for future meetings, of amorous or
deadly purport. It was a dazzling, bewildering scene of confusion and
splendor; the costumes were superb, and cut in the latest style; among
them, adding to the rich and interesting variety, were pages, dressed in
the Italian or Spanish fashion, standing like statues, with arms akimbo,
and swords at their sides. It was a picture overflowing with animation
and magnificence, of which all that we could say would be but a very
feeble and colorless description. Bring to life all the dandified,
laughing cavaliers, all the sportive easy-mannered ladies who figure in
the pages of Brantôme and the "Heptameron," put in their mouths the
crisp, clever, outspoken, idiomatic, eminently French speech of the
sixteenth century, and you will have an idea of this seductive court,
especially if you recall the saying of François I.: "A court without
women is a year without spring, or a spring without flowers." The court
of François I. was a perpetual spring, where the loveliest and noblest
of earthly flowers bloomed.
After the first bewilderment caused by the confusion and uproar, it was
easy to see that there were two hostile camps in the throng: one,
distinguished by lilac favors, was that of Madame d'Etampes; the other,
whose colors were blue, hoisted the flag of Diane de Poitiers. Those who
secretly adhered to the Reformed religion belonged to the first faction,
the unadulterated Catholics to the other. Among the latter could be seen
the dull, uninteresting countenance of the Dauphin; the intelligent,
winning, blonde features of Charles d'Orléans, the king's second son,
flitted here and there through the ranks of the faction of Madame
d'Etampes. Conceive these political and religious antipathies to be
complicated by the jealousy of women and the rivalry of artists, and the
result will be a grand total of hatred, which will sufficiently explain,
if you are surprised at them, a myriad of scornful glances and
threatening gestures, which all the courtier-like dissembling in the
world cannot conceal from the observation of the spectator.
The two deadly enemies, Anne and Diane, were seated at the opposite ends
of the room, but, notwithstanding the distance between them, not five
seconds elapsed before every stinging quip uttered by one of them found
its way to the ears of the other, and the retort, forwarded by the same
couriers, returned as quickly by the same road.
Amid all these silk and velvet-clad noblemen, in an atmosphere of clever
sayings, in his long doctor's robe, stern-featured but indifferent,
walked Henri Estienne, devotedly attached to the cause of the
Reformation, while not two steps away, and equally oblivious of his
surroundings, stood the Florentine refugee, Pietro Strozzi, pale and
melancholy, leaning against a pillar, and gazing doubtless in his heart
at far-off Italy, whither he was destined to return in chains, there to
have no repose save in the tomb. We need not say that the nobly born
Italian, a kinsman, through his mother, of Catherine de Medicis, was
heart and soul devoted to the Catholic party.
There, too, talking together of momentous affairs of state, and stopping
frequently to look each other in the face as if to give more weight to
what they were saying, were old Montmorency, to whom the king had given
less than two years before the office of Constable, vacant since the
fall of Bourbon, and the chancellor, Poyet, bursting with pride over the
new tax he had imposed, and the ordinance of Villers-Cotterets, just
countersigned by him.[8]
Mingling with none of the various groups, taking part in no
conversation, the Benedictine and Cordelier François Rabelais, with a
smile which showed his white teeth, watched and listened and sneered,
while Triboulet, his Majesty's favorite jester, rolled his humpback and
his biting jests around between the legs of the guests, taking advantage
of his pygmy-like stature to bite here and there without danger, if not
without pain.
Clement Marot, resplendent in a brand-new coat as _valet-de-chambre_ to
the king, seemed fully as uncomfortable as on the day of his reception
at the Hôtel d'Etampes. It was evident that he had in his pocket some
poor fatherless sonnet, which he was seeking to dress in the guise of an
impromptu conception. But alas! we all know that inspiration comes from
on high, and we cannot control it. A ravishing idea had come to his mind
unbidden upon the name of Madame Diane. He struggled against it, but the
Muse is a mistress, not a lover; the lines formed themselves without his
assistance, the rhymes matched themselves to one another as if by some
magic power which he could not control. In fine, the wretched verses
tormented him more than we can say. He was devoted to Madame d'Etampes
beyond question, and to Marguerite de Navarre,--that too, was
incontestable,--as was the fact that the Protestant party was the one
toward which his sympathies leaned. It may even be that he was in search
of an epigram against Madame Diane, when this madrigal in her honor came
to his mind; but come it did. And how, we pray to know, when such superb
lines were evolved in his brain in laudation of a Catholic, could he
forbear, despite his zeal for the Protestant cause, to confide them in a
whisper to some appreciative friend of literary tastes?
That is what poor Marot did. But the injudicious Cardinal de Tournon, to
whose bosom he intrusted his verses, deemed them so beautiful, so
magnificent, that, in spite of himself, he passed them on to M. le Duc
de Lorraine, who lost no time in telling Madame Diane of them. Instantly
there was a great whispering among the partisans of the blue, in the
midst of which Marot was imperatively summoned, and called upon to
repeat them. The lilacs, when they saw Marot making his way through the
crowd toward Madame Diane, hastened in the same direction, and crowded
around the poet, enchanted and terrified at the same time. At last the
Duchesse d'Etampes herself left her place, being curious, as she said,
to see how "that knave Marot,[9] who had so much wit, would set about
praising Madame Diane."