Florence and the Pope. Charles V. had
determined to make himself master of Italy; his forces closed around
Rome, and Clement, fleeing through the underground passage from the
Vatican, shut himself up in the castle of St. Angelo, and from it beheld
the horrors of the sack of the city.

From its parapets, too, he witnessed the occupation of his cherished
villa by Bourbon's savage soldiery.

Benvenuto Cellini relates (with his characteristic self-laudation) his
prowess in killing the Constable de Bourbon and in defending the castle
of St. Angelo, and although his perspective is slightly forced from his
habit of placing his own colossal figure in the foreground, no
chronicle gives a more vivid account of these stirring events.

[Illustration: Stucchi by Giovanni da Udine

Villa Madama]

What a picture he might have painted for us of the meeting of the Pope
and the Emperor after the pacification; when Clement crowned his late
adversary and Charles, reinstating Duke Alessandro over Florence,
betrothed his beautiful daughter Margaret to that base-born reprobate!

Cellini might also have told us much of the after-life of the Duchess,
for he knew her well, and mentions her with admiration in his
autobiography. He served Alessandro too in Florence, and boasts of the
intimacy which he enjoyed in the ducal household.

There was no one living at that period so well qualified as he to relate
the inner history of that tragical marriage and of the romance which
effaced its memory and lingers still like an elusive perfume in her
exquisite villa.

Judge, lenient reader, if Cellini had told that last story, would not
its main _facts_ have corresponded with those embodied in the following
pages, though the tamer phrasing and more conventional attitude of the
writer compared with the audacity of his racier chronicle

"Are as moonlight unto sunlight,
And as water unto wine."

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASKET

BEING CERTAIN PAGES NOT INCLUDED IN THE AUTO-BIOGRAPHY OF ITS MAKER

I

It will be remembered by those who have read my published memoirs that
in the year 1535, while I was in Florence in the service of Duke
Alessandro de' Medici, I received orders from his excellency to execute
a little _coffre_ in gold to hold his own portrait, a medallion which I
had previously modelled from life and cast in relievo.

That I dismissed so lightly masterpieces of which I had such reason to
be proud was due to the fact that