neer his contrivance that while he seemingly included in its ranks
the young bloods of every party in the state, he was able, by the wise
adjustment of his machinery, to deal, or at least to intend, disaster
only to those that were opposed to him. Caesar might well have been
praised for so intelligent an artifice, and yet Messer Simone of the
Bardi, for all that he was brave enough, was very far from being a
Caesar. However, he planned his plan well, and I praise him for it all
the more light-heartedly because it came to grief so signally, and all
through one whose enmity he rated at too light a price.

It is ever the way of such fellows as Simone, that are of the suspicious
temperament and quick to regard folk as their enemies, to overlook, in
their computation of the perils that threaten their cherished purposes,
the gravest danger of all. Simone had plenty of enemies in Florence, and
he thought that he had provided against all of them, or, at the least,
all that were seriously to be reputed troublesome, when he swaddled and
dandled and matured his precious invention of the Company of Death. But
while he grinned as he read over the list of the recruits to that
delectable regiment, and hugged himself at the thought of how he would
in a morning's work thoroughly purge it of all that were his
antagonists, he suffered his wits to go wool-gathering in one instance
where they should have been most alert. Either he clean forgot or he
disdained to remember a certain wager of his, and a certain very fair
and very cunning lady with whom he had laid it, and to whose very
immediate interest it was that she should win the wager. Messer Simone
seemed either to think that Madonna Vittoria was not in earnest, or that
she might be neglected with safety. Whichever his surmise, Messer Simone
made a very great mistake.

It proved to be one of the greatest factors in the sum of Messer
Simone's blunder that he should have been tempted by ironic fortune to
turn for aid in the ingenious plot he was hatching to the particular man
upon whom he pitched for assistance. Already in those days of which I
write, far-away days as they seem to me now in this green old age--or
shall I, with an eye to my monkish habit, call it gray old age?--of
mine, those gentry existed who have now become so common in Italy, the
gentry that were called Free Companions. These worthy personages were
adventurers, seekers after fortune, men eager for wealth and power, and