The Cardinal returned home and at once sent the man who was waiting on the bishopric to tell me that the Pope wanted to have me back, but that he would lodge me in a ground-floor room by his private garden, where everyone could visit me as if I were in his house. At this I begged Andrea to be good enough to tell the Cardinal not to give me up to the Pope but to let me look after myself: I would have myself hidden inside a mattress and carried out of Rome to a safe hiding-place. To give me up to the Pope, I added, was sending me to certain death.
It is believed that when the Cardinal heard this he would have been only too glad to do what I asked: but that Andrea, who was after the bishopric, gave the game away. The Pope sent for me at once and had me lodged, as he had said, in one of the lower rooms by his private garden. The Cardinal sent word warning me not to eat any of the food that the Pope gave me. He added that he would send me food himself and that he had been forced into doing what he had, but that I was to keep my spirits up and he would help me to get free.
In these circumstances I was visited every day, and I received important offers of help from many great noblemen. The Pope used to send me food, but I left it untouched and ate what came from Cardinal Cornaro. So the days went by.
Among my other friends was a young Greek, aged twenty-five. He was incredibly vigorous, and the best swordsman in Rome; and although he was faint-hearted he was a good trustworthy fellow, and very credulous. He had heard about the Pope’s saying that he meant to make it up to me for my misfortunes. And it was in fact true that, at the beginning, the Pope had said this; but he ended up saying quite different things. So I took this young Greek into my confidence.
‘My dear brother,’ I said to him, ‘they’re determined to assassinate me, so now is the time to help. They think that with their doing me such extraordinary favours I don’t realize that the only reason for it is that they want to trick me.’
In reply the good young fellow said: ‘Dear Benvenuto, they say in Rome that the Pope has given you a post with an income worth five hundred crowns, so I beg you not to let your suspicions rob you of such a good thing.’
However, with my arms crossed over my breast, I begged him to get me away from where I was: I realized a pope like him could do me a great deal of good, but, I added, I knew for certain that – on the sly, in order to save appearances – he was doing his best to deal me a nasty blow. Therefore, I went on, he should act quickly and try to save my life; if he helped me escape in the way I told him I would always acknowledge that I owed him my life, and I would lay down my life for him, if necessary. By now he was in tears.
‘My dear brother,’ he said, ‘you’re determined to ruin yourself; but I can’t refuse to do what you ask me. Tell me how, and I’ll do all you say even though it’s against my will.’
So we settled matters: I told him all my plans, which could easily have been successful. However, when I imagined that he was just about to put what I had arranged into operation, he came to tell me that for my own good he intended to disobey me, and that he fully believed what he had heard from men who were well in with the Pope and knew all about my case. There was no other way I could help myself; so I remained in misery and despair. This was on the feast of Corpus Christi, 1539.
The whole day went past, and then, that same night after the dispute, a great abundance of food was brought me from the Pope’s kitchen: a fine supply came from Cardinal Cornaro’s kitchen as well. As some of my friends were present I made them stay to supper with me. I was in bed, with my leg in splints, but I made a cheerful meal with them and they stayed on. An hour after nightfall they left me; two of my servants settled me ready for sleep, and then lay down in the antechamber.
I had a dog, black as a mulberry, with a shaggy coat; he was splendid for hunting, and he never strayed more than a yard from my side. During the night he slept under my bed, and at least three times I called my servant to take him out, because he was whining terrifyingly. When the servants came in the dog rushed at them and tried to bite them. They panicked and were scared that the dog had gone mad, he was howling so persistently.
This went on till about four hours after nightfall. Then, as the clock was striking, the chief constable with a large escort walked into my room; the dog came from under the bed and flew at them so furiously, tearing their cloaks and stockings, that they thought in their terror that he had gone mad. However, the chief constable was an experienced man and he said:
‘It’s perfectly natural that a good dog should know by instinct of any harm about to come to its master. Two of you grab hold of some sticks and beat him off, and the rest of you, tie Benvenuto to this chair and take him where you’ve been ordered.’
As I said, the day that had just passed was the feast of Corpus Christi, and it was about four hours after nightfall. They carried me along well hidden and covered, with four of them walking in front to move on the few men who were still on the streets. In this way they brought me to the place called the Torre di Nona, where they put me in the condemned cell, setting me down on a scrap of mattress. They left one of the guards with me and all night long this fellow kept sympathizing with me over my bad luck: ‘Oh dear! Poor Benvenuto! what have you done to them?’
So from the place I was in, and from what the guard said, I was quite certain what was to happen to me. I spent some of the night racking my brains as to the reason why it had pleased God to punish me in this way; and since I couldn’t think of any I was terribly disturbed. The guard started doing his best to console me, but I begged him for the love of God to keep quiet and stop talking to me, since I could set my mind at rest better and more quickly if I were left alone. He promised that he would.
Then I turned my mind completely to God, praying fervently that He would in His mercy take me into His kingdom; I prayed that although I had complained because I thought that as far as the laws were concerned such an end would be undeserved, and although I had committed murders, His own Vicar had called me from my native town and forgiven me by the authority of human laws and of His own. All that I had done had been to protect the body that His Divine Majesty had lent to me: so I could not allow that, under the rules by which we lived in this world, I deserved such a death. It seemed to me that I was like an unfortunate man walking along the street who is killed by a stone falling from a great height above him: this is clearly the influence of the stars. Not that the stars have plotted together to do us good or evil, but we are all subject to the influence of their conjunctions. I know that I have free will, and I know for certain that if I showed my faith like a saint the angels of heaven would carry me out from this dungeon and give me sure protection against all my afflictions; but seeing that God does not seem to have made me worthy of such a thing it must be that the celestial influences are working malignantly against me. For a while I pondered in this way, then I calmed myself and soon I was asleep.
At daybreak I was woken up by the guard who said: ‘You’re a good man, but you’re an unlucky one! There’s no time for sleeping now – there’s a man come who has some bad news for you.’
‘The sooner I escape from the earthly prison, the better I’ll be pleased,’ I said, ‘especially as I’m certain that my soul is saved, and that I’m dying unjustly. Our glorious divine Saviour is making me one with His disciples and friends, who like Him were killed unjustly. Now it’s my turn to be put to death unjustly, and I devoutly thank God for it. Why doesn’t the man who has to sentence me come?’
‘He’s too upset about it all: and he’s crying.’
At this I called him by name – Benedetto da Cagli – and I said:
‘Come forward, my dear Benedetto, I’m perfectly calm and ready; it’s far more glorious for me to die unjustly than it would be if I deserved death. Come forward, I beg you, and bring me a priest so that I may have a few words with him – not that I need to, since I’ve made my holy confession to the Lord God. But I want to observe the decrees of our Holy Mother Church: although She is doing me this wicked wrong, I am only t
oo glad to forgive. So come along, dear Benedetto, and be quick about it, before other feelings get the better of me.’
After I had said all this, that admirable man told the guard to lock the door, because the business couldn’t be done unless he was there. Then he went along to the house of Signor Pier Luigi’s wife, who was with the Duchess whom I mentioned before. When he arrived before them, he said:
‘Noble lady, be good enough, I beg you for the love of God, to ask the Pope to send someone else to pass sentence on Benvenuto and perform my office, because I renounce it and I shall never do it again.’
Then, sick at heart, he went his way, sighing deeply.
The Duchess, who was present, said with a frown: ‘This is the wonderful justice one finds in the Rome ruled by God’s Vicar! The Duke, my husband, who is now dead, thought very highly of this man because of his goodness and his talents; he loved to have him by his side and was against his returning to Rome.’
Then, muttering angrily to herself, she left the house.
And then Pier Luigi’s wife (she was called Signora Jerolima) went along to the Pope and, throwing herself down on her knees – there were several cardinals present – she spoke so passionately that she made his Holiness blush for shame, and he replied:
‘For your sake we shall let him be, though in fact we never bore him any ill will.’
But he only added this because of the cardinals who were standing there, and who had heard everything that splendid, brave-hearted woman had said.
Meanwhile I was waiting in great fear and trembling. My heart was beating furiously, and all the men whose duty it was to carry out the wretched sentence were waiting as miserably as I was. Then, after supper time had passed, they went off to see to themselves and I was brought some food. I was astounded at this, and I said:
‘Now truth has prevailed against the malignity of the stars! I pray God if it is His will to save me from this storm.’
I started eating; and as earlier on I had resigned myself to my evil fate so now I began to hope for better fortune. I ate with a good appetite, and then waited, without seeing or hearing anyone, till an hour after nightfall when the chief constable came along with a fair number of his patrol and put me back in the chair in which, the evening before, they had carried me to that place. Then, after repeating several times in a very kind voice that I was not to worry, he ordered his men not to jolt my broken leg, and to treat me as carefully as their own eyes. They did what he said, carrying me into the castle I had escaped from. We climbed to the very top of the keep, to a small courtyard where, for a while, they shut me up.
Meanwhile the castellan had himself carried to where I was: ill and afflicted as he was, he said:
‘You see how I’ve caught you again?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but do you see how I escaped as I said I would? And if I hadn’t been sold under Papal guarantee for a bishopric, by a Venetian cardinal and the Roman Farnese, both of whom have scratched the face of God’s law, you would never have caught me again. But since they behaved so foully, you go and do your worst as well: I haven’t a care left in the world.’
The poor man began to shout aloud: ‘Ah! Ah! he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, and he’s bolder now than when he was well. Put him down there below the garden, and never talk to me about him again: he’ll be the death of me.’
I was carried down below the garden into a very dark, dank room full of tarantulas and noxious worms. They threw a miserable hemp mattress on the ground, and that evening I was left without food, locked in behind four doors. I stayed like that till five hours before nightfall the next day. Only then was I brought something to eat. I asked them to let me have some of my books to read. None of them replied, but they reported what I had said to that wretched castellan who had asked them to tell him. The next morning I was given my Italian Bible and another book containing Giovanni Villani’s Chronicles. I asked for some of my other books, but they told me I couldn’t have any more and had too many as it was. So I passed the time very miserably, on that damp scrap of mattress, which within three days was wringing wet. I was completely unable to move because of my broken leg; and when I wanted to get out of bed, because of the demands of nature, I had to go on hands and knees, suffering terrible agonies to avoid fouling the spot I slept on.
For an hour and a half every day I got a faint gleam of light filtering into my squalid cell through a tiny chink. Just for that short space of time I could read, otherwise, night and day, I waited patiently in the darkness, thinking all the time of God and of our human weakness. I was convinced that before many days passed, in these conditions and in that place, my unhappy life would come to an end. However I consoled myself as best I could, reflecting how much more painful it would have been to have died under the terrible agony of the executioner’s knife; but as it was I was meeting death half-drugged with sleep, which was a much more agreeable way to end. Little by little I felt strength ebbing, till my strong constitution had become used to the purgatory I was suffering. Then, when this happened and I was inured to it all, I resolved to bear my tremendous suffering as long as my strength held out.
I began the Bible from the beginning, devoutly reading and meditating on it. I was so fascinated that if it had been possible I would have spent all my time reading it. But, as the light failed, all my sufferings immediately flooded back, and I was so tortured that more than once I made up my mind to put out my life with my hand. They had left me without a knife, however, and so I had no easy means of doing such a thing. All the same on one occasion I took a solid wooden beam that was lying there and propped it up in such a way that it would fall like a trap. I wanted to make it crash down on my head, which would have been smashed at the first blow. But when I had set up the whole contraption, and was resolutely preparing to knock it down, as I went to put my hand to it I was seized by an invisible hand and hurled a distance of about four cubits.
I was so terrified that I remained there in a dead faint: and I stayed like that from dawn till five hours before nightfall, when they brought in my dinner. They must have come in several times without my noticing them, because, when I did notice them, I heard Captain Sandrino Monaldi205 say:
‘Oh, the unhappy man – he was such a unique genius, and look at the end he came to!’
I opened my eyes when I heard this and saw standing there some priests in their cassocks, who cried out:
‘Oh, you said he was dead!’
Bozza said: ‘I found him dead, that’s why I said so.’
Without delay they lifted me up, took hold of the mattress, which was as soggy as a plate of macaroni, and threw it out of the room: when they told the castellan about it he had me given another one.
On reflecting as to what it was that frustrated my attempt I decided that it must have been a divine power, my guardian angel.
The following night a wonderful vision in the form of a beautiful young man appeared to me in a dream and started rebuking me.
‘Do you know who it was who lent you that body that you were ready to wreck before the appointed time?’ he said.
I seemed to answer that I recognized everything as having come from the God of nature.
‘So then,’ he replied, ‘you despise His works, and you want to destroy them? Leave Him to guide you, and do not abandon hope in His saving power.’
And he added a great deal else, in very impressive words, of which I don’t remember the thousandth part. I began to be convinced that this angelic being had spoken the truth; and then, glancing round my cell, I caught sight of some pieces of musty brick. So rubbing one piece against another I managed to make a little paste. Then, still crawling on my hands and knees, I went up to the cell door and gnawed at the edge with my teeth till I had bitten off a small splinter. After that was done, I settled down to wait for the time when some light would creep into the prison; it first came in three and a half hours before sunset, and lasted an hour. Then I started to write as best I could on some superfluous pag
es in my Bible, and I rebuked the powers of my intellect for being impatient with life: they replied to my body, excusing themselves on account of their sufferings: and then my body held out the hope of better things. All this I wrote in dialogue, as follows:
‘Powers of my soul, in torment,
How cruel it is of you to hate this life!’
‘If you against Heaven are bent,
Who then will succour us in this our strife?
Let us depart, to seek a better life.’
‘Wait, be not so swift to go:
Heaven promises you will
Be yet more happy than you were before.’
‘A short while we’ll stay below,
If our great God intends to grant us still
The grace that we shall never suffer more.’
My strength came back to me, and after I had calmed myself by my own efforts I carried on reading my Bible: and my eyes grew used to the darkness, so that whereas before I could read for an hour and a half I could now read for three whole hours. I began to meditate with extreme wonder on the greatness of God’s power over those simple men, who believed so fervently that God would grant them all they hankered after. I assured myself that God would help me too, because of His divine mercy as well as because of my own innocence. I remained continually in communion with God, sometimes praying and sometimes deep in meditation; my delight in meditating on God in this way began to grow so intense that I forgot all my past sufferings, and all day long I sang psalms and compositions of my own, all addressed to Him.
There was one thing, however, that made me suffer terribly: what had happened was that my nails had grown so long that I could not touch myself without their wounding me. I was unable to dress without their turning inwards or outwards and causing me great torment. At the same time my teeth began to decay. I became conscious of this when the dead teeth started being pushed out by those teeth that were still living; little by little they pierced my gums, and the end of the roots started breaking through their sockets. When I realized what was happening I pulled them out, just as if I was drawing a sword from its scabbard, without any pain or bleeding. I lost a great many in this way. However, I reconciled myself to these new afflictions; and I carried on, sometimes singing, sometimes praying, and sometimes writing with that brick paste I mentioned. I began to write a poem in praise of the prison, and in it I gave an account of the things that had happened to me there. I shall write it down here in its appropriate place.
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini Page 28