Michelangelo’s dejection caused serious anxiety to his friends.  Jacopo Salviati, writing on the 30th October from Rome, endeavoured to restore his courage.  “I am greatly distressed to hear of the fancies you have got into your head.  What hurts me most is that they should prevent your working, for that rejoices your ill-wishers, and confirms them in what they have always gone on preaching about your habits.”  He proceeds to tell him how absurd it is to suppose that Baccio Bandinelli is preferred before him.  “I cannot perceive how Baccio could in any way whatever be compared to you, or his work be set on the same level as your own.”  The letter winds up with exhortations to work.  “Brush these cobwebs of melancholy away; have confidence in his Holiness; do not give occasion to your enemies to blaspheme, and be sure that your pension will be paid; I pledge my word for it.”  Buonarroti, it is clear, wasted his time, not through indolence, but through allowing the gloom of a suspicious and downcast temperament—­what the Italians call accidia—­to settle on his spirits.

Skipping a year, we find that these troublesome negotiations about the tomb were still pending.  He still hung suspended between the devil and the deep sea, the importunate Duke of Urbino and the vacillating Pope.  Spina, it seems, had been writing with too much heat to Rome, probably urging Clement to bring the difficulties about the tomb to a conclusion.  Michelangelo takes the correspondence up again with Fattucci on November 6, 1526.  What he says at the beginning of the letter is significant.  He knows that the political difficulties in which Clement had become involved were sufficient to distract his mind, as Julius once said, from any interest in “stones small or big.”  Well, the letter starts thus:  “I know that Spina wrote in these days past to Rome very hotly about my affairs with regard to the tomb of Julius.  If he blundered, seeing the times in which we live, I am to blame, for I prayed him urgently to write.  It is possible that the trouble of my soul made me say more than I ought.  Information reached me lately about the affair which alarmed me greatly.  It seems that the relatives of Julius are very ill-disposed towards me.  And not without reason.—­The suit is going on, and they are demanding capital and interest to such an amount that a hundred of my sort could not meet the claims.  This has thrown me into terrible agitation, and makes me reflect where I should be if the Pope failed me.  I could not live a moment.  It is that which made me send the letter alluded to above.  Now, I do not want anything but what the Pope thinks right.  I know that he does not desire my ruin and my disgrace.”