adduced in his defence, he was committed to the castle of S. Angelo.  When he received his sentence, he called heaven and earth to witness, thanking God that he had “the happiness not to be confined for some error of his sinful nature, as generally happens to young men.”  Whereupon “the brute of a Governor replied, Yet you have killed enough men in your time.”  This remark was pertinent; but it provoked a torrent of abuse and a long enumeration of his services from the virtuous Cellini.

The account of this imprisonment, and especially of the hypochondriacal Governor who thought he was a bat and used to flap his arms and squeak when night was coming on, is highly entertaining.[377] Not less interesting is the description of Cellini’s daring escape from the castle.  In climbing over the last wall, he fell and broke his leg, and was carried by a waterman to the palace of the Cardinal Cornaro.  There he lay in hiding, visited by all the rank and fashion of Rome, who were not a little curious to see the hero of so perilous an escapade.  Cornaro promised to secure his pardon, but eventually exchanged him for a bishopric.  This remarkable proceeding illustrates the manners of the Papal Court.  The cardinal wanted a benefice for one of his followers, and the Pope wished to get his son’s enemy once more into his power.  So the two ecclesiastics bargained together, and by mutual kind offices attained their several ends.

Cellini with his broken leg went back to languish in his prison.  He found the flighty Governor furious because he had “flown away,” eluding his bat’s eyes and wings.  The rigour used towards him made him dread the worst extremities.  Cast into a condemned cell, he first expected to be flayed alive; and when this terror was removed, he perceived the crystals of a pounded jewel in his food.  According to his own account of this mysterious circumstance, Messer Durante Duranti of Brescia, one of Cellini’s numerous enemies, had given a diamond of small value to be broken up and mixed with a salad served to him at dinner.  The jeweller to whom this charge was entrusted, kept the diamond and substituted a beryl, thinking that the inferior stone would have the same murderous properties.  To the avarice of this man Cellini attributed his escape from a lingering death by inflammation of the mucous membrane.[378]

During his first imprisonment he had occupied a fair chamber in the upper turret of the castle.  He was now removed to a dungeon below ground where Fra Fojano, the reformer, had been starved to death.  The floor was wet and infested with crawling creatures.  A few reflected sunbeams slanting from a narrow window for two hours of the afternoon, was all the light that reached him.  Here he lay, alone, unable to move because of his broken leg, with his hair and teeth falling away, and with nothing to occupy him but a Bible and a volume of Villani’s “Chronicles.”  His spirit, however, was indomitable; and the passionate