y one morning,
used to place these in his chamber and take away the old ones; and so
Cristofano was forced to put on those that he found. But it was
marvellous sport to stand and hear him raging with fury as he dressed
himself in the new clothes. "Look here," he would say, "what
devilments are these? Devil take it, can a man not live in his own way
in this world, without the enemies of comfort giving themselves all
this trouble?" One morning among others, Cristofano having put on a
pair of white hose, the painter Domenico Benci, who was also working
in the Palace with Vasari, contrived to persuade him to go with
himself, in company with other young men, to the Madonna
dell'Impruneta. There they walked, danced, and enjoyed themselves all
day, and in the evening, after supper, they returned home. Then
Cristofano, who was tired, went off straightway to his room to sleep;
but, when he set himself to take off his hose, what with their being
new and his having sweated, he was not able to pull off more than one
of them. Now Vasari, having gone in the evening to see how he was,
found that he had fallen asleep with one leg covered and the other
bare; whereupon, one servant holding his leg and the other pulling at
the stocking, they contrived to draw it off, while he lay cursing
clothes, Giorgio, and him who invented such fashions as--so he
said--kept men bound in chains like slaves. Nay, he grumbled that he
would take leave of them all and by hook or by crook return to S.
Giustino, where he was allowed to live in his own way and had not all
these restraints; and it was the devil's own business to pacify him.

It pleased him to talk seldom, and he loved that others also should
be brief in speaking, insomuch that he would have gone so far as to
have men's proper names very short, like that of a slave belonging to
M. Sforza, who was called "M." "These," said Cristofano, "are fine
names, and not your Giovan Francesco and Giovanni Antonio, which take
an hour's work to pronounce;" and since he was a good fellow at heart,
and said these things in his own jargon of the Borgo, it would have
made the Doleful Knight himself laugh. He delighted to go on
feast-days to the places where legends and printed pictures were sold,
and he would stay there the whole day; and if he bought some, more
often than not, while he went about looking at the others, he would
leave them at some place where he had been leaning. And never, unless
he was forced,