the pieces truly in the cement and arrange them
artistically, he expected both profit and fame as the result of this
great work and the host of figures it contained. Then, directly the
master was gone, Buffalmacco hastened to make his preparations for the
enterprise he was bent upon. He went down into the cellar, which,
communicating as it did with a baker's next door, was full of
cockroaches drawn thither by the smell of the sacks of flour. Everybody
knows how cockroaches, or kitchen-beetles, swarm in bakeries, inns and
corn-mills. These are a sort of crawling, stinking insects, with long,
ungainly, shaggy legs and an ugly shell of a dirty yellow.[1]

During the Civil Wars that stained the Arbia red and fertilized the
olive-yards with the blood of nobles, these loathsome insects had two
names in Tuscany: the Florentines called them Siennese, and the Siennese
Florentines.[2]

[Footnote 1: It would be better to speak of the wing-cases. "Shell" is
an utterly unsuitable word--not in the least fitting. The Oriental
cockroach is in question, an insect familiar in almost every part of
Europe.]

[Footnote 2: In Russia they are termed Prussians, and in Prussia
Russians. The French call them _cafards_ (canting creatures,
hypocrites).]

The good Buffalmacco laughed to see the creatures all moving up and
down and in and out, looking for all the world like tiny shields of a
host of pigmy knights jousting in a fairy tourney.

"Ah, ah!" he cried to himself, "they are may-bugs bedevilled, that's
what they are! They would not enjoy the springtime, and Jupiter punished
them for their sluggishness. He has condemned them to crawl about in the
dark, weighed down by their useless wings--an object-lesson to men to
make the most of life in the heyday of youth and love."

This was what Buffalmacco said to himself; for he was ready enough, like
other folk, to see in nature a symbol of his own passions and
inclinations, which were to drink, to divert himself with pretty women
and sleep his fill in a warm bed in winter and a nice cool one in
summer.

However, he had not visited the cellar to ponder on symbols and emblems,
and he was not long in carrying out his plan. He caught two dozen of the
cockroaches, without regard to sex or age, and popped them in a bag he
had brought with him for the purpose. This done, he proceeded to hide
the bag under his bed, and returned to the workroom, where his comrades
Bruno and Calendrino were painting,