f no importance. I see not why the King of
France should concern himself with her fate. Nevertheless, since our
prisoners have his patronage, they shall be detained no longer. I will
write to the Florentine signory commending the lady and her children to
their loving watch-care, and as you, Sir Yves, have been their conductor
hither, so shall you escort them to their destination."

Cesare could not gainsay his father's command. An hour later the gates
of St. Angelo opened for the departure of the Lady of Forli and her
children. I waited not for any chance of fate to turn backward the wheel
of fortune, and as my faithful troop galloped into line about her
litter, I gave the triumphant order--

"To Florence."

She dwells there even as I write these chronicles, in the Medicean
villa of Castello, and as at first she dared not keep her little son
with her (the men of the Medici being banished from Florence), she
confided him, still habited in girlish disguise, to the care of a
community of nuns, who kept a seminary for the daughters of noble
families. But at length, on the restoration of the Medici, he issued
from that retreat, and is now being bred to the profession of arms, in
the which he bids fair to realise the ambitions confided to me as we
rode from Forli, what time I deemed him the most unmannerly little
princess which it had been my lot to meet.

CHAPTER II

THE FINDING OF APOLLO

(AN ESCAPADE OF BAZZI'S)

I

_Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (called Sodoma) to Giulio Romano, painter
and architect at Mantua._

_Good Friend and sometime Pot-Comrade:_

By the which epithet I would signify that comradeship at Chigi's villa
at Rome in orgies of paint pots and brushes, flesh pots and flagons,
feasts of reason and of unreason, wherein we were alike insatiable until
the light of our revels went out in the death of our adored Raphael.

You write me that in the intervals of your labour you are piecing
together memoirs of those glorious Roman days in order to leave to the
world some record of the more intimate private life of our friend, and
you ask me for any anecdotes or remembered conversations which may fill
out this sheaf of tribute.

Faith, you, who have a whole garden of such souvenirs from which to
cull, in that you shared his labours, his home, his confidence and his
largess, have come to a wild and barren pasture for such sweet flowers;
and yet there was love between us, love which ever radiated from h