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Wherefore the said Pisans were put to shame, and the King, both by reason of the florin, and for the words of our wise citizen, made the Florentines free, and appointed for them their own Fondaco, and church, in Tunis, and gave them privileges like the Pisans. And this we know for a truth from the same Peter, having been in company with him at the office of the Priors."
Madonna Alfonsina, his mother, brought unpopularity upon him; for she was avaricious, and the Florentines, who noticed every detail, thought her grasping: and though he wanted to restrain her, he found himself unable to do so through the high esteem in which he held her.
Gathering from these advices that it was Louis's wish that the Florentines should not be molested further, and naturally anxious not to run counter to the king's intentions, Cesare perceived that the time to take action had arrived, the time for passivity in the affairs of Florence was at an end.
On my accession in later years to the service of the "Times" as Rome correspondent, I attacked the system of drainage and water supply of Florence in a series of letters, and brought down on my head the most furious abuse which my journalistic life has known, but which ended in the reformation, not yet complete, however, of the water supply of the city, and the admission by the Florentines that if they had attended to my warnings earlier they would have been saved great losses, chief of which was the abandonment of a projected return to Florence by Queen Victoria, on account of a serious epidemic of typhoid which broke out after her first visit.
The Florentines had never lost the name of liberty, which in Italy at that period meant less the freedom of the inhabitants to exercise self-government than the independence of the city in relation to its neighbors.
'Twas some time before the Florentines ceased to look on Tedaldo as a portent, as if he were risen from the dead; and a shadow of doubt whether he were really Tedaldo or no continued to lurk in the minds of not a few, including even his brothers: they had no assured belief; and in that frame had perchance long continued, but for a casual occurrence that shewed them who the murdered man was.
It appears that the Florentines were not satisfied with keeping the preparation of orchilla a mystery from the rest of the world, but that they endeavoured to lead all inquiry into a false channel, by calling it tincture of turnsole, desiring it to be believed, that it was an extract from the heliotropium or turnsole: the Dutch also disguised it in the form of a paste, which they called lacmus or litmus.
'Better let the Florentines be defeated, and then, used as they are to the life of a free city, they will settle with us and bring their silk and woollen industry with them, as the Lucchese did in their distress. The speech of the dying Doge Mocenigo to a few of the senators whom he had sent for to his bedside is still more remarkable.
Ask our Frate, our prophet, how his universal renovation is to be brought about: he will tell you, first, by getting a free and pure government; and since it appears that this cannot be done by making all Florentines love each other, it must be done by cutting off every head that happens to be obstinately in the way.
Nor were the affairs of Genoa or of Tuscany in repose, for the Florentines kept the Count Antonio da Marciano on the borders of Serezana; and while the war continued in Lombardy, annoyed the people of Serezana by inroads and light skirmishes.