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As it had become manifestly impossible to keep the secret of the discovery in the Palazzo Conti any longer, Volterra had behaved with his accustomed magnanimity.
On November 27 Soderini wrote to the Cardinal of Pavia introducing Michael Angelo and praising the cartoon the artist had to leave unpainted, and to the Cardinal of Volterra more formally as follows:— "The bearer will be Michael Angelo, the sculptor, whom we send to please and satisfy his Holiness our Lord.
The exhilaration therefore supplies to memory the whole light in which, for the too brief time, I went about "seeing" Volterra; so that my glance at the seated splendour reduces itself, as I have said, to the merest impressionism; nothing more was to be looked for, on the stretched surface of consciousness, from one breezy wash of the brush.
Gigi was much cleverer than he; that was why he always called Gigi an imbecile. The carpenter unfolded his plan. He knew as well as any one that the Conti were ruined and could not raise any such sum as he proposed to demand, even to save Sabina's good name. It would apparently be necessary to extract the blackmail from Volterra by some means to be discovered.
You may remember, as a symbol of the influence of Christianity in this result, that the Bishop of Volterra, with his clergy, came out in procession to meet them as they began to run the streets, and obtained this mercy; else the old habits of pillage would have prevailed.
The distance from Cortona to Volterra is not very great, and the fact that he was painting there in 1491 does not preclude the possibility of his having painted there six or seven years before, even if it was executed on the spot, which was not by any means always the case.
Siena and Florence ruined Volterra once more in the Middle Ages, isolating it near the pestilential Maremma and checking its growth outward and inward. The cathedral, the pride of a mediæval commonwealth, is still a mean and unfinished building of the twelfth century.
Masin was used to his master's ways and did not speak, but occupied himself in noiselessly dusting the mantelpiece at least a hundred times over. Volterra had not explained to the Princess the reason why her acceptance of his offer would make it so much easier for him to help her out of her difficulty.
Volterra having been lost and recovered almost at the same time, present circumstances afforded nothing of sufficient importance to occasion a new war, if ambition had not again provoked one. Niccolo Fortebraccio, the son of a sister of Braccio da Perugia, had been in the service of the Florentines during most of their wars with the duke.
The Baroness had been called to the telephone five minutes after Volterra had gone out with the porter, leaving word that he was going to the Palazzo Conti and would be back within two hours.
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