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A barometer and thermometer are almost the only novelties that a visitor from the sixteenth century would notice. The statuary is both old and new; for here are genuine antiques once in Ferdinand I's Villa Medici at Rome, and such modern masterpieces as Donatello's Judith and Holofernes, Cellini's Perseus, and Gian Bologna's two muscular and restless groups.
Similar jewels surrounded her queenly neck and the splendidly-shaped snow-white arms. Her cheeks were transparently pale to-day, and a gloomy, sinister fire was burning in her large black eyes. She looked beautiful, proud, and menacing, like Judith, who has adorned herself for the purpose of going to the tent of Holofernes.
And she rose and adorned herself with her rich and precious clothes, and went in and stood before Holofernes, and Holofernes' heart was pierced with her beauty, and he said to her: Sit down and drink in joy, for thou hast found grace before me. Judith said: I shall drink my lord, for my life is magnified this day before all the days of my life.
So it came to pass that Mother Holofernes began quarrelling with her daughter almost from the day that the girl was born. “You are,” she said, “as flaccid as Dutch tobacco, and it would take a couple of oxen to draw you out of your room. You fly work as you would the pest, and nothing pleases you but the window, you shameless girl.
He took the road which led to the lofty mountain upon whose summit the son-in-law of Mother Holofernes was cursing all mothers-in-law, past, present, and future, promising as soon as ever he regained his power to put an end to that class of vipers, and by a very simple method the abolition of matrimony.
One of them, the pastor Chamier, was animated by a zealous and bellicose fanaticism; he was never tired of calling to mind the calamities undergone by the towns that had submitted to the royal army; he was incessantly comparing Montauban to Bethulia, Louis XIII. to Nabuchodonosor, the Duke of Mayenne to Holofernes, the Montalbanese to the people of God, and the Catholics to the Assyrians.
You are more amorous than Cupid himself, but, if I have any power, you shall live as close as a nun.” On hearing all this, Panfila got up, yawned, stretched herself, and turning her back on her mother, went to the street door. Mother Holofernes, without paying attention to this, began to sweep with most tremendous energy, accompanying the noise of the broom with a monologue of this tenor:
In the composition of the Death of Holofernes Judith covers with a napkin the severed head, which is carried in a basket on the head of her handmaid; a most lovely group, said to have been taken from an intaglio representing a vintage scene, in which a nymph fills with grapes a basket supported on the head of a companion.
And when Judith was alone in the chamber, and Holofernes lay and slept in overmuch drunkenness, Judith said to her handmaid that she should stand without forth before the door of the privy chamber and wait about, and Judith stood before the bed praying with tears and with moving of her lips secretly, saying: O Lord God of Israel, conform me in this hour to the works of my hands, that thou raise up the city of Jerusalem as thou hast promised, and that I may perform this that I have thought to do.
Thus, Armado, describing Holofernes, says, "That's all one, my fair, sweet, honey monarch; for I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical, too, too vain, too, too vain; but we will put it, as they say, to fortuna della guerra"; whilst Holofernes, not behind his counterpart in self-esteem, sees in the other the defects which he cannot detect in himself.
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