The fact was that he would have preferred to return to the Castle of San Angelo at the risk of breaking his leg a second time in making his escape. Not that he despised his dear Scozzone; he loved her dearly, and sometimes a little jealously, as we have seen, but he adored art before everything, and his true and lawful wife was sculpture first of all. Furthermore, when he should be married, would not the husband depress the spirits of the gay Bohemian? Would not the _pater-familias_ interfere with the freedom of the sculptor? And, again, if he must marry all his models, he would commit bigamy a hundred times over. "When I cease to love Scozzone, and to need her as a model," he said to himself, "I will find some worthy fellow for her, too short-sighted to look back into the past and to divine the future, who will see nothing but a lovely woman and the marriage portion I will give her. Thus I will satisfy her mania for wearing the name of wife, bourgeois fashion." For Benvenuto was convinced that Scozzone's desire was simply to have a husband, and that it mattered little to her who the husband might be. Meanwhile, he left the ambitious damsel to take what comfort she could in her fancies. But since their installation at the Grand-Nesle, her eyes had been opened, and she realized that she was not so necessary to Cellini's life and work as she thought, for she could no longer with her gayety dispel the cloud of melancholy which overhung his brow, and he had begun to model a Hebe in wax for which she was not asked to pose. At last, the poor child--_horribile dictu_!--had essayed to play the coquette with Ascanio in Cellini's presence, and there had been not the slightest drawing together of the eyebrows to bear witness to the master's jealous wrath. Must she then bid farewell to all her blissful dreams, and become once more a poor, humiliated creature? As to Pagolo, if any one cares to sound the depths of his heart, we venture to say that he had never been more gloomy and taciturn than of late.