husband Filippo Strozzi. He followed her to the Palazzo Medici to ask for information as to how things were in Florence pretending, that having just arrived, he was ignorant. Ippolito, with the impetuosity of youth, recounted how ill the city was behaving and then complained bitterly that Madonna Clarice sided with rebels against her own kith and kin. Strozzi professed great sorrow for the behaviour of the Florentines, and still greater for that of his wife, but the fact was, he added with a sigh, that, as a Medici, Clarice was so superior to himself that he had not such control over her as might be desired. Nevertheless, as the Cardinal and the two lads still hesitated about following his advice and quitting the city, he summoned his wife to his help. “Standing in the long gallery she poured forth,” writes old Segni, “her scorn of the base-born scions of her family. ‘You show plainly, what is already known, that you are not of the blood of the Medici. I say this, not only of you, but of Pope Clement, wrongfully a Pope, and now most righteously a prisoner in S. Angelo. As for you, leave a house and a city, neither of which are yours by the right of either birth or of merit. Go, and lose no time.’” Quitting the Medici palace, the Cardinal and the two lads rode out of the Porta S. Gallo and for the third time the Medici were exiled, and their noble palace was attacked by the mob who were with difficulty restrained from setting it on fire. The arms of the Medici were everywhere defaced and the waxen counterfeits of the Popes Leo and Clement were torn from their places in the church of the Annunziata and destroyed (see p. 380).