The constable, however, owed him a great grudge for having escaped and threw him into a dark room under the garden, which had much water lying in it and was infested with tarantulas and other poisonous insects. He was given a mattress and a blanket and strongly locked in. He goes on: “Thus wretchedly did I drag on my time ... in three days everything in the room was under water, yet with my broken leg I could hardly stir an inch and was obliged to crawl about with great difficulty. Only for about an hour and a half I enjoyed a little of the reflected light of the sun, and I passed the remainder of the day and night in the dark patiently, having but little doubt that in a few days I should end my miserable life. Only I was comforted with the thought that I had been spared the excruciating pangs of being flayed alive,” a fate that he was told impended when he was a captive in the Tor di Nona. His sufferings must have been acute nevertheless. Nothing gave him more pain than his nails, which had grown to an inordinate length. “I could not touch myself without being cut by them, neither was I able to put on my clothes because they pricked and gave the most exquisite pain. My teeth likewise rotted in my mouth, and this I perceived because the foul teeth were pushed forward by the sound ones and the stumps came beyond their sockets when I pulled them as it were out of a scabbard without any pain or effusion of blood. Then being reconciled to my other sufferings, one time I sang, another time I played and sometimes wrote (verses) with the compound of brick dust.” This last refers to the ink he manufactured from the powder of rotten bricks, his pen being a splinter of wood he had gnawed with his teeth from the back of his door, and his paper one of the blank leaves of the Bible which was now his inseparable companion. His piety became exemplary; he was constantly on his knees at prayer. His keepers resented this and roughly handled him, carrying him away by the light of a torch, as Cellini thought, to the sink of Sammalo, “a frightful place where many have been swallowed up alive by falling from thence into a well under the foundations of the castle.” But his fate was only to be immured in a dismal cell where a previous occupant, a victim of Clement VII, had been starved to death. Here he saw visions, divine visitors appeared to him and he was in a state of mental exaltation not far removed from madness. A sonnet he then indited gained him much sympathy and was deemed the work of “a worthy and virtuous person” and the pope was moved to release him, but still listened to the malevolent counsels of Pier Luigi to keep him a prisoner.