There was a dastardly plot against Cellini’s life from the moment of his reincarceration. Cardinal Cornaro had warned him to touch no food that had been dressed in the pope’s kitchen, plainly hinting that it would be poisoned, but to eat only the victuals provided by the Cardinal. These also were tampered with by the admixture of the powder of a pounded diamond. “This is not a poison in itself,” Cellini tells us, “but it is so excessively hard that it retains its acute angles, differing from other stones ... and when the powder enters the stomach with the meat and the operation of digestion is being performed, the particles of the diamond stick to the cartilages and perforate them.... On the day that it was administered to me, being Good Friday, they put it into all my victuals, into the salad, the sauce and the soup. When I had done dinner, as there remained a little of the salad on the dish, I happened to fix my eyes on some of the smallest particles remaining and examining them in a strong light I thought I realized what had been done and I concluded myself to be a dead man. “But some glimmering hope was left to me, for taking up some of the grains on my knife I pressed them hard on an iron surface and heard them crack. ‘This is not a diamond then,’ I said joyfully, ‘it is the dust of some more common and brittle stone which will do me no injury.’ And I found afterwards that although a real diamond had been provided originally to be ground into powder, the jeweller to whom it had been handed appropriated it himself and instituted an imitation stone, not worth twenty pence.” After this Cellini, giving his reasons, besought a fellow prisoner, the bishop of Pavia and his next door neighbour, to supply him with food from his own table, and suspecting ever that some fresh attempt might be tried, he ate nothing that was not first tasted by the servant who brought it.