The bust sold to the Frenchman was easily identified with that which Bastianini had made, and which had been known to all artistic Florence, and the authorities at the Louvre were duly certified by many a loud-tongued informer that they had been gulled. The information, as is usually the case with information of the kind, came too late to be of service to the buyers, but not too late to give them serious annoyance. The bust had been exhibited at the Louvre in a prominent place; it had excited considerable notice; none of the savants presiding over that establishment had conceived the smallest suspicion of its genuineness; and it was excessively disagreeable to have to admit that they had all been deceived by a work made the other day by an unknown Florentine artist. It was so disagreeable that the gentlemen in question had not the courage to face the truth. They pooh-poohed their informants, professed to adhere without a doubt to their own first opinions, and the bust, to the great amusement of all the Florentine art-world, remained in its place of honor at the Louvre, exhibited as a cinque-cento terra-cotta for a long time after all Florence was perfectly cognizant of its real history, and after the young artist had produced three or four other busts all equally marked by unmistakable cinque-cento characteristics. One of these was a really remarkable bust of Savonarola, which may be seen any day in the (now public) gallery of St. Mark's at Florence. The original _teterrima causa belli_ has, I believe, disappeared from the Louvre Gallery. Poor Bastianini died shortly afterward, and it is due to his memory and undoubtedly great talent that it should be distinctly understood that from first to last he was no party to or profiter by the frauds to which his special talent had given rise.