Benvenuto Cellini relates (with his characteristic self-laudation) his prowess in killing the Constable de Bourbon and in defending the castle of St. Angelo, and although his perspective is slightly forced from his habit of placing his own colossal figure in the foreground, no chronicle gives a more vivid account of these stirring events. [Illustration: Stucchi by Giovanni da Udine Villa Madama] What a picture he might have painted for us of the meeting of the Pope and the Emperor after the pacification; when Clement crowned his late adversary and Charles, reinstating Duke Alessandro over Florence, betrothed his beautiful daughter Margaret to that base-born reprobate! Cellini might also have told us much of the after-life of the Duchess, for he knew her well, and mentions her with admiration in his autobiography. He served Alessandro too in Florence, and boasts of the intimacy which he enjoyed in the ducal household. There was no one living at that period so well qualified as he to relate the inner history of that tragical marriage and of the romance which effaced its memory and lingers still like an elusive perfume in her exquisite villa. Judge, lenient reader, if Cellini had told that last story, would not its main _facts_ have corresponded with those embodied in the following pages, though the tamer phrasing and more conventional attitude of the writer compared with the audacity of his racier chronicle "Are as moonlight unto sunlight, And as water unto wine." THE ADVENTURE OF THE CASKET BEING CERTAIN PAGES NOT INCLUDED IN THE AUTO-BIOGRAPHY OF ITS MAKER I It will be remembered by those who have read my published memoirs that in the year 1535, while I was in Florence in the service of Duke Alessandro de' Medici, I received orders from his excellency to execute a little _coffre_ in gold to hold his own portrait, a medallion which I had previously modelled from life and cast in relievo. That I dismissed so lightly masterpieces of which I had such reason to be proud was due to the fact that certain personages of exalted station and of choleric temper, quick and able to revenge any imputation upon their honour were concerned in the adventures of the casket, so that I deemed it prudent during their lifetime to withhold a recital which I trust my present reader may find of a diverting nature. This casket was conceded by all connoisseurs in such matters to be the most admirable work of its kind hitherto produced. It was crowned by a statuette of Hercules, with other most exquisite figurines at the four corners, set upon feet of crouching sphinxes, half women and half panthers, and was further enriched by reliefs of laughing boys holding garlands, by grotesque masks and foliages of the most graceful and ingenious design that could possibly be conceived. [Illustration: Villa Madama--Interior]