Marco was convinced they could devise nothing; however, finding absolute obedience the best way of influencing the Master, he fetched the account-books. Leonardo's brow contracted in a look of disgust, and he watched the opening of the too familiar green volume with the air of one looking into a gaping wound; then together they plunged into calculations, and it was wonder and pity to see the great mathematician making the blunders of a child in the additions and the subtractions. Now and then he suddenly remembered some mislaid account of a thousand ducats, sought it, fumbled in cases and boxes, and dusty piles of papers, but found in its place trifling and useless memoranda written in his own hand, such, for instance, as that one of Salaino's cloak:—
| Silver brocade, | Livre | 15 | soldi | 4 |
| Crimson velvet for trimming, | " | 9 | " | 0 |
| Braid, | " | 0 | " | 9 |
| Buttons, | " | 0 | " | 12 |
He tore them angrily, and blushing and swearing threw them under the table.
Giovanni, seeing on the great man's face these marks of human weakness, murmured to himself:—
'A new Hermes Trismegistus halved with a new Prometheus? Nay, neither god nor Titan, but a simple mortal like the rest of us! And to think that I feared him! the poor kind soul!'
X
Two days passed, and as Marco had foreseen, Leonardo forgot the money question completely. He demanded three florins for the purchase of a fossil with so confident an air that Marco lacked courage to refuse him, and handed out the money from his private hoard. The ducal treasurer, deaf to Leonardo's entreaties, had still not paid the year's salary, and was the less likely to do so that Ludovico himself required great sums to spend in preparation for war with France. Leonardo was obliged to borrow wherever he could, even from his own pupils.
Nor was the money forthcoming for the completion of the Sforza monument. The plaster cast, the mould, the receiver for the molten metal, the furnace—all were ready; but when the artist presented his estimate for the bronze, Il Moro was alarmed, and even refused him an interview.
At last, in the end of November, urged by want, he wrote a letter to the Duke; sentences fragmentary, disconnected, like the stammering of one overcome by confusion, who does not know how to beg.