'Who is that?' inquired Leonardo.
'Monseigneur de la Trémouille.'
'Then I am in time,' thought the artist; 'I must pursue him and make supplication.'
Nevertheless he actually stood motionless where he was; oppressed by an inability, a paralysis of the will, that would have hindered the stirring of a finger had his very life been in danger. Repugnance, shame, seized him at the thought of pushing his way through the crowd that he might, like Fra Luca Pacioli, run after and pull at the skirts of a person of quality. The Gascon shot his arrow; it whizzed through the air, hit the mark, and penetrated deeply into the mole on Francesco's cheek.
'Bigorre! Bigorre! Montjoie! Saint Denis!' shouted the soldiers, throwing their caps into the air, 'Vive la France!' The noisy crowd again encircled the Colossus, the jargon of many tongues broke forth anew; a fresh match was arranged, and again arrows whistled on the air and wounded the great Duke. Leonardo could not move. Inconceivable as it may seem, rooted to the spot as in some hideous dream, he watched the slow destruction of the work of the six best years of his life; of perhaps the greatest monument of the sculptor's art since the days of Phidias and Praxiteles. Under a hail of bullets, arrows, and even stones, the brittle clay was broken off in lumps or resolved into dust; the supports were laid bare. The Colossus had become an immense iron skeleton.
The sun streamed out from behind a bank of clouds. Nothing remained but the headless body of a man, the trunk of a horse, the fragment of a sceptre, and the inscription on the pedestal. 'Behold a god!' Just then the commandant of the French troops, the old Marshal Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, rode up. He looked at the place of the Colossus, stopped in sheer astonishment, looked again, shading his eyes from the sun; then turned to his attendants and asked—
'In the name of God, what has taken place?'
'Monseigneur,' replied a lieutenant. 'Captain Cockburn gave permission to his cross-bowmen——'
'The Sforza monument! the work of Leonardo da Vinci—I made a target for the archers of Gascony!' cried the marshal, and he rushed at the men, who, intent on their work of destruction, had not observed his displeasure; seized a Frenchman by the collar and flung him to the ground, rating him soundly. In his fury the old general had become quite purple.
'Monseigneur,' stammered the soldier, struggling to his knees, shaking with fright, 'Monseigneur, we did not know! Captain Cockburn had said——'