Messer Niccolò continued to pour forth his notions; and Leonardo marvelled at the strange mixture of truth and error in his talk, at his audacity, and his slavish appeal to the authority of the ancients. He approved him when he spoke of the scientific difficulty in using guns of large calibre, owing to the inaccuracy of their range; but the next minute he asserted that fortresses were useless, because the Spartans and the Romans built none. He appeared to regard the opinions of the Greeks and Romans much as Leonardo regarded mathematical axioms. The latter, however, did not hear the conclusion of the dispute, as the landlord called him to the bedchamber reserved for him upstairs.
III
It snowed all night, and in the morning the guide refused to continue the journey, the weather being in his opinion not fit even for a dog to go out in. Leonardo was forced to remain at the inn. He amused himself trying a self-turning roasting-spit which he had invented.
'With this mechanism,' he expounded to the astonished onlookers, 'the cook need have no fear of burning the meat, for the action of the fire remains even. With increase of heat it turns faster, that is all.'
It would seem that the success of his flying-machine could hardly have afforded him greater pleasure than the perfection of this cooking engine.
In the same room Messer Niccolò was explaining to certain young artillery sergeants an infallible system, based on abstract mathematics, for winning at dice—'circumventing,' as he called it, 'the caprices of the strumpet Fortune.' Every time he tried to give a practical illustration of its value, he lost, greatly to his own astonishment and to the amusement of his audience. The conclusion of the game was unexpected and not entirely to Messer Niccolò's glory. It revealed that his pouch was empty, and that he could not meet his losses.
Late that evening there arrived another guest, with a great array of servants, pages, grooms, jesters, negroes, animals, boxes, and chests. It was the elegant Venetian courtesan, the magnifica meretrice, Lena Griffi, who had been so nearly despoiled by Savonarola's 'youthful inquisitors.' Two years ago, following the example of many of her sisterhood, the repentant Magdalen had cut her hair and shut herself up in a convent. This was, however, merely an artifice to raise her price in the city tariff of courtesans, drawn up for the use of strangers. From the monastic chrysalis she had emerged like a butterfly awakened to a new and more splendid life. Very soon the mammola veneziana had risen to great celebrity, and had fashioned for herself, according to the usage of the principal courtesans, a fine genealogical-tree, by which it appeared that she was the daughter of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of Ludovico, Duke of Milan. She became the mistress of an old and doting cardinal, whose infirmities were palliated by his wealth, and was now journeying to Fano, where her elderly lover was attached to Cæsar Borgia's camp. The host could not refuse admission to so exalted a personage. He accommodated her suite by turning out certain Ancona merchants from a fair-sized bedroom, housing them in the forge, and promising them a reduction in their bill. Similar treatment he proposed for Messer Niccolò and his room-mates, the French captains, in order to provide a chamber for the lady herself.
Messer Niccolò, however, protested, and grew very angry, asking the landlord if he had lost his reason, if he knew with whom he was speaking? if it were not unheard-of insolence to insult respectable people for the pleasing of the first jade tumbled in out of the street? Here intervened the hostess, a masterful lady who, in the words of the proverb, had not 'pawned her tongue to a Jew'; she suggested that before making so much noise he had better pay the bill for himself, his servant, and his three horses; and also return the four ducats lent him last Friday by her husband. And she added, in a stage whisper, that she wished a bad Easter to all the adventurers and beggars who swarmed on the high roads, and, pretending to be great ones, lived at free quarters and mocked at honest people. No doubt there was some applicability in all this, for Messer Niccolò was reduced to silence, and seemed considering how he could retire with the best grace from his position. Meantime servants were already removing his goods, and Madonna Lena's monkey was grimacing at him, and jumping over the table among his papers and great leather books, the Decades of Livy and Plutarch's Lives.
Leonardo now approached and said, raising his berretto:—