And Fra Mariano, his favourite jester added:—
'Seek your own pleasure, Holy Father! All else is folly.'
The pope surrounded himself with poets, musicians, painters, and scholars. A golden age had dawned for imitative men of letters, who had one unassailable article of faith, the perfection of Cicero's prose and of Virgil's poetry.
The shepherds of Christ's flock avoided the mention of His name, because it was a word unknown to Cicero's Orations. They called nuns, vestals; the Holy Ghost, the Inspiration of the Supreme Jove; and they requested the Pope to include Plato in the roll of saints. Bembo, a future cardinal, owned that he did not read the Epistles of Paul (he called them Epistolaccie) lest he should spoil his style. When Francis I. asked for the Laocoön, Leo X. replied that he would sooner give him the head of Peter the Apostle.
The pope loved his scholars and artists, his poets and pedants; but above all he loved his jesters. He solemnly crowned Cuerno, the celebrated rhymster and drunkard, and was no less liberal to him than to Raphael. He spent huge sums on feasts, though he ate sparingly himself, being afflicted with a weak digestion, and an incurable purulent disease; and his soul was no less sick than his body, for he suffered from continual ennui.
When Leonardo first presented himself at the Vatican he was told that his only hope of obtaining audience of His Holiness was to declare himself a buffoon. He did not follow this good advice, and failed of admission time and again. Of late he had experienced strange forebodings which he tried to put from him as senseless and absurd. It was not anxiety as to his affairs which oppressed him; nor was it his failure to gain adequate recognition from Leo X. or Giuliano de' Medici. He had been too long used to annoyances of this kind. But his vague disquiet, his ominous apprehension, continually increased; till one radiant autumn evening, as he was returning from the Vatican, his heart sank, under the pressure of imminent catastrophe.
He was living in the same house where he had lived during his former visit to Rome; one of the small detached buildings behind St. Peter's, which had belonged to the Papal Mint. It was old and gloomy, and having been unoccupied for several years was exceedingly damp. He entered a large vaulted apartment with cracks on walls and ceiling, and windows overshadowed by the wall of the adjoining house.
In the corner sat Astro the imbecile, his feet drawn up under him, his hands busy whittling sticks, while he purred his monotonous lullaby—
Cucurlu, curlu!