“Is this the way you keep your promise?”

Then, armed as he was only with his teeth and nails, he bit the gentleman’s thumb, and wrestled with him so stoutly that they both fell down beside the bed.

The gentleman, not feeling altogether confident, called to his servant, who, finding the Duke and his master so closely twined together that he could not tell the one from the other, dragged them both by the feet into the middle of the room, and then tried to cut the Duke’s throat with his poignard.  The Duke defended himself until he was so exhausted through loss of blood that he could do no more, whereupon the gentleman and his servant lifted him upon the bed and finished him with their daggers.  They then drew the curtain and went away, leaving the dead body shut up in the room.

Having vanquished his great enemy, by whose death he hoped to free his country, the gentleman reflected that his work would be incomplete unless he treated five or six of the Duke’s kindred in the same fashion.  The servant, however, who was neither a dare-devil nor a fool, said to him—­

“I think, sir, that you have done enough for the present, and that it would be better to think of saving your own life than of taking the lives of others, for should we be as long in making away with each of them as we were in the case of the Duke, daylight would overtake our enterprise before we could complete it, even should we find our enemies unarmed.”

Cowed by his guilty conscience, the gentleman followed the advice of his servant, and taking him alone with him, repaired to a Bishop (4) whose office it was to have the city gates opened, and to give orders to the guard-posts.

     4 Probably Cardinal Cybo, Alexander’s chief minister, who
     according to Sismondi, was the first to discover the
     murder.—­Ed.

“I have,” said the gentleman to the Bishop, “this evening received tidings that one of my brothers is at the point of death.  I have just asked leave of the Duke to go to him, and he has granted it me; and I beg you to send orders that the guards may furnish me with two good horses, and that the gatekeeper may let me through.”

The Bishop, who regarded the gentleman’s request in the same light as an order from his master the Duke, forthwith gave him a note, by means of which the gate was opened for him, and horses supplied to him as he had requested; but instead of going to see his brother he betook himself straight to Venice, where he had himself cured of the bites that he had received from the Duke, and then passed over into Turkey. (5)

5 On leaving Florence, Lorenzo repaired first to Bologna and then to Venice, where he informed Philip Strozzi of how he had rid his country of the tyrant.  After embracing him in a transport, and calling him the Tuscan Brutus, Strozzi asked the murderer’s sisters, Laudamina and Magdalen de’ Medici, in marriage for his own sons, Peter and Robert.  From Venice