But his quick mind had soon traced out the course that would secure his own safety with the fewest unpleasant concomitants. It is agreeable to keep a whole skin; but the skin still remains an organ sensitive to the atmosphere.
His reckoning had not deceived him. That night, before he returned home, he had secured the three results for which he most cared:
- he was to be freed from all proceedings against him on account of complicity with the Mediceans;
- he was to retain his secretaryship for another year, unless he previously resigned it; and,
- lastly, the price by which he had obtained these guarantees was to be kept as a State secret.
The price would have been thought heavy by most men; and Tito himself would rather not have paid it.
He had applied himself first to win the mind of Francesco Valori, who was not only one of the Ten under whom he immediately held his secretaryship, but one of the special council appointed to investigate the evidence of the plot. Francesco Valori, as we have seen, was the head of the Piagnoni, a man with certain fine qualities that were not incompatible with violent partisanship, with an arrogant temper that alienated his friends, nor with bitter personal animosities—one of the bitterest being directed against Bernardo del Nero. To him, in a brief private interview, after obtaining a pledge of secrecy, Tito avowed his own agency for the Mediceans—an agency induced by motives about which he was very frank, declaring at the same time that he had always believed their efforts futile, and that he sincerely preferred the maintenance of the popular government; affected to confide to