Niccolò Machiavelli: A Private Life

1526, Sant’Andrea in Percussina, outside Florence

I have spread the papers across the table before sunrise and weighted the corners with stones from the vineyard wall, because a wind entering uninvited through the shutter is still only wind and can be answered with weight, whereas a messenger entering from Florence with a seal in his hand and cautious respect in his voice brings with him that more troublesome weather made of opportunity, resentment, recollection, and the stale but still intoxicating suggestion that the city has not yet finished with me, that the offices from which I was once cut away like rotten cloth from a garment may, under sufficient pressure of war and panic, admit me again by some side door which will not restore honour exactly and yet will restore motion, motion being in such matters more necessary than honour, more lively certainly, and for a man long kept to farm accounts, domestic economies, and the bitter theatre of hearing his own name turned into proverb by those who never wrote a dispatch worth sending, much more nourishing too. The farm is quiet only if one mistakes suspension for peace. I do not. A rider on the track transforms all quiet into prelude. Florence does the same, and she has been doing it to me for so long that the anticipatory quickening is now nearly indistinguishable from the state it precedes, which means I spend much of my time in a condition of being about to hear something significant rather than actually hearing it. She has always preferred me useful and compromised rather than vindicated and trusted, and because I know her habits better than I know the temper of my own son on certain mornings, I cannot receive even the smallest summons as simple employment. There is always a second purpose folded beneath the first, and often a third, and if I do not order my own account before their errands multiply again, the city will keep the anecdotes, the scandal, the little wicked book everyone quotes badly, and discard the service, which would be entirely in character.