Cicero did defend P.Sulla this year; but whence came the story of the money borrowed from Sulla we do not know.

"It is a trick of rhetoric craftily to confess charges made, so as not to come within the reach of the law.

So that, if anything base be alleged which cannot be denied, you may turn it aside with a joke, and make it a matter of laughter rather than of disgrace, as it is written that Cicero did when, with a drolling word, he made little of a charge which he could not deny.

For when he was anxious to buy a house on the Palatine Hill, and had not the ready money, he quietly borrowed from P.Sulla--who was then about to stand his trial, 'sestertium viciens'-- twenty million sesterces.
When that became known, before the purchase was made, and it was objected to him that he had borrowed the money from a client, then Cicero, instigated by the unexpected charge, denied the loan, and denied also that he was going to buy the house.

But when he had bought it and the fib was thrown in his teeth, he laughed heartily, and asked whether men had so lost their senses as not to be aware that a prudent father of a family would deny an intended purchase rather than raise the price of the article against himself."-- Noctes Atticae, xii., 12.