BOOK VI[60

Journal from Paris to Venice--The Jura--The Alps--Milan--Verona--The roll-call of the dead--The Brenta--Incidental remarks--Venice--Venetian architecture--Antonio--The Abbé Betio and M. Gamba--The rooms in the Palace of the Doges--Prisons--Silvio Pellico's prison--The Frari--The Academy of Fine Arts--Titian's _Assumption_--The metopes of the Parthenon--Original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael--The Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo--The Arsenal--Henry IV.--A frigate leaving for America--The Cemetery of San Cristoforo--San Michele di Murano--Murano--The woman and the child--Gondoliers--Bretons and Venetians--Breakfast on the Riva degli Schiavoni--The tomb of Mesdames at Trieste--Rousseau and Byron--Great geniuses inspired by Venice--Old and new courtezans--Rousseau and Byron compared.

7 _to_ 10 _September, on the road._

I left Paris on the 3rd of September 1833, taking the Simplon Road through Pontarlier.

Salins, lately burnt to the ground, had been built up again; I preferred it with its Spanish tumble-down ugliness[61]. The Abbé d'Olivet[62] was born on the banks of the Furieuse; Voltaire's first master, who received his pupil at the Academy, had nothing in common with the paternal stream.

The great storm which caused so many shipwrecks in the Channel assailed me on the Jura. I arrived at night on the "wastes" of the Lévier stage. The caravanserai built of wooden planks, brilliantly lighted and filled with travellers taking shelter suggested not a little the keeping of a witches' sabbath. I refused to stop; they brought the horses. When it came to closing the lanterns of the calash, a great difficulty arose; the hostess, an extremely pretty young witch, lent a hand, laughing. She took care to hold her candle-end, protected by a glass tube, close up to her face, so as to be seen.

At Pontarlier, my old host, a great Legitimist during his life-time, was dead. I supped at the inn called the National: a good omen for the newspaper of that name. Armand Carrel is the chief of those men who did not lie during the Days of July.

The Castle of Joux defends the approaches to Pontarlier; it has seen two men succeed one another in its donjons, both of whom the Revolution will bear in memory: Mirabeau and Toussaint-Louverture[63], the black Napoleon, imitated and killed by the white Napoleon.

"Toussaint," says Madame de Staël, "was brought to a French prison, where he died in the most wretched manner. Perhaps Bonaparte does not so much as remember this crime, because he has been less often reproached with it than with the others."

The hurricane increased: I encountered its greatest violence between Pontarlier and Orbe. It increased the size of the mountains, rang the bells in the hamlets, drowned the roar of the torrents in that of the thunder, and swept down howling upon my calash, like a heavy squall on the sail of a ship. When low-lying lightning-flashes cracked across the heaths, one saw flocks of sheep stand motionless, their heads hidden between their fore-feet, presenting their tails tucked in and their shaggy quarters to the showers of rain and hail beaten up by the wind. The voice of the man calling the time from the summit of a mountain belfry sounded like the cry of the last hour.

At Lausanne, all was smiling-again: I had often visited that town before; I no longer know a soul there.

At Bex, while they were harnessing to my carriage the horses which had perhaps drawn the bier of Madame de Custine, I stood leaning against the door of the house where my hostess of Fervacques died. She had been celebrated before the revolutionary tribunal for her long hair. In Rome, I have seen beautiful fair hair taken from a tomb.

In the Rhone Valley, I met an almost naked little girl, dancing with her goat; she asked for alms of a rich young man, well-dressed, who was posting past with a laced courier in front and two footmen sitting behind the glittering chariot. And you imagine that such a distribution of property can exist? You think that it does not justify popular risings?

Sion brings back to me an epoch in my life: after being secretary of embassy in Rome, I was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Valais by the First Consul[64].

At Brigg, I left the Jesuits struggling to raise up again what cannot be raised up[65]: uselessly established at the foot of time, they are crushed beneath its mass, like their monastery beneath the weight of the mountains.

This was the tenth time of my crossing the Alps: I had told them all that I had to tell them in the different years and different circumstances of my life. Ever regretting what he has lost, ever rapt in memories, ever marching towards the grave in tears and isolation: that is man.

The images borrowed from mountain scenery have particularly sensible relations with our fortunes: this one passes in silence, like the outpouring of a spring; that one attaches a noise to his course, like a torrent; that other flings away his existence, like a cataract that appeals and disappears.

[Sidenote: The Simplon.]

The Simplon already wears an abandoned air, even as the life of Napoleon; even as that life, it has nothing left but its glory: it is too great a work to belong to the little States upon which it has devolved. Genius has no family; its inheritance falls by right of escheat to the common crowd, which nibbles at it and plants a cabbage where a cedar grew.

The last time that I crossed the Simplon, I was going as Ambassador to Rome; I fell; the herds whom I had left on the top of the mountain are there yet: snows, clouds, tumble-down rocks, pine-forests and the turmoil of waters incessantly encompass the hut threatened by the avalanche. The most living person in those chalets is the goat. Why die? I know. Why be born? I cannot tell. Still, admit that the foremost sufferings, moral sufferings, the torments of the mind are wanting among the dwellers in the region of the chamois and the eagles. When I went to the Congress of Verona, in 1822, the station on the peak of the Simplon was kept by a Frenchwoman: in the middle of a cold night and of a squall of wind which prevented me from seeing her, she talked to me of the Scala in Milan; she was expecting ribbons from Paris: her voice, the only thing about that woman that I know, was very sweet through the darkness and the gale.

The descent to Domo d'Ossola appeared to me more and more wonderful; a certain play of light and shadow increased its magic. One was caressed by a little breath which our old tongue called the _aure_: a sort of early morning-breeze, bathed and scented with the dew. I once more beheld the Lago Maggiore, on which I was so melancholy in 1828 and of which I caught sight from the Valley of Bellinzona in 1832. At Sesto-Calende, Italy presented herself: a blind Paganini sang and played the fiddle at the edge of the lake as I crossed the Ticino.

On entering Milan, I again saw the magnificent avenue of tulip-trees of which no one speaks; the travellers apparently take them for plane-trees. I protest against this silence, in memory of my savages: it is surely the least that America can do, to give shade to Italy. One might also plant magnolias at Genoa, mixed with palm-trees and orange-trees. But who dreams of such a thing? Who thinks of beautifying the earth? That care is left to God. The governments are occupied with their fall, and men prefer a card-board tree on the stage of a _fantoccini_ theatre to the magnolia-tree whose roses would scent the cradle of Christopher Columbus.

In Milan, the annoyance about the passports is as stupid as it is brutal. I did not pass through Verona without emotion; it was there that my active political career had its real beginning. My mind thought on what the world might have become if that career had not been interrupted by a contemptible jealousy.

Verona, so lively in 1822, thanks to the presence of the sovereigns of Europe, had, in 1833, returned to silence; the Congress had passed as completely in its lonely streets as the Court of the Scaligers and the Senate-house of the Romans. The arenas whose benches I had seen filled with a hundred thousand spectators yawned deserted; the buildings which I had admired under the illuminations embroidered on their architecture wrapped themselves, grey and bare as they were, in an atmosphere of rain.

[Sidenote: The roll-call of the dead.]

How many ambitions were stirring among the actors at Verona! How many destinies of nations were examined, discussed and weighed! Let us call the roll of those wooers of dreams; let us open the book of the Day of Wrath: _Liber scriptus proferetur_[66]; monarchs, princes, ministers, here is your ambassador, your colleague returned to his post: where are you? Answer.

The Emperor of Russia, Alexander?

"Dead."

The Emperor of Austria, Francis I.[67]?

"Dead."

The King of France, Louis XVIII.?

"Dead."

The King of France, Charles X.[68]?

"Dead."

The King of England, George IV.?

"Dead."

The King of Naples, Ferdinand I.?

"Dead."

The Duke of Tuscany[69]?

"Dead."

Pope Pius VII.?

"Dead."

The King of Sardinia, Charles Felix[70]?

"Dead."

The Duc de Montmorency, French Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

Mr. Canning, English Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

M. de Bernstorff, Prussian Foreign Minister?

"Dead."

M. de Gentz, of the Austrian Chancery?

"Dead."

Cardinal Consalvi, Secretary of State to His Holiness?

"Dead."

M. de Serre, my colleague on the Congress[71]?

"Dead."

M. d'Aspremont, my secretary of embassy?

"Dead."

Count Neipperg, the husband of Napoleon's widow?

"Dead."

Countess Tolstoi?

"Dead."

Her tall young son?

"Dead."

My host in the Lorenzi Palace?

"Dead."

If so many men inscribed with me on the roll of the Congress have had their names inserted in the obituary; if nations and royal dynasties have perished; if Poland has succumbed; if Spain is again annihilated; if I have been to Prague to enquire after the flying remnants of the great House whose representative I was at Verona: what, then, are earthly things? No one remembers the speeches which we made round the table of Prince Metternich; but, O power of genius, no traveller will ever hear the lark sing in the fields of Verona without recalling Shakespeare! Each of us, by digging to different depths in his memory, finds another layer of dead, other extinct sentiments, other illusions which uselessly he suckled, like those of Herculaneum, at the breast of Hope.

On leaving Verona, I was obliged to change my measure to compute the time that was past; I was going back twenty-seven years, for I had not made the journey from Verona to Venice since 1806. At Brescia, at Vicenza, at Padua, I passed by the walls of Palladio, Scamozzi[72], Franceschini, Nicholas of Pisa[73], Friar John.

The banks of the Brenta disappointed my hopes; they had remained more smiling in my imagination: the dykes raised along the canal conceal the marches too much. Several villas have been demolished; but a few very elegant ones still remain. There, perhaps, lives Signor Pococurante[74], whom the city ladies with their sonnets disgusted, to whom the two pretty girls began to grow very indifferent, to whom music grew tiresome after half an hour, who thought Homer mortally tedious, who detested the pious. Æneas, the boy Ascanius, the silly King Latinus, the ill-bred Amata and the insipid Lavinia, who saw nothing extraordinary in Horace' journey to Brundusium and his account of his bad dinner, who declared that he never read Tully and still less Milton, that barbarian who spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil.

"'Alas!' said Candid softly to Martin, 'I am afraid this man holds our German poets in great contempt[75].'"

In spite of my semi-disappointment and many gods in the little gardens, I was charmed with the mulberry-trees, the orange-trees, the fig-trees and the softness of the air, I who, such a short time before, was travelling through the fir-groves of Germany and over the mountains of the Czechs, where the sun looks ill.

[Sidenote: I arrive in Venice.]

I arrived on the 10th of September, at break of day, at Fusina, which Philippe de Comines[76] and Montaigne call "Chaffousine." At half past ten, I had landed in Venice. My first care was to send to the post-office: there was nothing addressed to me direct, nor indirectly to Paolo; of Madame la Duchesse de Berry, no news at all. I wrote to Count Griffi, the Neapolitan Minister in Florence, to ask him to let me know the movements of Her Royal Highness.

Having everything in order, I resolved patiently to await the Princess: Satan sent me a temptation. I longed, at his diabolical suggestion, to stay alone, for a fortnight, at the Hôtel de l'Europe, to the detriment of the Legitimate Monarchy. I wished the august traveller bad roads, without reflecting that my restoration of King Henry V. might be delayed for half a month! Like Danton, I crave pardon for it of God and men.

VENICE, HÔTEL DE L'EUROPE, 10 _September_ 1833.

Salve, Italuni Regina.... . . . . . Nec tu semper eris[77].

O d'Italia dolente Eterno lumine.... Venezia[78]!

In Venice, one can imagine one's self on the deck of a superb galley lying at anchor, on the _Bucentaur_, where a feast is being given in your honour and from whose side you see wonderful things all around. My inn, the Hôtel de l'Europe, is situated at the entrance to the Grand Canal, opposite the Dogana di Mare, the Giudecca and San Giorgio Maggiore. When one goes up the Grand Canal, between its two rows of palaces, so marked by their centuries, so varied in architectural style, when one moves from the Piazza to the Piazzetta, when one contemplates the basilica and its domes, the Palace of the Doges, the Procuratie Nuove, the Zucca, the Torre dell' Orologio, the campanile of St Mark's and the Column of the Lion, all mingled with the sails and masts of the shipping, the movement of the crowd and the gondolas, the azure of the sky and sea, the freaks of a dream or the frolics of an Oriental imagination present nothing more fantastic. Sometimes Cicéri[79] paints and collects upon a canvas, for the illusions of the stage, monuments of all shapes, all times, all countries, all climates: it is still Venice.

Those double-gilt edifices, so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80], Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni Bellini[83], Paris Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles, granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de Comines:

"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"

[Sidenote: The glories of Venice.]

And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90], Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts, as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and floral diadems.

It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions and the enchantment of pleasure.

Venice never knew idolatry: she grew up Christian in the island where she was reared, far from the brutality of Attila. The women descended from the Scipios, the Pauli and the Eustochie escaped from Alaric's violence in the Grotto of Bethlehem. Standing apart from all other cities, the eldest daughter of ancient civilization without ever having been dishonoured by conquest, Venice contains neither Roman remains nor monuments of the Barbarians. Nor does one see there what one sees in the north and west of Europe, in the midst of industrial progress: I refer to those new structures, those whole streets built in a hurry, in which the houses remain either unfinished or empty. What could one build here? Wretched dens which would show the poverty of conception of the sons after the magnificence of the genius of the fathers; white-washed hovels which would not reach to the first storey of the gigantic residences of the Foscaris and the Pesaros. When one sees the trowel of mortar and the handful of plaster that have had to be applied, for an urgent repair, against a marble capital, one is shocked. Better the rotten planks boarding up Grecian or Moorish windows, the rags hung out to dry on graceful balconies, than the imprint of the mean hand of our century.

[Sidenote: The view from my windows.]

Why cannot I lock myself up in this town which harmonizes so well with my destiny, in this city of poets, where Dante, Petrarch, Byron passed! Why cannot I finish writing my Memoirs by the light of the sun that falls upon these pages! At this moment the luminary is still burning my Floridan savannahs and is setting here at the end of the Grand Canal. I can no longer see it; but, through an opening in this wilderness of palaces, its rays strike the ball of the Dogana, the lateen-sails of the boats, the yards of the ships and the porch of the convent of San Giorgio Maggiore. The tower of the monastery, changed into a rosy column, is reflected in the waves; the white front of the church is so brightly lighted that I can pick out the smallest details of the chisel. The outlines of the shops of the Giudecca are painted with a Titian light; the gondolas on the canal and the harbour are swimming in the same light. Venice is there, seated on the shore, like a beautiful woman about to die away with the day-light: the evening breeze lifts up her balmy tresses; she dies saluted by all the graces and all the smiles of nature.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

In Venice, in 1806, there was a young Signor Armani, the Italian translator or a friend of the translator of the _Génie du Christianisme._ His sister, as he said, was a nun: _monaca._ There was also a Jew, on his way to the farce of Napoleon's Grand Sanhedrim[93], who had his eyes on my purse; then M. Lagarde, the chief of the French spies, who gave me dinner: my translator, his sister, the Jew of the Sanhedrim are either dead or no longer live in Venice. At that time, I was staying at the Hotel of the Golden Lion, near the Rialto; that hotel has changed its position. Almost opposite my old inn is the Palazzo Foscari, which is falling. Back, all that old lumber of my life! I should go mad with ruins: let us speak of the present.

I have tried to depict the general effect of the architecture of Venice; in order to receive an impression of the details, I have been up and down and again up the Grand Canal, I have visited and revisited the Piazza San Marco. It would need volumes to exhaust that subject. Count Cicognara's[94] _Fabbriche più conspicue di Venezia_ supply the features of the monuments; but the exposition is not clear. I will content myself with noting down two or three of the most frequently recurring arrangements.

From the capital of a Corinthian column is described a semicircle, the point of which descends upon the capital of another Corinthian column: exactly in the middle of those shafts rises a third, of the same dimensions and the same order; from the capital of that central column two epicycles spring to right and left, the ends of which also come to lie upon the capitals of other columns. The result of this design is that the arches, in crossing each other, give birth to ogives at their point of intersection[95], so that a charming admixture is formed of two architectural styles, the full Roman arch and the ogive of Arab-Gothic or "Mediæval" origin; but it is certain that the latter exists in the so-called Cyclopean monuments; I have seen very pure specimens of it in the tombs of Argos[96].

The Ducal Palace presents twines reproduced in some other palaces, particularly in the Palazzo Foscari: the columns support pointed arches; those arches leave voids between them: between those voids the architect has placed two roses. The rose depresses the extremity of the two ellipses. Those roses, which meet at a point of their circumference in the fore front of the building, become a kind of row of wheels upon which the rest of the edifice is carried.

In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air.

Remarkable in the Venetian monuments are the architectural masks and heads. In the Palazzo Pesaro, the entablature of the first storey, of the Doric order, is decorated with heads of giants; the Ionic order of the second storey is bound by heads of knights which stretch horizontally from the wall, with their faces looking towards the water: some are wrapped in a chin-piece, others have their visors half-lowered; all wear helmets whose plumes bend round into ornaments under the cornice. Lastly, on the third storey, of the Corinthian order, we see heads of female statues with their hair differently knotted.

[Sidenote: Venetian architecture.]

In St. Mark's, embossed with domes, encrusted with mosaics, loaded with incoherent spoils of the East, I found myself at the same time in San Vitale at Ravenna, in St. Sophia in Constantinople, in St. Saviour's in Jerusalem and in those lesser churches of the Morea, Chios and Malta: St. Mark's, a monument of Byzantine architecture, composite of victory and conquest raised to the Cross, is a trophy, as is the whole of Venice. The most remarkable effect of its architecture is its darkness under a brilliant sky; but to-day, the loth of September, the deadened light from the outside harmonized with the gloomy basilica. They were completing the Forty Hours ordered to obtain fine weather. The fervour of the faithful praying against rain was great: the Venetians look upon a grey and watery sky as the plague.

Our prayers were granted: the evening became charming; at night I went for a walk on the quay. The sea lay smooth; the stars mingled with the scattered lights of the boats and ships anchored here and there. The cafés were full, but one saw no _Pulcinelli_, Greeks nor Moors: everything comes to an end. A Madonna, brightly illuminated at the crossing of a bridge, attracted the crowd: young girls were devoutly telling their beads on their knees; they made the Sign of the Cross with their right hand and stopped the passers-by with their left. Returning to my inn, I went to bed and to sleep to the singing of the gondoliers stationed under my windows.

I have as my guide Antonio, the oldest and best-informed of the _ciceroni_ of the place; he knows the palaces, statues and pictures by heart

On the 11th of September, I paid a visit to the Abbé Betio and M. Gamba[97], the keepers of the Library: they received me with extreme politeness, although I had no letter of recommendation.

As one goes through the rooms of the Ducal Palace, one passes from wonders to wonders. There the whole history of Venice unrolls itself, painted by the greatest masters: their pictures have been described a hundred times.

Among the antiques, I remarked, like everybody else, the group of _Leda and the Swan_ and the _Ganymede_ ascribed to Praxiteles. The Swan is prodigious in its embrace and its voluptuousness; Leda is too compliant. The eagle of the _Ganymede_ is not a real eagle; it looks the best-tempered beast in the world. Ganymede, charmed at being carried off, is enchanting: he talks to the eagle, which talks to him.

Those antiques are placed at either end of the magnificent rooms of the Library. I contemplated, with the sacred respect of the poet, a manuscript of Dante's and gazed, with the greed of the traveller, upon the map of the world of Fra Mauro[98] (1460). Africa, however, does not appear to be traced upon it so correctly as they say. They ought, above all, in Venice, to explore the archives: they would find invaluable documents there.

From the painted and gilded halls, I passed to the prisons and the dungeons; the same palace presents the microcosm of society, joy and sorrow. The prisons are under the leads, the dungeons on the level of the water of the canal and on two storeys. A thousand tales are told of strangulations and secret beheadings[99]; by way of compensation we hear that a prisoner left those dungeons fat, plump and rosy, after eighteen years spent in captivity: he had lived like a toad inside a rock. All honour to the human race! What a fine thing it is!

Plenty of philanthropic phrases stain the vaults and walls of the underground cells, since the day when our Revolution, so adverse to blood,

. . . . . . . dans cet affreux séjour D'un coup de _hache_ a fait entrer le jour[100].

[Sidenote: The Venetian prisons.]

In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility. No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the Doges; only it seemed to me that I saw in the cells of the aristocracy what the Christians saw when they shattered the idols: nests of mice escaping from the heads of the gods. That is what happens to every power that is disembowelled and exposed to the light: it lets out the vermin which we used to adore.

The Bridge of Sighs connects the Ducal Palace with the prisons of the town; it is divided into two separate passages: through one of these, the ordinary prisoners entered; through the other, the State prisoners went before the tribunal of the Inquisitors or the Ten. This bridge presents a graceful exterior, and the façade of the prison is admired: beauty cannot be dispensed with in Venice, even for tyranny and misfortune! Pigeons make their nests in the windows of the gaol; little doves, all covered with down, flutter their wings and moan at the bars, while waiting for their mother. In former days, innocent creatures used to be cloistered almost on leaving the cradle; their parents never saw them again except through the gratings of the parlour or the wicket of the door.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

You can readily imagine that, in Venice, I necessarily thought of Silvio Pellico[101]. M. Gamba had told me that the Abbé Betio was the master of the Palace and that, by applying to him, I should be able to make my researches. The excellent librarian, to whom I had recourse one morning, took a big bunch of keys and led me, along several passages and up various stair-cases, to the garrets of the author of _Le mie Prigioni._

M. Silvio Pellico has made only one mistake; he has spoken of his gaol as of one of those famous prison-cells high up in the air, marked by their roofing _sotto i piombi._ Those prisons are, or rather were five in number, in that portion of the Ducal Palace which adjoins the Ponte della Paglia and the canal of the Bridge of Sighs. Pellico did not dwell there; he was incarcerated at the other end of the Palace, near the Ponte degli Canonici, in a building contiguous to the Palace, which building had been transformed, in 1820, into a gaol for political prisoners. However, he was also "under the leads," for a plate of that metal formed the roofing of his hermitage.

The description which the prisoner gives of his first and second room is exact to the last particular. Through the window of the first room, one looks out on the roof of St. Mark's; one sees the well in the inner yard of the Palace, a corner of the Piazza, the different steeples of the town and, beyond the lagoons, on the horizon, mountains in the direction of Padua. The second room is recognised by its big window and by another smaller and higher window: it was through the big one that Pellico used to perceive his companions in misfortune in a detached building opposite and, on the left, above, the dear children who used to talk to him from their mother's casement.

To-day all those chambers are deserted, for men remain nowhere, not even in the prisons; the bars of the windows have been removed and the walls and ceilings white-washed. The gentle and learned Abbé Betio, living in this abandoned part of the Palace, is its peaceful and solitary guardian.

[Sidenote: Silvio Pellico.]

The rooms which immortalize Pellico's captivity are lofty and airy; they command a splendid view; they are the prison for a poet; there would not be much to say about them, admitting the tyranny and absurdity: but the death sentence for a speculative opinion! The Moravian[102] dungeons! Ten years taken from life, youth and talent! And the gnats, those nasty animals by which I myself am being eaten up at the Hôtel de l'Europe, hardened though I be by the weather and the mosquitoes of Florida! For the rest, I have often been worse lodged than was Pellico in his belvedere in the Ducal Palace, notably in the prefecture of the doges of the French Police, where I was obliged to climb up on a table to enjoy the light.

The author of _Francesca da Rimini_ thought of Zanze in his gaol; I, in mine, sang of a young girl whom I had just seen die. I was very anxious to know what became of Pellico's little guardian. I have set persons to make researches: if I find out anything, I will tell you.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

A gondola landed me at the Frari, where we French, accustomed as we are to the Grecian or Gothic exteriors of our own churches, are not much struck by those outsides of basilicas in brick, ungrateful and common to the eye; but, in the inside, the harmony of the lines and the disposition of the masses produce a simplicity and a calmness of composition that enchant one.

The tombs in the Frari, placed in the lateral walls, decorate the building without obstructing it The magnificence of the marbles blazes forth on every side, charming foliage bears witness to the finish of the old Venetian sculpture. On one of the squares of the pavement in the nave are these words:

HERE LIES TITIAN, THE RIVAL OF ZEUXIS AND APELLES

This stone is opposite one of the painter's master-pieces. Canova has his gorgeous sepulchre not far from Titian's flag-stone; this sepulchre is the replica of the monument which he had conceived for Titian himself and which he executed afterwards for the Archduchess Maria Christina[103]. The remains of the sculptor of the _Hebe_ and the _Magdalen_ are not all collected in this work: thus Canova inhabits the representation of a tomb made by himself, not for himself, which tomb is but his semi-cenotaph.

From the Frari, I proceeded to the Manfrini Gallery. The portrait of Ariosto is speaking. Titian painted his mother, an old matron of the people, squalid and ugly: the artist's pride shows itself in the exaggeration of this woman's years and poverty.

At the Academy of Fine Arts, I hurried fast to the picture of the _Assumption_, discovered by Cicognara[104]: ten large male figures at the bottom of the picture; observe the man rapt in ecstasy on the left, watching Mary. The Virgin, above this group, rises in the centre of a semicircle of cherubs; there is a multitude of admirable faces in that glory: a woman's head, on the right, at the point of the crescent, of unspeakable beauty; two or three heavenly spirits flung horizontally across the sky, in the bold, picturesque manner of Tintoretto. I am not sure that a standing angel does not experience some feeling of a too terrestrial love. The Virgin is largely proportioned; she is clad in a red drapery; her blue scarf floats in the air; her eyes are raised towards the Eternal Father, who appeared at the zenith. Four positive colours, brown, green, red and blue, cover the picture: the aspect of the whole is sombre, the character unideal, but of an incomparable truth and natural vivacity. Nevertheless, I prefer the _Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple_, by the same painter, which hangs in the same room.

Facing the _Assumption_ and very cleverly lighted is Tintoretto's _Miracle of St. Mark_, a vigorous scene which seems dug out of the canvas with the chisel and mallet rather than the brush.

I went on to the plaster-casts from the metopes of the Parthenon; these plasters had a three-fold interest for me: in Athens, I had seen the voids left by the ravages committed by Lord Elgin[105] and, in London, the kidnapped marbles of which I found the mouldings in Venice. The roving destiny of those master-pieces was linked with mine, and yet Phidias did not fashion my clay.

I was unable to tear myself away from the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Raphael. Nothing is more interesting than those sketches of genius abandoned alone to its studies and its whims: it admits you to its intimacy; it initiates you into its secrets; it informs you by what steps and by what efforts it has attained perfection: one is enraptured at seeing how it was mistaken, how it perceived its error and corrected it. Those pencil-strokes drawn on the corner of a table on a wretched piece of paper retain a marvellous richness and natural artlessness. When you reflect that Raphael's hand has passed over those immortal scraps, you are angry with the glass which prevents you from kissing those holy relics.

[Sidenote: Santi Giovanni e Paolo.]

I refreshed myself, after my admiration at the Academy of Fine Arts, with an admiration of a different kind at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, even as one rests one's mind by a change of reading. This church, whose unknown architect followed in the foot-steps of Niccola Pisano, is rich and spacious. The apse into which the high altar retires represents a kind of erect shell; two other sanctuaries accompany this shell laterally: they are tall and narrow, with many-centred vaultings, and are separated from the apse by rabbeted channels.

The ashes of the Doges Mocenigo[106], Morosini[107], Vendramin[108] and several other heads of the Republic[109] rest here. Here also is the skin of Antonio Bragadino[110], the defender of Famagusta, to whom Tertulliano expression may be applied: "a living skin." Those illustrious remains inspire a great and painful sentiment: Venice herself, the magnificent catafalco of her warlike magistrates, the two-fold coffin of their ashes, is now no more than a living skin.

Stained-glass windows and red curtains, while veiling the light in Santi Giovanni e Paolo, increase the religious effect. The numberless columns brought from the East and from Greece have been planted in the basilica, like avenues of exotic trees. A storm rose while I was roaming in the church: when will the trumpets sound that shall rouse all these dead? I said as much under Jerusalem, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Returning to my hotel after those visits, I thanked God for having transported me from the porkers of Waldmünchen to the pictures of Venice.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

After my discovery of the prisons in which material Austria tries to stifle Italian intellects, I went to the Arsenal. No monarchy, however powerful it be or have been, has presented a similar nautical compendium.

An immense space, enclosed by crenellated walls, contains four docks for large ships, yards for building those ships, establishments for all that concerns the military and merchant navy, from the rope-yard to the gun-foundry, from the work-shop where they carve the oar of the gondola to that where they square the keel of a seventy-four, from the rooms devoted to the old armour captured in Constantinople, in Cyprus, in the Morea, at Lepanto to the rooms in which modern armour is exhibited: the whole mingled with galleries, columns, works of architecture raised and designed by the chief masters.

In the naval arsenals of Spain, England, France, Holland, one sees only that which is connected with the objects of those arsenals; in Venice, the arts are allied to industry. The monument to Admiral Emo[111], by Canova, awaits you beside the carcass of a ship; rows of guns meet your eye through long porticoes: the two colossal lions from the Piræus keep the gate of the dock from which a frigate is about to issue for a world which Athens did not know and which was discovered by the genius of modern Italy.

[Sidenote: The Arsenal.]

In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer recalls those lines of Dante:

In the Venetians' arsenal as boils Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while His bark one builds anew, another stops The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage, One hammers at the prow, one at the poop, This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls, The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].

All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads, one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least dream of liberty.

When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the _Bucentaur_, they wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.

Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the _Bucentaur_, Napoleon's cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.

A Frenchman coming from Prague to Venice and expecting the mother of Henry V. must needs be touched at seeing the armour of Henry IV. in the Venice Arsenal. The sword which the Bearnese wore at the Battle of Ivry[113] used to be joined to that armour: that sword is no longer there.

By a decree of the Grand Council of Venice, dated 3 April 1600:

"_Enrico di Borbone IV., re di Francia e di Navarra, con li figluoli e discenditi suoi, sia annumerato tra il nobli di questio nostro maggior consiglio._"

Charles X., Louis XIX. and Henry V., descendants of "Enrico di Borbone," are therefore nobles of the Republic of Venice, which no longer exists, even as they are Kings of France in Bohemia, even as they are canons of St. John Lateran in Rome, and always by right of Henry IV.; I have represented them in this last quality: they have lost their president's cap and their amice, and I have lost my embassy. And yet I was so well off in my stall in St. John Lateran! What a beautiful church! What a beautiful sky! What admirable music! Those songs have lasted longer than my grandeurs and those of my Canon-King.

My glory annoyed me greatly at the Arsenal; it shines on my forehead unknown to myself: Field-marshal Pallucci, Admiral and Commandant-General of the Navy, recognised me by my horns of fire. He hastened up to me, himself showed me several curiosities and then, excusing himself for his inability to accompany me any longer, because of a council over which he had to preside, he placed me in the hands of a superior officer.

We met the captain of the frigate which was on the point of sailing. He accosted me without ceremony and said to me, with that sailor's frankness which I like so much:

"Monsieur le vicomte"--as though he had known me all his life--"have you any message for America?"

"No, captain: be sure to give her my compliments; it is long since I saw her!"

I cannot see a vessel without dying of longing to go with her: if I were free, the first ship sailing for the Indies would have a chance of carrying me away. How I regretted not to have been able to accompany Captain Parry[114] to the Arctic regions! My life is at its ease only in the midst of the clouds and the seas: I always cherish the hope that it will disappear under a sail. The weighty years which we heave into the waves of time are not anchors: they do not delay our course.

[Sidenote: The Isola di San Cristoforo.]

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

In the Arsenal, I was not far from the Isola di San Cristoforo, which serves to-day as a cemetery. This island used to contain a convent of Capuchins; the convent has been pulled down and its site is nothing more than a square enclosure. The tombs are not very many in number, or at least they are not raised above the level and grassy ground. Against the west wall are fixed five or six stone monuments; little black wooden crosses, with a white date, are scattered about the enclosure: that is how they now bury the Venetians whose forefathers rest in the mausoleums of the Frari and Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Society, as it grows larger, has humbled itself: democracy has overtaken death.

On the edge of the cemetery, on the east side, one sees the vaults of the Schismatic Greeks and those of the Protestants; they are separated from each other by a wall and again separated from the Catholic burials by another wall: sad dissents whose memory is perpetuated in the asylum where all quarrels end! Close by the Greek cemetery is another recess which protects a hole into which the still-born children are thrown to Limbo. Happy creatures! You have passed from the darkness of the maternal womb into everlasting darkness, without going through the light!

Near this hole lie bones dug into the ground like roots, as each new grave is cleared: some, the older ones, are white and dry; others, more recently disinterred, are yellow and damp. Lizards run about those remains, glide in between the teeth, through the eyes and nostrils, come out through the mouth and ears of the skulls, their houses or nests. Three or four butterflies hovered over the mallow-flowers entwined with those bones, an image of the soul under that sky which resembles that under which the story of Psyche was invented. One skull still had a few hairs of the same shade as my own. Poor old gondolier! Did you at least steer your bark better than I have steered mine?

A common grave remains open in the enclosure; they had just lowered a physician beside his old practice. His black coffin was covered with earth only at the top and its naked side awaited the side of another dead man to warm it Antonio had stuffed his wife in there, a fortnight ago, and it was the defunct doctor who had dispatched her: Antonio blessed a requiting and avenging God and bore his misfortune patiently. The coffins of private individuals are taken to that dismal dwelling-place in private gondolas, followed by a priest in another gondola. As the gondolas look like hearses, they suit the ceremony. A larger wherry, an "omnibus" of Cocytus, performs the service of the hospitals. Thus we find renewed the Egyptian burials and the fables of Charon and his ferry-boat.

In the cemetery beside Venice stands an octagonal chapel dedicated to St. Christopher[115]. This saint, taking a child on his shoulders at the ford of a river, found it heavy; now the child was the Son of Mary, who holds the globe in His hand: the altar-picture represents this fair adventure.

And I too have tried to carry a child-king, but I did not perceive that he was sleeping in his cradle with ten centuries: a load too heavy for my arms.

I observed in the chapel a wooden candle-stick: the taper was extinguished; a holy-water font for blessing the burials; and a little book: _Pars Ritualis Romani pro usu ad exsequianda corpora defunctorum_; when we are already forgotten, Religion, our immortal and never wearied kinswoman, mourns us and follows us: _exsequor fugam._ A tinder-box contained a steel; God alone disposes of the spark of life. Two quatrains written on common paper were fastened up on the inner panels of two of the three doors of the building:

Quivi dell' uom le frali spoglie ascoce Pallida morte, O passegier, t'addita, etc.

The only somewhat striking tomb in the cemetery was raised in advance by a woman who subsequently delayed eighteen years in dying: the inscription informs us of this circumstance; thus this woman for eighteen years hoped in vain for her sepulchre. What sorrow nourished this hope within her?

On a little black wooden cross appears this other inscription:

VIRGINIA ACERBI, ANNO 72, 1824. MORTA NEL BACIO DEL SIGNORE.

The years are harsh to a fair Venetian woman.

[Sidenote: San Michele di Murano.]

Antonio said to me:

"When this cemetery is full, they will give it a rest and bury the dead in the Isola di San Michele di Murano[116]."

The expression was a correct one: when the harvest is gathered, one lets the soil lie fallow and ploughs other furrows elsewhere.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

We have been to see that other field awaiting the Great Husbandman. San Michele di Murano is a smiling monastery with a graceful church, porticoes and a white cloister. The windows of the convent give a view, over the porticoes, of Venice and the lagoons; a garden filled with flowers meets the turf whose compost is still being prepared under the fresh-coloured skin of some young girl. This charming retreat is given over to Franciscans; it would better suit nuns singing like the little pupils of Rousseau's _Scuole_:

"How happy are they," says Manzoni, "who have taken the holy veil before fixing their eyes on a man's face."

Give me, I entreat you, a cell here in which to finish my Memoirs.

Fra Paolo[117] is buried at the entrance to the church; that seeker after noise must be very wroth at the silence that surrounds him.

Pellico, when sentenced to death, was lodged at San Michele before being transported to the fortress of the Spielberg. The president of the tribunal before which Pellico appeared takes the poet's place at San Michele; he is buried in the cloister; he will not leave that prison.

Not far from the tomb of the magistrate is that of a foreign woman married at the age of twenty-two years, in the month of January; she died in the month of February following. She did not want to go beyond the honeymoon; her epitaph says:

CI REVEDREMO.

If it were true!

Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation! Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction of the _ego_, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, _ci revedremo!_

I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119].

I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child; the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures.

Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion. Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the placards which advertise on the same bill the opera of the day and the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed, as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal.

[Sidenote: The gondoliers.]

The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the _lazzaroni_ in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were not past.

At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash their _barchette_ at the _Traghetti_, just as dragoons curry, brush and sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola.

When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the wind and serving as a weather-cock, at the top of the monument of the Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "_Sia, stati! Sta longo!_" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the _calle_ will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his _zitella_ the half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace Henry V. on the throne.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much, when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: _civitas Venetorum, civitas Venetica?_ Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul?

It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were a colony of the _pescatori_ of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung from the horn of Gaul: _cornu Galliæ._[126]

[Sidenote: On the Riva degli Schiavoni.]

Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten excellent butter at Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans; naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the _Mercure_:

"It was reserved for us to find at the back of the Adriatic the tomb of two king's daughters[127] whose funeral oration we had heard delivered in an attic in London. Ah, at least the grave that holds those noble ladies will have once heard its silence broken; the sound of a Frenchman's foot-steps will have made two Frenchwomen start in their coffins! The respects of a poor gentleman, at Versailles, would have been nothing to princesses; the prayer of a Christian, on foreign soil, will perhaps have been agreeable to saints."

Some few years, it seems to me, have passed, since I began to serve the Bourbons: they have enlightened my fidelity, but they will not tire it I am breakfasting on the Riva degli Schiavoni, while waiting for the exile.

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

From the little table at which I sit, my eyes wander over all the roads: a breeze from the offing cools the air; the tide is rising; a three-master is coming in. The Lido on one side, the Doge's Palace on the other, the lagoons in the middle: that is the picture. It is from this port that so many glorious fleets set sail; old Dandolo sallied forth in all the pomp of naval chivalry, of which Villehardouin[128], who began our language and our Memoirs, has left us a description:

"And when the ships were laden with arms, and meats, and knights, and sergeants, and the shields were arrayed all round in the form of a frieze, and the banners waved, of which there were so many fair ones, never did fairer fleets sail from any port."

The morning scene in Venice also puts me in mind of the story of Captain Olivet and Zulietta, which was so well told:

"The gondola lay to, and I saw a dazzlingly beautiful young woman step out, coquettishly dressed and very nimble. In three bounds she was in the cabin and seated at my side, before I perceived that a place had been laid for her. She was a brunette of twenty years at the most, as charming as she was lively. She could speak only Italian; her accent alone would have been enough to turn my head. While eating and chatting, she fixed her eyes on me and then, exclaiming, 'Holy Virgin! O my dear Brémond, how long it is since I saw you!1 she threw herself into my arms, sealed her lips to mine and pressed me almost to suffocation. Her large, black, Oriental eyes darted shafts of fire into my heart; and although surprise at first diverted my senses, my amorous feelings very rapidly overcame me.... She told us that I was the image of M. de Brémond, the director of the Tuscan custom-house; that she had been madly in love with this M. de Brémond; that she was still madly in love with him; that she had left him because she was a fool; that she took me in his place; that she wanted to love me, since it suited her; that, for the same reason, I must love her as long as it suited her; and that, when she left me in the lurch, I must bear it patiently as her dear Brémond had done. No sooner said than done....

"In the evening, we escorted her back to her apartments. While we were talking, I noticed two pistols on her dressing-table.

"'Ah, ah!' said I, taking one up, 'here is a patch-box of a new construction; may I ask what it is used for?'

"She said, with an ingenuous pride which made her still more charming:

"'When I am complaisant to those whom I do not love, I make them pay for the weariness they cause me: nothing can be fairer; but, although I endure their caresses, I will not endure their insults, and I shall not miss the first man who shall be wanting in respect to me.'

'When I left her, I made an appointment for the next day. I did not keep her waiting. I found her _in vestito di confidenza_, in a more than wanton undress, which is known only in southern countries and which I will not amuse myself with describing, although I remember it too well.... I had no idea of the delights that awaited me. I have spoken of Madame de Larnage, in the transports which the recollection of her still sometimes awakens in me; but how old, ugly, and cold she was, compared with my Zulietta! Do not attempt to imagine the charms and graces of this bewitching girl; you would be too far from the truth. The young virgins of the cloister are not so fresh, the beauties of the harem are not so lively, the houris of paradise are not so piquant.[129]"

This adventure ended with an eccentricity on the part of Rousseau and Zulietta's phrase:

"_Lascia le donne e studia la matematica._"

[Sidenote: Zulietta, Margherita Cogni.]

Lord Byron also gave up his life to paid Venuses: he filled the Mocenigo Palace with those Venetian beauties, who had " taken refuge," according to him, "under the _fazzioli._" Sometimes, perturbed by a feeling of shame, he fled, and spent the night on the water in his gondola. He had, as his favourite sultana, Margherita Cogni, surnamed, from her husband's condition, the Fornarina[130]:

"Very dark, tall"--it is Lord Byron who speaks--"the Venetian face, very fine black eyes. She was two-and-twenty years old....

"In the autumn, one day, going to the Lido... we were overtaken by a heavy squall. . . . . . . ....On our return, after a tight struggle, I found Margarita on the open steps of the Mocenigo Palace, on the Grand Canal, with her great black eyes flashing through her tears, and the long dark hair, which was streaming, drenched with rain, over her brows and breast. She was perfectly exposed to the storm; and the wind blowing her hair and dress about her thin tall figure, and the lightning flashing round her, and the waves rolling at her feet, made her look like Medea alighted from her chariot, or the sybil of the tempest that was rolling around her, the only living thing within hail at that moment except ourselves. On seeing me safe, she did not wait to greet me.... but calling out to me, '_Ah! can' della Madonna, ne este il tempo per andar' al' Lido!_--Ah! dog of the Virgin, is this a time to go to the Lido?' ran into the house," etc.

In these two stories of Rousseau and Byron, one feels the difference in social position, character and education between the two men. Through the charm of the style of the author of the _Confessions_ peeps something vulgar, cynical, in bad form, in bad taste; the obscenity of expression peculiar to that period still further spoils the picture. Zulietta is superior to her lover in elevation of feeling and in habitual elegance: it is almost a fine lady smitten with the puny secretary of a paltry ambassador[131]. The same inferiority appears again when Rousseau arranges to bring up, with his friend Carrio, at their common expense, a little girl of eleven years whose favours, or rather whose tears, they were to share.

Lord Byron bears himself differently: he shines forth with the manners and the fatuousness of the aristocracy; a peer of Great Britain, playing with the woman of the people whom he has seduced, he raises her to himself by his caresses and the magic of his talent Byron arrived in Venice rich and famous: Rousseau landed there poor and unknown; everybody knows the palace that blabbed the errors of the noble heir of the English commodore[132]: no _cicerone_ could point out to you the house in which the plebeian son of the humble clock-maker of Geneva hid his pleasures. Rousseau does not even speak of Venice; he seems to have lived in it without seeing it: Byron has sung it admirably[133].

You have seen in these Memoirs what I have said of the relations of imagination and destiny that seem to have existed between the historian of _René_ and the poet of _Childe Harold._ Here I point to another of those conjunctures so nattering to my pride. Does not the dark-haired Fornarina of Lord Byron bear a certain family likeness to the fair-haired Velléda of the _Martyrs_, her elder?

[Sidenote: Velléda.]

"'Hidden among the rocks, I waited some time, but nothing appeared. Suddenly, my ear was struck by sounds which the wind carried to me from the middle of the lake. I listened and distinguished the accents of a human voice; at the same time I discovered a skiff poised on the crest of a wave; it came down again, disappeared between two billows, and then showed itself once more on the summit of a heavy swell; it approached the shore. A woman was steering; she sang as she struggled against the storm and seemed to sport amidst the winds: one would have thought that they were in her power, from the manner in which she seemed to defy them. I saw her throw into the lake by turns, as a sacrifice, pieces of linen, sheep's fleeces, cakes of wax and little gold and silver grindstones.

"Soon she touched land, sprang on shore, fastened her bark to the trunk of a willow and darted into the wood, leaning on the poplar oar which she held in her hand. She passed quite close to me without seeing me. Her figure was tall; a dark, short, sleeveless tunic scarce served to veil her nudity. She carried a golden sickle slung from a brass girdle and her head was encircled with an oaken branch. The whiteness of her arms and complexion, her blue eyes, her rosy lips, her long fair hair that waved dishevelled in the air bespoke the daughter of the Gauls and contrasted, by their gentleness, with her proud and fierce gait She sang words full of terror in a melodious voice, and her uncovered breast rose and fell like the foam of the waves[134].'"

I should blush to show myself between Byron and Jean-Jacques, without knowing what place posterity will award me, if these Memoirs were to appear during my life; but, when they see the light, I shall have gone and for all time, like my illustrious predecessors, to a distant shore; my shade will be delivered to the breath of opinion, vain and light like the little that will remain of my ashes.

Rousseau and Byron had one feature in common in Venice: neither showed any feeling for the arts. Rousseau, who had wonderful gifts for music, does not seem to know that, near Zulietta, there existed pictures, statues, monuments; and yet with what charm do those master-pieces mate with love, whose object they divine and whose flame they increase! As to Lord Byron, he "loathes the infernal din" of Rubens' colours, he "spits upon" all the pictures of saints with which the churches are glutted; he never met a picture or statue coming within a league of his thought. He prefers to those deceitful arts the beauty of a few mountains, a few seas, a few horses, a certain Morean lion and a tiger which he saw supping in Exeter Change. Is there not a little prejudice in all this?

Que d'affectation et de forfanterie[135]!

VENICE, _September_ 1833.

But what, then, is this town in which all the lofty intelligences have arranged to meet? Some have visited it themselves; others have sent their Muses there. Something would have been lacking to the immortality of those talents, if they had not hung pictures on that temple of voluptuousness and glory. Without again recalling the great poets of Italy, the geniuses of the whole of Europe placed their creations there: there breathed Shakespeare's Desdemona, very different from Rousseau's Zulietta and Byron's Margherita, that chaste Venetian who declares her love to Othello:

And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her[136].

There appeared Otway's[137] Belvidera, who says to Jaffeir:

Oh smile, as when our loves were in their spring. . . . . . . . . . Oh lead me to some desert wide and wild, Barren as our misfortunes, where my soul May have its vent, where I may tell aloud To the high heavens, and every list'ning planet, With what a boundless stock my bosom's fraught; Where I may throw my eager arms about thee, Give loose to love, with kisses kindling joy, And let off all the fire that's in my heart[138].

Goethe, in our time, has celebrated Venice, and the gentle Marot[139], who first made his voice heard at the awakening of the French Muses, took refuge in Titian's native place. Montesquieu wrote:

"Although one had seen all the cities of the world, there might still be a surprise in store for him in Venice[140]."

When, in too undraped a picture, the author of the _Lettres persanes_ depicts a Mussulman woman surrendered in Paradise to two "heavenly men," does he not seem to have painted the courtezan of Rousseau's _Confessions_ and her of Byron's Memoirs? Was not I, between my two Floridans, like Anaïs between her two angels[141]? But the "painted girls" and I were not immortal.

[Sidenote: And Corinne.]

Madame de Staël gives Venice over to the inspiration of Corinne: the latter hears the sound of the cannon that announces "the obscure sacrifice of a young girl[142] ...a solemn counsel, which a woman resigned to her fate gives to those who still struggle with destiny." ...Corinne climbs to the top of the tower of St. Mark's, contemplates the city and the waves, turns her eyes towards Greece "enveloped in clouds;" at night she sees "nothing but the reflection of the lanterns which light the gondolas:" they give her the idea of "spectres gliding upon the water, guided by a little star[143]."

Oswald departs; Corinne darts out of the room to recall him: "The rain then fell in torrents, a most violent wind arose;" Corinne descends to the banks of the canal:

"The night was so dark that not a single bark was to be seen.... Corinne called to the gondoliers, who took her cries for those of some wretch drowning in the tempest; nevertheless none dared approach to offer assistance, so formidable were the waves of the Grand Canal[144]."

There again you have Lord Byron's Margherita.

I find an unspeakable pleasure in meeting the masterpieces of those great masters in the very place for which they were made. I breathe freely in the midst of the immortal band, like a humble traveller admitted to the hospitable hearth of a rich and beautiful family.

[60] This book was written on the road from Paris to Venice, between the 7th and 10th of September 1833, and in Venice, from the 10th to the 15th of September 1833.--T.

[61] Salins suffered from a terrible conflagration in 1825. It was rebuilt, with regular streets, by public subscription.--T.

[62] Pierre Joseph Thoulier, Abbé d'Olivet (1682-1768) was born at Salins, on the Furieuse, a tributary of the Loire. He first joined the Jesuits, where he was known as the Père Thoulier, but soon left the Company, in order to follow a literary career. Meantime Voltaire had been his pupil at the college of Louis-le-Grand. He became a member of the French Academy in 1723; Voltaire in 1746. D'Olivet is the author of an _Histoire de l'Académie française_, up to 1700, and of several important grammatical works and translations, and he worked much on the Dictionary of the French Academy.--T.

[63] Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Castle of Joux, at his father's instance, in 1775; Toussaint-Louverture (_cf._ Vol. III., p. 191, n. 3) died there on the 27th of April 1803, after a ten months' confinement--T.

[64] _Cf._ Vol. II., pp. 246-250.--T.

[65] "When, on the 7th of August 1814, the Bull of _Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum_, came to sanction the work of restoration of the Company of Jesus, the primitive cantons of Switzerland did not remain insensible to the joys of Catholicism. Ignace Brocard, Jacques Roh, Gaspard Rothenflue and several of their fellow-countrymen enlisted under the banner of the newly-reinstated Order. The Valais gave back to the Jesuits their old college of Brigg." (CRÉTINEAU-JOLY, _Histoire du Sunderbund_, Vol. I., p. 428.)--B.

[66] _Dies Iræ_, Stanza 5:

Liber seri plus proferetur, In quo totum continetur, Unde mundus judicetur.--T.

[67] Francis I. lived till 1835.--T.

[68] Charles X. lived till 1836.--T.

[69] Ferdinand III. Grand-duke of Tuscany (1769-1824). _Vide supra_ p. 12, n. 1.--T.

[70] Charles Felix I. King of Sardinia (1765-1831) succeeded to the throne on the abdication of his brother, Victor Emanuel I., in 1821, the year before the Congress of Verona.--T.

[71] Pierre François Hercule Comte de Serre (1777-1822). He died as Ambassador to Naples.--T.

[72] Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616), the architect of many of the finest buildings in North Italy.--T.

[73] Niccola Pisano (_circa_ 1206-1278), one of the greatest Italian architects.--T.

[74] And not Signor Procurante, as the earlier editions of the Memoirs have it.--T.

[75] VOLTAIRE: _Candide, ou l'Optimisme_, Part I., Chap. XXV.: _Candid and Martin pay a Visit to Seignor Pococurante, a Noble Venetian._--T.

[76] Philippe de Comines (_circa_ 1445-1511), the statesman and historian, author of the valuable _Cronique et hystoire faicte et composée par messire Philippe de Comines._--T.

[77] JACOPO SANNAZARO.--_Author's Note._

[78] GABRIELLO CHIABRERA, _Canzoni eroiche_, III.: _Per Vittorio Cappello, Generale de' Veneziani nella Morea_, 10-12.--T.

[79] Pierre Luc Charles Cicéri (1782-1868), a famous French scene-painter, who executed numbers of stage-scenes for the Royal Academy of Music, or grand Opera-house, in Paris.--B.

[80] Giorgio Barbarelli (_circa_ 1477-1511), known as Giorgione, the great Venetian colourist and pupil of Giovanni Bellini (_vide infra._)--T.

[81] Paolo Cagliari (1528-1588), of Verona, known as Paul Veronese, one of the most celebrated painters of the Venetian School, went to Venice in 1555 and remained there. He executed the decorations of the Library of St. Mark in 1563 and the ceiling of the council-chamber in the Palace of the Doges in 1577.--T.

[82] Jacopo Robusti (1518-1594), called Tintoretto from the trade of his father, a dyer, received his first important order in 1546, for the decoration of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In 1560, he began to paint the Scuola di San Rocco and the Doges' Palace and, in the same year, seems to have taken Titian's place as Court painter to the Doges.--T.

[83] Giovanni Bellini (_post_1427-1516), the founder of the Venetian School of painting and the greatest of the fifteenth-century artists. Titian and Giorgione were both his pupils.--T.

[84] Paride Bordone (_circa_ 1500-1571), one of Titian's greatest pupils.--T.

[85] Jacopo Palma the Elder( _circa_ 1480-1528) and Jacopo Palma the Younger (_circa_ 1544-1628), uncle and nephew.--T.

[86] Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) settled in Venice and presented the city with his library (1362).--T.

[87] George Gemistus Pletho (_b._ 1390), the celebrated Byzantine Platonic philosopher and scholar.--T.

[88] Johannes Cardinal Bessarion (1395-1472), Archbishop of Nicæa (1437), a cardinal (1439), Archbishop of Siponto and Bishop of Sabina and Tusculum, and Patriarch of Constantinople (1463). Bessarion was a disciple of Plethon and author of, among many other works of Platonic philosophy, the famous _Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis_ (1469).--T.

[89] Or Acre: 1104.--T.

[90] 1176.--T.

[91] 1124.--T.

[92] 10 October 1571.--T.

[93] The so-called Grand Sanhedrim of 1806 was a council summoned by Napoleon for the 20th of October of that year, consisting of representatives of the chief synagogues of France, Italy and Europe. The object of its deliberations was to point out to the Government means of enabling the Jews to participate in the civil and political rights of England, by modifying such of their habits and doctrines as kept them isolated from their fellow-citizens. The sittings of the Grand Sanhedrim, which consisted of 71 members, opened on the 9th of February and ended on the 9th of March 1807. The most notable clause, from Napoleon's point of view, in the solemn public declaration issued on the latter date, is that dispensing Jews who are performing military service from all religious observances that are irreconcilable with such military service.--T.

[94] Leopoldo Conte Cicognara (1767-1834), a distinguished diplomatist and antiquarian. He became President of the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice in 1812. His principal work, the _Storia della Scultura_, was published in 1813-1818.--T.

[95] It is clear to my eyes that the ogive, whose so-called mysterious origin men go so far to seek, was born casually of the intersection of two semicircular arches; therefore it is found everywhere. Later architects have done no more than release it from the designs in which it originally figured.--_Author's Note._

[96] See the previous note.--_Author's Note._

[97] Bartolommeo Gamba (1780-1841), a learned Italian bibliographer and biographer. His chief work is the _Serie dell' Edizioni dei Testi di Lingua Italiana_ (1812-1828).--T.

[98] Fra Mauro (_fl._ 15th Century), a monk of the Camaldule Order, who drew his famous map of the world between 1457 and 1459.--T.

[99] Here for instance, is Charles Dickens' lurid description of the _Pozzi_, or Prisons, which he pretends to see in a dream:

"I descended from the cheerful day into two ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day a torch was placed--I dreamed--to light the prisoners within, for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions in the blackened vaults. I saw them. For their labour with the rusty nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many generations.

"One cell I saw in which no man remained for more than four-and-twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the Confessor came--a monk brown-robed and hooded--ghastly in the day and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty door--low-browed and stealthy--through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and rowed away, and drowned where it was death to cast a net." (_Pictures from Italy: An Italian Dream._)--T.

[100]

. . . . . . "Into that hideous den, With one blow of the axe, admitted light again."--T.

[101] Silvio Pellico (1788-1854) was imprisoned in Milan and Venice from 1820 to 1822 and at the Spielberg, near Brünn, from 1822 to 1830. His _Mie Prigioni_ had only lately been published (1833) and Chateaubriand was much struck with them. During his previous journey to Italy, in a letter dated Basle, 17 May 1833, he wrote to Madame Récamier:

"Here I am at Basle, safe and sound. You have seen that fine river pass which is going, for a moment, to bring news of me to you in France. Travelling always gives me back my strength, sentiment and thought; I am very busy writing _a new prologue to a_ BOOK. I nave read the whole of Pellico, cursorily. I am delighted with it; I should like to write an account of that work, the saintliness of which will prevent its success with our revolutionaries, who are free after Fouché's fashion. Are you not enchanted with _Zanze sotto i Piombi?_ And the little deaf-and-dumb person? And Schiller, the old gaoler, and the religious conversations through the window, and our poor Maroncelli? And that poor young wife of the _sopr'intendente_, who dies so sweetly? And the return to beautiful Italy?"--B.

[102] Bruno, near which the Spielberg stands, is the capital of Moravia.--T.

[103] Maria Christina Josephs Johanna Antonia of Austria, Duchess of Saxe-Teschen (1742-1798), married to Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen in 1766. The Archduchess Maria Christina's monument, by Canova, is in the church of the Augustines in Vienna.--T.

[104] Titian's _Assumption_, one of the most renowned of existing pictures, was discovered by Count Cicognara in the church of the Frari, for which it had been painted as an altar-piece. It was restored and removed to the _Accademia di Belle Arti_, where it still hangs.--T.

[105] Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin and eleventh Earl of Kincardine (1766-1841) was British Envoy to Constantinople from 1799 to 1802. Between 1801 and 1803, he removed to England from Athens the so-called Elgin marbles, comprising the bulk of the surviving plastic decoration of the Parthenon, executed under the direction of Phidias about 440 B.C. These stolen goods were purchased by the nation in 1816 and are now in the British Museum.--T.

[106] Tommaso Mocenigo, Doge from 1414 to 1423; Giovanni Mocenigo, Doge from 1475 to 1485; and Luigi Mocenigo, Doge from 1570 to 1577, are all buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.--T.

[107] Michele Morosini, Doge of Venice for a few months in 1382.--T.

[108] Andrea Vendramin, Doge of Venice (_d._ 1478), became Doge in 1476.--T.

[109] Seventeen doges in all are buried in Santi Giovanni e Paolo or "Zanipolo," as the Venetians pronounce it.--B..

[110] Marco Antonio Bragadino (_d._ 1571), flayed alive by the Turks after his valiant defense of Famagusta, in Cyprus.--T.

[111] Angelo Emo (1731-1792), the last of the Venetian admirals. He bombarded Tunis and forced it to sign a truce with the Republic--T.

[112] Cary's DANTE: _Hell_, Canto XXI. 7-15.--T.

[113] Henry IV. defeated the Leaguers at Ivry-la-Bataille on the 14th of March 1590.--T.

[114] Sir William Edward Parry (1790-1855) started on his second polar expedition in 1821 and his third in 1824. These two expeditions, neither of which was specially successful, are referred to by Chateaubriand on page 136 of Vol. I. of the Memoirs. A later expedition, by way of Spitsbergen, was likewise unsuccessful. From 1823 to 1829, Parry was Acting Hydrographer to the Navy. In 1852, he was made a rear-admiral and, in 1853, Governor of Greenwich Hospital.--T.

[115] St. Christopher (_fl._ 3rd Century) is said to have lived in Syria and to have been of prodigious height and strength. As a penance for having been a servant of the devil, he devoted himself to the task of carrying pilgrims across a river where there was no bridge. Christ came to the river one day in the form of a child and asked to be carried over, but His weight grew heavier and heavier till His bearer was nearly broken down in the midst of the stream. When they reached the shore:

"Marvel not," said the Child, "for with Me thou hast borne the sins of the world."

St. Christopher is usually represented as bearing the Infant Christ and leaning upon a staff. He was martyred under the Emperor Decius _circa_ 250. The Church celebrates the Feast of St. Christopher on the 25th of July.--T.

[116] The Isola di San Michele contains the modern burying-ground of Venice.--T.

[117] Pietro Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623), known as Fra Paola and surnamed Servita, a noted Venetian historian, entered the Order of the Servites in 1565. In 1570, he was made professor of philosophy in the Servite Monastery in Venice. He was distinguished, in the controversy with Pope Paul V. (1606-1607), as the champion of free thought. His chief work is the _Istoria del Concilio di Trento_, published in London in 1619. Fra Paolo was a member of the Council of Ten and consulting theologian to the Venetian Republic.--T.

[118] _Cf._ VOL I., p. 76.--T.

[119] _Cf._ Vol. I., p. 236.--T.

[120] The _gazetta_ was a Venetian coin, worth about three farthings, the sum charged for a reading of the first Venetian newspaper, a written sheet which appeared about the middle of the sixteenth century during the war with Soliman II.--T.

[121] Aldus Manutius (_circa_ 1450-1515), the celebrated printer and founder of the Aldine Press in Venice; his son, Paulus Manutius (1511-1574); and the latter's son, Aldus Manutius the Younger (1547-1597). All three were distinguished Classical scholars as well as noted printers.--T.

[122] Antonio Franconi (1738-1836), a native of Venice, began life as a tumbler and travelling physician. Afterwards he instituted bull-fights in Lyons and, later, at Bordeaux; and, lastly, went into partnership, in 1783, with Astley, the English circus-proprietor, who had opened a theatrical riding-school in Paris, and founded the circus which he called the Cirque Olympique and which obtained a prodigious success.--T.

[123] The Veneti were an ancient Celtic people living in Brittany, near the coast of the Bay of Biscay. They were subdued by Cæsar, after a severe maritime war, in 56 B.C.--T.

[124] A people dwelling near the head of the Adriatic, between the Po and the Adige.--T.

[125] Vannes, or, in Breton, Gwened is the capital of the Department of Morbihan and is the ancient Civitas Venetorum, the capital of the Veneti.--T.

[126] _Cornu Galliæ_, Cornouailles, Cornwall.--T.

[127] Madame Adélaïde (1732-1800) and Madame Victoire (1733-1799), daughters of Louis XV.--T.

[128] Geoffroi de Villehardouin (_circa_ 1160--_circa_ 1215), the author of a famous chronicle: _Histoire de la conquête de Constantinople, ou Chronique des empereurs Baudouin et Henri de Constantinople._ Villehardouin's Chronicle is not only trustworthy from an historical point of view, but is even more deserving for its literary excellence, while being one of the oldest monuments of original French prose. The Fourth Crusade, in which Villehardouin took part, left Venice in October 1203.--T.

[129] ROUSSEAU: _Confessions_, Part I., Book VII.--T.

[130] The baker's wife.--T.

[131] M. de Montaigu.--T.

[132] Hon. John Byron (1723-1786), second son of William fourth Lord Byron and grand-father of the poet, entered the Navy as a boy. In 1764, he was promoted to commodore and commanded two vessels in a voyage of exploration round the world; he returned in 1766, having accomplished little beyond some curious observations on the Indians of Patagonia and the discovery of some small islands in the Pacific Ocean. He was Governor of Newfoundland from 1769 to 1772; became a vice-admiral in 1778; and on the 6th of July 1779 fought an engagement with the French fleet off Grenada, in the West Indies, the result of which was doubtful.--T.

[133] _Cf._ BYRON, _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, Canto IV.--T.

[134] CHATEAUBRIAND, _Les Martyrs_, Book IX.: _The Story of Eudorus._--T.

[135] MOLIÈRE, _Tartufe_, Act III. Sc. ii.:

"What affectation and blind real is this!"--T.

[136] SHAKESPEARE: _Othello, the Moor of Venice_, Act I. Sc. iii.--T.

[137] Thomas Otway (1652-1685), the principal tragic poet of the English classical school. The most famous of his tragedies, _Venice Preserved_, from which the following quotation is taken, appeared in 1682.--T.

[138] OTWAY: _Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered_, Act I. Sc. i.--T.

[139] Clément Marot (1497-1544), the poet, when compelled to fly from France on account of his scandalous life, took refuge in Béarn (1535), then at the Court of Ferrara, where he was secretary to Renée of France, and, finally, in Venice (1536).--T.

[140] MONTESQUIEU: _Lettres persanes._ Letter XXXI.: _Rhédi à Usbek, à Paris._--T.

[141] The incident of Anals will be found in the _Lettres persanes._