I feared
Venice. The woman put spies about me to exploit my infirmity. I spare
you a tale of adventures worthy of Gil Blas.--Your Revolution followed.
For two whole years that creature kept me at the Bicetre as a lunatic,
then she gained admittance for me at the Blind Asylum; there was no help
for it, I went. I could not kill her; I could not see; and I was so poor
that I could not pay another arm.

"If only I had taken counsel with my jailer, Benedetto Carpi, before I
lost him, I might have known the exact position of my cell, I might have
found my way back to the Treasury and returned to Venice when Napoleon
crushed the Republic--

"Still, blind as I am, let us go back to Venice! I shall find the door
of my prison, I shall see the gold through the prison walls, I shall
hear it where it lies under the water; for the events which brought
about the fall of Venice befell in such a way that the secret of the
hoard must have perished with Bianca's brother, Vendramin, a doge to
whom I looked to make my peace with the Ten. I sent memorials to the
First Consul; I proposed an agreement with the Emperor of Austria; every
one sent me about my business for a lunatic. Come! we will go to Venice;
let us set out as beggars, we shall come back millionaires. We will buy
back some of my estates, and you shall be my heir! You shall be Prince
of Varese!"

My head was swimming. For me his confidences reached the proportions of
tragedy; at the sight of that white head of his and beyond it the black
water in the trenches of the Bastille lying still as a canal in Venice,
I had no words to answer him. Facino Cane thought, no doubt, that I
judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his gesture
expressed the whole philosophy of despair.

Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of _Super flumina Babylonis_. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard Bourdon
must have stood still to listen to an exile's last prayer, a last cry of
regret for a lost name, mingled with memories of Bianca. But gold soon
gained the upper hand, the fatal passion quenched the light of youth.

"I see it always," he said; "dreaming or waking, I see it; and as I pace
to and fro, I pace in the Treasury, and the diamonds sparkle. I am no