o find all our dancers detestable and our singers atrocious?
Paris and London rob us of all our leading stars. Paris passes judgment
on them, and London pays them. Genovese and la Tinti will not be left to
us for six months--"

At this juncture, the Austrian left the box. Vendramin, the Prince, and
the other two Italians exchanged a look and a smile, glancing at the
French physician. He, for a moment, felt doubtful of himself,--a
rare thing in a Frenchman,--fancying he had said or done something
incongruous; but the riddle was immediately solved.

"Do you thing it would be judicious," said Emilio, "if we spoke our mind
in the presence of our masters?"

"You are in a land of slaves," said the Duchess, in a tone and with
a droop of the head which gave her at once the look for which the
physician had sought in vain. "Vendramin," she went on, speaking so that
only the stranger could hear her, "took to smoking opium, a villainous
idea suggested to him by an Englishman who, for other reasons of his,
craved an easy death--not death as men see it in the form of a skeleton,
but death draped with the frippery you in France call a flag--a
maiden form crowned with flowers or laurels; she appears in a cloud of
gunpowder borne on the flight of a cannon-ball--or else stretched on a
bed between two courtesans; or again, she rises in the steam of a bowl
of punch, or the dazzling vapor of a diamond--but a diamond in the form
of carbon.

"Whenever Vendramin chooses, for three Austrian lire, he can be a
Venetian Captain, he can sail in the galleys of the Republic, and
conquer the gilded domes of Constantinople. Then he can lounge on the
divans in the Seraglio among the Sultan's wives, while the Grand Signor
himself is the slave of the Venetian conqueror. He returns to restore
his palazzo with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. He can quit the women
of the East for the doubly masked intrigues of his beloved Venetians,
and fancy that he dreads the jealousy which has ceased to exist.

"For three zwanziger he can transport himself into the Council of Ten,
can wield there terrible power, and leave the Doges' Palace to sleep
under the watch of a pair of flashing eyes, or to climb a balcony from
which a fair hand has hung a silken ladder. He can love a woman to whom
opium lends such poetic grace as we women of flesh and blood could never
show.

"Presently he turns over, and he is face to face with the dreadful frown
of the senator, who hold