doge, would
naturally have many thoughts when he found himself the wearer of that
restricted and diminished crown.

He could not be unconscious of how the stream was going, nor unaware of
that gradual sapping of privilege and decreasing of power which even in
his own case had gone further than with his predecessor. Perhaps he had
noted with an indignant mind the new limits of the _promissione_, a
narrower charter than ever, when he was called upon to sign it. He had
no mind, we may well believe, to retire thus from the administration of
affairs. And when these giovinastri, other people's boys, the scum of
the gay world, flung their unsavory jests in the face of the old man who
had no son to come after him, the silly insults so lightly uttered, so
little thought of, the natural scoff of youth at old age, stung him to
the quick.

Old Falieri's heart burned within him at his own injuries and those of
his old comrades. How he was induced to head the conspiracy, and put his
crown, his life, and honor on the cast, there is no further information.
His fierce temper, and the fact that he had no powerful house behind him
to help to support his case, probably made him reckless. In April, 1355,
six months after his arrival in Venice as doge, the smouldering fire
broke out. Two of the conspirators were seized with compunction on the
eve of the catastrophe and betrayed the plot--one with a merciful motive
to serve a patrician he loved, the other with perhaps less noble
intentions--and, without a blow struck, the conspiracy collapsed. There
was no real heart in it, nothing to give it consistence; the hot passion
of a few men insulted, the variable gaseous excitement of wronged
commoners, and the ambition--if it was ambition--of one enraged and
affronted old man, without an heir to follow him or anything that could
make it worth his while to conquer.

An enterprise more wild was never undertaken. It was the passionate
stand of despair against force so overwhelming as to make mad the
helpless, yet not submissive, victims. The Doge, who no doubt in former
days had felt it to be a mere affair of the populace, a thing with which
a noble ambassador and proveditore had nothing to do, a struggle beneath
his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a
fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to
believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the
forlorn hope of overcoming that