in love with his wife. My mistress and I were guiltless as cherubs when the sposo caught us together talking of love. He was armed, I was not, but he missed me; I sprang upon him and killed him with my two hands, wringing his neck as if he had been a chicken. I wanted Bianca to fly with me; but she would not. That is the way with women! So I went alone. I was confiscated to death, and my property was confiscated and made over to my next-of-kin; but I had carried off my diamonds, five of Titian’s pictures taken down from their frames and rolled up, and all my gold.

‘I went to Milan, no one molested me, my affair in no wise interested the State—One small observation before I go further,’ he continued, after a pause; ‘whether it is true or no that the mother’s fancies at the time of conception or in the months before birth can influence her child, this much is certain, my mother during her pregnancy had a passion for gold, and I am the victim of a monomania, of a craving for gold, which must be gratified. Gold is so much a necessity of life for me, that I have never been without it; I must have gold to toy with and finger. As a young man I always wore jewellery, and carried two or three hundred ducats about with me wherever I went.’

He drew a couple of gold coins from his pocket and showed them to me as he spoke.

‘I can tell by instinct when gold is near. Blind as I am, I stop before the jewellers’ shop windows. That passion was the ruin of me; I took to gambling to play with gold. I was not a cheat, I was cheated, I ruined myself. I lost all my fortune. Then the longing to see Bianca once more possessed me like a frenzy. I stole back to Venice and found her again. For six months I was happy; she hid me in her house and fed me. I thought thus deliciously to finish my days. But the Provveditore courted her, and guessed that he had a rival; we in Italy can feel that. He played the spy upon us, and surprised us together in bed, base wretch! You may judge what a fight for life it was; I did not kill him outright, but I wounded him dangerously.

‘That adventure broke my luck. I have never found another Bianca; I have known great pleasures; but among the most celebrated women of the court of Louis XV I never found my beloved Venetian’s charm, her love, her great qualities.

‘The Provveditore called his servants, the palace was surrounded and entered; I fought for my life that I might die beneath Bianca’s eyes; Bianca helped me to kill the Provveditore. Once before she had refused flight with me; but after six months of happiness she wished only to die with me, and received several thrusts. I was entangled in a great cloak that they flung over me, carried down to a gondola, and hurried to the Pozzi dungeons. I was twenty-two years old; I gripped the hilt of my broken sword so hard, that they could only have taken it from me by cutting off my hand at the wrist. A curious chance, or rather the instinct of self-preservation, led me to hide the fragment of the blade in a corner of my cell, as if it might still be of use. They tended me; none of my wounds were serious. At two-and-twenty one can recover from anything. I was to lose my head on the scaffold. I shammed illness to gain time. It seemed to me that the canal lay just outside my cell. I thought to make my escape by boring a hole through the wall and swimming for my life. I based my hopes on the following reasons.

‘Every time that the gaoler came with my food, there was light enough to read directions written on the walls—“Side of the Palace”, Side of the Canal”, “Side of the Vaults”. At last I saw a design in this, but I did not trouble myself much about the meaning of it; the actual incomplete condition of the Ducal Palace accounted for it. The longing to regain my freedom gave me something like genius. Groping about with my fingers, I spelt out an Arabic inscription on the wall. The author of the work informed those to come after him that he had loosened two stones in the lowest course of masonry and hollowed out eleven feet beyond underground. As he went on with his excavations, it became necessary to spread the fragments of stone and mortar over the floor of his cell. But even if gaolers and inquisitors had not felt sure that the structure of the buildings was such that no watch was needed below, the level of the Pozzi dungeons being several steps below the threshold, it was possible gradually to raise the earthen floor without exciting the warder’s suspicions.