University of Virginia Library

4. IV.

IN those feeble days of Venice which went before the
triumphant entry of Napoleon, when the Council
of Three had themselves learned to tremble, and the
Lion of St. Mark was humbled,—there came to Venice,
from the island of Corfu, a palsied old man whose name
was Enrico Pesaro, bringing with him an only son who
was called Antonio.

The old man sought to gather such remnants of the
ancient Pesaro estate as could be saved from the greedy
hands of the government; and he purchased rich masses
for the rest of the souls of the murdered father and
brother.

He died when Venice died; leaving as a legacy to
his son a broken estate and the bruised heart, with which
he had mourned the wrong done to his kindred. The
boy Antonio had only mournful memories of the old

Venice, where his family—once a family of honor, and
of great deeds—was cut down; and the new Venice was
a conquered city.

In the train of the triumphant Army of Italy there
came, after a few years, many whose families had been
in times past banished and forgotten. An old love for the
great city, whose banner had floated proudly in all seas,
drew them to the shrine in the water, where the ashes
of their fathers mouldered. Others wandered thither
seeking vestiges of old inheritance; or, it might be,
traces of brothers, or of friends, long parted from them.

Among these, there came, under the guardianship
of a great French general, a pensive girl from Avignon
on the Rhone. She seemed French in tongue, and yet
she spoke well the language of Italy, and her name was
that of a house which was once great in Venice. She
sought both friends and inheritance.

Her story was a singular one. Her grandfather
was once royal ambassador to the State of Venice. Her
mother had fled at night from his house, to meet upon
the shores of the Lagoon a Venetian lover, who was of
noble family, but a culprit of the State. As she approached
the rendezvous, upon the fatal night, she
found in the distance a flaming barge of St. Mark; and
presently after, heard the cry and struggles of some victim
of State cast into the Lagoon.

Her gondola came up in time to save Antonio Pesaro!

The government put no vigor in its search for drowned
men: and the fugitives, made man and wife, journeyed
safely across Piedmont. The arm of St. Mark was very
strong for vengeance, even in distant countries; and the
fugitive ones counted it safe to wear another name,
until years should have made safe again the title of
Pesaro.

The wife had also to contend with the opposition of
a father, whose abhorrence of the Venetian name would
permit no reconciliation, and no royal sanction of the
marriage. Thus they lived, outcasts from Venice, and
outlawed in France, in the valley town of Avignon.
With the death of Pesaro, the royal ambassador relented;
but kindness came too late. The daughter sought him
only to bequeath to his care her child.

But Blanche Pesaro, child as she was, could not love
a parent who had not loved her mother; and the royal
ambassador, who could steel his heart toward a suffering
daughter, could spend little sympathy upon her
Italian child. Therefore Blanche was glad, under the
protection of a republican general of Provence, to seek
what friends or kindred might yet be found in the island
city, where her father had once lived, and her mother
had loved. She found there a young Count (for the
title had been revived) Antonio Pesaro—her own father's
name; and her heart warmed toward him, as to her
nearest of kin. And the young Count Antonio Pesaro,

when he met this new cousin from the West, felt his
heart warming toward one whose story seemed to lift
a crime from off the memory of his father. There was
no question of inheritance, for the two parties joined
their claim, and Blanche became Countess of Pesaro.

But the pensive face which had bloomed among the
olives by Avignon, drooped under the harsh winds that
whistle among the leaning houses of Venice. And the
Count, who had inherited sadness, found other and
stronger grief in the wasting away, and the death of
Blanche, his wife.

She died on a November day, in the tall, dismal
house where the widowed Count now lives. And there
the daughter, Blanche left him, arranges flowers on the
the ledge of the topmost windows, where a little of the
sunshine finds its way.

The broken gentleman lingers for hours beside the
portraits of the old Count, who was Inquisitor, and of
Antonio, who had such wonderful escape; and they say
that he has inherited the deep self-reproaches which his
father nourished, and that with stern and silent mourning
for the sins and the weaknesses which have stained
his family name, he strides, with his vacant air, through
the ways of the ancient city, expecting no friend but
death.

Such was the story which my garrulous little Professor,

warmed with the lively Italian wine, told to me
in the Locanda del Vapore.

And, judging as well as I can from the air of the old
gentleman, and his daughter, whom I first saw upon the
Quay of the Zattere, and from what I can learn through
books of the ancient government of Venice, I think the
story may be true.

My lively little Professor says it is verissimo; which
means, that it as true as anything (in Italian) can be.