XIV
But even in Venice—the magic city—there were days of mists, silvery and gray, when life took on the indistinctness and indecision of a dream; as there were days less lucent, when sea and sky melted in an indistinguishable line and the chameleon tints of the marshes mellowed into a monotonous gray surface—when the wonted brilliancy of the sunset clouds, and the glittering domes and campaniles were only faint gray shadows on the gray whiteness of the waters. And gondoliers came suddenly into vision, parting the mists with thin, black, swaying outlines, as quickly fading in the near, gray distance when they passed, while the shipping loomed like phantoms on an immediate horizon, vanishing, vision-like; and even the sounds of life came muffled over the still lagoon, like ghostly echoes from a city wrapped in dreams.
These were days of dim forebodings, too, for the anxious men of action who ruled the Republic. In the Broglio there was more often silence than speech, as the older senators gathered in knots, with faces the more expressive because of much reticence in words; the sense of approaching contest increased their mental restlessness and made them outwardly more stern. Each looked into another''''s stormy, resolute face, so passing many a counsel whose echoes he feared to start under the rambling porticoes of the Piazza, where friars of every order mingled freely with the crowd, and idlers carried tales into dark, basement recesses, and one knew not which was friend or foe. Meanwhile the Winged Lion, with those terrible, jeweled, glaring eyes, and the primitive patron San Teodoro—each high on his column, in a Nirvana of quiescence—kept solemn semblance of vigil over that dread space where sometimes a horror of which one dared not speak scattered the sunshine high in air between those silent wardens of San Marco. Yet the horror of those figures swinging lifeless, with veiled faces, was met in silence by a people trained to suffer this secret meting out of penalty for transgressions in which justice and vengeance stood confused.
The ceaseless chains of elections had begotten bribery, corruption, and strife; the over-weening luxury had fostered unworthy ambitions—it was a time of much lawlessness. Under the shadow of the embassies infamous intrigues were planned by bands of idle men, who shrank from no deed of evil which held its promise of gold; the water-storey of some splendid palace might be a lurking-place for unprincipled men—spies and informers by profession—who wore the liveries of noble families whose secrets they would unhesitatingly consign to that merciless Bocca del Leone , for favor or vengeance of those they secretly served. For underneath the glitter and the pomp of these latter days of Venice—its presage of decay—a turbulent mass of malcontents, foreigners disappointed in intrigue, Venetians shut out from power, grasped and plotted for its semblance,—sold murder for gold, treason for gold,—escaping justice by the wiles they so deftly unveiled, or by the importance of the deposition it was in their power to make. Secret, swift, relentless, absolute—Venice had work for men who did not court the sunlight; and such a nucleus drew to its dark centre intriguers from other courts, and gathered in and strengthened the worthless within its own borders, until the evil was growing heavy to deal with.
Causes of discontent between Church and State were alarmingly on the increase; and while in no other dominion, save that of Rome alone, were ecclesiastical possessions so rich, or their establishments more splendid than at Venice, nowhere were the lines of power so jealously defined and guarded as in the government of this Republic from which ecclesiastics were rigorously excluded,—although no least ceremonial was held complete without the presence of the Patriarch and priests who evidenced the devotion of Venice to the Holy Mother Church,—though every parish kept its festa, and the religion of Venice was an essential part of the life of its people. But if the priests had no visible seat in the splendid Council Chambers of the Republic, they boasted at Rome that their sway over the consciences of these lordly senators was well established by virtue of the confessional and that, in the event of contest, there would be many votes for Rome.
The ridotti , the informal clubs of Venice in those days, were important centres of influence—political, legislative, and literary; and there was a certain palazzo Morosini, well known to many of the senators who gathered in the Broglio, where questions of vital interest to the thinkers and rulers of Venice were discussed with the degree of knowledge that might have been expected from so eminent a company as that which made the home of the distinguished senator Andrea Morosini the scene of its ridotto, and where freedom of speech was much greater than seemed wise in the candid sunshine of the Piazza.
Of its present numbers all, at some period of their lives, held high office under the Republic—they were senators, secretaries of state, ambassadors—and three among that little group of thirty lived to wear the beretta. It represented essentially the patrician culture of Venice, and Morosini himself was already eminent as an historian; but the chief literary centre was still acknowledged to be that quaint house in Campo Agostino, of Aldo Manuzio, il vecchio , bearing, as in his day, shield-wise, its forbidding inscription, \"Whoever you are, Aldo requesteth you, if you want anything, to ask it in few words and depart; unless, like Hercules, you come to lend the aid of your shoulders to the weary Atlas. There will always be found, in that case something for you to do, however many you may be.\" But in this Aldine mansion only the most-learned men of letters gathered, and Greek was the sole language permitted in its discussions.
One of the habitues of the Aldine Club was chief among this noble company of the Morosini. He was a grave, scholarly man who listened and questioned much out of a seemingly inexhaustible fund of historic, legal, and ecclesiastical knowledge—a man who had the power of stimulating others, and whose rare word, when uttered, was of value. He had opinions gathered at first hand from influential minds of every land and creed to contribute to the talk when it flowed in narrowing channels; and he himself came thither for refreshment from abstruse studies, out of a quiet cell in the convent of the Servi, while seemingly unaware that many a stranger begged for an invitation to the palazzo Morosini in the hope of an introduction to this \"miracle of Venice.\"
Perhaps this grave friar, apparently so careless of his distinction, was the unsuspected intellectual thread which bound, as it were, together the various influential circles of Venice; for in every centre, plebeian or patrician, where there was anything new to be mooted or anything of value to be discussed, he was a visitor so welcome and so frequent that he might well have exerted a steady, unifying influence upon Venetian thought.
At the sign of the \"Nave d''''oro,\" in the Merceria, where the vast commercial interests of Venice were the absorbing theme, and strangers from every clime and merchants just returned from distant ports were eager now, as in the days when Marco Polo had so valiantly entertained the goodly company, to rehearse the tale of their adventures—it was neither merchant nor noble who stood forth on the bizarre background of brilliant baubles and gold-woven tissues as the centre of this ridotto, but a friar, learned in languages and sciences, of whom it was pleasantly affirmed that \"he was the only man in Venice who could discuss any subject in any tongue!\"
As this friar, unattended and on foot, turned out of the narrow calle from San Samuele into the Campo San Stefano, the Giustiniani, father and son, were just landing from their gondolas in the midst of a gay retinue, on the steps of the palazzo Morosini; other gondolas of other nobles were floating in full moonlight before the quay; and to Fra Paolo, who did not share the Venetian love of color and of art, the elaborately frescoed façade of an opposite palace—an extravagant freak of the Veronese''''s which the Venetians were already beginning to cherish as the work of their great artist who would paint no more—seemed an impertinence unworthy of that dazzling illumination.
Marcantonio Giustiniani had but lately returned from Rome, where, during his residence as Secretary to the Venetian Ambassador, the affair of the Venetian Patriarch Zani, which had roused such indignation in Venice, had taken place. The matter was still of interest in official quarters, because the death of Zani had caused a new vacancy, to which Venice, according to her ancient right, had appointed the successor; and this new Patriarch Vendramin should never go, as Zani had done at the request of the Holy Father, to receive his benediction and be met with that perfidious announcement that he had \"examined and approved the Venetian candidate,\" whom he now confirmed as Patriarch to the Most Serene Republic!