The Innocents Abroad

Chapter 22

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for

nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world's

applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well nigh held

dominion of the seas, and whose merchant fleets whitened the remotest

oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every

clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay. Six

hundred years ago, Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the

great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous

trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world. To-day her

piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are

vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is

departed, and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about

her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten

of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the commerce of a

hemisphere and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her

puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth,

--a peddler of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for

school-girls and children.

The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for

flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists. It seems a sort of

sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us

softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and

her desolation from our view. One ought, indeed, to turn away from her

rags, her poverty and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was

when she sunk the fleets of Charlemagne; when she humbled Frederick

Barbarossa or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of

Constantinople.

We reached Venice at eight in the evening, and entered a hearse belonging

to the Grand Hotel d'Europe. At any rate, it was more like a hearse than

any thing else, though to speak by the card, it was a gondola. And this

was the storied gondola of Venice!--the fairy boat in which the princely

cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit

canals and look the eloquence of love into the soft eyes of patrician

beauties, while the gay gondolier in silken doublet touched his guitar

and sang as only gondoliers can sing! This the famed gondola and this

the gorgeous gondolier!--the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable

hearse-body clapped on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy,

barefooted guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which

should have been sacred from public scrutiny. Presently, as he turned a

corner and shot his hearse into a dismal ditch between two long rows of

towering, untenanted buildings, the gay gondolier began to sing, true to

the traditions of his race. I stood it a little while. Then I said:

"Now, here, Roderigo Gonzales Michael Angelo, I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a

stranger, but I am not going to have my feelings lacerated by any such

caterwauling as that. If that goes on, one of us has got to take water.

It is enough that my cherished dreams of Venice have been blighted

forever as to the romantic gondola and the gorgeous gondolier; this

system of destruction shall go no farther; I will accept the hearse,

under protest, and you may fly your flag of truce in peace, but here I

register a dark and bloody oath that you shan't sing. Another yelp, and

overboard you go."

I began to feel that the old Venice of song and story had departed

forever. But I was too hasty. In a few minutes we swept gracefully out

into the Grand Canal, and under the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry

and romance stood revealed. Right from the water's edge rose long lines

of stately palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and

thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys;

ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves.

There was life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a

hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret

enterprises of bravoes and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half

in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the Republic seemed to

have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such

enterprises as these at that same moment. Music came floating over the

waters--Venice was complete.

It was a beautiful picture--very soft and dreamy and beautiful. But what

was this Venice to compare with the Venice of midnight? Nothing. There

was a fete--a grand fete in honor of some saint who had been instrumental

in checking the cholera three hundred years ago, and all Venice was

abroad on the water. It was no common affair, for the Venetians did not

know how soon they might need the saint's services again, now that the

cholera was spreading every where. So in one vast space--say a third of

a mile wide and two miles long--were collected two thousand gondolas, and

every one of them had from two to ten, twenty and even thirty colored

lanterns suspended about it, and from four to a dozen occupants. Just as

far as the eye could reach, these painted lights were massed together

--like a vast garden of many-colored flowers, except that these blossoms

were never still; they were ceaselessly gliding in and out, and mingling

together, and seducing you into bewildering attempts to follow their mazy

evolutions. Here and there a strong red, green, or blue glare from a

rocket that was struggling to get away, splendidly illuminated all the

boats around it. Every gondola that swam by us, with its crescents and

pyramids and circles of colored lamps hung aloft, and lighting up the

faces of the young and the sweet-scented and lovely below, was a picture;

and the reflections of those lights, so long, so slender, so numberless,

so many-colored and so distorted and wrinkled by the waves, was a picture

likewise, and one that was enchantingly beautiful. Many and many a party

of young ladies and gentlemen had their state gondolas handsomely

decorated, and ate supper on board, bringing their swallow-tailed,

white-cravatted varlets to wait upon them, and having their tables

tricked out as if for a bridal supper. They had brought along the

costly globe lamps from their drawing-rooms, and the lace and silken

curtains from the same places, I suppose. And they had also brought

pianos and guitars, and they played and sang operas, while the plebeian

paper-lanterned gondolas from the suburbs and the back alleys crowded

around to stare and listen.

There was music every where--choruses, string bands, brass bands, flutes,

every thing. I was so surrounded, walled in, with music, magnificence

and loveliness, that I became inspired with the spirit of the scene, and

sang one tune myself. However, when I observed that the other gondolas

had sailed away, and my gondolier was preparing to go overboard, I

stopped.

The fete was magnificent. They kept it up the whole night long, and I

never enjoyed myself better than I did while it lasted.

What a funny old city this Queen of the Adriatic is! Narrow streets,

vast, gloomy marble palaces, black with the corroding damps of centuries,

and all partly submerged; no dry land visible any where, and no sidewalks

worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the

restaurant, you must call a gondola. It must be a paradise for cripples,

for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town,

because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the

houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming

in and out of the alleys and by-ways, that I could not get rid of the

impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet,

and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water

mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.

In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the

charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered

sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once

more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago. It is easy,

then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and

fair ladies--with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon

the rich argosies of Venetian commerce--with Othellos and Desdemonas,

with Iagos and Roderigos--with noble fleets and victorious legions

returning from the wars. In the treacherous sunlight we see Venice

decayed, forlorn, poverty-stricken, and commerceless--forgotten and

utterly insignificant. But in the moonlight, her fourteen centuries of

greatness fling their glories about her, and once more is she the

princeliest among the nations of the earth.

"There is a glorious city in the sea;

The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets,

Ebbing and flowing; and the salt-sea weed

Clings to the marble of her palaces.

No track of men, no footsteps to and fro,

Lead to her gates! The path lies o'er the sea,

Invisible: and from the land we went,

As to a floating city--steering in,

And gliding up her streets, as in a dream,

So smoothly, silently--by many a dome,

Mosque-like, and many a stately portico,

The statues ranged along an azure sky;

By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride,

Of old the residence of merchant kings;

The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them,

Still glowing with the richest hues of art,

As tho' the wealth within them had run o'er."

What would one naturally wish to see first in Venice? The Bridge of

Sighs, of course--and next the Church and the Great Square of St. Mark,

the Bronze Horses, and the famous Lion of St. Mark.

We intended to go to the Bridge of Sighs, but happened into the Ducal

Palace first--a building which necessarily figures largely in Venetian

poetry and tradition. In the Senate Chamber of the ancient Republic we

wearied our eyes with staring at acres of historical paintings by

Tintoretto and Paul Veronese, but nothing struck us forcibly except the

one thing that strikes all strangers forcibly--a black square in the

midst of a gallery of portraits. In one long row, around the great hall,

were painted the portraits of the Doges of Venice (venerable fellows,

with flowing white beards, for of the three hundred Senators eligible to

the office, the oldest was usually chosen Doge,) and each had its

complimentary inscription attached--till you came to the place that

should have had Marino Faliero's picture in it, and that was blank and

black--blank, except that it bore a terse inscription, saying that the

conspirator had died for his crime. It seemed cruel to keep that

pitiless inscription still staring from the walls after the unhappy

wretch had been in his grave five hundred years.

At the head of the Giant's Staircase, where Marino Faliero was beheaded,

and where the Doges were crowned in ancient times, two small slits in the

stone wall were pointed out--two harmless, insignificant orifices that

would never attract a stranger's attention--yet these were the terrible

Lions' Mouths! The heads were gone (knocked off by the French during

their occupation of Venice,) but these were the throats, down which went

the anonymous accusation, thrust in secretly at dead of night by an

enemy, that doomed many an innocent man to walk the Bridge of Sighs and

descend into the dungeon which none entered and hoped to see the sun

again. This was in the old days when the Patricians alone governed

Venice--the common herd had no vote and no voice. There were one

thousand five hundred Patricians; from these, three hundred Senators were

chosen; from the Senators a Doge and a Council of Ten were selected, and

by secret ballot the Ten chose from their own number a Council of Three.

All these were Government spies, then, and every spy was under

surveillance himself--men spoke in whispers in Venice, and no man trusted

his neighbor--not always his own brother. No man knew who the Council of

Three were--not even the Senate, not even the Doge; the members of that

dread tribunal met at night in a chamber to themselves, masked, and robed

from head to foot in scarlet cloaks, and did not even know each other,

unless by voice. It was their duty to judge heinous political crimes,

and from their sentence there was no appeal. A nod to the executioner

was sufficient. The doomed man was marched down a hall and out at a

door-way into the covered Bridge of Sighs, through it and into the

dungeon and unto his death. At no time in his transit was he visible to

any save his conductor. If a man had an enemy in those old days, the

cleverest thing he could do was to slip a note for the Council of Three

into the Lion's mouth, saying "This man is plotting against the

Government." If the awful Three found no proof, ten to one they would

drown him anyhow, because he was a deep rascal, since his plots were

unsolvable. Masked judges and masked executioners, with unlimited power,

and no appeal from their judgements, in that hard, cruel age, were not

likely to be lenient with men they suspected yet could not convict.

We walked through the hall of the Council of Ten, and presently entered

the infernal den of the Council of Three.

The table around which they had sat was there still, and likewise the

stations where the masked inquisitors and executioners formerly stood,

frozen, upright and silent, till they received a bloody order, and then,

without a word, moved off like the inexorable machines they were, to

carry it out. The frescoes on the walls were startlingly suited to the

place. In all the other saloons, the halls, the great state chambers of

the palace, the walls and ceilings were bright with gilding, rich with

elaborate carving, and resplendent with gallant pictures of Venetian

victories in war, and Venetian display in foreign courts, and hallowed

with portraits of the Virgin, the Saviour of men, and the holy saints

that preached the Gospel of Peace upon earth--but here, in dismal

contrast, were none but pictures of death and dreadful suffering!--not a

living figure but was writhing in torture, not a dead one but was smeared

with blood, gashed with wounds, and distorted with the agonies that had

taken away its life!

From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step--one might almost jump

across the narrow canal that intervenes. The ponderous stone Bridge of

Sighs crosses it at the second story--a bridge that is a covered tunnel

--you can not be seen when you walk in it. It is partitioned lengthwise,

and through one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in

ancient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches whom the

Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter oblivion in the dungeons,

or to sudden and mysterious death. Down below the level of the water, by

the light of smoking torches, we were shown the damp, thick-walled cells

where many a proud patrician's life was eaten away by the long-drawn

miseries of solitary imprisonment--without light, air, books; naked,

unshaven, uncombed, covered with vermin; his useless tongue forgetting

its office, with none to speak to; the days and nights of his life no

longer marked, but merged into one eternal eventless night; far away from

all cheerful sounds, buried in the silence of a tomb; forgotten by his

helpless friends, and his fate a dark mystery to them forever; losing his

own memory at last, and knowing no more who he was or how he came there;

devouring the loaf of bread and drinking the water that were thrust into

the cell by unseen hands, and troubling his worn spirit no more with

hopes and fears and doubts and longings to be free; ceasing to scratch

vain prayers and complainings on walls where none, not even himself,

could see them, and resigning himself to hopeless apathy, driveling

childishness, lunacy! Many and many a sorrowful story like this these

stony walls could tell if they could but speak.

In a little narrow corridor, near by, they showed us where many a

prisoner, after lying in the dungeons until he was forgotten by all save

his persecutors, was brought by masked executioners and garroted, or

sewed up in a sack, passed through a little window to a boat, at dead of

night, and taken to some remote spot and drowned.

They used to show to visitors the implements of torture wherewith the

Three were wont to worm secrets out of the accused--villainous machines

for crushing thumbs; the stocks where a prisoner sat immovable while

water fell drop by drop upon his head till the torture was more than

humanity could bear; and a devilish contrivance of steel, which inclosed

a prisoner's head like a shell, and crushed it slowly by means of a

screw. It bore the stains of blood that had trickled through its joints

long ago, and on one side it had a projection whereon the torturer rested

his elbow comfortably and bent down his ear to catch the moanings of the

sufferer perishing within.

Of course we went to see the venerable relic of the ancient glory of

Venice, with its pavements worn and broken by the passing feet of a

thousand years of plebeians and patricians--The Cathedral of St. Mark.

It is built entirely of precious marbles, brought from the Orient

--nothing in its composition is domestic. Its hoary traditions make it an

object of absorbing interest to even the most careless stranger, and thus

far it had interest for me; but no further. I could not go into

ecstasies over its coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture,

or its five hundred curious interior columns from as many distant

quarries. Every thing was worn out--every block of stone was smooth and

almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers who

devoutly idled here in by-gone centuries and have died and gone to the

dev--no, simply died, I mean.

Under the altar repose the ashes of St. Mark--and Matthew, Luke and John,

too, for all I know. Venice reveres those relics above all things

earthly. For fourteen hundred years St. Mark has been her patron saint.

Every thing about the city seems to be named after him or so named as to

refer to him in some way--so named, or some purchase rigged in some way

to scrape a sort of hurrahing acquaintance with him. That seems to be

the idea. To be on good terms with St. Mark, seems to be the very summit

of Venetian ambition. They say St. Mark had a tame lion, and used to

travel with him--and every where that St. Mark went, the lion was sure to

go. It was his protector, his friend, his librarian. And so the Winged

Lion of St. Mark, with the open Bible under his paw, is a favorite emblem

in the grand old city. It casts its shadow from the most ancient pillar

in Venice, in the Grand Square of St. Mark, upon the throngs of free

citizens below, and has so done for many a long century. The winged lion

is found every where--and doubtless here, where the winged lion is, no

harm can come.

St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, I think.

However, that has nothing to do with my legend. About the founding of

the city of Venice--say four hundred and fifty years after Christ--(for

Venice is much younger than any other Italian city,) a priest dreamed

that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to

Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations;

that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent

church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to

be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish

from off the face of the earth. The priest proclaimed his dream, and

forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark. One

expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never

abandoned during four hundred years. At last it was secured by

stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something. The commander of a

Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them,

and packed them in vessels filled with lard. The religion of Mahomet

causes its devotees to abhor anything that is in the nature of pork, and

so when the Christian was stopped by the officers at the gates of the

city, they only glanced once into his precious baskets, then turned up

their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go. The bones were buried in

the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to

receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were

secured. And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if

those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a

dream, and its foundations be buried forever in the unremembering sea.