Tagliavia was overwhelmed with confusion. Unreservedly he accepted the explanation, and as unreservedly tendered his apologies.
“Let it be a lesson to you, Count,” said Casanova, “of the error to which human perception is prone. Can you seriously oppose such testimony to my oracle’s infallible pronouncement?”
“Then I will not rest,” cried Tagliavia, “until I have found Steffani, and compelled him to confess and atone.”
“But if not dead already the man soon will be,” Bragadino said. “You remember the oracle’s pronouncement? Will you avenge yourself upon your daughter by compelling her to marry a notorious scoundrel doomed by the justice of heaven?”
The Count’s affection for his daughter struggled with his pride of family. And if affection did not yet carry the day, Casanova, assured that he must come to it in the end, confidently planned the issue. He whispered at parting to Barbaro to bring the Count again next day. Then, after they had left he went out in his turn and, changing gondolas three times so as to throw off any possible pursuit, reached the widow’s house.
He threw Angela into a panic by announcing her father’s presence in Venice. But he made haste to convince her that he was working diligently to obtain her pardon, and without divulging too much yet knew in his compelling way how to persuade her to be guided absolutely by his counsel.
“You will take a gondola at nightfall,” he instructed her, “and go straight to your kinsman Messer Barbaro, who has returned and who will gladly give you shelter.”
“But he will betray my presence to my father!”
Her lovely eyes dilated in alarm.
“He will not,” Casanova assured her confidently. “He knows your father’s frame of mind, and he will say no word of your presence until the Count’s humour has become entirely one of forgiveness, as I promise you that it shall.”
Thus he succeeded in persuading her.
“You will tell Messer Barbaro that you followed Steffani to Venice, that he had promised to marry you on your arrival, but that you have not seen him since you came. All this is true, remember. Say further that you awaited him in the house of a respectable widow. Avoid divulging her name, and above all make no slightest mention of me lest you ruin everything.”
“Ah, never that!” she cried. “You must remain my friend. My father shall thank you for all that you have done for me. What might I not have become if you had not come to my aid?”
“The thanks your father would render me might considerably discompose me,” said Casanova grimly. “You could do nothing so likely to make me regret befriending you as that. Promise me, then, that my name shall never cross your lips; that you will forget the insignificant part I have played in this.”
“How can I ever forget . . .” she began, and faltered. Her lids fluttered down over her eyes, a faint surge of colour showed itself in her cheeks, and with a sigh she ended by promising to do his will. He departed in a dangerous state of emotionalism, convinced that it was high time to set a term to his odd relations with the too tender daughter of the fire-eating Count.
Next day precisely at noon Barbaro came again to Bragadino’s with Tagliavia. Casanova observed in Barbaro a vague uneasiness, a furtiveness of glance, that told him all had fallen out as he had planned. The Count looked pale and harassed, and he had lost all the ferocity of manner that had earlier marked him.
“I have sought all day and almost all night in vain,” he announced brokenly. “My daughter!”
They comforted him, and gradually Bragadino suggested he should consult Paralis once more. He consented, and Casanova sat down to make his pyramid. He laboured awhile at his numbers, then threw down the pen.
“There is no answer,” he announced. “It must be because your intentions are not yet what Paralis demands.”
The Count protested that he was ready to pardon his daughter.
“But Paralis demands that your spirit shall be purely one of forgiveness.”
“I am but human,” said the Count impatiently, thereby confirming Casanova’s doubts.
For three days he was not seen again. And when at last he came his mood appeared so thoroughly chastened that Casanova produced from his oracle the following revelation:
“Angela, who was lured away by arts of magic, has for the past four days been safe in her kinsman’s house, where the father may embrace her when he will.”
The Count read it aloud, his eagerness changing to disappointment and contempt. “But this is nonsense,” he cried, and Bragadino looked alarmed.
“It is not nonsense,” answered Barbaro, in a voice that quivered with excitement. “It is the truth most wonderfully revealed. She has been at my house since Wednesday night, poor child.”
“And you never told me?”
The Count looked round. Then slowly his lips parted in a bitter smile.
“The oracle is explained,” he sneered.
But Barbaro and Bragadino pledged their honour that he was mistaken, that he wronged them grossly by this suggestion, that the oracle’s pronouncement was a pure miracle.
And then a miracle happened indeed. Came Messer Dandolo into the room in a breathless state, with dilating eyes.
“Did not Paralis foretell the speedy death of Steffani? Well, he is dead — I have just heard the news.”
“Dead!” they all echoed, awe-stricken, and none more deeply than Casanova himself.
“Dead to the world at least,” Dandolo explained. “He has become a monk!”
Then Bragadino gave vent to his wonder, seeing in this constructive death a greater mark of the divine wisdom of Paralis than if Steffani had actually perished in the flesh. “The actual words of Paralis were that he was sentenced by the will of Heaven! How true, how wonderfully true that was! And how slow we are to read the divine messages of our oracle.”
Casanova’s first shock of surprise gave way to self-complacency. His prophecy had been a shrewd inference of what must inevitably happen to a man in Steffani’s position, pursued by the avenging brother of one woman and the avenging father of another. Only in the cloister or the grave could he find refuge, and it was his own wit, thought Casanova, that had drawn from the oracle this culminating proof of its supernatural nature.
UNDER THE LEADS
An oft-told tale is that of Giacomo di Casanova’s escape from the Prison of the Piombi. Not so that of his first and frustrated attempt at evasion. And yet, of the two, this is in my opinion the more entertaining, not only because of the extraordinary resourcefulness with which he went about the task, but also for the ready wit which showed him a way out of the ghastly peril that attended its discovery.
His arrest took place in July of 1755. Early one morning the terrible Messer Grande and his tipstaves broke into Casanova’s lodging, aroused him from his slumbers, and bade him dress and go with them.
“In whose name do you command me?” quoth the startled Casanova.
“In the name of the Inquisitors of State.”
Casanova realized that it was not a season for argument. He rose, and what time the apparitors were ransacking his rooms, he dressed with care. He selected a suit of blue taffeta with silver lace, in which he had intended that day to visit and conquer a certain lady at Murano. He clubbed his luxuriant hair becomingly, and drew on a pair of white silk stockings. Lacquered red-heeled shoes with steel buckles, and an elegant new hat laced with point of Spain completed his toilet. He announced himself ready.
Messer Grande led him below, thrust into him a gondola, and carried him off to prison. He was accounted, it seems, a disturber of the public peace; he was notoriously a libertine, a gamester, and heavily in debt; also — and this was more serious, matter indeed for an /auto de fé/ — he was accused of practising magic. To establish this grave charge, Messer Grande found in his lodging, and carried off thence, various forbidden works — copies of /The Clavicula of Solomon/, the /Zecor-ben/, a /Picatrix/, and a very full /Instruction on the Planetary Hours/, giving the necessary incantations for rai
sing devils of all varieties.
These works were part of his adventurer’s stock in trade, the plinth upon which he erected his reputation for supernatural powers, whereby he exploited to his own profit the credulity of simpletons of all degrees. In all Europe there was no man with a greater contempt for those horn-books of chicanery, no man more convinced than Casanova that they were written by knaves for fools. He would have explained to the Inquisitors of State that he collected works of magic as curiosities of literature, as instances of pitiful human aberration. But the Inquisitors of State would not have believed him, for the Inquisitors were of those who took magic seriously. And anyhow they never asked him to explain. They had lodged him without any sort of trial in the Prison of the Piombi, the garret under the leads of the palace of the Doges of the Most Serene Republic.
There in the care of a villainous gaoler named Lorenzo, Casanova inhabited a miserable cell some twelve feet square by five and a half feet high — so low that a man of his fine height could not move upright in it. No table or toilet implement was allowed him beyond an ivory spoon bought at his own charges. The cell was lighted (very occasionally) by a window two feet square, criss-crossed by six iron bars each an inch thick, and even then the light was blocked by an exterior baulk of timber some eighteen inches wide that crossed the aperture at close quarters. During the summer months, when first he occupied that cell, there was light enough by which to read for some five hours daily. This period decreased as the year advanced, until when winter came and the mists from the lagoon hung over Venice, the daily hours of darkness numbered twenty-four, which is to say that he lived in perpetual night, that he was left in perpetual darkness to sit and think and go mad, for no lamp was permitted him.
The days passed, and grew into weeks; the weeks accumulated into months, and he abode there in that unspeakable cell under the leads, scorched — and devoured by insects — in summer; frozen almost to death when winter followed, without books — save two works of a religious character — without exercise of any kind, or any means of beguiling the endless tale of days. There, gaunt now and hollow-eyed, indescribably filthy, with matted beard and unkempt hair, lay the once elegant, flamboyant adventurer, forgotten, as it seemed to him, by God and man.
It was a cruel, subtle torture, calculated to break the health and destroy the sanity of any normal man. But Casanova’s constitution was of iron, his nerves of steel, and his sanity was kept whole by his faith in himself and his confidence that his wits must sooner or later discover him a way to escape. That he should even think of escaping from such a place reveals the high quality of his courage; that he should come to find the means, fashioning himself the implements out of nothing, as it were, proves how incomparable was his resource. Indeed, in none of the many adventures with which his life was filled did he ever display in so high a degree his audacity, inventiveness, and cunning. Be you the judge.
He was allowed for a few minutes daily, whilst his cell was being swept, to walk in the attic upon which his prison opened — a gallery of some twelve feet wide by thirty feet in length. Here one day he espied in a pile of rubbish in a corner a small slab of black marble. He picked it up, thinking that it might in some way prove useful. That was in the spring of 1756, by when he had been some six or eight months in prison. A few weeks later, in the same place, his eye was attracted by a discarded door-bolt — a stout bar of iron measuring a couple of feet in length. He appropriated it, with a vague sense that at last he had brought the possibility of escape within his reach.
His imagination had been busily at work, and he was well served by his knowledge of the ducal palace — for this prison of the Piombi is, as has been said, simply the extensive garret of the Palace of the Doges, deriving its name from the lead with which the roof immediately above is covered. His window faced the west, and from this and other observations and deductions he knew that his cell was immediately above the noble chamber in which the Council of Ten held its sittings.
Long ago he had come to the conclusion that the only possible way of escape lay through that chamber, and the only way into it through the floor of his cell. He had dreamt of cutting a hole in the floor, through which he might lower himself, but that was a dream that had been dismissed again and again by his despair of ever obtaining the tools to effect such an operation. Now, at last, he possessed the tools, or at least the material out of which he could fashion them.
He set about this task at once, and for days thereafter he laboured almost unremittingly to sharpen one end of the bolt, using the slab of marble as a whetstone. It was a test at once of patience and of endurance. Progress was almost imperceptibly slow, and meanwhile the palm of his right hand became a mass of sores from the ceaseless contact with, and the chafing of, the iron. In the end, however, he found himself armed with a sharp, octagon-pointed spontoon, which he concealed in the upholstery of the armchair that had been supplied him.
But it was one thing to have fashioned himself an implement with which to cut his way through the floor, and quite another to carry out undiscovered a task that must entail at least a couple of months’ work.
He was visited each morning by Lorenzo, who brought him food for the day. His gaoler came attended on these visits by a couple of archers, whose chief duty it was to sweep out the cell. It follows that any attempted excavation must immediately be revealed to them, and unless he could discover some good reason why this daily task of essential cleanliness should be permanently abandoned, it must remain impossible for him to put his project into execution. A reason might seem beyond discovery, yet his inventiveness and histrionic ability discovered it.
He began by peremptorily forbidding the archers to sweep, without advancing any reason. For a week he was obeyed without question, then at last Lorenzo made the enquiry that Casanova had been expecting into the reason for this strange order.
“They raise the dust,” said Casanova, “and the dust chokes me. I cough so violently that I fear serious — even fatal — consequences.”
Lorenzo wrinkled the ape-like features of his leathern face, and peered suspiciously at his prisoner.
“I will have the floor sprinkled with water,” he announced.
“That would be worse, Messer Lorenzo,” cried Casanova. “The damp might give me congestion of the lungs.”
The gaoler said no more. He withdrew in silence, and for another week there was no sweeping. But Casanova waited inactive, and on the eighth day Lorenzo came, attended again by his archers. He ordered them to sweep the cell, and that this might be done with thoroughness he lighted a couple of candles, and bade them carry the bed out into the gallery.
Casanova perceived quite plainly from this — as he had fully expected — that Lorenzo’s suspicions had been aroused, and he smiled to himself as he submitted without protest. But when the gaoler came to visit him next morning he found his prisoner abed in an exhausted condition, holding a blood-drenched handkerchief to his lips. (He had contrived to scratch his arm some hours earlier.)
“What’s this? What ails you?” he cried in alarm.
“You would sweep,” Casanova reproached him, fighting for breath. “Behold the consequences. I have had so violent a cough that I must have broken a blood-vessel.” A paroxysm of coughing interrupted him at the moment. He lay back gasping. “It is very likely I shall die of it,” he groaned.
In terror, Lorenzo ran to fetch a doctor, who when he came prescribed some medicine, and ordered a blood-letting. To him Casanova complained bitterly.
“It is this gaoler who is to blame for my condition,” he said. “I warned him of what would happen if he insisted upon sweeping my cell.”
He had expected sympathy from the doctor, but hardly that the fellow should reproach Lorenzo as he did, denouncing the gaoler’s obstinate ignorance, and relating a sad story of a young man who had died as a result of breathing dust when troubled in the chest.
Lorenzo defended himself by protesting that his sole intention had been to render service to the pris
oner, and he ended by swearing that in view of what had happened the cell should be swept no more. When the doctor had departed Lorenzo humbled himself still further by begging Casanova to forgive him.
“How was I to know,” he ended, “that it would have such serious consequences for you?”
“I warned you,” Casanova answered feebly from his bed.
“But I sweep the cells of other prisoners, and they remain sound and healthy.”
“Perhaps their lungs are not as delicate as mine,” was the plaintive explanation, accepted without further question by the gaoler. And thus Casanova won immunity from the main danger of having his work discovered whilst in progress.
He had decided to make the excavation under his bed, moving this aside for the purpose, and then replacing it so as to conceal what was done. He commenced operations at once, but progress was slow because, as we have seen, he was in darkness for all but some five hours out of the twenty-four, and in darkness it was impossible to work. Unless he was to take a year over his labours, he must fashion himself a lamp. Courageously he addressed himself to the problem. For a vessel there was the little pan in which eggs were cooked for him; oil he procured by doing without it in the salad served him daily; a wick was easily fashioned out of strands taken from the bedclothes and the lamp was ready. But the lamp was nothing without light, and how was light to be obtained?
The crowning-piece of the inventiveness he displayed in this affair is afforded by the manner in which he went about the Promethean task of assembling the elements of light.
Luck helped him a little by providing him with one of the ingredients. Under each arm of the coat of that brave summer suit of taffeta in which, you will remember, he had gone to prison nearly a year ago, he had ordered his tailor to place a patch of amadou, so as to prevent the delicate material from being stained by perspiration. Thus he found himself supplied with tinder, or at least with that which would become tinder when sulphur was added to it. To obtain the sulphur he used his considerable medical knowledge. He feigned indisposition, and complained of an irritation of the skin, begging Lorenzo to ask the doctor for a prescription. Came next day a recipe, recommending a diet and — as he had reckoned — an unguent of flower of sulphur.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 538
