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me. I leapt on him. I strangled him with my bare hands, twisting his neck like a hen’s. I was ready to run off with Bianca but she refused to come. That’s women for you! I left by myself. I was convicted, my wealth was impounded for my heirs. But I did carry off my diamonds, five Titian canvases rolled up, and all my gold. I went to Milan, where no one bothered me; my adventure held no interest for that state . . .
    “One small remark before I continue,” he said after a pause, “is whether or not a woman’s fantasies during pregnancy or conception might affect her child. It is a known fact that while she was pregnant my mother had a craving for gold. Gold is for me an obsession; satisfying it is so necessary to my life that, no matter what my situation, I am never without gold on my person. I am constantly handling gold—as a youth I always wore jewels and always carried two or three hundred gold ducats.”
    As he spoke these words, he drew two ducats from his pocket and showed them to me.
    “I smell gold. Blind as I am, I pull up short when I pass a jeweler’s shop. This passion ruined me; I became a gambler to gamble for gold. I was not a swindler, I was swindled, I drove myself to ruin. When I no longer had any fortune left, I was gripped by a frenzy to see Bianca. I returned secretly to Venice and found her again. I was happy for six months, hidden in her house and fed by her; I expected delightedly to live out my life that way. She was being courted by the provveditore ; the man sensed there was a rival, in Italy they have a feel for that sort of thing; he spied on us, caught us in bed, the coward! Imagine our terrific struggle! I didn’t kill him, but I wounded him seriously. The adventure put an end to my happy life.
    “From that day on I have never found another Bianca. I have had great pleasures, I have lived at Louis XV’s court among the most renowned ladies, but never, anywhere, have I found the qualities, the charms, the love I knew with my darling Venetian.
    “The provveditore called out his men and the palace was surrounded, invaded; I defended myself, hoping to die before the eyes of Bianca, who was helping me kill the provveditore. In earlier days the woman had refused to flee with me, but now, after those six months of happiness together, now she wanted to die along with me, and she suffered several wounds herself. Someone threw a greatcoat over me; I was caught in it, rolled up, and carried off in a gondola to a dungeon cell, one of the pozzi beneath the Doge’s Palace. I was twenty-two years old.
    “I was still gripping the pommel of my sword so hard that to take it from me would have required cutting off my fist. By a curious chance—or rather, inspired by some idea of precaution—I hid that iron stub in a corner of my cell, as if it might someday be useful. I was treated; my wounds were not fatal. At twenty-two, a person gets over everything. I was sentenced to be decapitated; I played the invalid to gain time. I calculated that my dungeon cell lay alongside the canal, and my plan was to escape by digging through the wall and swimming across the canal, at the risk of drowning. You see the kind of reasoning on which my hopes depended. Whenever the jailer brought me food, I would study the words that had been scratched onto the walls, such as ‘palace side,’ ‘canal side,’ ‘basement side,’ and I eventually worked out a map whose orientation was a bit puzzling but which could be explained by the still-unfinished state of the ducal palace.
    “With the ingenuity that arises from the appetite for freedom, by fingering the surface of a stone I managed to decipher an inscription in Arabic. An early prisoner had alerted those who followed to stones he had loosened along the bottom edge of the wall, with eleven feet of tunnel behind it. To continue the man’s work would mean depositing the rubble of excavated stone and mortar on the cell floor. But even if the guards and the