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grace I was rid of my accomplice. At the time I didn’t grasp the full effect of this mishap, which delighted me. We had been so agitated, pressing on in a daze with barely a word between us, waiting until we should be safely far away to relax. It is not surprising that the strange fellow should have lost his head. But you will see how God eventually punished me. I did not rest easy until I had sold off two-thirds of my diamonds in London and Amsterdam, and converted my gold into commercial tender.
    “For five years, I hid out in Madrid; then, in 1770, I returned to Paris under a Spanish name and led a dazzling life. Bianca had died. Then, in the midst of my dissipations, and with a fortune of six million, I was stricken blind. I am convinced that the affliction is the consequence of my time in the dungeon, my work digging the tunnel—unless my capacity to see gold somehow was an abuse of the visual faculty that predestined me to lose my sight.
    “At the time, I was in love with a woman to whom I expected to bind my own destiny. I had told her the secret of my identity—she belonged to a powerful family—and I had great hopes for Louis XV’s evident favor toward me. I put my trust in that young woman, who was a friend of Madame du Barry. She urged me to consult a renowned oculist in London, but after several months’ stay in that city, she abandoned me in Hyde Park; she stripped me of my whole fortune and left me without resources—for, as I was obliged to hide my name, lest it deliver me to the vengeance of Venice, I could not call on anyone for help; I feared Venice.
    “My disability was exploited by spies that woman had set upon me. I’ll spare you tales of adventures worthy of Gil Blas. Your Revolution occurred. I was forced into the Quinze-Vingts shelter, where that woman had me committed after holding me for two years in the Bicêtre asylum as insane. I was never able to kill her as I couldn’t see and as I was too poor to pay someone to do it. If, before losing Benedetto Carpi, my Venetian jailer, I had asked him to set down the exact location of my dungeon cell, I could have recognized the treasury, acknowledged my crime, and returned to Venice when Napoleon abolished the republic there.
    “But now, never mind my blindness, let’s be off to Venice! I will find the prison door, I will see the gold through the walls, I will sense it beneath the waters that flow above it. The events that have overthrown Venice’s powers are such that the secret of the treasure trove must have died with Vendramino, Bianca’s brother, a doge who I had hoped would arrange my peace with the Council of Ten. I sent missives to the First Consul, I proposed a treaty with the Austrian emperor—they all dismissed me as a madman! Come now, let us leave for Venice: We leave as beggars and we’ll return as princes! We’ll buy back my properties and you will be my heir, the Prince of Varese!”
    Dazzled by this pronouncement, which in my imagination expanded into the dimensions of a poem, I gazed at the sight of his white head, and there before the dark water of the Bastille moats, water as still as that in the Venice canals, I made no answer. Facino Cane must surely have felt that I was judging him, as everyone else had done, with disdainful pity, for he waved his hand in a gesture that evoked all the philosophy of despair. The tale must have carried him back to his happy times in Venice; he seized his clarinet and dolefully played a Venetian song, a barcarolle for which he drew once more on his first talent, the talent of a patrician in love. It was something like the psalm “Super flumina Babylonis.” My eyes filled with tears. If a few late-night strollers happened along boulevard Bourdon just then, they probably stopped to listen to that ultimate prayer of the exile, the last longing for a lost name, touched with the memory of Bianca. But soon gold took the upper hand again, and that fateful passion stamped out the youthful