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Updated: June 9, 2025
Well, he drew a chair close to mine; and, after again enquiring how I did, said, in a low voice, "You will pardon me, Miss Anville, if the eagerness I feel to vindicate myself, induces me to snatch this opportunity of making sincere acknowledgments for the impertinence with which I tormented you at the last ridotto.
Mme. de Bargeton went to a ridotto given to the town by a regiment, and fell in love with an officer of a good family, a sub-lieutenant, to whom the crafty Napoleon had given a glimpse of the baton of a Marshal of France. Love, restrained, greater and nobler than the ties that were made and unmade so easily in those days, was consecrated coldly by the hands of death.
One has to wonder at the strange indifference which settled over those descendants of the illustrious men whose names are built into the magnificent palaces on both sides of the Grand Canal; and there is perhaps no greater lesson than that which may be learnt from studying the private history of the noble patrician families of Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men whose hearts were opened to all great emotions and by looking at the marionette life of the men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as it is portrayed in the pictures of Longhi, where the Chamber of Sighs never empties itself of the opulent gamblers who patronized the Ridotto night and day.
"I held my resolution of not going to the Ridotto till past three o'clock, when, finding that nobody was willing to sit any longer but Boone, who was not able, I took, as I thought, the least of two evils, and so went there rather than to bed; but found it so infinitely dull, that I retired in half an hour.
However pungent the tone, the words of this man could no more be attributed to personal bitterness than they might be influenced by personal interest; and although the opinion which they indicated was a surprise to some of the company, instinctively they felt the situation to be graver than they had feared, and the evening's talk drifted as wholly into the current of Church and State as if this ridotto were a commission appointed by the Ten to prepare resolutions upon the situation.
Mirvan had borne so large a share in the disagreeable altercation, Lord Orville forbore to make any comments upon it; so that the subject was immediately dropt, and the conversation became calmly sociable, and politely cheerful, and, to every body but me, must have been highly agreeable:-but, as to myself, I was so eagerly desirous of making some apology to Lord Orville, for the impertinence of which he must have thought me guilty at the ridotto, and yet so utterly unable to assume sufficient courage to speak to him, concerning an affair in which I had so terribly exposed myself, that I hardly ventured to say a word all the time we were walking.
After I had taken care of all the gold she had won, I gave her my arm, and we left the 'ridotto', but remarking that a few inquisitive persons were following us, I took a gondola which landed us according to my instructions. One can always escape prying eyes in this way in Venice. After supper I counted our winnings, and I found myself in possession of one thousand sequins as my share.
After the pattern of Ridotto rooms abroad, there were the card-rooms and tea-rooms, where Mr. Pickwick played whist with Miss Bolo. We note the sort of Adam or Chippendale chair on which the whist Dowager is sitting with her back to us.
On the Wednesday I was punctual at the rendezvous, and I had not to wait long for M M , who came disguised in male attire. "No theatre to-night," she said to me; "let us go to the 'ridotto', to lose or double our money." She had six hundred sequins. I had about one hundred. Fortune turned her back upon us, and we lost all.
I caught a glimpse of him standing quietly just inside the 'Nave d'Oro, while the other signori who go there to ridotto were out in the Merceria to see the show; and I made haste away lest the crowd should object to my habit for being like Fra Paolo's they were so crazy for Bragadin, following in the footsteps of the Signoria, like good Venetians!"
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