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Updated: June 9, 2025
I was in a perspiration, and the weather was cold; I threw myself into a gondola, and in order not to get chilled I landed at the 'ridotto'. I had two hours to spare before going to the casino of Muran, and I longed to enjoy the astonishment of my beautiful nun when she saw M. Pierrot standing before her.
He cares little for forms and ceremonies; is a good mower; wears a billycock which has passed through much tribulation we believe it was once the subject of a church meeting; can play cricket pretty well, and enjoys the game; is frank, candid, and speaks straight out; can say a good thing and knows when he has said it; has an above-board, clear, decisive style; is not a great scholar, and would be puzzled, like the generality of parsons, if asked how many teeth he had in his head, or who was the grandfather of his mother's first uncle; knows little of Latin and less of Greek, but understands human nature, and that, says the Clockmaker, beats scholarship; has been in America, which accounts for the nasal ring in his talk; is active, sanguine, free, and easy, and would enjoy either a ridotto or a fast; can utter lively, merry things in his sermons, and does not object sometimes to recognise the wisdom of Shakspere.
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.
The ridotti, the informal clubs of Venice in those days, were important centres of influence political, legislative, and literary; and there was a certain palazzo Morosini, well known to many of the senators who gathered in the Broglio, where questions of vital interest to the thinkers and rulers of Venice were discussed with the degree of knowledge that might have been expected from so eminent a company as that which made the home of the distinguished senator Andrea Morosini the scene of its ridotto, and where freedom of speech was much greater than seemed wise in the candid sunshine of the Piazza.
Elmore very thoughtfully, "that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic." "Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says," answered Hoskins.
When I think about the past of Venice, I don't care so much to see any of the heroically historical things; but I should like immensely to have looked in at the Ridotto, when the place was at its gayest with wigs and masks, hoops and small-clothes, fans and rapiers, bows and courtesies, whispers and glances. I dare say I should have found Don Ippolito there in some becoming disguise."
At the sign of the "Nave d'oro," in the Merceria, where the vast commercial interests of Venice were the absorbing theme, and strangers from every clime and merchants just returned from distant ports were eager now, as in the days when Marco Polo had so valiantly entertained the goodly company, to rehearse the tale of their adventures it was neither merchant nor noble who stood forth on the bizarre background of brilliant baubles and gold-woven tissues as the centre of this ridotto, but a friar, learned in languages and sciences, of whom it was pleasantly affirmed that "he was the only man in Venice who could discuss any subject in any tongue!"
They called me adventurer, bully, dice-loader, impostor, and a hundred pretty names; but I had a way of silencing these gentry. I took the Count de Schmetterling, the richest and bravest of the young men who seemed to have a hankering for the Countess Ida, and publicly insulted him at the ridotto; flinging my cards into his face.
The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and simplest appointments. There are no boxes the whole theatre is scarcely larger than a stage-box and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen for places in the dress-circle above.
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