THE TOMBS IN SS. GIOVANNI E PAOLO
him that this was Marino Faliero’s last resting-place; a matter concerning which the poet expressed considerable doubt.
The great stone sarcophagus spoken of by Giovanni Casoni was used afterwards during many years as a reservoir by the apothecary of the Civil Hospital, and is to-day in the outer loggia of the Correr Museum, bearing no trace of inscription or arms. The latter were probably shipped off.
With regard to the absence from the archives of the Council of Ten of all documents relating to the trial of Marino Faliero, many historians, among whom are Romanin and Rawdon Brown, are inclined to suppose that it was not entered in the acts of the Council, owing to what they call a certain praiseworthy shame on the part of the judges, which hindered them from inserting the name of the head of the Republic among those of other condemned persons. There are sufficient reasons and sufficient proofs, however, for supposing that the whole account of the trial was set down in a special book, which had no place in the regular series of the archives of the Council; and that this volume was either lost, or was burned in one of the fires which have at different times done damage in the ducal palace. The official report was evidently known to the old chroniclers, who translated long passages from it, from the original Latin into the vulgar tongue. This volume is referred to in a marginal note found in a document of 1355, referring to the conspiracy—‘Ponatur in libro processum.’
The Council of Ten was never subject to such praiseworthy crises of shame; and the secretary of the Council, as Lazzarini observes, would have been very much astonished if he could have had cognisance of the conjectures which our modern sentimentalism would form regarding the facts. A number of other documents are missing from the archives of the Council of Ten, of which the absence does not suggest either a poetical interpretation, or any explanation of a political character; the papers were simply lost.
The unfortunate Dogess, who perhaps quitted the ducal palace with the body of her beheaded husband, was obliged soon afterwards to leave his own house, where she had taken refuge to hide her grief. The municipality took possession of all property which had belonged to Marino Faliero, but restored to his widow the whole amount of her dowry, and two thousand lire left her by the will of the deceased. The wretched widow was obliged to swear that she did not keep any object of value that had belonged to her husband; but the Council restored to her a little brooch of gold, with a silver pendant, which had been improperly confiscated, since it had come to her from her own family. Furthermore, certain objects were returned to her which she and her sister Engoldisia had inherited from Fiordalise Gradenigo, their mother. The poor woman at first retired to the convent of Saint Lawrence, in the district of San Severo; soon afterwards she went to Verona, where she had some lands, but at last she established herself in a house of her own in Venice.
