‘Long live Vittor Pisani!’ they shouted.
‘No,’ he cried, answering them in commanding tones. ‘Long live Saint Mark!’
Some obeyed him, and some would not, and the two cries mingled together, ‘Pisani, Saint Mark, Saint Mark, Vittor Pisani.’
Daru, ii. 217.
The historian Daru, whose passion for romance sometimes led him far, says that Pisani asked to be allowed to spend one more night in confinement, in order that he might prepare himself by prayer for performing his devotions the next morning, and that it was from the window of his prison that he rebuked the crowd for cheering him. Yet Daru himself, a few pages earlier, had just described the prisons of Venice in the fourteenth century as horrible dens which had neither light nor air except from a narrow corridor, adding that the most piercing screams could never be heard outside.
Men like Pisani have little need of acting or posing in order to increase their prestige, for it is enough that they should show themselves and brave men will follow them. The captain was taken from prison at once and, after saying a prayer in the basilica, went before the Doge.
The mutual position of the two men was a strange one. Contarini must have been well aware that Pisani’s condemnation had been utterly unjust; Pisani had suffered that condemnation without complaint, and well knew that the Doge had voted for it; both were brave and patriotic men, who believed devoutly in the system by which their own aristocracy repressed among its members any attempt at individualism, spied upon itself, and treated failure as a crime. Pisani, if the situation had been reversed, would have condemned Contarini as unhesitatingly as Contarini had condemned him. It was certainly against the theory of the Republic that he should be taken out of prison before he had expiated his defeat; but it was inevitable, and he was free.
Yet both men found something to say in these almost absurd circumstances, which was neither commonplace, nor undignified, nor merely complimentary.
Rom. iii. 278.
‘Your prudent and wise conduct,’ said the Doge, ‘will efface your misfortunes, and avenge not only any offence which you may have received yourself’—Pisani had been called a coward by the provveditor of the Republic—‘but also the injuries which our country has suffered at the hands of our enemies; you will therefore consider rather the favour done you now than the past disgrace in which you have been, and you will gladly seize this occasion of proving how unfounded those accusations were which were made against you, and how much you desire to earn in future the gratitude of our country.’