For some reason impossible to explain, nothing was done to either, and before long even the steward was set at liberty. The Inquisitors confined themselves to threatening the two with ‘the public indignation’ and their own severest measures, if the Count did not dismiss his Bravi and ‘reform his conduct.’
After that, history is silent as to his exploits. He was no longer young, and even the zest of murder and rapine was probably beginning to pall on his weary taste. We know that he sincerely mourned the fall of the Republic which had been so consistently kind to him, and he never plotted against the government. He could not but feel that it would have been an exaggeration to accuse it of having been hard on him.
His son Francesco, on the contrary, turned out to be one of the most turbulent of revolutionaries, and helped to lead the insurrection at Bergamo. But for the intervention of Bonaparte himself, he would have been killed by the inhabitants of Salò, who remained faithful to the Republic, when they repulsed the insurgents. He was one of the five delegates whom the city of Brescia sent to Bonaparte, to name him president of the Cisalpine Republic. He died in 1848, after having written a life of his father, which was published eleven years later in Trieste. One cannot but feel that in composing a memoir of his parent, filial piety led him too far.
In concluding this chapter, which has dealt with criminals, I shall take the opportunity of observing that the places in which criminals were confined in Venice shared in the general decay of everything connected with the government. In the seventeenth century and earlier all prisoners had been carefully kept separate according to their misdeeds; in the eighteenth, mere children were shut up with adult criminals, and debtors were confined with thieves. In the women’s prisons lunatics were often imprisoned with the sane, a state of things that led to the most horrible scenes.
The gaolers of the Pozzi and the Piombi did not even keep the prisons clean, and the state of the cells was such that I do not care to disgust the reader by describing it. In the other prisons, or attached to them, a regular tavern was tolerated and perhaps authorised, as a place of gathering for the prisoners, and here games of chance were played, even
Mutinelli, Ult.
such as were forbidden elsewhere in the city. The archives of the Ten show how many crimes were committed in the very places where men were confined to expiate earlier offences. As for the gaolers, they were one and all corruptible. One of the Savi, the patrician Gritti, denounced to the Senate, in 1793, a gaoler who let the healthiest and most airy cells to the highest bidders.
THE PESARO PALACE, GRAND CANAL