This letter, with its artificial enthusiasm, is dated March fourteenth, 1791, three months before the King’s flight and his arrest at Varennes, and less than two years before his murder on the scaffold.
FROM THE PONTE DELLA PIETÀ
Cappello’s successor as Ambassador in Paris, Alvise Pisani, continued to keep his government informed of what occurred. On the twenty-fifth of September 1791, Louis XVI. addressed another letter to his ‘most dear friends, allies, and confederates,’ the Venetians, in which he expresses the certainty that they will be rejoiced to hear of his having signed the Constitution, which had so greatly shocked Cappello. In spite of the painful impression produced by these documents, it was necessary to answer them, if only as a matter of etiquette.
The position of the Republic was a difficult one. Prudence required the strictest neutrality as to the affairs of other nations; but the mere fact that every one recognised this as Venice’s only possible position exposed her to perfidious and secret attacks of all sorts. France maintained a vast number of secret agents to propagate revolutionary doctrines in the Venetian territory, and at the same time lost no opportunity of trying to pick a quarrel with the Republic, by insulting her flag. On the twenty-ninth of November 1792, the captain of a French man-of-war, bearing a Spanish name, the Buenos Ayres, asked permission to land with eight men on the Venetian shore, but refused to submit to the regulations of the Health Office. His request was refused. Thereupon he proceeded to abuse the Venetian government from the deck of his ship. He wound up by declaring that there was no such thing existing as a Sovereign Government, that all men were equal, and that he was a magistrate, as good as any senator. He chose to land, and he would land if he chose. A Venetian galley hindered him
Rom. ix. 219.
from doing so, but as he made off he cried out: ‘You will change your minds in a year!’
Poor France! She herself was to learn a century later that all men are equal—in the eyes of German Jews.
At that time Austria allied herself with Piedmont to oppose the French invasion which was imminent, and the Venetian Envoy at the court of Turin continually advised his government to join this league, which alone could save the Republic and the other Italian powers.