The Arsenal.
In spite of those fine remains of Neptune, the Arsenal no longer recalls those lines of Dante:
In the Venetians' arsenal as boils
Through wintry months tenacious pitch, to smear
Their unsound vessels; for the inclement time
Sea-faring men restrains, and in that while
His bark one builds anew, another stops
The ribs of his that hath made many a voyage,
One hammers at the prow, one at the poop,
This shapeth oars, that other cables twirls,
The mizen one repairs, and main-sail rent[112].
All this animation is over: the emptiness of seven-eighths of the arsenal, the extinct furnaces, the boilers gnawed with rust, the rope-walks without wheels, the dock-yards without shipwrights bear witness to the same death that has smitten the palaces. Instead of the throng of carpenters, sail-makers, seamen, caulkers, ship's lads, one sees a few galley-slaves dragging their fetters: two of them were eating off the breech of a gun; at that iron table they could at least dream of liberty.
When formerly those galley-slaves rowed on board the Bucentaur, they wore a purple tunic thrown over their branded shoulders, to make them look like kings cleaving the waves with gilded paddles; they gladdened their toil with the clank of their chains, even as in Bengal, at the Feast of the Durga, the nautch-girls, dressed in gold gauze, accompany their dances with the sound of the rings with which their necks, arms and legs are adorned. The Venetian convicts married the doge to the sea and themselves renewed their indissoluble union with slavery.
Of those many fleets which bore the crusaders to the shores of Palestine and forbade any foreign sail to be displayed to the winds of the Adriatic, there remain a model of the Bucentaur, Napoleon's cutter, a savages' canoe and some designs of ships drawn in chalk on the black-board of the school of the Naval Guard.
A Frenchman coming from Prague to Venice and expecting the mother of Henry V. must needs be touched at seeing the armour of Henry IV. in the Venice Arsenal. The sword which the Bearnese wore at the Battle of Ivry[113] used to be joined to that armour: that sword is no longer there.
By a decree of the Grand Council of Venice, dated 3 April 1600: