Give me, I entreat you, a cell here in which to finish my Memoirs.
Fra Paolo[117] is buried at the entrance to the church; that seeker after noise must be very wroth at the silence that surrounds him.
Pellico, when sentenced to death, was lodged at San Michele before being transported to the fortress of the Spielberg. The president of the tribunal before which Pellico appeared takes the poet's place at San Michele; he is buried in the cloister; he will not leave that prison.
Not far from the tomb of the magistrate is that of a foreign woman married at the age of twenty-two years, in the month of January; she died in the month of February following. She did not want to go beyond the honeymoon; her epitaph says:
Ci revedremo.
If it were true!
Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation! Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction of the ego, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, ci revedremo!
I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119].
I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child; the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures.