Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion. Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the placards which advertise on the same bill the opera of the day and the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed, as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal.
The gondoliers.
The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the lazzaroni in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were not past.
At six o'clock in the morning, they come to their gondolas, fastened to posts with their prows aground. Then they begin to scrape and wash their barchette at the Traghetti, just as dragoons curry, brush and sponge their horses on picket. The ticklish sea-horse is restive and refuses to stand still under the movements of its horseman, who draws water in a wooden vessel and pours it over the sides and into the well of the craft. He several times repeats the aspersion, taking care to discard the water from the surface of the sea in order to obtain the cleaner water below. Then he scrubs the oars, polishes the brasses and the glass of the little black deck-house, dusts the cushions and carpets and rubs up the iron head of the prow. The whole is not done without a few words of humour or affection addressed, in the pretty Venetian dialect, to the skittish or docile gondola.
When the gondola's toilet is completed, the gondolier proceeds to make his own. He combs his hair, shakes out his jacket and his blue, red or grey cap, washes his face, feet and hands. His wife, daughter or mistress brings him a bowl containing a mess of vegetables, bread and meat. Breakfast over, each gondolier awaits Fortune, singing: he has her before his eyes, one foot in the air, holding out her scarf to the wind and serving as a weather-cock, at the top of the monument of the Dogana di Mare. Does she give the signal? The favoured gondolier, with oar upraised, starts out at the back of his craft, even as Achilles used to fly in former days, or as one of Franconi's[122] circus-riders gallops to-day on the crupper of a fiery steed. The gondola, shaped like a skate, glides over the water as over ice: "Sia, stati! Sta longo!" that does for the whole day. Then night comes, and the calle will see my gondolier singing and drinking with his zitella the half-sequin which I leave him, as I go off most certainly to replace Henry V. on the throne.
Venice, September 1833.
I was trying to find out, when I woke, why I liked Venice so much, when I suddenly remembered that I was in Brittany: it was the force of kindred that found utterance within me. Was there not, in Cæsar's time, in Armorica, a country of the Veneti[123]: civitas Venetorum, civitas Venetica? Has not Strabo "said that they said" that the Veneti[124] were the descendants of the Veneti of Gaul?
It has been contradictorily held that the fishermen of Morbihan were a colony of the pescatori of Palestrina: Venice, then, would be the mother and not the daughter of Vannes[125]. One can reconcile this by supposing, which for that matter is very probable, that Vannes and Venice were mutually brought to bed of one another. I therefore look upon the Venetians as Bretons; the gondoliers and I are cousins, sprung from the horn of Gaul: cornu Galliæ.[126]
On the Riva degli Schiavoni.
Delighted with this thought, I went to breakfast in a café on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The bread was new, the tea scented, the cream as in Brittany, the butter as in the Prévalais; for butter, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, has improved everywhere: I have eaten excellent butter at Granada. The bustle of a harbour always delights me: barge-masters were picnicking; vendors of fruit and flowers offered me lemons, grapes and nosegays; fishermen got ready their tartans; naval cadets, stepping into a long-boat, went off to their lessons in naval tactics on board the flag-ship; gondolas were taking passengers to the Trieste steam-boat. Yet it was that same Trieste which was like to have had me cut down on the steps of the Tuileries by Bonaparte, as he threatened when, in 1807, I took it upon myself to write in the Mercure: