That same evening he received confirmation of the news from Count Pizzamano. The Count accepted the interception of Lebel's letters as a sign that at long last the Serenissima was asserting her rights. The presence in Venice of Barras' cat's-paw Lebel was one more evidence of the evil intentions of the French, and it would go very ill with this secret envoy when he were found.
This did not trouble Marc-Antoine at all. Messer Grande—as the Venetian Captain of Justice was called—would hunt in vain for Camille Lebel. What troubled him was that the prospect of French defeat, instead of uplifting him, was actually and disloyally dejecting him because of its dangers for Isotta.
Meanwhile, if Vendramin's hatred of Marc-Antoine, by whom he accounted himself so outrageously wronged, abated nothing, at least he was able to dissemble it on those comparatively rare occasions when they met at the Casa Pizzamano.
In this stagnation, Christmas came and went. It was celebrated in Venice with gaieties as unrestrained as usual, or, if restrained at all, restrained merely by the intense cold of a winter that brought the rare spectacle of snow on the house-tops and ice-floes in the canals of Fusina and Marghera. The result was to drive the people to seek indoor amusements. The theatres were never more crowded; the cafès did a roaring trade; and the casinos were thronged with those who went to gamble, to dance, or merely to flirt and gossip.
With the new year the city disposed itself for the licences of carnival, as if these were no serious matters to preoccupy it.
Marc-Antoine killed time as best he could. With a party of friends he attended the first performance of Ugo Foscole's Tieste, and supped, as was the carnival custom, in the box which they had rented. He allowed himself to be taken to masked balls given at the Filarmonici and the Orfei, which presented scenes of light-hearted merriment the like of which he had never witnessed. The numerous attendance at these functions of Venetian officers who flocked into the city from their quarters on Malamocco and elsewhere, far from reminding the merrymakers of the clouds of war that still hung upon the horizon, merely served to contribute to the general gaiety.
Whilst life flowed so carefree now in Venice, the Austrians marched to relieve Mantua, and to deliver the decisive blow that should end this campaign. Their defeat on the snow-clad field of Rivoli, with the capture of Provera's division of seven thousand men and thirty guns, gave pause for a moment to the carnival gaieties in Venice. But even now the alarm was far from being either as deep or as general as the circumstances warranted. With the aim of overriding panic, the Government deliberately circulated the assurance that it would provide for whatever might be necessary. In that assurance amusement was resumed.
Along the Riva dei Schiavoni and in the Piazza, as the weather became milder with the advent of February, there were constant throngs of idlers and revellers, and little crowds congregating about the itinerant shows set up for their amusement: the marionettes, the tumblers, the quack-salvers, the story-singers, the astrologers, the fortune-telling canaries, the Furlana dancers, or the circus in the Piazza. Patrician men and women, in mask and bauta, their quality proclaimed by their silks and velvets and gold-laced hats, mingled freely with the noisy populace, sharing their greed of laughter, and as reckless of the doom which was advancing so relentlessly upon the Serenissima.
For now the pace of events was quickening. The fall of Mantua followed upon Alvinzy's defeat. Rendered mobile thereby, Bonaparte went off to Rome and constrained the Pope to the Treaty of Tolentino. As one result of it three great convoys, including bullock carts laden with bronzes, pictures, and treasures of art of every description plundered from the Vatican, took the road to France.
Yet Venice, unable, it seemed, to tolerate any protraction of depression, was uplifted within a few days of the fall of Mantua by definite news that the Archduke Charles was coming with reinforcements from the Rhine to take command of the remains of Alvinzy's army.
Those in authority and those with real vision or real knowledge saw little ground for confidence in this fourth Austrian attempt against Bonaparte. For Bonaparte, too, had received at last, and unstintedly, the reinforcements for which he had so long been clamouring. With an army of sixty thousand men at his back, more than well-found in artillery upon which he placed so much reliance, and rid at last of the Mantua incubus, he was incalculably more formidable than ever before in this campaign.
So formidable, indeed, that the Doge and his councillors, in insisting more passionately than ever upon inaction, completely reversed their former arguments. Hitherto it had been that the Austrian strength more than sufficed to shield them. Now it was that the strength of the French must render futile anything that Venice could do.
The city itself and the surrounding islands swarmed with the troops that had been levied. There were four thousand men at Chioggia; three Dalmatian regiments on Malamocco, one at the Certosa, and a battalion on the Giudecca. There was a Slavonian regiment at San Giorgio Maggiore, and a battalion of Italians under Domenico Pizzamano at Sant' Andrea. Sixteen companies were quartered at Murano; the Croatian company of Colonel Radnich was at Fusina; and there were further troops quartered at San Francesco della Vigna and at San Giorgio in Alga. The total came to some sixteen thousand men, without taking into account a further ten thousand in garrisons on the mainland. In addition, there were seven naval divisions, stationed at Fusina, Burano, in the Canal of the Marani, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, it was deemed, even by minds as intrepid as that of Count Pizzamano, that these forces were inadequate now for an offensive alliance.
Manin was constrained to admit, at least in private and almost in tears, the error of having missed the moment for action which had presented itself just before Rivoli. To take such action now would be in the nature of a gambler's throw. And if the dice fell against them, the independence of the Serenissima would be the forfeit.
Austria having failed them, Manin perceived their only hope to lie now in the favour of Heaven. By his orders there were special prayers, services, and processions, and the unveiling of a miraculous image in Saint Mark's. The only result of this was to alarm the people and lead to demonstrations hostile to the Signory for not having taken timely measures.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CITIZEN VILLETARD
Marc-Antoine was roused on the morning the first Sunday in Lent by a peremptory summons from Lallemant.
Masks and mummeries had disappeared from the streets and canals of Venice, and the church bells were summoning a sobered population to devotion. The sun shone with a hard brightness, and already there was a feeling of spring in the air.
Closeted with Lallemant, Marc-Antoine found a young-old man of middle height, whose pallid, foxy countenance, lean, dry, and lined, seemed too old for his lithe, active body. His spare, sinewy legs were encased in white buckskins and black knee-boots with reversed yellow tops. He wore a long riding-coat of rough brown cloth with silver buttons and very wide lapels. And on the conical brown hat which he retained he had plastered a tricolour cockade. He was without visible weapons.
Lallemant, who did not appear to be in the best of humours, presented him as the Citizen Villetard, an envoy from General Bonaparte.
The keen glance of the man's small, sunken eyes played searchingly over Marc-Antoine. His nod was curt, his voice, harsh and rasping.
'I have heard of you, Citizen Lebel. You have been some months in Venice. But you do not appear to have accomplished very much.'
Marc-Antoine met aggressiveness with aggressiveness.