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There can be little doubt—although it is not explicitly so stated in his memoirs—that it was the sight of the mast of a fruit-boat before the window of his prison that first aroused the notion in his fertile brain.

But let us begin at the beginning of this story of one of the earliest exploits of that Giacomo di Casanova who has been so aptly called the Prince of Adventurers, and whom some have accounted the very Prince of Scoundrels.

He was at the time in the eighteenth year of his age, but with the appearance of at least some five-and-twenty, extremely tall and personable, and already equipped with that air of a man of the great world which later—and coupled with his amazing impudence and undoubted talents—was to stand him in such excellent stead in the exploitation of his fellow-man.

To Casanova this was perhaps the most critical stage of his life. The career of the priesthood for which he had been intended by his mother—and for which, surely, there never lived a man less suitable—had rejected him. The seminary at Padua, in which he had been qualifying for holy orders, outraged by the wildness of his almost pagan nature, had just expelled him. He had accepted that expulsion in the spirit of philosophy for which he is so remarkable, accounting all things for the best. In this instance no doubt he was justified. He had doffed his seminarist's cassock, replacing it by a laced coat bought at second-hand, and the steel-hilted sword of the ruffler. Thus he had returned, in the summer of that year 1743, to Venice, the city of his birth, intent upon following his destiny—sequere deum, as he puts it himself.

There he had eked out, by gaming, the slender allowance which his mother made him out of her earnings on the trestles of a forain theatre at Warsaw; and we perceive already the beginnings of that extraordinary success of his at faro and kindred games of cards—a success so constant that, in spite of his emphatic and repeated assurances, we cannot avoid a suspicion on the score of the methods he employed.

But that is by the way. His trouble came to him through one Razetta, a Venetian of some substance and importance, of whom he has many evil things to say, some of which we are disposed to credit. In what Razetta first provoked his hostility we are not permitted to perceive. But we do know that such was his hatred of the man that, although Razetta must undoubtedly have been accounted an excellent match for Casanova's sister, our young adventurer would have none of it.

His sister dwelt—as did Casanova himself in the early days of that sojourn of his in Venice—at the house of the Abbé Grimani, the kindly old tutor appointed to the pair of them by their absent mother. At this house Signor Razetta was a constant visitor, and our shrewd ex-seminarist was not long in perceiving the attraction that drew him thither and in deciding that the matter must end. He began with his sister, whom he addressed in that pseudo-philosophic strain peculiar to him—if his memoirs are a faithful mirror of his utterances—a habit of speech acquired, we suppose, in the course of his preparation for a pulpit which he was, fortunately, never destined to disgrace. He reduced her to tears, he tells us—which is not in the least surprising. Indeed, we marvel that anyone should ever have listened to him without weeping. That done, he flung out after her lover, who had just taken leave of Grimani. He overtook him on the Rialto as dusk was falling. Accompanied by a servant Signor Razetta was on his way to a café in the neighbourhood where it was his habit to spend an hour or two before going home to bed.

Casanova demanded two words in private with him. Razetta—a corpulent and uncomely gentleman of some thirty years of age, deeming it as well to use civility towards the brother—and such a brother!—of the lady to whose favour he aspired, bade his lackey draw off across the bridge out of earshot.

Casanova used, as was the fashion with him, many words, and but little tact.

"It afflicts me, Signor Razetta," said he, "that a gentleman of my condition should be reduced to the necessity of discussing with an animal of yours, so delicate a matter as his own sister. But the fault, sir, is not mine. You have been wanting—as, after all, perhaps, was but to be expected—in that fine feeling which might have saved us both from the humiliations inseparable from this interview."

"Sir!" roared Razetta, his great face aflame. "You insult me!"

"I congratulate you upon a susceptibility to insult which I should never have suspected in a man of your deplorable origin and neglected breeding," said Casanova. "Since it is so, you afford me some hope that we may yet understand each other without the necessity being thrust upon me of proceeding to harsher measures."

"Not another word, sir," blazed the other, "I will not listen to you further!" And he swung on his heel.

But Casanova took him by the shoulder. I have said that he was tall. It remains to add that he was of a prodigious strength. Razetta's soft flesh was mangled in that iron grip, his departure arrested.

Casanova turned him about again, and smiled balefully into his empurpled face.

"It is as I feared," he said. "Indeed until you spoke of insult I had not conceived that words could be of the least avail with you. Nor indeed was I prepared to employ with you any argument whatsoever. My sole intent was to command you never again to show your face at the Abbé Grimani's while my sister is in residence there, and to assure you that in the event of your disobedience—a folly to which I implore you not to commit yourself—I shall be put to the necessity of thrashing you until there is not a bone left whole in your body."

Razetta shook with blending rage and fear.

"By the Madonna!" he swore. "I go straight to the Signoria to inform the Saggio of your threats and demand his protection. You shall be laid by the heels, my fine cockerel. There is law and order in Venice, and—"

"Alas!" Casanova interrupted, "you precipitate the inevitable."

He raised his cane, and fell to belabouring with it the unfortunate Razetta. Razetta struggled, struck out in self-defence as best he could, and yelled to his servant.

Over the kidney stones of the bridge the man came clattering to his master's aid. Casanova, ever gripping his victim's shoulder, pulled him back to the foot of the bridge, where there was a gap in the parapet. Through this he flung him into the canal.

When the servant came up, our ex-seminarist was straightening his cravat and smoothing his ruffles. He pointed quite unnecessarily to the water where Razetta was floundering and gurgling in danger of drowning.

"You'll find your master down there," said he. "No doubt you will wish to fish him out for the sake of what wages he may owe you. But you would be doing humanity a nobler service if you left him where he is." And he went home to supper, conscious that he had borne himself with infinite credit.

The sequel was, of course, inevitable. Razetta, rescued from drowning, smarting with pain and choler, went to lay his plaint before the chief notary—the Saggio della Scrittura—who was responsible for the preservation of order in the city.

Next morning Casanova awakened to find his chamber invested by officers of justice. They hauled him into a great black gondola, and so to the palace of the Signoria and the presence of the magistrate. There he found Razetta, who poured out his denunciation with a volubility marred by frequent sneezings, and Razetta's servant, who affirmed on oath the truth of his master's statement.

"What have you to say?" demanded the scowling Saggio of Casanova.

Casanova's swarthy, masterful face was a study in scorn; his full red lips curled contemptuously.

"I have to say, excellency, that these villains make a mock of your credulity and abuse your justice. Let me throw light upon their motives. That rogue Razetta, there, permits himself the effrontery of paying his addresses to my sister. I have signified to him my distaste of this, and my desire that he shall set a term to it. His retort, excellency, is this false accusation, and he has bribed and suborned his servant to confirm the lies with which he has insulted you."

That was but the beginning. His volubility was never at fault, and whatever the Church may have gained when he was expelled the seminary, there can be little doubt that she lost a famous preacher. His was a fervour that carried conviction, and he might have carried it now but for the testimony of Razetta's back and shoulders, which were black and blue from last night's drubbing.

The end of it was that Casanova was taken back to the black gondola. This headed towards the Lido, and brought up a half-hour later at the steps of the fort of Sant' Andrea, fronting the Adriatic on the very spot where, annually, on the Feast of the Ascension, the bucentaur comes to a halt when the Doge goes forth to wed the sea. A year's sojourn in this prison was the heavy penalty imposed upon Casanova in expiation of his offence against the peace of Venice.

The place was garrisoned by Albanian soldiers, brought from that part of Epirus which belonged to the most serene republic. Its governor was a Major Pelodero, by whom Casanova was amiably received and given the freedom of the entire fortress. The major, it would seem, took a lenient view of the offence which the young man was sent to expiate, and he came, no doubt, under the influence of that singular charm and personal magnetism which was one of this rogue's chief assets. He was given a fine room on the first floor with two windows, and it was from these that he first espied the masts of those fruit-sellers' boats, and so—after a week's residence in the fort—came to conceive the first notion of enlisting their service to help him effect his escape.

That, of course, was no more than the first, crude, germinal and somewhat obvious idea that leapt to his mind. Another in his place might have been content to act upon it. Not so Casanova. He considered that merely to escape could, after all, profit him but little. Perforce he must remain an outlaw, a fugitive from justice, unable to show his face again in Venice without the certainty of being sent to the galleys. A door was open to him, and he were a fool not to avail himself of it. Yet he were a greater fool to avail himself of it in the crude fashion that first suggested itself. He sat down to think, and at last he discovered a way by which he might bring about his honourable enlargement, the discomfiture of Razetta, and, perhaps, his own considerable profit as well.

The result of his consideration was that when, at dawn on the morrow, the gentle splash of an oar reached him from below, he slipped from his bed, and gained the window. The single mast of a fruit barge came level with it at that moment. He thrust his head between the bar and the sill, and called softly to one of the boatmen.

"Hola, my friend! Have you any peaches?"

"Peaches? Certainly, excellency. At once!" And whilst one of the men steadied the vessel against the wall of the fort, the other swarmed up the short, stout mast with a basket on the crook of his arm.

Casanova stretched out to reach it. He emptied out the peaches on to the floor of his room, put a gold coin in the basket and so returned it to the man, who broke into protestations of gratitude at such munificence, and summoned every saint in the calendar to watch over this princely consumer of peaches.

"That," said Casanova, indicating the shining ducat, "is a fruit culled from the Tree of Wisdom. So that you are wise you may fill your basket with the like."

"Show me but where the tree grows, excellency!" was the fruiterer's prompt reply.

"What would you do for ten ducats?" enquired the prisoner, and in naming that amount he named almost all the money he had in his possession.

"Anything short of murder," replied the other, dazzled by the mention of a sum which to one of his modest estate amounted to a fortune.

Casanova pondered him, smiled and nodded.

"Be here at ten tonight," he said. "Now go."

Protesting that he would not fail, the boatman slithered down his mast again, and the barge moved on past the fort towards the city, all gilded now by the sun new-risen from the Adriatic.

Casanova looked at his peaches, and his first notion was to send them as a present to the governor's wife. But he thought better of it. They might afford a trace, however slender, to what he had planned should follow. So, one by one, he dropped them into the sea.

Later that morning, as he was taking the air with Major Pelodero's aide-de-camp, he happened to leap down from one of the bastions of the fortress. As his foot touched the ground he cried out, staggered, and fell in a heap, clapping his hand to his knee. Stefani, the aide, ran immediately to his assistance.

"It is nothing," said Casanova, and sought to rise unaided, but found the thing impossible.

He availed himself, then, of the hand solicitously held out to him, and came to his feet; or rather, to his left foot, for he found it quite impossible to put his right to the ground. He must have wrenched his knee, he declared, clenching his teeth in his effort to master the pain from which Stefani perceived him very obviously to be suffering. Then leaning heavily upon his cane, and assisted on the other side by the aide's arm, he hobbled painfully within doors and straight to his room, where presently he was attended by the surgeon of the fort. His knee was examined, and although no swelling was visible as yet, its sensitiveness was apparent from the manner in which the patient winced under the pressure exerted by the doctor on his knee cap.

"A slight strain of the muscles," the latter concluded. "Not very serious, although undoubtedly painful. You have had a narrow escape, sir. As it is, a few days' rest and bandages, according to a fashion of which I possess the secret and you will be yourself again."

Thereafter the knee was tightly bound in bandages soaked in camphorated spirits of wine, and Casanova sat for the remainder of the day with the ailing limb stretched across a chair. Major Pelodero and some other officers of the garrison, taking pity upon his helpless plight, spent a portion of the evening at cards with him; and whatever the condition of his leg, his wits had clearly suffered no damage, for despite the modesty of the points, he contrived to win a matter of six ducats from them. When they left him, towards eight o'clock, he begged that his servant might be sent to him and permitted to spend the night in his room, lest in his present crippled state he should have need of assistance.

This servant was a new acquisition of Casanova's. He was a temporary valet, one of the soldiers of the garrison whose services the prisoner was permitted to hire for a few coppers daily. The fellow's chief recommendation to the ex-seminarist lay in the fact that he had been a hairdresser before enlisting, and Casanova's hair—as he tells us himself—required rescuing from the effects of the neglect which it had naturally suffered in the seminary. It is obvious to any reader of his memoirs that he was at all times extremely vain of his personal appearance, and it is easy to imagine how highly he valued, and how assiduously he employed, the services of this fellow.

On the present occasion it would seem that the sometime hairdresser had another quality which recommended him to his temporary master. He was a famous drunkard. Casanova, in a more than ordinarily indulgent mood, now afforded him the means to gratify his inclinations on that score. He gave him money, and bade him procure three bottles of a full-bodied Falernian from the canteen. Further, he insisted that the fellow should drink them, although I confess that "insisted" is hardly the word in which to describe such mild persuasion as he found it necessary to employ.

By half-past nine the soldier-valet was snoring most unpleasantly, reduced to a stupor. By ten o'clock the whole fort was wrapped in slumber, for strict discipline prevailed, and early hours were kept. By five minutes past ten came the splash of an oar under Casanova's window, and but for the darkness, a mast might have been seen to come to a halt before it.

Casanova slipped from his bed and into his clothes with a nimbleness that was miraculous, and still more miraculous was the cure that appeared to have been effected; for as he crossed to the window there was no slightest sign of lameness in his agile gait. A single bar was set horizontally across the window, but there was room for a man of ordinary proportions to pass above or below it; and Casanova, though tall and strong, was of slender—almost stripling—proportions at this time of his life. He tied a sheet to the bar, twisted it into a rope, slipped through, and a moment later he was standing amid the decaying vegetable matter in the barge. There he found but one man, the fruiterer with whom he had that morning come to an understanding. He pressed five ducats into the rogue's hand.

"The other five when the thing is done," said he. "Now push off!"

The boatman plied his single oar, gondolier-wise in the stern, and stood off from the fort.

"Whither now, excellency?" he enquired.

"Hoist your sail," said Casanova—for the breeze was fresh—"and steer for Venice."

They had words, of course. The boatman had conceived that here was a simple matter of assisting a gentleman to escape from prison, and that Casanova would desire him to make for the open sea beyond the Lido, and so head for the mainland. This going to Venice was fraught with danger, and he spoke of the risk he ran of being sent to the galleys if he were caught with an evaded prisoner.

Casanova took up a stout oak cudgel that he found in the bottom of the boat. He was ever a violent man, in words and in deeds. On this occasion his threats were sufficient, especially as they were seconded by a reminder that ten ducats was a sum worth some risk.

By his directions, then, the boat came to moor at the Schiavoni. He leapt ashore, bidding the fruiterer await him there. Thence he walked quickly to San Stefano, rousing a dozing gondolier, and had himself borne to the Rialto.

It was striking eleven when he stationed himself upon the bridge to wait. It was a little before the hour at which Razetta usually returned from that obscure café which he frequented and whither commonly he was wont to go upon leaving the Abbé Grimani's. Leaning upon the parapet, Casanova waited patiently, smiling grimly down at the black, oily waters in pleasurable contemplation of the business they were to do.

He had not very long to wait. At about a quarter-past eleven he beheld his victim emerge from one of the narrow side-streets on the right of the bridge, accompanied, as on another similar occasion, by a lackey, who now bore a lantern. Casanova quitted his position and moved down to meet him.

They came face to face at the foot of the bridge, Casanova walking in the middle of the road and receiving the full glare of the lantern as he advanced. He halted, and Razetta stared at him, first in incredulity, and then in terror.

"Do you bar my passage?" Casanova thundered truculently, affecting to suppose the other to be the aggressor, and a whirling blow of his cudgel shivered the lantern into a thousand atoms.

"Seize him!" cried Razetta to his lackey. But his lackey was deaf to the command. His hand was still tingling from the blow that had swept the lantern from it. "Body of Satan! You have broken prison! You shall go to the galleys for this!"

"You mistake me, I think," said Casanova.

"Mistake you? Not I! You are that villain Casanova! Seize him, I say!"

"If you will insist upon hindering me I must defend myself as best I can!" replied Casanova, and he plied his cudgel.

On the occasion of their last meeting he had been armed with a slender cane capable of comparatively light punishment. But the stout oaken club he wielded tonight went near to endangering the very life of Razetta. Its smashing blows fell upon his shoulders, upon his limbs, and finally upon his head. He screamed, and his servant roared for help, until the matter ended as it had ended on that other occasion. Razetta was knocked into the canal.

Casanova flung his cudgel after him, and in a voice of thunder ordered the servant to be silent.

"Instead of squalling there go and fish him out," he said, "so that I may have the pleasure of throwing him in yet again some other evening."

Steps were approaching down the street by which Razetta had come. Casanova waited for no more. He flung swiftly across the bridge and down a narrow by-lane. He made a detour that brought him out at a spot where his gondola was waiting. He jumped in, and was carried back to San Stefano—the pursuit, meantime, having been arrested by the more urgent need to rescue the drowning man.

So quickly had he acted that in less than ten minutes of flinging Razetta into the water he was once more aboard the fruit barge, speeding towards the Lido and the Fort of Sant' Andrea. Five minutes before midnight he was climbing back through the window of his prison. Another three minutes and he was in bed, considering his soldier-servant still asleep in his chair. To rouse him, Casanova flung first one boot at his head, and then the other, cursing him volubly the while, and in his loudest tones.

The fellow awoke with a yell when the heel of the second boot caught him so shrewdly on the forehead that it drew blood.

"What is it, sir? What is it?" he babbled, still half-bewildered from sleep and wine.

"What is it, you drunken dog?" roared Casanova, in a mighty passion. "Do you think you were sent hither to spend the night asleep in a chair? I suffer. My knee burns. My head throbs. I have a fever! I cannot sleep! Go, fetch the surgeon. Tell him I am in agony!"

The soldier protested that it was midnight—through the stillness of the night came the boom of the hour from St Mark's even as he spoke—and that the surgeon would be abed. But Casanova was so fierce and bloodthirsty in his reply that the man departed at a run. He was back in five minutes, accompanied now by the surgeon in nightcap and bed-gown.

Casanova lay back moaning, his eyes had closed. The haste he had made had drenched him in a perspiration which admirably answered his present purposes, whilst his general agitation set up an irregularity in his pulse sufficient to deceive the incompetent man of medicine of the fort.

"Do you suffer?" quoth the surgeon sympathetically.

"Like the damned!" groaned Casanova, through clenched teeth. "This bed is become a bed of pain. I burn, my knee throbs; I cannot sleep. If I could but sleep!"

The surgeon went to mix a drug. On the way he roused the governor with the news that Casanova was taken seriously ill. The governor cursed Casanova and the surgeon jointly and severally for disturbing his rest and went to sleep again most unsympathetically.

Casanova swallowed the drug when it was brought him. The surgeon sat with him until he announced that he felt easier, and that, if the light were extinguished, he thought he might now be able to sleep.

In the morning he was much better. Supported by his servant and leaning upon his cane, he hobbled to breakfast in Major Pelodero's dining-room—for the genial governor had made him free of his table—and he congratulated the surgeon in very graceful and flattering terms upon his skill, and the efficacy of his drug. His fever had entirely abated, and his knee was much less painful. The surgeon recommended care and rest for a few days yet, when he was sure that all would be well.

But it would seem that there was to be no rest for Casanova just yet.

They were still at breakfast when a soldier came with the announcement that an officer sent by the Chief Notary of Venice had just arrived at the fort. The governor went instantly to receive that envoy.

"His excellency the Saggio, sir," said the officer, "has sent me to receive your explanation of a circumstance by which he is greatly exercised. He desires to know how it happens that news of the evasion of your prisoner, Signor Giacomo di Casanova, should have been communicated to him in the first instance by others than yourself?"

The officer's tone was extremely frosty. Major Pelodero's reply was of the hottest.

"What the devil may be the meaning, sir, of this impertinence? I resent your manner, and as for your news, it is as foolish as is, apparently, its bearer!"

"Sir!" cried the officer, in a very big voice.

"Bah!" The major swung on his heel. "Desire Signor Casanova to attend us here," he bade the orderly.

The officer's eyes grew round; his mouth itself kept them some sort of company.

"Do I understand that Signor Casanova is still here? That the report which has reached his excellency the Saggio is false?"

"You shall see!" was the peppery governor's curt answer.

Casanova came in, hobbling and assisted. Looking from one to the other of those present, he courteously announced himself their servant. The major sneered at the officer, and waited for him to speak. The officer stared from Casanova to the major, and said nothing. It was Casanova, himself, at last, who broke the silence.

"May I hope, sir, that your presence here, and the governor's request for my presence signify that the truth of the matters with which I am charged has at last been brought to light, and that you are come to announce me my release? Since I am suffering in health, as you may see, such news were very welcome. Though, considering my crippled condition, and that I am unable to walk without assistance, I am less vexed at the moment by my incarceration than I might be at another time."

"I—I don't understand!" stammered the officer.

"So I had thought," snapped the major testily.

"Perhaps—perhaps I had better explain," said the officer.

"I confess it is not unnecessary," agreed the major.

Forth came the explanation. Razetta and his servant had been before the Saggio that very morning to lay a second plaint against Casanova, the details of which the officer now expounded.

"But this is incredible," said Casanova, his face blank.

"Not merely incredible, but impossible," said the governor, still smarting under the memory of the tone the officer had taken at the outset of their interview.

"Would it not be best that I should go before the Saggio at once, sir?" said Casanova.

It was, of course, the only thing to do. The prisoner accompanied the officer back to Venice, and with them went the governor, the surgeon, and Casanova's servant.

Casanova's arrival in such company at the palace of the Signory surprised the Saggio as much as his appearance in the fort had surprised the Saggio's envoy.

Casanova bowed as gracefully as his crippled condition would permit him, a twinge of pain crossing his features as he did so. The Saggio was solicitous, and ordered a chair to be set for him. He sank into it gently, assisted by the surgeon and the governor, his leg stretched stiffly in front of him. Then he made one of his famous speeches to the bewildered magistrate.

Somewhere in his voluminous memoirs he protests that a gentleman should never have recourse to anything but the truth save only when he deals with rogues, with whom it would be unavailing. It would seem to follow that he had a good many dealings with such rogues in his time, and that he took the liberty of placing the Saggio himself in that category.

"I understand, excellency," he said, "that it is alleged by Signor Razetta and his servant that last night, near the bridge of the Rialto, at about midnight, I fell upon him with a cudgel, belaboured him, and flung him again into the canal—all, in fact, as precisely as before."

The Saggio nodded without interrupting, and Casanova proceeded, his bold black eyes full upon the other's countenance.

"When last before your excellency I had the honour to inform you that your credibility was being abused, and your high office mocked by those two villains. It is not for me to blame your excellency for having been their dupe. They were two, and I was but one; and the law—of which you are so exalted and worthy an administrator—runs that the testimony of two persons must outweigh that of one. But there is another justice more discerning and far-reaching than that human justice of which your excellency is so noble and shining a dispenser. That justice, it would appear, has led these villains to overreach themselves and betray their falsehood. If your excellency's renowned perspicuity should ever plumb the depths of this infamy, it will, I have no doubt, be discovered that Signor Razetta, misled by some false rumour that I had broken prison, has come to you with this fresh lie that he might thus spur you on to my recapture."

"And yet, sir," the Saggio interrupted, "Messer Razetta's condition and the testimony of several other witnesses prove beyond all doubt that he was most cruelly beaten and thrown into the canal."

"Since that is so, I can but suppose that he is in error—an error quickened by his malice. I do not need to plead my case today. The facts plead for me more eloquently and irrefutably than would be possible to any words of mine. Not only—as your excellency sees—have I not broken prison, but I have been crippled these four-and-twenty hours, unable to walk without assistance. If more were necessary, this good fellow here, who tended me all night, can inform your excellency that precisely at the hour in which I am accused of having committed this offence on the Rialto I was in bed at Sant' Andrea, in extreme pain and beset by fever. Further this learned doctor will tell you that, summoned by my servant, he came to ease my sufferings at that hour; and the governor here will add that he was informed of my condition at the time. Never in all the history of justice was an accused man furnished with so complete an alibi. I leave it to your excellency's acute penetration to lay bare the truth of this affair."

The Saggio heard the other three in turn, each and all of them emphatically bearing out Casanova's statement.

"It is enough," he said in the end. "It is but logical to assume that, whatever the motives that may have actuated him, since Messer Razetta was mistaken in his assailant last night, he must similarly have been mistaken before."

"Mistaken!" quoth the rogue Casanova, with a wry smile.

The Saggio made him no reply. He took up a pen, and wrote rapidly.

"You will be restored to liberty at once, sir," he announced, "and Signor Razetta shall be dealt with. You are free to return home."

But Casanova had not yet quite reached the end of his rascally purpose.

"I go in such dread of the rancour of that villain Razetta," said he, "that I will implore your excellency to afford me the State's protection until I am restored to such vigour as will enable me to protect myself. I shall be eternally grateful for your permission to return with the major to Sant' Andrea until my knee is completely mended—a matter of a week or so, as the doctor here informs me."

His excellency graciously gave his consent to this, and would have thereupon have dismissed them but that still Casanova had not done.

"I most respectfully submit to your excellency that some amend is due to me for what I have suffered morally and physically: the indignity, extremely painful to a man of my sensitive honour; the duress in which I have been kept; and finally my present crippled condition, arising directly out of my imprisonment."

The Saggio frowned.

"The State, sir—" he was beginning coldly.

"Ah, sir, your indulgence!" Casanova interrupted him. "It is not from the State that I suggest any amend should come. It is not the fault of the State that these things have come to pass. The fault is entirely Razetta's, and I submit—most respectfully and humbly—that it is from Razetta should proceed the adequate compensation which I solicit."

The Saggio reflected.

"It is but just," he agreed at last. "At what sum do you estimate your inconvenience?"

Casanova sighed reflectively.

"It is not in ducats and sequins, excellency," said he, "that a gentleman of my condition can estimate the damage to his honour and his body. To do so were to affront the one and the other. Not then to compensate me, for that is impossible, but to punish Razetta do I suggest that he should be mulcted in my favour to the extent of—shall we say?—a hundred ducats."

The magistrate pursed his lips. The sum was heavy.

"I should say," he answered deliberately, "that fifty ducats were a just fine."

"Your excellency is the best judge," said Casanova, with angelic submission. "Fifty ducats be it then—to teach him the way of truth and honesty."

Thus ended the matter, in spite of all that Razetta had to say, which was a deal, and all of it so offensive and profane that it confirmed the Saggio in his conviction that he was dealing justly.

With the fifty ducats Casanova set up a faro bank, and prospered so well that in the end Venice became dangerous for him, and he was compelled to seek fresh pastures for his splendid talents.