Such firebrands as Pesaro and Pizzamano were convicted of a rashness, which if it had prevailed must have impoverished Venice and left the Lion of Saint Mark to lick his wounds.

Against this there were no arguments. The men contemned could only look on in silence, and pray, like the loyal patriots they were, that those who contemned them might be right.

It certainly seemed so now.

Bonaparte's hopeless situation finds expression in the cry contained in his dispatch of the thirteenth of that month of November to the Directory: 'The army of Italy reduced to a handful of men is exhausted . . . We are abandoned in the interior of Italy. The brave men remaining regard death as inevitable amid chances so continual and with forces so inferior in number.'

And then, when all seemed ended, when the loud jubilation in Venice bore witness to relief from the anxieties that had been simmering under her ever-frivolous surface, the genius of the Corsican blazed forth more terribly than ever. Four days after writing that dispatch, he heavily defeated Alvinzy's army on the bloody field of Arcola, and drove its wreckage before him.

But the consequent dismay was not long to endure. Soon it was realized that the French had snatched victory from the ashes of defeat at a cost they could not afford. They had gained a breathing space; no more. Heavy reinforcements were being hurried to Alvinzy. Mantua held firmly against Serrurier's blockade. Arcola, in the Venetian view, had merely postponed a conclusion which it could not avert. The French were face to face with ruin.

In vain did the advocates of intervention denounce this crass optimism which would not learn from past experiences. God and the Austrians, they were confidently answered, would settle matters very soon. So why should the Government of Venice shoulder this burden?

Marc-Antoine himself was encouraged to agree with the optimists by the pessimism which he now discovered at the French Legation. There was more than the exhausted state of the Army of Italy to trouble France at that moment. Her armies on the Rhine were also doing badly, and it looked, indeed, as if at last Europe were to be rid of the French nightmare.

Effectively to maintain the rôle of Lebel, Marc-Antoine wrote strongly to Barras, as Lebel would have written, urging Bonaparte's need of reinforcements if all that had been won were not to be thrown away. He had no qualms in writing thus. His representations, he knew, could add nothing to those which Bonaparte himself was making; and it was clear that if the Directory had not found it possible to respond adequately to similar demands in the past, the events on the Rhine would render it even less possible now.

His letters, however, produced one unexpected result, communicated to him by Lallemant, whom he found one day more than ordinarily perturbed.

'I am wondering,' said the ambassador, 'whether, after all, there is anything to justify your lingering here. I have sure information that the police are hunting Venice for you at this moment.'

'For me?'

'For the Citizen-Representative Lebel. They are assured of his presence. They have, of course, been more or less aware of it ever since that ultimatum of yours on the subject of the ci-devant Comte de Provence.' He sighed a little wearily. 'These Venetians are rousing themselves to audacity now that they think our claws have been cut. My last courier was held up by General Salimbeni at Padua. He was eventually allowed to proceed with my dispatches to the Directory. But I learn that a letter of yours to Barras was detained on the ground that it was a personal, and not an official, communication. It is now in the hands of the inquisitors of state, and Messer Grande has received orders to discover and arrest you.'

As once before, the only thing in all this that really impressed Marc-Antoine was the efficiency it revealed of the secret service which Lallemant had organized.

'It is not possible that they should identify me with Lebel,' he said.

'I am of the same opinion. But if they should, it would go very hard with the man whom they regard as having placed them under the shame of expelling the soi-disant Louis XVIII from Venetian territory. And I should be given no chance of intervening on your behalf. The inquisitors move very secretly, and they leave no traces. Only this week I have lost one of my most valuable agents: a Venetian. By no means the first. He has simply disappeared, and I have no doubt at all that he has been quietly strangled after a secret trial. As he was not a French subject, I cannot even lodge an inquiry about him.'

'I thank Heaven that I am at least a French subject, and . . .'

'You forget,' Lallemant interrupted him, 'that you pass for an English one. I can't claim you without admitting the fraud. That wouldn't improve your chances.' He paused there, to repeat a second later: 'I really think you would be wise to leave.'

But Marc-Antoine dismissed the suggestion.

'Not while the service of the Nation may create a need for my presence.'

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.