"The Provveditore called his servants, the palace was surrounded and
entered; I fought for my life that I might die beneath Bianca's eyes;
Bianca helped me to kill the Provveditore. Once before she had refused
flight with me; but after six months of happiness she wished only to
die with me, and received several thrusts. I was entangled in a great
cloak that they flung over me, carried down to a gondola, and hurried
to the Pozzi dungeons. I was twenty-two years old. I gripped the hilt
of my broken sword so hard, that they could only have taken it from me
by cutting off my hand at the wrist. A curious chance, or rather the
instinct of self-preservation, led me to hide the fragment of the
blade in a corner of my cell, as if it might still be of use. They
tended me; none of my wounds were serious. At two-and-twenty one can
recover from anything. I was to lose my head on the scaffold. I
shammed illness to gain time. It seemed to me that the canal lay just
outside my cell. I thought to make my escape by boring a hole through
the wall and swimming for my life. I based my hopes on the following
reasons.

"Every time that the jailer came with my food, there was light enough
to read directions written on the walls--'Side of the Palace,' 'Side
of the Canal,' 'Side of the Vaults.' At last I saw a design in this,
but I did not trouble myself much about the meaning of it; the actual
incomplete condition of the Ducal Palace accounted for it. The longing
to regain my freedom gave me something like genius. Groping about with
my fingers, I spelled out an Arabic inscription on the wall. The
author of the work informed those to come after him that he had loosed
two stones in the lowest course of masonry and hollowed out eleven
feet beyond underground. As he went on with his excavations, it became
necessary to spread the fragments of stone and mortar over the floor
of his cell. But even if jailers and inquisitors had not felt sure