every one sent me about my business for a lunatic. Come! we will go to
Venice; let us set out as beggars, we shall come back millionaires. We
will buy back some of my estates, and you shall be my heir! You shall
be Prince of Varese!"

My head was swimming. For me his confidences reached the proportions
of tragedy; at the sight of that white head of his and beyond it the
black water in the trenches of the Bastille lying still as a canal in
Venice, I had no words to answer him. Facino Cane thought, no doubt,
that I judged him, as the rest had done, with a disdainful pity; his
gesture expressed the whole philosophy of despair.

Perhaps his story had taken him back to happy days and to Venice. He
caught up his clarionet and made plaintive music, playing a Venetian
boat-song with something of his lost skill, the skill of the young
patrician lover. It was a sort of _Super flumina Babylonis_. Tears
filled my eyes. Any belated persons walking along the Boulevard
Bourdon must have stood still to listen to an exile's last prayer, a
last cry of regret for a lost name, mingled with memories of Bianca.
But gold soon gained the upper hand, the fatal passion quenched the
light of youth.

"I see it always," he said; "dreaming or waking, I see it; and as I
pace to and fro, I pace in the Treasury, and the diamonds sparkle. I
am not as blind as you think; gold and diamonds light up my night, the
night of the last Facino Cane, for my title passes to the Memmi. My
God! the murderer's punishment was not long delayed! _Ave Maria_," and
he repeated several prayers that I did not heed.

"We will go to Venice!" I said, when he rose.