When I no longer had any fortune left, I was gripped by a frenzy to see Bianca. I returned secretly to Venice and found her again. I was happy for six months, hidden in her house and fed by her; I expected delightedly to live out my life that way. She was being courted by the provveditore; the man sensed there was a rival, in Italy they have a feel for that sort of thing; he spied on us, caught us in bed, the coward! Imagine our terrific struggle! I didn’t kill him, but I wounded him seriously. The adventure put an end to my happy life.

“From that day on I have never found another Bianca. I have had great pleasures, I have lived at Louis XV’s court among the most renowned ladies, but never, anywhere, have I found the qualities, the charms, the love I knew with my darling Venetian.

“The provveditore called out his men and the palace was surrounded, invaded; I defended myself, hoping to die before the eyes of Bianca, who was helping me kill the provveditore. In earlier days the woman had refused to flee with me, but now, after those six months of happiness together, now she wanted to die along with me, and she suffered several wounds herself. Someone threw a greatcoat over me; I was caught in it, rolled up, and carried off in a gondola to a dungeon cell, one of the pozzi beneath the Doge’s Palace. I was twenty-two years old.

“I was still gripping the pommel of my sword so hard that to take it from me would have required cutting off my fist. By a curious chance—or rather, inspired by some idea of precaution—I hid that iron stub in a corner of my cell, as if it might someday be useful. I was treated; my wounds were not fatal. At twenty-two, a person gets over everything. I was sentenced to be decapitated; I played the invalid to gain time. I calculated that my dungeon cell lay alongside the canal, and my plan was to escape by digging through the wall and swimming across the canal, at the risk of drowning. You see the kind of reasoning on which my hopes depended. Whenever the jailer brought me food, I would study the words that had been scratched onto the walls, such as ‘palace side,’ ‘canal side,’ ‘basement side,’ and I eventually worked out a map whose orientation was a bit puzzling but which could be explained by the still-unfinished state of the ducal palace.

“With the ingenuity that arises from the appetite for freedom, by fingering the surface of a stone I managed to decipher an inscription in Arabic. An early prisoner had alerted those who followed to stones he had loosened along the bottom edge of the wall, with eleven feet of tunnel behind it. To continue the man’s work would mean depositing the rubble of excavated stone and mortar on the cell floor. But even if the guards and the Inquisitors had not been confident that the building’s construction demanded only exterior surveillance, the dungeon floor lay a few steps below grade, which would allow any gradual rise in level to go unnoticed by the jailers.

“This enormous labor had been useless, at least to the man who had begun it—its unfinished state meant that the unknown prisoner must have died. In order that his devoted labors should not be forever wasted, some later prisoner must know Arabic—but I had studied Eastern languages at the Armenian convent! A line inscribed into the rear of the stone told the fate of this unfortunate fellow: He died a victim of his immense wealth, which the state of Venice had coveted and seized.

“It took me a month to achieve visible results. As I worked, and especially in those moments when I was undone by fatigue, I heard the chink of gold, I saw gold before me, I was dazzled by diamonds. Oh, but wait: One night, my blunted steel hit wood; I sharpened the sword butt and bored a hole into the wood.

“To manage the work, I squirmed on my belly like a serpent. I stripped bare and advanced like a mole, thrusting my hands ahead of me and pressing against the stone itself to force my way forward. Two nights before I was to appear before my judges, I determined to make a last effort—I pierced the wood, and my steel tool encountered nothing beyond it. Imagine my amazement when I set my eyes to the hole! I was in the wall panel of a cellar where by a faint light I could make out a mound of gold. The doge and one of the Council of Ten were there in the vault, I could hear their voices. From their talk I understood that this was the republic’s secret treasury, the repository of gifts to the doges and stores of booty, known as the ‘denier de Venise’—taxes levied on the plunder from expeditions. I was saved! When the jailer entered my cell, I proposed that he should facilitate my escape and leave with me, carrying all we could manage. With no reason to hesitate, he accepted.

“A ship was leaving for the Levant, and all the arrangements were made. Bianca aided in the preparations I dictated to my accomplice.