To avoid suspicion, Bianca was to join us at Smyrna. In a single night, the hole was cut larger, and we descended into the secret treasury of Venice. What a night! I saw four full bins of gold; in the anteroom, silver was stacked in two great piles with a pathway between for crossing the room, and the coins stood five feet high against the walls. I thought the jailer would go mad, he was singing, leaping about, laughing, frolicking in the gold; I threatened to strangle him if he wasted time or made any more noise. In his joy, he failed at first to notice a table piled with diamonds. I threw myself on them nimbly enough to load up my sailor’s smock and my trouser pockets. Good Lord! And I didn’t take even a third of what was there. Beneath the table were gold ingots. I persuaded my companion to load gold into as many sacks as we could carry, pointing out that this was the only way to avoid detection abroad. ‘The pearls, the jewelry, the diamonds would mark us,’ I told him. Avid as we were, still we couldn’t take away more than two thousand pounds in gold, which already required six trips through the prison to load the gondola. The sentinel at the canal gate had been bribed with a sack holding ten pounds in gold. As for the two gondoliers, they believed they were simply doing a job for the republic.

“We left at daybreak. When we were in the open sea, and I recalled the events of the night—when I remembered the sensations I had experienced, saw again that enormous treasury where, by my calculations, I had left behind thirty million in silver and twenty million in gold, several millions more in diamonds, pearls, and rubies—I was struck by a fit of madness. I had gold fever.

“We disembarked at Smyrna and immediately set sail again for France. As we boarded the French ship, by God’s grace I was rid of my accomplice. At the time I didn’t grasp the full effect of this mishap, which delighted me. We had been so agitated, pressing on in a daze with barely a word between us, waiting until we should be safely far away to relax. It is not surprising that the strange fellow should have lost his head. But you will see how God eventually punished me. I did not rest easy until I had sold off two-thirds of my diamonds in London and Amsterdam, and converted my gold into commercial tender.

“For five years, I hid out in Madrid; then, in 1770, I returned to Paris under a Spanish name and led a dazzling life. Bianca had died. Then, in the midst of my dissipations, and with a fortune of six million, I was stricken blind. I am convinced that the affliction is the consequence of my time in the dungeon, my work digging the tunnel—unless my capacity to see gold somehow was an abuse of the visual faculty that predestined me to lose my sight.

“At the time, I was in love with a woman to whom I expected to bind my own destiny. I had told her the secret of my identity—she belonged to a powerful family—and I had great hopes for Louis XV’s evident favor toward me. I put my trust in that young woman, who was a friend of Madame du Barry. She urged me to consult a renowned oculist in London, but after several months’ stay in that city, she abandoned me in Hyde Park; she stripped me of my whole fortune and left me without resources—for, as I was obliged to hide my name, lest it deliver me to the vengeance of Venice, I could not call on anyone for help; I feared Venice.

“My disability was exploited by spies that woman had set upon me. I’ll spare you tales of adventures worthy of Gil Blas. Your Revolution occurred. I was forced into the Quinze-Vingts shelter, where that woman had me committed after holding me for two years in the Bicêtre asylum as insane.