The pretty version of the story;—and the true version of the same.—Saint Mark's Square at Florence.—Bianca's beauty.—The Medici _en famille_.—The Casino of St. Mark.—The Proprieties.—"Cosa di Francesco." In one of the twelve million volumes[140] of the Archives of Venice, preserved in the two hundred and ninety–eight rooms of the suppressed convent of St. Maria dei Frari, there is one pointed out to our notice by the learned and accurate Emmanuele[141] Cigogna, in which certain passages have been blotted out; and in the margin opposite to them are written, in clerk's Latin, the words, "Obliterated by order of the Council of Ten." The volume in question is a register of criminal processes before the court of the "Avvogaria" for the year 1563. But the "Avvogadori" (members of one of the numerous magistracies of Venice, whose attributions were partly those of police magistrates, and partly such as belong to a public prosecutor), in obeying the commands of "The Ten," did not reckon on the lynx–eyed curiosity of modern peerers into the secrets of the past. "As this obliteration," says Signor Cigogna, "was not effected by the knife, but only by drawing a pen with a different ink over the lines, the passages scratched out have been very clearly decyphered by the skill and sharp eyes of Signor Marco Solari, the paleographer." And the secret, which the terrible "Ten" thought to hide for evermore, thus divulged, and stripped of its clerk's Latin dress, is to this effect. [Sidenote: THE SUPPRESSED PASSAGE.]