These judicial records are terribly unmanageable material in a biographer's hand. To think that a lynx–eyed paleographer, by poking out one volume among twelve million, and therein decyphering what was meant to be concealed for ever three hundred years ago, should have utterly spoiled for us the pretty romantic story, with which Bianca's adventures have generally been understood to commence. Romantic and despairing passion of the young Florentine banker's clerk, shot to the heart by glances darted across the narrow canal from the noble palace opposite;—(alas! the same detestable registers prove, that the Florentine bank in which Bonaventuri was employed was not opposite, but in a line with the Cappello palace, and out of glance–shot;)—chance meeting at matins; imprudent but innocent interviews at early dawn, with palace door left ajar to secure the means of timely return; unhappy stroke of destiny in the shape of the baker going his early rounds, and, thinking to do well, shutting fatally the half–open palace door, and cutting off all retreat from the unfortunate maiden thus forced by terror and despair to sudden and unpremeditated flight with her lover:—all knocked to the ground like a child's card house, by the interference of a lynx–eyed, dry–as–dust paleographer! [Sidenote: THE TRUE STORY.] So the Florentine banker's clerk was a vulgar fortune–hunter, scheming to carry off an heiress! Bianca herself was not only "no better," as the classic phrase goes, but very perceptibly worse, "than she should have been!"—(another MS.[144] chronicle declares that, being motherless, and not very sharply looked after, she took to "freer habits of life than were usual among noble Venetian damsels"). The flight from Venice was a planned and got up thing, not unaccompanied, say some[145] authorities, by a carefully–selected trousseau of the family jewels; and the baker, unconscious, but fatal instrument in the hands of destiny, a myth! All this pretty story, then, which shares with so many others still prettier, the misfortune of not being in accordance with fact, has to be regretfully abandoned. Regretfully also must be sacrificed all the detailed account of Bianca's journey with Bonaventuri to Florence, with various adventures on the road,—hiding at Ferrara, and narrow escape there from the secret emissaries of the republic, &c. &c., which adorns the more or less fictitious accounts of the matter, that have been written in great number upon the "romance of history" plan. All these things may have happened; but unhappily there is no authority for saying that they did so. A poor fact–bound biographer, therefore, having due fear of Dryasdust before his eyes, finds himself obliged to shape his statement in this fashion.