Early one morning the chief agent of the Inquisitors of State, who was known as “Messier Grande,” came to his lodgings with an escort of thirty soldiers and arrested him while he was in bed. While the police secured his papers and his compromising books, Casanova dressed himself leisurely; he shaved and combed his locks and put on his best clothes, a shirt of finest lace and a long coat of the best taffety, “just as if he was going to a wedding party,” he explains. Then Messier Grande carried him off in a gondola to a place of security where he was locked up until the afternoon, when an order arrived to take him to prison. The police gondola followed a devious track through the smaller canals and at last reached the Grand Canal where it ran alongside the palace stairs. Here they landed and the prisoner was ushered into the presence of an official wearing a patrician’s robe, who scanned him from head to foot and said briefly, “Take him and lock him up.” This was the secretary of the inquisitors, who talked in Tuscan as if ashamed to use the Venetian dialect. Casanova next gives us a glimpse of the interior of the prison: “Messier Grande now handed me over to the warder of the Piombi, who, with an enormous bunch of keys in his hand, led me up two small staircases into a gallery, to a locked door, through it into a second gallery, at the end of which we entered a dirty garret, badly lighted by a circular window high up. I thought this was my prison chamber, but I was mistaken, for at the end was another door double-lined with iron, perforated by a circular hole, and I was ordered to enter. For the moment I was otherwise engaged, curiously examining a strange machine strongly attached to the wall. It was an iron horseshoe an inch thick and five inches across the opening. ‘Oh that,’ explained the gaoler, ‘you would like to know what that is? When their excellencies, the inquisitors, desire that any one should be strangled, he takes his seat on the stool below, and this machine is put round his neck, half of which it encircles. A silken cord, attached to a wheel, is placed round the other half and by turning a handle the silk is tightened until death ensues and the sufferer gives up his soul to God--for you will understand the priest is close at hand and never leaves him until all is over.’ ‘Ah,’ I replied, ‘and I presume it is your business to tighten the cord.’ He would not condescend to answer but led me into my cell and left me asking whether I would like to order any food. ‘I haven’t thought of it yet,’ I said lightly, and he went away. I paid the penalty of thus showing temper, for he did not return till next day and I was left for twenty-four hours wholly without food.”