On the other hand, after a long lapse of time, and in the presence of documents proceeding from opposite sources, it is now so hard to ascertain the simple truth, that the story of the younger Carrara is told in two quite opposite ways. The version I have given seems to be the more reasonable one; the other tells us that it was not Visconti, but Venice, that persecuted the young couple, and that it was not Venice, but Visconti, who in the end recalled them to Padua. Be that as it may, Carrara was once more in possession of his principality in 1392. It seems to me thoroughly in accordance with the policy of Venice to have thus installed him again at her very gates and under her protection, in order to crush him and his family the more effectually, as she soon afterwards did. Fourteen years later Venice had literally forced him to declare war against her, and had sent the invincible Carlo Zeno to command her armies; the inevitable result had followed, and Carrara himself with two of his sons were prisoners in the ducal palace. The three were condemned to death, and were strangled in prison. The private execution of the noble prisoners of war was not acknowledged by the government, and the city was gravely informed that they had, all three, died of colds or coughs, vaguely described as catarrh. But the people were not deceived, and were certainly not displeased; and within twenty-four hours a triumphant song was bawled through the streets of Venice, of which the burden was ‘A dead man makes no war.’ The words have remained a proverb in Italy. The elder Carrara, long a state prisoner in Milan, had been duly poisoned with ‘magical liquors’ by the five court physicians of Visconti in 1393. One of the younger Carrara’s younger sons died in Florence very soon after his father, but the fourth survived to be murdered in his turn nearly thirty years later. I find in Smedley’s _Sketches from Venetian History_ a very curious and interesting note with regard to him and to the disappearance of his race. [Sidenote: _Smedley, I. chap. x. note._]