So much for Bonaparte’s ‘friend.’ The Republic also offered the most profuse hospitality to Madame Baraguay d’Hilliers, in the hope that she would soften her husband’s harsh temper. By this time Bonaparte knew as well as Condulmer himself that the Venetian fleet was miserably manned, and that the city must yield at once if besieged, and he thought it quite useless to receive any more envoys. Besides, he knew that his propaganda had succeeded in the capital itself; his paid agents had done their work well, and it had been bravely seconded by the manifest incompetence of the government which had exasperated all classes. It is said that there were fifteen thousand republicans ready to answer the first signal as soon as it should be given by Villetard, the Secretary of the French Legation. These were not by any means all of the people, for many ladies of the nobility had been [Illustration: SO-CALLED HOUSE OF DESDEMONA] spending their time in making tricolour cockades, and the government knew it. The French no longer took the trouble to conceal the preparations they were making for a revolution. A wholesale grocer who played a very suspicious part in the whole affair, Tommaso Zorzi, was dining with Villetard, and heard several Frenchmen speaking of the revolution that was arranged for the next day; it was intended to set up a tree of liberty in the Square of Saint Mark’s and to declare the fall of the aristocratic government. When every one else was gone, Zorzi implored Villetard to put off firing the train, and explained that a large part of the populace would side with their old masters. The French Secretary would promise nothing, and on leaving him Zorzi hastened to the ducal palace and was received by the Doge in spite of the late hour. He told what he had heard. The Doge sent at once for Pietro Donà, and the two bade Zorzi obtain from Villetard a written declaration of the conditions on which he would consent to give up the revolution. On the following day Zorzi and his friend Spada appeared before the Savi with a paper which they said they had drawn up in the presence of Villetard, who had refused to write anything himself. The impression one gets in reading this document is that Zorzi and his shadow were in the trick with Villetard. The paper calls them ‘mediators,’ [Sidenote: _Rom. x. 386 for the text._] talks of ‘pacifically changing the aristocratic forms of government,’ ‘leaving open to the sight of the public the prisons called the Piombi and Pozzi,’ abolishing capital punishment, setting up a tree of liberty in the Square of Saint Mark’s, publicly burning the insignia of the old government, a universal amnesty, and a Te Deum in Saint Mark’s, where the image of the Virgin Mary was to be exhibited. The paper also named the provisional government, in which the grocer and his shadow were to occupy high positions.