In the course of the month of June began the trial of the three Inquisitors, Agostino Barbarigo, Angelo Maria Gabrieli, and Catterino Corner, and of Pizzamano, the commander of the Lido fort. Even Bonaparte was obliged to admit that there was nothing against them, but he would not allow them to be acquitted; he thought it better policy to pardon them ‘in consideration of their advanced age.’ His letter on the subject is dated the fourth of October. But Pizzamano, though declared free, was still kept in prison at Bonaparte’s pleasure, and on the twenty-sixth of October sent a petition directly to the latter. Bonaparte sent it on to General Serrurier, in Venice, with an order for the man’s liberation written in the margin. Bonaparte had kept up his comedy to the very last. On the eighth of October, General Balland had given the Venetians, in his chief’s name, the most ample assurances of attachment and devotion. On the seventeenth, nine days later, by the treaty of Campo-Formio, Bonaparte sold Venice and the whole Venetian territory to the Emperor of Austria, including Dalmatia and Istria, in exchange for the Ionian Islands, the Cisalpine Republic, the Duchy of Modena, and the provinces of Lombardy as far as the Adige and Mantua. Having got his price for the dead body, Bonaparte proceeded to strip it of everything valuable, so far as he could, before handing it over. The horses of Saint Mark’s were taken down from the façade of the basilica, the most valuable pictures, parchments, and books were packed, and all was sent to Paris. The farce of freedom was over, and the bitterness of reality came back, harder to bear, perhaps, but as much more honourable, as suffering is more dignified than drunken rioting. On the eighteenth of January 1798 the Austrian garrison took possession of Venice. Before closing these pages, I shall go back a few months and shall translate Giustina Renier Michiel’s touching account of the scene which took place in Dalmatia, in the preceding month of August, when the Austrians came by sea to take possession of the country. On the twenty-second of August, Rukavina [the Austrian general] arrived with a fleet and a thousand soldiers and landed at Pettana, a mile and a half from Perasto. The [Sidenote: _G. R. Michiel, Origini. Compare also Rom. x. 249._]