The gondola drifts slowly between the palaces resting on the water. The Ca D’Oro outlines against the sky its designs of Romanesque acanthus. The Pesaro Palace opens its gigantic stalactic gates into the shadow of its deep courtyard. From under the curved arch of the Rialto a tear still falls. The erect, angular obelisks of the Palace of Pappadopoli pierce the sky as though in defiance of the enemy, and from the high belvederes two somber cannon raise their sinister mouths in air. On the deserted “fondamenta” there appears the slim figure of a woman enveloped in a shawl and she advances tranquilly gazing towards the East. How calm, how sacred her demeanor! Nothing of earth is there about her body; all her sinews seem set for the same struggle, all her nerves seem tautened by the same love. Her gesture is not new. It has been beheld before on earth. The Virgins of the Carpaccio know it; it has been known for the past fifteen centuries by the women of Venice accustomed to await the advent from the sea of their greatest griefs and their supreme joys. For those women, for the children who have been tortured on the other side of the Piave, I am determined that this pure image of Venice, this pure image of our race shall not suffer contamination. The clouds of springtime fled rapidly overhead; piling one upon the other into white heaps, swollen to huge proportions. Occasionally a strip of azure disclosed itself and then an oblique ray of light shot through, coloring for a second the vivid façades of the palaces. A boat filled with cabbages, of the large white-headed variety from Verona, passed near us and scattered the fragrance of the country. Ca’ Foscari stood out, with its broad face and large windows rimmed with gold, and farther on glittered the statues of the Contarini Delle Figure palace. A solitary aeroplane which had arisen from Sant. Andrea described slow curves overhead, accelerating and retarding the run of its motor. My faithful friends, my trusted companions were in the boat with me. We had come to Venice in a moment of expectation, during a respite in the struggle, to derive from these memories the strength to accomplish our undertaking, now almost wholly matured in my mind and become the favored child of my imagination. Every day I outlined it and reshaped it with great love; daily I examined its weak spots with affectionate care; daily my assurance revived; every moment I tormented and tortured myself with new doubts so as to be certain that I might not be cheating myself, that I would not fail. At night, before sleep overtook me, I felt the beautiful armored creature alive in my flesh; I felt in my rapid pulse the whirlwind of its strength ready to hurl itself like an arrow which cannot fail; I was conscious of the calculating cunning, the vivid joy of doing evil, the perfervid pride in being able to do harm. The terrible anxiety of expectation burned into my forehead like a sledgehammer shaping a red-hot point.