Students can live here cheaply at seven crowns a month for the master and six for the servant in respectable boarding-houses. We left early on the Saturday morning, traversing a very fine road beside the river, and having on either hand fields very fertile with corn, and well shaded by rows of trees, upon which the vines were trained. All along the road fine pleasure houses had been built, and over the gate of one of these belonging to the Contarini is an inscription telling how the king[12] lodged here on his way back from Poland. After travelling twenty miles we stopped for dinner at Chaffousine,[13] which is naught but an inn, and here we took boat for Venice. Here they bring ashore all the boats with machinery and pulleys worked by two horses after the fashion of an oil mill. They move their boats by means of wheels placed underneath, which run along planks and thereby convey them over to the canal which runs into the sea on which Venice is situated. We took dinner at Chaffousine, and, having embarked in a gondola, arrived at Venice in time for supper after travelling five miles. [Illustration: VENICE _To face p. 14_, vol. ii. ] On the morning of the morrow, Sunday, M. de Montaigne saw M. de Ferrier,[14] the king’s ambassador, who welcomed him heartily and took him to Mass and back to his house to dinner. On the Monday he and M. d’Estissac again dined there. One remark let fall by the ambassador amongst divers others seemed to him very strange, to wit, that he (the ambassador) held no conversation with the people of the city, who were of a humour so suspicious that should one of their number speak to him only twice, this one would be looked upon askance.[15] M. de Ferrier also informed him that the city of Venice brought an annual income of fifteen hundred thousand crowns to the Signory.[16] With regard to the curiosities of the place they are familiar enough, and M. de Montaigne said that he had found Venice different from what he had anticipated, and that, after he had made a diligent visitation of the city, he was somewhat disappointed. The government, the situation, the arsenal, the Place of St. Mark, and the vast crowds of foreigners, seemed to him most worthy of remark of anything he saw. On Monday November, 6, while he sat at supper, the Signora Veronica Franca,[17] a noble Venetian lady, sent for his acceptance a little book of letters which she had put together, whereupon he gave two crowns to the bearer. On the Tuesday after dinner he had an attack of colic which lasted two or three hours; it was not, as far as could be seen, one of his worst, and before supper he passed two large stones, one after the other. He failed to perceive in the women of Venice that great beauty for which they are famed. He saw some of the highest class of those who make a market of their charms, and this institution appeared to him more marvellous than any other of the city, to see