Among the antiques, I remarked, like everybody else, the group of _Leda and the Swan_ and the _Ganymede_ ascribed to Praxiteles. The Swan is prodigious in its embrace and its voluptuousness; Leda is too compliant. The eagle of the _Ganymede_ is not a real eagle; it looks the best-tempered beast in the world. Ganymede, charmed at being carried off, is enchanting: he talks to the eagle, which talks to him. Those antiques are placed at either end of the magnificent rooms of the Library. I contemplated, with the sacred respect of the poet, a manuscript of Dante's and gazed, with the greed of the traveller, upon the map of the world of Fra Mauro[98] (1460). Africa, however, does not appear to be traced upon it so correctly as they say. They ought, above all, in Venice, to explore the archives: they would find invaluable documents there. From the painted and gilded halls, I passed to the prisons and the dungeons; the same palace presents the microcosm of society, joy and sorrow. The prisons are under the leads, the dungeons on the level of the water of the canal and on two storeys. A thousand tales are told of strangulations and secret beheadings[99]; by way of compensation we hear that a prisoner left those dungeons fat, plump and rosy, after eighteen years spent in captivity: he had lived like a toad inside a rock. All honour to the human race! What a fine thing it is! Plenty of philanthropic phrases stain the vaults and walls of the underground cells, since the day when our Revolution, so adverse to blood, . . . . . . . dans cet affreux séjour D'un coup de _hache_ a fait entrer le jour[100]. [Sidenote: The Venetian prisons.] In France, the gaols were crammed with victims who were got rid of by cutting their throats; but, in the prisons of Venice, they set free the shades of men who had, perhaps, never been there. The gentle butchers who sliced the throats of children and old men, the kind spectators who assisted at the guillotining of women were melted at the progress of humanity, so well proved by the opening of the Venetian dungeons. As for me, I have a hard heart; I am not like those heroes of sensibility. No old headless ghosts appeared before my eyes in the Palace of the Doges; only it seemed to me that I saw in the cells of the aristocracy what the Christians saw when they shattered the idols: nests of mice escaping from the heads of the gods. That is what happens to every power that is disembowelled and exposed to the light: it lets out the vermin which we used to adore.