Back, that doubt; back, the thought that no anguish rends annihilation! Atheist, when death buries its nails into your heart, who knows but that, in the last moment of consciousness, before the destruction of the _ego_, you will feel an atrocity of pain capable of filling eternity, an immensity of suffering of which a human being can have no idea in the circumscribed limits of time! Ah yes, _ci revedremo!_ I was too near the island and town of Murano not to visit the factories whence came the mirrors in my mother's room at Combourg[118]. I did not see those factories, which are now closed; but they spun out before my eyes, like the thread of our frail lives, a slender cord of glass: it was of that glass that the bead was made that hung from the nose of the little Iroquois at the Falls of Niagara: the hand of a Venetian girl had rounded off the ornament of a savage girl[119]. I met a finer sight than Mila. A woman was carrying a swaddled child; the delicate complexion, the captivating glance of that Muranese are idealized in my memory. She looked sad and preoccupied. Had I been Lord Byron, this would have been a favourable opportunity for making an experiment with seduction on poverty; a little money goes a long way here. Then I should have played the desperate solitary beside the waves, intoxicated with my success and my genius. Love seems a different thing to me: I have lost sight of René since many a year; but I doubt if he sought the secret of his pains in his pleasures. Every day, after my excursions, I sent to the post, but there was nothing there: Count Griffi did not reply from Florence; the public papers permitted to exist in this land of independence would not have dared to state that a traveller had alighted at the White Lion. Venice, where the gazettes[120] were born, is reduced to reading the placards which advertise on the same bill the opera of the day and the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The Alduses[121] will not come forth from their tombs to embrace, in my person, the defender of the liberty of the press. I had therefore to wait Returning to my inn, I dined and amused myself with the company of the gondoliers stationed, as I have said, under my window at the entrance to the Grand Canal. [Sidenote: The gondoliers.] The gaiety of those sons of Nereus never forsakes them: clothed by the sun, they are fed by the sea. They do not lie about idly like the _lazzaroni_ in Naples: ever stirring, they are sailors who lack ships and work, but who would still carry on the trade of the world and win the Battle of Lepanto, if the days of Venetian liberty and glory were not past.