At a banquet, which it was customary for the doge to celebrate in his palace, after the bull-hunt, on the Carnival Thursday, a squabble had arisen from some too pressing familiarity offered by one of the young gallants of the court to his mistress. Michele Steno, a gentleman of poor estate, was enamoured of a lady in attendance upon the dogaressa; and, presuming upon her favour, he was guilty of some freedom which led the doge to order his exclusion.--This command appears to have been executed with more than necessary violence; and the youth, fired by the indignity which disgraced him in the eyes of his mistress, sought revenge by assailing Faliero in that point in which he conceived him to be most vulnerable. He wrote on the doge's chair, in the council chamber, a few words reflecting upon the dogaressa: "Marino Faliero, husband of the lovely wife; he keeps, but others kiss her."[7] The offence was traced to its author; it was pitiful and unmanly; yet it scarcely deserved heavier punishment than that which the XL adjudged to it--namely, that Steno should be imprisoned for two months, and afterwards banished from the state for a year. But, to the morbid and excited spirit of Faliero, the petty affront of this rash youth appeared heightened to a state crime; and the lenient sentence with which his treason (for so he considered it) had been visited, was an aggravation of every former indignity offered to the chief magistrate by the oligarchy which affected to control him. Steno, he said, should have been ignominiously hanged, or at least condemned to perpetual exile.