Those double-gilt edifices,çoisRené so profusely embellished by Giorgione[80], Titian, Paul Veronese[81], Tintoretto[82], Giovanni Bellini[83], Paris Bordone[84], the two Palmas[85], are filled with bronzes, marbles, granites, porphyries, precious antiques, rare manuscripts; their internal magic is equal to their external magic; and when, in the bland light that illumines them, one discovers the illustrious names and noble memories attached to their vaults, one cries with Philippe de Comines:
"'Tis the most triumphant city that ever I saw!"
And yet it is no longer the Venice of the Minister of Louis XI.; the Venice the Bride of the Adriatic and mistress of the seas; the Venice that gave emperors to Constantinople, kings to Cyprus, princes to Dalmatia, the Peloponnesus, Crete; the Venice that humiliated the German Cæsars and received the Popes as suppliants at her inviolable hearths; the Venice of whom monarchs esteemed it an honour to be the citizens, to whom Petrarch[86], Pletho[87], Bessarion[88] bequeathed the remnants of Greek and Latin literature saved from the shipwreck of barbarism; the Venice, a republic in the midst of Feudal Europe, that served as a buckler to Christianity; the Venice, the "setter-up of lions," that trampled on the ramparts of Ptolemaïs[89], Ascalon[90], Tyre[91] and overthrew the Crescent at Lepanto[92]; the Venice whose doges were men of learning and whose merchants knights; the Venice that laid low the Orient or bought its perfumes, that brought back from Greece conquered turbans or recovered master-pieces; the Venice that issued victorious from the ungrateful League of Cambrai; the Venice that triumphed through her feasts, her courtezans and her arts, as through her arms and her great men; the Venice that was at once Corinth, Athens and Carthage, adorning her head with rostral crowns and floral diadems.
It is no longer even the city through which I passed when I went to visit the shores that had witnessed her glory; but, thanks to her voluptuous breezes and agreeable waters, she retains a charm: it is especially to declining countries that a beautiful climate is a necessity. There is civilization enough in Venice to lend a niceness to existence. The seduction of the sky prevents one from requiring greater human dignity: an attractive virtue is exhaled from those vestiges of greatness, those traces of the arts which surround one. The ruins of an old state of society which produced such things as these, while giving you a distaste for a new state of society, leave you no desire for a future. You love to feel yourself die with all that is dying around you; you have no other care than to adorn what remains of your life as it is gradually laid aside. Nature, which causes young generations to reappear amongst ruins as quickly as it covers those ruins with flowers, keeps for the most enfeebled races the habit of the passions and the enchantment of pleasure.