The daughter of a Venetian patrician gone off with a banker’s clerk!  The idea maddened the old man—­he would trace them, and punish them, and all who had assisted their flight.  Messer Giovanni Battista Buonaventuri, Pietro’s uncle, the manager of the bank; Bianca’s maid and her parents; the two gondolieri and their wives; and ever so many others were cast into prison.

No news came of the erring couple, and now they were well ahead of pursuit.  Two thousand ducats was the blood-money offered for Pietro, dead or alive.  Assassins bought for gold followed on the road to Florence, but never caught up their quarry.  Messer Bartolommeo’s vengeance knew no bounds, and his new wife, Madonna Lucrezia de’ Grimani-Contarini fanned the flames.  She hated Bianca.

The winter sun had long ago set beyond the stone-pines of Monte Oliveto, and the deep blue Tuscan sky had turned to sober slate, purpled with the fading glow of northern crimson.  It was a night near Christmas, and Ser Zenobio Buonaventuri sat at his table, in his modest little one-storied house on the Piazza San Marco, putting the finishing touches to his precis of the day’s notarial work, in the Corte della Mercanzia.  His worthy spouse, Madonna Costanza’s weary fingers had just completed the stitching of the last of twelve pairs of kid gloves, for her employers, of the Guild of the Fur and Skin Merchants—­the Salvetti, who were her relatives.

They had been talking, as was their wont, about their dashing, handsome son Pietro, the pride of their hearts, who was away in Venice, a clerk under his uncle, Giovanni Battista.  They were a lonesome couple, and they deplored their four years’ parting from their only boy.  To be sure, he had often, indeed regularly, written to them happy, contented letters.  Moreover, Messer Giovanni Battista had sent them very satisfactory reports of his application to business, but he named one subject, which filled the hearts of the doting parents with apprehension—­it was, of course, a story of romance.  Pietro had a sweetheart—­that in itself caused little uneasiness; what healthy-minded young fellow had not!  But Pietro had an unusually amorous nature, and his love escapades had not been few in Florence.  In Venice, “the Court of Venus,” he revelled in the fair beauty and the freedom of maidens, so much more lovely and so much less reserved, than the Florentine girls he knew.  But when Messer Giovanni Battista named as his innamorata the young daughter of one of the proudest patricians of the Serene Republic, the worthy couple were in trepidation lest the lad’s passion should lead to regrettable embarrassments.

No love was lost between the sister Republics, and the feeling of hostility in public matters was carried into private life.  Pietro never named the romance, but Ser Zenobio, by way of meeting—­as was his wont—­his troubles half way, penned anxious cautions to his son.  The Buonaventuri, though by no means an obscure family, were not Grandi like the Cappelli, Lords of Venice.  Moreover, Bianca’s father was a wealthy man and a member of the Supreme Council, whilst Ser Zenobio was merely a modest notary of no great fame or fortune.