“As I came into the theatre,” the Frenchman observed, “you were the first person I saw; and I remarked to his Excellency that if there was a woman who could personify a nation it was you.  But I grieve to discover that, though you represent its divine beauty, you have not the constitutional spirit.”

“Are you not bound,” said the Duchess, pointing to the ballet now being danced, “to find all our dancers detestable and our singers atrocious?  Paris and London rob us of all our leading stars.  Paris passes judgment on them, and London pays them.  Genovese and la Tinti will not be left to us for six months—­”

At this juncture, the Austrian left the box.  Vendramin, the Prince, and the other two Italians exchanged a look and a smile, glancing at the French physician.  He, for a moment, felt doubtful of himself,—­a rare thing in a Frenchman,—­fancying he had said or done something incongruous; but the riddle was immediately solved.

“Do you thing it would be judicious,” said Emilio, “if we spoke our mind in the presence of our masters?”

“You are in a land of slaves,” said the Duchess, in a tone and with a droop of the head which gave her at once the look for which the physician had sought in vain.  “Vendramin,” she went on, speaking so that only the stranger could hear her, “took to smoking opium, a villainous idea suggested to him by an Englishman who, for other reasons of his, craved an easy death—­not death as men see it in the form of a skeleton, but death draped with the frippery you in France call a flag—­a maiden form crowned with flowers or laurels; she appears in a cloud of gunpowder borne on the flight of a cannon-ball —­or else stretched on a bed between two courtesans; or again, she rises in the steam of a bowl of punch, or the dazzling vapor of a diamond—­but a diamond in the form of carbon.

“Whenever Vendramin chooses, for three Austrian lire, he can be a Venetian Captain, he can sail in the galleys of the Republic, and conquer the gilded domes of Constantinople.  Then he can lounge on the divans in the Seraglio among the Sultan’s wives, while the Grand Signor himself is the slave of the Venetian conqueror.  He returns to restore his palazzo with the spoils of the Ottoman Empire.  He can quit the women of the East for the doubly masked intrigues of his beloved Venetians, and fancy that he dreads the jealousy which has ceased to exist.

“For three zwanziger he can transport himself into the Council of Ten, can wield there terrible power, and leave the Doges’ Palace to sleep under the watch of a pair of flashing eyes, or to climb a balcony from which a fair hand has hung a silken ladder.  He can love a woman to whom opium lends such poetic grace as we women of flesh and blood could never show.

“Presently he turns over, and he is face to face with the dreadful frown of the senator, who holds a dagger.  He hears the blade plunged into his mistress’ heart.  She dies smiling on him; for she has saved him.