My first task was to change my clothes.  Father Balbi looked like a peasant, but he was in better condition than I, his clothes were not torn to shreds or covered with blood, his red flannel waistcoat and purple breeches were intact, while my figure could only inspire pity or terror, so bloodstained and tattered was I. I took off my stockings, and the blood gushed out of two wounds I had given myself on the parapet, while the splinters in the hole in the door had torn my waistcoat, shirt, breeches, legs and thighs.  I was dreadfully wounded all over my body.  I made bandages of handkerchiefs, and dressed my wounds as best I could, and then put on my fine suit, which on a winter’s day would look odd enough.  Having tied up my hair, I put on white stockings, a laced shirt, failing any other, and two others over it, and then stowing away some stockings and handkerchiefs in my pockets, I threw everything else into a corner of the room.  I flung my fine cloak over the monk, and the fellow looked as if he had stolen it.  I must have looked like a man who has been to a dance and has spent the rest of the night in a disorderly house, though the only foil to my reasonable elegance of attire was the bandages round my knees.

In this guise, with my exquisite hat trimmed with Spanish lace and adorned with a white feather on my head, I opened a window.  I was immediately remarked by some lounger in the palace court, who, not understanding what anyone of my appearance was doing there at such an early hour, went to tell the door-keeper of the circumstance.  He, thinking he must have locked somebody in the night before, went for his keys and came towards us.  I was sorry to have let myself be seen at the window, not knowing that therein chance was working for our escape, and was sitting down listening to the idle talk of the monk, when I heard the jingling of keys.  Much perturbed I got up and put my eye to a chink in the door, and saw a man with a great bunch of keys in his hand mounting leisurely up the stairs.  I told the monk not to open his mouth, to keep well behind me, and to follow my steps.  I took my pike, and concealing it in my right sleeve I got into a corner by the door, whence I could get out as soon as it was opened and run down the stairs.  I prayed that the man might make no resistance, as if he did I should be obliged to fell him to the earth, and I determined to do so.

The door opened; and the poor man as soon as he saw me seemed turned to a stone.  Without an instant’s delay and in dead silence, I made haste to descend the stairs, the monk following me.  Avoiding the appearance of a fugitive, but walking fast, I went by the giants’ Stairs, taking no notice of Father Balbi, who kept cabling:  out “To the church! to the church!”

The church door was only about twenty paces from the stairs, but the churches were no longer sanctuaries in Venice; and no one ever took refuge in them.  The monk knew this, but fright had deprived him of his faculties.  He told me afterwards that the motive which impelled him to go to the church was the voice of religion bidding him seek the horns of the altar.