Venice. Without streets and vehicles, the uproar
of wheels, the brutality of horses, and with its little winding ways
where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of
a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of
furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an
immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most
ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the
part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses
of decoration. And somehow the splendid common domicile, familiar,
domestic, and resonant, also resembles a theater, with actors clicking
over bridges and, in straggling processions, tripping along fondamentas.
As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the
canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the
same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the
battered scenery of their little houses of comedy, strike you as members
of an endless dramatic troupe.

I went to bed that night very tired, without being able to compose a
letter to Miss Tita. Was this failure the reason why I became conscious
the next morning as soon as I awoke of a determination to see the poor
lady again the first moment she would receive me? That had something to
do with it, but what had still more was the fact that during my sleep a
very odd revulsion had taken place in my spirit. I found myself aware of
this almost as soon as I opened my eyes; it made me jump out of my bed
with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door
ajar or a candle burning under a shelf. Was I still in time to save my
goods? That question was in my heart; for what had now come to pass
was that in the unconscious cerebration of sleep I had swung back to a
passionate appreciation of Miss Bordereau's papers. They were now more
precious than ever, and a kind of ferocity had come into my desire to
possess them. The condition Miss Tita had attached to the possession of
them no longer appeared an obstacle worth thinking of, and for an hour,
that morning, my repentant imagination brushed it aside. It was absurd
that I should be able to invent nothing; absurd to renounce so easily
and turn away helpless from the idea that the only way to get hold of
the papers was to unite myself to her for life. I would not unite myself
and yet I would have them. I must add that by the time