es of a guest who was quite ready to become their master. They
saw clearly that their hours were numbered, that they were approaching
that fatal period at which rioting becomes imminent, when the leaders
are carried away with it, like pieces of straw in a swift current.

"Hercules could not show himself in public without being received with
shouts of acclamation and noisy greetings, and deputations from the
nobility, as well as from the people, came repeatedly and told him that
he had only to make a sign and to say a word, for his name to be in
every mouth, and for his authority to be accepted. They begged him on
their knees to accept the supreme authority, as though he would be
conferring a favor on them, but the free-lance did not seem to
understand them, and repelled their offers with the superb indifference
of a soldier who has nothing to do with the people or a crown.

"At length, however, his resistance grew weaker; he felt the
intoxication of power, and grew accustomed to the idea of holding the
lives of thousands in his hands, of having a palace, arsenals full of
arms, chests full of gold, ships which he could send on adventurous
cruises wherever he pleased, and of governing that city, with all its
houses and all its churches, and of being a leading figure at all grand
functions in the cathedral.

"The shop-keepers and merchants were overcome by terror at this, and
bowed before the shadow of that great sword, which might sweep them all
away and upset their false weights and scales. So they assembled
secretly in a monastery of the Carmelite friars outside the gates of the
city, and a short time afterwards the weaver Marconelli, and the
money-changer Rippone brought Giaconda, who was one of the most
beautiful courtesans in Venice, and who knew every secret in the _Art of
Love_, and whose kisses were a foretaste of Paradise, back with them
from that city. She soon managed to touch the soldier with her delicate,
fair skin, to make him inhale its bewitching odor in close proximity,
and to dazzle him with her large, dark eyes, in which the reflection of
stars seemed to shine, and when he had once tasted that feast of love,
and that heavy wine of kisses, when he had clasped that pink and white
body in his arms, and had listened to that voice which sounded as soft
as music, and which promised him eternities of joy, and vowed to him
eternities of pleasures, Hercules lost his head, and forgot his dreams
and his oaths.