Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined it built in the Republic’s declining years by some ruinous noble, whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble’s great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent _feste da ballo_. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo’s school, which had smiled down on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color. How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.
There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming old Prussian painter, Nerlÿ; the frescos of this are dim and faded and dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his wife’s necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner, the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here, doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded, and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in perpetual moonlight.