Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, no. 25, November 1859 | Page 5

divulge, or agonize human love into inadvertent disloyalty.
At length their fate was decided. Foresti's companion in prison was the
son of a judge of Ferrara; and, one November midnight, their
conversation was interrupted by the unexpected entrance of the jailer,
who bade Foresti follow him. The hour and the manner of the official
convinced both him and his comrade that his sacrifice was resolved

upon; they embraced, and he left the cell to find himself strictly
guarded by six soldiers. This nocturnal procession marched silently
through the vast, lonely, and magnificent rooms of the Ducal Palace to
the door which leads to the Bridge of Sighs: it was the old road to
destruction,--the mysterious process, made familiar by novelists and
poets, by which the ancient and sinister republic made more fearful the
vengeance of government. As the unfortunate youth passed through a
labyrinth of gloomy corridors, he recognized the haunts of the ancient
Inquisition; the atmosphere was clogged with damp; moisture dripped
from the stones. A dungeon, lighted only by a lamp suspended from the
vault, and narrow, humid, and unfurnished, except with a pile of straw
and a rude table, proved the dreary goal of their heavy steps. Left to his
own reflections, Foresti contemplated his prospects with deliberate
anguish; that he had been found guilty was apparent; if the fact of his
direct agency in initiating the oath of self-emancipation, the sacred
compact of national self-assertion in the Austrian dominions, had
transpired, he felt that his prominence as a judicial officer, and the
firmness with which he had refused to explain the purposes or betray
the associates of this memorable league, made him the most probable
victim of extreme measures, should one be chosen from the Carbonari
of Ferrara. At that period of his life he entertained the opinion that
suicide was justifiable to avoid an ignominious death at the hands of
arbitrary power. Believing his fate sealed, he gave a few moments of
tender reminiscence to his dead mother and his living father and sisters,
to the dreams of his youth, and the patriotic aspirations to which he was
about to fall a sacrifice. The jailer returned, bringing a book and a
bottle of wine, for which he had asked; a few tears were shed, a prayer
for forgiveness breathed, and then he plunged a knife into his breast;
the blade broke; he shattered the bottle at his side and swallowed the
fragments, and then fell bleeding and exhausted on the straw. If left
long alone, life would have ebbed away; but, probably in anticipation
of such a catastrophe, the officer ere many hours revisited the cell to
put chains upon the prisoner. Discovering his condition, a surgeon was
called, remedies were applied, and two Austrian sentinels carried
Foresti into the presence of the judge. It was scarcely dawn; the
venerable and courteous, but inflexible representative of the Emperor
expressed solicitude and sympathy; a secretary and physician, with the

guard and their prisoner, confronted each other by the dim light of two
candles. Irritated by the conventional politeness of this arbiter of his
destiny at such a crisis, having vainly sought death, and bitterly
conscious of the long outrages perpetrated under the name of justice,
Foresti burst forth into stern invectives, and boldly declared his liberal
sentiments, his allegiance to the principles for the sake of which he thus
suffered, and his absolute enmity to the usurpers of his country's
freedom. The Cavalier Mazzetti treated this overflow of emotion as the
ebullition of a youthful mind, romantic and intrepid, but unreasonable;
he professed the sincerest pity for so gifted and brave a youth, lamented
his delusion, painted in emphatic words his want of gratitude and
allegiance, treated his political creed and organization as chimerical,
and wound up by informing Foresti that he was condemned to die on
the public square of Venice, and that nothing would save him but a
complete revelation of the true plan, arrangements, and members of the
secret conclave to which he belonged. Threats and blandishments failed
to move the prisoner; he was silent, accepted his doom, and was
remanded with two allies,--one of whom purchased a remission by
treason to his vows. Such was the climax of two dreary years of
imprisonment, aggravated by ingenious moral torture.
If the modern history of liberty is written by a comprehensive
humanitarian, he will not look exclusively to the battle-field for
picturesque and impressive _tableaux_; in that record most signally
will it appear that "the angel of martyrdom is brother to the angel of
victory"; and among the memorable scenes which an earnest chronicler
will delineate with noble pathos, few can exceed in moral interest that
which the Piazza of San Marco, at Venice, presented on Christmas Eve,
1821. There is not a spot in Europe,