To end this state of things Andoche Junot was dispatched to Venice.
Bad manners were the order of the day with the men of the new French règime. Equality, they held, could dispense with courtesies, and was best expressed by an insolent and coarse directness, and by the elimination of all ceremonial. It was strict attention to this which had enabled Marc-Antoine so successfully to play the part of Lebel. The bad manners of Bonaparte were overshadowed by the greatness of the man; his arrogance sprang from consciousness of power in himself rather than in his office. The bad manners of those who surrounded him, each of whom played to other audiences the rôle of a little Bonaparte, was stark, flagrant, and uncondonably offensive.
To receive this emissary the College assembled in the splendid chamber in which Veronese and Tintoretto had immortalized the power and glory of Venice. Overhead, on the ceiling, depicted in sensuous beauty by Veronese, Venetia was enthroned upon the globe, with Justice and Peace for her supporters. Above the throne of the Doge glowed the same master's great canvas of the Battle of Lepanto, whilst on the right were ranged Tintoretto's portraits of such great doges as Donà, da Ponte, and Alvise Mocenigo.
Here, arrayed in their patrician robes, the members of the College, with the enthroned Doge presiding, awaited the soldier.
When he faced them from the threshold, booted, spurred, and hat on head, it was as a meeting of the old order and the new: the austere, ceremonious, and gracious with the frankly direct, the boorish, and the graceless.
The Master of Ceremonies, the Knight of the Doge, advanced, wand in hand, to conduct and present the emissary as the etiquette prescribed. But the coarse soldier, thrusting him brutally aside, tramped across the room without uncovering, his sabre clanking after him. Unbidden he mounted the steps of the throne and flung himself into the seat reserved for foreign ambassadors, on the right of the Doge.
The Senators stared askance, stricken dumb by this contemptuous treatment. The sun of Venice had set indeed if an insolent foreign upstart could dare to be so negligent of the deference due to this august assembly. Lodovico Manin, pale and nervous, was so lost to a sense of the dignity of his high office as to offer, nevertheless, the courteous words of welcome that the forms prescribed.
Junot's utter disregard of these was like a blow in the face to every patrician present. He plucked a paper from his belt. It was the letter from Bonaparte. In a voice loud and harsh he read out its contents to them. They were in tune with his conduct. They were inspired by the same brutal, hectoring directness. The commander of the Army of Italy complained of the arming of the peasants and of the murder of French soldiers. On the provocative brigandage by these same French soldiers, the robbery, rape, and murder of subjects of a state which was at peace with France, he was silent.
'You attempt in vain,' Bonaparte wrote, 'to avoid the responsibility of your order. Do you think that I cannot cause the first people of the Universe to be respected? . . . The Senate of Venice has replied with perfidy to the generosity which we have always shown. My aide-de-camp, who goes to you, will offer you the choice of peace or war. If you do not at once disarm and disperse the hostile peasants and arrest and surrender to us the authors of the murders, war is declared.'
There was more of the same kind.
Having read it to the end, Junot got to his feet as abruptly as he had sat down, and ever with the same coarse disregard of courtesies, he clanked out again.
'Now we see,' said Count Pizzamano, addressing no one in particular, 'how low our policy of drift, our pusillanimity, and our avarice have brought us. From being the first people in Europe, we are become the most abject.'
And abjectly now they sent their apologies to Bonaparte, their expressions of respect and devotion and their promise of immediate compliance with his demands.
With that war-averting answer Junot departed on Easter Monday, and on that same day in Verona to cries of 'Saint Mark!' and 'Death to the French!' the fury of a long-suffering people flamed terribly forth.
The French fled for shelter to the forts, but not before some hundreds of them had been slaughtered. In those forts they were besieged by the Dalmatian troops and the armed peasants who had headed the rising, and Count Francesco Emili was dispatched to Venice to implore the Senate to break with France and to send reinforcements to support the Veronese patriots.
But the Serenissima, which had not broken with France when she might successfully have done so, was horror-stricken at the invitation to break now. Dissociating herself utterly from that rising known to history as the Veronese Easter, she once more asserted her neutrality and her friendship for France, leaving those who had risen in their loyalty to her to prepare for death as their reward.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte dispatched Augier to Verona, and peace was restored there within a few days.
In that massacre of the Veronese Easter was all the pretext that the French required for a declaration of war. But as if it were not enough, there occurred in Venice itself, on the very day that the uprising in Verona was quelled, an act of war of which Domenico Pizzamano was the hero.
On Easter Monday the Council of Ten had published a decree, consonant with Venetian neutrality, excluding from the harbour all foreign warships.
On the following Thursday the French frigate, the Libèrateur d'Italie, commanded by Jean Baptiste Laugier, and accompanied by two luggers, having taken on board a Chioggia fisherman as a pilot, attempted to enter the Port of Lido.
Domenico Pizzamano, who was in command at the Fort Sant' Andrea, shared the despair and humiliation in which such patriots as his father watched the now inevitable and shameful end of the Most Serene Republic. It may be that he welcomed this opportunity of showing that in Venice there were still embers at least of the great fire that in other days had made her glorious; and in any case his orders from the Council of Ten made his duty clear.
When word was conveyed to him of the approach of those foreign ships, he repaired instantly to the ramparts to survey matters for himself.
The vessels displayed no colours, but they were certainly not Venetian, and whatever might be the case of the two consorts, the Libèrateur, which was leading, was heavily armed.
Domenico took his decision instantly. He ordered two rounds to be fired across her bows as a warning.
For the luggers this was enough. Without more ado they both went about and stood off. Captain Laugier, however, continued defiantly upon his course, breaking out the French tricolour.
It was now that Domenico may well have given thanks to Heaven that to him, as to those martyrs at Verona, it was vouchsafed to strike a blow for Venetian honour without regard to what might follow. He opened fire in earnest. The Libèrateur returned it, until crippled by a shot between wind and water she ran aground on a mudbank to save herself from sinking. Domenico went off with two armed launches to take possession of the ship, and was accompanied by a galliot commanded by Captain Viscovich with a company of Slavonian soldiers.
They boarded the French vessel, and after a brief sharp fight, in which Laugier was killed, made themselves master of her as night was falling.
Among her papers, which he seized, Domenico found abundant evidence of intelligence between Laugier and French residents in Venice. These papers he delivered to the Council of Ten, so that action might be taken upon them. But next morning, under the sternest representations from Lallemant, all were surrendered to the ambassador.
On the day after that Domenico was commanded to attend before the Council of Ten. He was received with enthusiasm, officially praised, and encouraged to continue with the same zeal in the discharge of his duty. To the men who had taken part in the affair the Council voted an extra month's pay.