In the days of the Republic, affairs of state were debated by members of the Senate, drawn from the noble families eligible for service. No other Venetians had any influence over the Republic’s policy.
Real authority was vested in a Council of Ten, elected from members of the Great Council. The ten governed in the name of the doge.
And behind the Ten, pulling the levers of absolute power, without appeal, stood a Council of Three.
All this, a system of absolute rule by a secret cabal, was swept away by the Napoleonic intervention. In 1797 a departing honor guard of Croat infantry had fired a farewell salute; the senators, in panic, instantly voted themselves out of existence and fled the chamber.
But a relic of the old government still survived.
While the contessa’s friend lamented the loss of the old stone lions of St. Mark, there was one, at least, whose future seemed assured, even under the Habsburgs. At the back of the Doges’ Palace, in a narrow alley with blank windowless sides, a stone head of a lion was fixed to the wall, its eyes staring, its mouth agape.
And into this mouth, the bocca di leone, ordinary citizens had always been encouraged to post information that would be of use to the Council of Three. The information, anonymously supplied, would be investigated and, if it proved interesting, could be used immediately-or simply filed away in dossiers that the Venetian state kept on all its more prominent citizens. A whiff of treachery, a sharp commercial practice, a breach of contract, a marital infidelity-hidden knowledge was the tool by which the Venetians governed their state. Knowledge of the world at large had made them rich; knowledge of themselves, they hoped, would keep them safe.
It was not, after all, a very progressive republic, which is why it broke apart when Napoleon touched it, like a bubble of Murano glass.
Far from stopping the mouth of the terrible lion in the name of Liberty, the French had actually widened it: the anonymous denunciation became a tool of the revolutionary government in Paris, too.
And the Austrians, who were never the most zealous reformers, and preferred to leave things much as they had found them, soon took to regularly inspecting the bocca di leone themselves.
Naturally they didn’t turn up much. The people of Venice were generally reluctant to provide their foreign rulers with information.
But old habits die hard.
Venice was the first city in Europe to have street lighting, but the alley at the back of the Doges’ Palace was almost dark when a shadow slipped past the bocca di leone toward ten o’clock at night.
The shadow seemed to glide along the alley without a pause, but the lion was fed with a lozenge of paper, very small and tightly rolled.