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bronze beneath the folds of their blood-red cloaks,’ who
would be walking in Venice next week, on the Easter vigil;
but that I myself might be the minute personage whom, in
an enlarged photograph of St. Mark’s that had been lent to
me, the operator had portrayed, in a bowler hat, in front of
the portico), when I heard my father say: ‘It must be pretty
cold, still, on the Grand Canal; whatever you do, don’t for-
get to pack your winter greatcoat and your thick suit.’ At
these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; a thing that I
had until then deemed impossible, I felt myself to be pene-
trating indeed between those ‘rocks of amethyst, like a reef
in the Indian Ocean”; by a supreme muscular effort, a long
way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself, as of a
shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room
which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of
Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and
peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagi-
nation had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at
work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once
accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels
when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me to
bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor not only as-
sured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and
Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned their
that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must,
for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept
from anything that wa; liable to excite me.
And, alas, he forbade also, most categorically, my be-
ing allowed to go to the theatre, to hear Berma; the sublime

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