society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to which she is
sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon her at her home;
while for her to walk alone with a young man would be vastly more
scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently, unheard of. The
Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as northern women are
trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that their sex would be
worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not appear in this
shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and one who cares to
have a just estimate of this matter must by no means believe all the evil
he hears. There may be much corruption in society, but there is infinitely
more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all
sense of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel
to the prying, tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in
the world. A small country village in America or England has its
meddlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness
of a chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty
penetration of a gifted roue, and you have some idea of Venetian scandal.
In that city, where all the nobler organs of expression are closed by
political conditions, the viler channels run continual filth and poison,
and the people, shut out from public and free discussion of religious and
political themes, occupy themselves with private slander, and rend each
other in their abject desperation. As it is part of the existing political
demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived
of these harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which
people, in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are
almost unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it
is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as
unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is
small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caffe, when
the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence. Not