This
informer was rewarded with four thousand sequins, and instructed
forthwith to quit the Venetian territories; but having, while at
Brescia, renewed communications with suspected persons, he was brought
back to the _Lagune_ and drowned. The minute particularities of
Jaffier's depositions, and the motive which prompted him to offer them,
(the latter, as we have already shown, resting on a gross anachronism,)
are, we believe pure inventions by St. Real; and Otway has used a poet's
license to palliate still farther deviations from authentic history.
Under his hands, Pierre,--whom all accounts conspire in representing to
us as a foreign, vulgar and mercenary bravo, equally false to every
party, and frightened into confession,--is transformed into a Venetian
patriot, the proud champion of his country's liberty; who declaims in
good, set, round, customary terms against slavery and oppression; and
who, in the end, escapes a mode of execution unknown to Venice, by
persuading the friend who has betrayed him, and whom he has consequently
renounced, to stab him to the heart, in order "to preserve his memory."
The weak, whining, vacillating, uxorious Jaffier, by turns a cut-throat
and a King's evidence; now pawning, now fondling, and now menacing with
his dagger an imaginary wife; first placing his comrade's life in
jeopardy, then begging it against his will, and finally taking it with
his own hand, is a yet more unhappy creation of wayward fancy; and it is
only in the names of the conspirators, in the introduction of an
Englishman, Eliot, (whom he has brought nearer vernacular spelling than
he found him,--Haillot,[15]) and in the character of Rainault, that
Otway is borne out by authority.
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