Everything that happened throughout this fatal month tended to my ruin, for Madame Memmo, mother of Andre, Bernard, and Laurent Memmo, had taken it into her head that I had inclined her sons to atheistic opinions, and took counsel with the old knight Antony Mocenigo, M. de Bragadin’s uncle, who was angry with me, because, as he said, I had conspired to seduce his nephew.  The matter was a serious one, and an auto-da-fe was very possible, as it came under the jurisdiction of the Holy Office—­a kind of wild beast, with which it is not good to quarrel.  Nevertheless, as there would be some difficulty in shutting me up in the ecclesiastical prisons of the Holy Office, it was determined to carry my case before the State Inquisitors, who took upon themselves the provisional duty of putting a watch upon my manner of living.

M. Antony Condulmer, who as a friend of Abbe Chiari’s was an enemy of mine, was then an Inquisitor of State, and he took the opportunity of looking upon me in the light of a disturber of the peace of the commonwealth.  A secretary of an embassy, whom I knew some years after, told me that a paid informer, with two other witnesses, also, doubtless, in the pay of this grand tribunal, had declared that I was guilty of only believing in the devil, as if this absurd belief, if it were possible, did not necessarily connote a belief in God!  These three honest fellows testified with an oath that when I lost money at play, on which occasion all the faithful are wont to blaspheme, I was never heard to curse the devil.  I was further accused of eating meat all the year round, of only going to hear fine masses, and I was vehemently suspected of being a Freemason.  It was added that I frequented the society of foreign ministers, and that living as I did with three noblemen, it was certain that I revealed, for the large sums which I was seen to lose, as many state secrets as I could worm out of them.

All these accusations, none of which had any foundation in fact, served the Tribunal as a pretext to treat me as an enemy of the commonwealth and as a prime conspirator.  For several weeks I was counselled by persons whom I might have trusted to go abroad whilst the Tribunal was engaged on my case.  This should have been enough, for the only people who can live in peace at Venice are those whose existence the Tribunal is ignorant of, but I obstinately despised all these hints.  If I had listened to the indirect advice which was given me, I should have become anxious, and I was the sworn foe of all anxiety.  I kept saying to myself, “I feel remorse for nothing and I am therefore guilty of nothing, and the innocent have nothing to fear.”  I was a fool, for I argued as if I had been a free man in a free country.  I must also confess that what to a great extent kept me from thinking of possible misfortune was the actual misfortune which oppressed me from morning to night.  I lost every day, I owed money everywhere, I had pawned