As for us we take words from all languages and all sources, provided they suit the genius of our own language.  We love to see our riches increase; we even steal from the poor, but to do so is the general characteristic of the rich.

The amiable marchioness gave us a delicious dinner in a house designed by Palladio.  Chiaccheri had warned me to say nothing about the Shepherdess Fortuna; but at dinner she told him she was sure he had taken me to her house.  He had not the face to deny it, and I did not conceal the pleasure I had received.

“Stratico admires Fortuna,” said the marchioness, “and I confess that her writings have great merit, but it’s a pity one cannot go to the house, except under an incognito.”

“Why not?” I asked, in some astonishment.

“What!” said she to the abbe, “you did not tell him whose house it is?”

“I did not think it necessary, her father and mother rarely shew themselves.”

“Well, it’s of no consequence.”

“But what is her father?” I asked, “the hangman, perhaps?”

“Worse, he’s the ‘bargello’, and you must see that a stranger cannot be received into good society here if he goes to such places as that.”

Chiaccheri looked rather hurt, and I thought it my duty to say that I would not go there again till the eve of my departure.

“I saw her sister once,” said the marchioness; “she is really charmingly pretty, and it’s a great pity that with her beauty and irreproachable morality she should be condemned to marry a man of her father’s class.”

“I once knew a man named Coltellini,” I replied; “he is the son of the bargello of Florence, and is poet-in-ordinary to the Empress of Russia.  I shall try to make a match between him and Fortuna’s sister; he is a young man of the greatest talents.”

The marchioness thought my idea an excellent one, but soon after I heard that Coltellini was dead.

The ‘bargello’ is a cordially-detested person all over Italy, if you except Modena, where the weak nobility make much of the ‘bargello’, and do justice to his excellent table.  This is a curious fact, for as a rule these bargellos are spies, liars, traitors, cheats, and misanthropes, for a man despised hates his despisers.

At Sienna I was shewn a Count Piccolomini, a learned and agreeable man.  He had a strange whim, however, of spending six months in the year in the strictest seclusion in his own house, never going out and never seeing any company; reading and working the whole time.  He certainly did his best to make up for his hibernation during the other six months in the year.

The marchioness promised she would come to Rome in the course of the summer.  She had there an intimate friend in Bianconi who had abandoned the practice of medicine, and was now the representative of the Court of Saxony.

On the eve of my departure, the driver who was to take me to Rome came and asked me if I would like to take a travelling companion, and save myself three sequins.