“Who are you?” I said at length.  “I think I have seen you before, and yet . . .”

“I will soon tell you my name and the story of my woes; but first give me something to eat, for I am dying of hunger.  I have had nothing but bad soup for the last few days.”

“Certainly; go downstairs and have your dinner, and then come back to me; you can’t eat and speak at the same time.”

My man went down to give him his meal, and I gave instructions that I was not to be left alone with him as he terrified me.

I felt sure that I ought to know him, and longed to hear his story.

In three quarters of an hour he came up again, looking like some one in a high fever.

“Sit down,” said I, “and speak freely.”

“My name is Albergoni.”

“What!”

Albergoni was a gentleman of Padua, and one of my most intimate friends twenty-five years before.  He was provided with a small fortune, but an abundance of wit, and had a great leaning towards pleasure and the exercise of satire.  He laughed at the police and the cheated husbands, indulged in Venus and Bacchus to excess, sacrificed to the god of pederasty, and gamed incessantly.  He was now hideously ugly, but when I knew him first he was a very Antinous.

He told me the following story: 

“A club of young rakes, of whom I was one, had a casino at the Zuecca; we passed many a pleasant hour there without hurting anyone.  Some one imagined that these meetings were the scenes of unlawful pleasures, the engines of the law were secretly directed against us, and the casino was shut up, and we were ordered to be arrested.  All escaped except myself and a man named Branzandi.  We had to wait for our unjust sentence for two years, but at last it appeared.  My wretched fellow was condemned to lose his head, and afterwards to be burnt, while I was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment ‘in carcere duro’.  In 1765 I was set free, and went to Padua hoping to live in peace, but my persecutors gave me no rest, and I was accused of the same crime.  I would not wait for the storm to burst, so I fled to Rome, and two years afterwards the Council of Ten condemned me to perpetual banishment.

“I might bear this if I had the wherewithal to live, but a brother-in-law of mine has possessed himself of all I have, and the unjust Tribunal winks at his misdeeds.

“A Roman attorney made me an offer of an annuity of two pawls a day on the condition that I should renounce all claims on my estate.  I refused this iniquitous condition, and left Rome to come here and turn hermit.  I have followed this sorry trade for two years, and can bear it no more.”

“Go back to Rome; you can live on two pawls a day.”

“I would rather die.”

I pitied him sincerely, and said that though I was not a rich man he was welcome to dine every day at my expense while I remained in Naples, and I gave him a sequin.