M. de Malipiero, who in his own way had great wisdom, and who saw that in Venice I was plunging headlong into pleasures and dissipation, and was only wasting a precious time, was delighted to see me on the eve of going somewhere else to fulfil my destiny, and much pleased with my ready acceptance of those new circumstances in my life.  He read me a lesson which I have never forgotten.  “The famous precept of the Stoic philosophers,” he said to me, “‘Sequere Deum’, can be perfectly explained by these words:  ’Give yourself up to whatever fate offers to you, provided you do not feel an invincible repugnance to accept it.’” He added that it was the genius of Socrates, ’saepe revocans, raro impellens’; and that it was the origin of the ‘fata viam inveniunt’ of the same philosophers.

M. de Malipiero’s science was embodied in that very lesson, for he had obtained his knowledge by the study of only one book—­the book of man.  However, as if it were to give me the proof that perfection does not exist, and that there is a bad side as well as a good one to everything, a certain adventure happened to me a month afterwards which, although I was following his own maxims, cost me the loss of his friendship, and which certainly did not teach me anything.

The senator fancied that he could trace upon the physiognomy of young people certain signs which marked them out as the special favourites of fortune.  When he imagined that he had discovered those signs upon any individual, he would take him in hand and instruct him how to assist fortune by good and wise principles; and he used to say, with a great deal of truth, that a good remedy would turn into poison in the hands of a fool, but that poison is a good remedy when administered by a learned man.  He had, in my time, three favourites in whose education he took great pains.  They were, besides myself, Therese Imer, with whom the reader has a slight acquaintance already, and the third was the daughter of the boatman Gardela, a girl three years younger than I, who had the prettiest and most fascinating countenance.  The speculative old man, in order to assist fortune in her particular case, made her learn dancing, for, he would say, the ball cannot reach the pocket unless someone pushes it.  This girl made a great reputation at Stuttgard under the name of Augusta.  She was the favourite mistress of the Duke of Wurtemburg in 1757.  She was a most charming woman.  The last time I saw her she was in Venice, and she died two years afterwards.  Her husband, Michel de l’Agata, poisoned himself a short time after her death.