My Spaniard was delighted when I dismissed Costa and proportionately sorry when I took him back.

“He’s no profligate,” said Le Duc; “he is sober, and has no liking for bad company.  But I think he’s a robber, and a dangerous robber, too.  I know it, because he seems so scrupulously careful not to cheat you in small things.  Remember what I say, sir; he will do you.  He is waiting to gain your confidence, and then he will strike home.  Now, I am quite a different sort of fellow, a rogue in a small way; but you know me.”

His insight was, keener than mine, for five or six months later the Italian robbed me of fifty thousand crowns.  Twenty-three years afterwards, in 1784, I found him in Venice, valet to Count Hardegg, and I felt inclined to have him hanged.  I shewed him by proof positive that I could do so if I liked; but he had resource to tears and supplications, and to the intercession of a worthy man named Bertrand, who lived with the ambassador of the King of Sardinia.  I esteemed this individual, and he appealed to me successfully to pardon Costa.  I asked the wretch what he had done with the gold and jewels he had stolen from me, and he told me that he had lost the whole of it in furnishing funds for a bank at Biribi, that he had been despoiled by his own associates, and had been poor and miserable ever since.

In the same year in which he robbed me he married Momolo’s daughter, and after making her a mother he abandoned her.

To pursue our story.

At Turin I lodged in a private house with the Abbe Gama, who had been expecting me.  In spite of the good abbe’s sermon on economy, I took the whole of the first floor, and a fine suite it was.

We discussed diplomatic topics, and he assured me that I should be accredited in May, and that he would give me instructions as to the part I was to play.  I was pleased with his commission, and I told the abbe that I should be ready to go to Augsburg whenever the ambassadors of the belligerent powers met there.

After making the necessary arrangements with my landlady with regard to my meals I went to a coffeehouse to read the papers, and the first person I saw was the Marquis Desarmoises, whom I had known in Savoy.  The first thing he said was that all games of chance were forbidden, and that the ladies I had met would no doubt be delighted to see me.  As for himself, he said that he lived by playing backgammon, though he was not at all lucky at it, as talent went for more than luck at that game.  I can understand how, if fortune is neutral, the best player will win, but I do not see how the contrary can take place.