I felt very miserable, and did not utter a word during the dinner; my silence was construed into a proof of my sagacity.  As we rose from the table, the Abbe Gama invited me to spend the day with him, but I declined under pretence of letters to be written, and I truly did so for seven hours.  I wrote to Don Lelio, to Don Antonio, to my young friend Paul, and to the worthy Bishop of Martorano, who answered that he heartily wished himself in my place.

Deeply enamoured of Lucrezia and happy in my love, to give her up appeared to me a shameful action.  In order to insure the happiness of my future life, I was beginning to be the executioner of my present felicity, and the tormentor of my heart.  I revolted against such a necessity which I judged fictitious, and which I could not admit unless I stood guilty of vileness before the tribunal of my own reason.  I thought that Father Georgi, if he wished to forbid my visiting that family, ought not to have said that it was worthy of respect; my sorrow would not have been so intense.  The day and the whole of the night were spent in painful thoughts.

In the morning the Abbe Gama brought me a great book filled with ministerial letters from which I was to compile for my amusement.  After a short time devoted to that occupation, I went out to take my first French lesson, after which I walked towards the Strada-Condotta.  I intended to take a long walk, when I heard myself called by my name.  I saw the Abbe Gama in front of a coffee-house.  I whispered to him that Minerva had forbidden me the coffee-rooms of Rome.  “Minerva,” he answered, “desires you to form some idea of such places.  Sit down by me.”

I heard a young abbe telling aloud, but without bitterness, a story, which attacked in a most direct manner the justice of His Holiness.  Everybody was laughing and echoing the story.  Another, being asked why he had left the services of Cardinal B., answered that it was because his eminence did not think himself called upon to pay him apart for certain private services, and everybody laughed outright.  Another came to the Abbe Gama, and told him that, if he felt any inclination to spend the afternoon at the Villa Medicis, he would find him there with two young Roman girls who were satisfied with a ‘quartino’, a gold coin worth one-fourth of a sequin.  Another abbe read an incendiary sonnet against the government, and several took a copy of it.  Another read a satire of his own composition, in which he tore to pieces the honour of a family.  In the middle of all that confusion, I saw a priest with a very attractive countenance come in.  The size of his hips made me take him for a woman dressed in men’s clothes, and I said so to Gama, who told me that he was the celebrated castrato, Bepino delta Mamana.  The abbe called him to us, and told him with a laugh that I had taken him for a girl.  The impudent fellow looked me full in the face, and said that, if I liked, he would shew me whether I had been right or wrong.