As I was returning home I met Lord Lincoln’s governor; whom I had known at Lausanne eleven years before.  I told him of what had happened to me through his hopeful pupil getting himself fleeced.  He laughed, and told me that the grand duke had advised Lord Lincoln not to pay the money he had lost, to which the young man replied that if he were not to pay he should be dishonoured since the money he had lost had been lent to him.

In leaving Florence I was cured of an unhappy love which would doubtless have had fatal consequences if I had stayed on.  I have spared my readers the painful story because I cannot recall it to my mind even now without being cut to the heart.  The widow whom I loved, and to whom I was so weak as to disclose my feelings, only attached me to her triumphal car to humiliate me, for she disdained my love and myself.  I persisted in my courtship, and nothing but my enforced absence would have cured me.

As yet I have not learnt the truth of the maxim that old age, especially when devoid of fortune, is not likely to prove attractive to youth.

I left Florence poorer by a hundred sequins than when I came there.  I had lived with the most careful economy throughout the whole of my stay.

I stopped at the first stage within the Pope’s dominions, and by the last day but one of the year I was settled at Bologna, at “St. Mark’s Hotel.”

My first visit was paid to Count Marulli, the Florentine charge d’affaires.  I begged him to write and tell his master, that, out of gratitude for my banishment, I should never cease to sing his praises.

As the count had received a letter containing an account of the whole affair, he could not quite believe that I meant what I said.

“You may think what you like,” I observed, “but if you knew all you would see that his highness has done me a very great service though quite unintentionally.”

He promised to let his master know how I spoke of him.

On January 1st, 1772, I presented myself to Cardinal Braneaforte, the Pope’s legate, whom I had known twenty years before at Paris, when he had been sent by Benedict XVI. with the holy swaddling clothes for the newly-born Duke of Burgundy.  We had met at the Lodge of Freemasons, for the members of the sacred college were by no means afraid of their own anathemas.  We had also some very pleasant little suppers with pretty sinners in company with Don Francesco Sensate and Count Ranucci.  In short, the cardinal was a man of wit, and what is called a bon vivant.

“Oh, here you are!” cried he, when he saw me; “I was expecting you”

“How could you, my lord?  Why should I have come to Bologna rather than to any other place?”

“For two reasons.  In the first place because Bologna is better than many other places, and besides I flatter myself you thought of me.  But you needn’t say anything here about the life we led together when we were young men.”