had not been able to prevent C——­ C——­ from seeing in a looking-glass the position of the two impudent wretches, and her face was suffused with blushes; I, however, spoke to her quietly of indifferent things, and recovering her composure she answered me, speaking of her gloves, which she was folding on the pier-table.  After his brutal exploit, P——­ C——­ came impudently to me and embraced me; his dissolute companion, imitating his example, kissed my young friend, saying she was certain that she had seen nothing.  C——­ C——­ answered modestly that she did not know what she could have seen, but the look she cast towards me made me understand all she felt.  If the reader has any knowledge of the human heart, he must guess what my feelings were.  How was it possible to endure such a scene going on in the presence of an innocent girl whom I adored, when I had to fight hard myself with my own burning desires so as not to abuse her innocence!  I was on a bed of thorns!  Anger and indignation, restrained by the reserve I was compelled to adopt for fear of losing the object of my ardent love, made me tremble all over.  The inventors of hell would not have failed to place that suffering among its torments, if they had known it.  The lustful P——­ C——­ had thought of giving me a great proof of his friendship by the disgusting action he had been guilty of, and he had reckoned as nothing the dishonour of his mistress, and the delicacy of his sister whom he had thus exposed to prostitution.  I do not know how I contrived not to strangle him.  The next day, when he called on me, I overwhelmed him with the most bitter reproaches, and he tried to excuse himself by saying that he never would have acted in that manner if he had not felt satisfied that I had already treated his sister in the tete-a-tete in the same way that he treated his mistress before us.

My love for C——­ C——­ became every instant more intense, and I had made up my mind to undertake everything necessary to save her from the fearful position in which her unworthy brother might throw her by selling her for his own profit to some man less scrupulous than I was.  It seemed to me urgent.  What a disgusting state of things!  What an unheard-of species of seduction!  What a strange way to gain my friendship!  And I found myself under the dire necessity of dissembling with the man whom I despised most in the world!  I had been told that he was deeply in debt, that he had been a bankrupt in Vienna, where he had a wife and a family of children, that in Venice he had compromised his father who had been obliged to turn him out of his house, and who, out of pity, pretended not to know that he had kept his room in it.  He had seduced his wife, or rather his mistress, who had been driven away by her husband, and after he had squandered everything she possessed, and he found himself at the end of his wits, he had tried to turn her prostitution to advantage.  His poor mother who idolized him had given him everything she had, even her own clothes, and I expected him to plague me again for some loan or security, but I was firmly resolved on refusing.  I could not bear the idea of C——­ C——­ being the innocent cause of my ruin, and used as a tool by her brother to keep up his disgusting life.