Alone with the countess, I examined the door of communication between the two rooms and found it slightly open.

“Your father,” I said, “would have surprised me, and it is easy to guess what he would have done with the two sbirri who were with him.  The plot is clear, and I have only escaped from it by the happiest of chances.”

She denied, wept, called God to witness, threw herself on her knees; but I turned my head away, and taking my cloak went away without a word.  She kept on writing to me, but her letters remained unanswered, and I saw her no more.

It was summer-time, and between the heat, her passions, hunger, and wretchedness, her head was turned, and she became so mad that she went out of the house stark naked, and ran up and down St. Peter’s Place, asking those who stopped her to take her to my house.  This sad story went all over the town and caused me a great deal of annoyance.  The poor wretch was sent to an asylum, and did not recover her reason for five years.  When she came out she found herself reduced to beg her bread in the streets, like all her brothers, except one, whom I found a cadet in the guards of the King of Spain twelve years afterwards.

At the time of which I am speaking all this had happened a year ago, but the story was dug up against me, and dressed out in the attire of fiction, and thus formed part of those clouds which were to discharge their thunder upon me to my destruction.

In the July of 1755 the hateful court gave Messer-Grande instructions to secure me, alive or dead.  In this furious style all orders for arrests proceeding from the Three were issued, for the least of their commands carried with it the penalty of death.

Three or four days before the Feast of St. James, my patron saint, M——­ M——­ made me a present of several ells of silver lace to trim a sarcenet dress which I was going to wear on the eve of the feast.  I went to see her, dressed in my fine suit, and I told her that I should come again on the day following to ask her to lend me some money, as I did not know where to turn to find some.  She was still in possession of the five hundred sequins which she had put aside when I had sold her diamonds.

As I was sure of getting the money in the morning I passed the night at play, and I lost the five hundred sequins in advance.  At day-break, being in need of a little quiet, I went to the Erberia, a space of ground on the quay of the Grand Canal.  Here is held the herb, fruit, and flower market.

People in good society who come to walk in the Erberia at a rather early hour usually say that they come to see the hundreds of boats laden with vegetables, fruit and flowers, which hail from the numerous islands near the town; but everyone knows that they are men and women who have been spending the night in the excesses of Venus or Bacchus, or who have lost all hope at the gaming-table, and come here to breath a purer air and to calm their minds.  The fashion