In November, 1767, as I was going from Pampeluna to Madrid, my coachman, Andrea Capello, stopped for us to dine in a town of Old Castille.  So dismal and dreary a place did I find it that I asked its name.  How I laughed when I was told that it was Agrada!

“Here, then,” I said to myself, “did that saintly lunatic produce that masterpiece which but for M. Cavalli I should never have known.”

An old priest, who had the highest possible opinion of me the moment I began to ask him about this truthful historian of the mother of Christ, shewed me the very place where she had written it, and assured me that the father, mother, sister, and in short all the kindred of the blessed biographer, had been great saints in their generation.  He told me, and spoke truly, that the Spaniards had solicited her canonization at Rome, with that of the venerable Palafox.  This “Mystical City,” perhaps, gave Father Malagrida the idea of writing the life of St. Anne, written, also, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost, but the poor devil of a Jesuit had to suffer martyrdom for it—­an additional reason for his canonization, if the horrible society ever comes to life again, and attains the universal power which is its secret aim.

At the end of eight or nine days I found myself moneyless.  Lawrence asked me for some, but I had not got it.

“Where can I get some?”

“Nowhere.”

What displeased this ignorant and gossiping fellow about me was my silence and my laconic manner of talking.

Next day he told me that the Tribunal had assigned me fifty sous per diem of which he would have to take charge, but that he would give me an account of his expenditure every month, and that he would spend the surplus on what I liked.

“Get me the Leyden Gazette twice a week.”

“I can’t do that, because it is not allowed by the authorities.”

Sixty-five livres a month was more than I wanted, since I could not eat more than I did:  the great heat and the want of proper nourishment had weakened me.  It was in the dog-days; the strength of the sun’s rays upon the lead of the roof made my cell like a stove, so that the streams of perspiration which rolled off my poor body as I sat quite naked on my sofa-chair wetted the floor to right and left of me.

I had been in this hell-on-earth for fifteen days without any secretion from the bowels.  At the end of this almost incredible time nature re-asserted herself, and I thought my last hour was come.  The haemorrhoidal veins were swollen to such an extent that the pressure on them gave me almost unbearable agony.  To this fatal time I owe the inception of that sad infirmity of which I have never been able to completely cure myself.  The recurrence of the same pains, though not so acute, remind me of the cause, and do not make my remembrance of it any the more agreeable.  This disease got me compliments in Russia when I was there ten years later, and I found it in such esteem that I did not dare to complain.  The same kind of thing happened to me at Constantinople, when I was complaining of a cold in the head in the presence of a Turk, who was thinking, I could see, that a dog of a Christian was not worthy of such a blessing.