he looked neat and clean enough I did not care to have him to sleep with me, dreading the results of a lover’s dreams.  He neither understood how wrongly he had acted, nor how the count was constrained to punish him publicly as a cloak to the honour of his daughter and his house.  The next day he was given a mattress and a dinner to the value of fifteen sous, which the Tribunal had assigned to him, either as a favour or a charity, for the word justice would not be appropriate in speaking of this terrible body.  I told the gaoler that my dinner would suffice for the two of us, and that he could employ the young man’s allowance in saying masses in his usual manner.  He agreed willingly, and having told him that he was lucky to be in my company, he said that we could walk in the garret for half an hour.  I found this walk an excellent thing for my health and my plan of escape, which, however, I could not carry out for eleven months afterwards.  At the end of this resort of rats, I saw a number of old pieces of furniture thrown on the ground to the right and left of two great chests, and in front of a large pile of papers sewn up into separate volumes.  I helped myself to a dozen of them for the sake of the reading, and I found them to be accounts of trials, and very diverting; for I was allowed to read these papers, which had once contained such secrets.  I found some curious replies to the judges’ questions respecting the seduction of maidens, gallantries carried a little too far by persons employed in girls’ schools, facts relating to confessors who had abused their penitents, schoolmasters convicted of pederasty with their pupils, and guardians who had seduced their wards.  Some of the papers dating two or three centuries back, in which the style and the manners illustrated gave me considerable entertainment.  Among the pieces of furniture on the floor I saw a warming-pan, a kettle, a fire-shovel, a pair of tongs, some old candle-sticks, some earthenware pots, and even a syringe.  From this I concluded that some prisoner of distinction had been allowed to make use of these articles.  But what interested me most was a straight iron bar as thick as my thumb, and about a foot and a half long.  However, I left everything as it was, as my plans had not been sufficiently ripened by time for me to appropriate any object in particular.

One day towards the end of the month my companion was taken away, and Lawrence told me that he had been condemned to the prisons known as The Fours, which are within the same walls as the ordinary prisons, but belong to the State Inquisitors.  Those confined in them have the privilege of being able to call the gaoler when they like.  The prisons are gloomy, but there is an oil lamp in the midst which gives the necessary light, and there is no fear of fire as everything is made of marble.  I heard, a long time after, that the unfortunate Maggiorin was there for five years, and was afterwards sent to Cerigo for ten.