“You asked me for sixty.”

“Yes, that was when I was asking a loan of you as a friend; but since I owe the money to force, I require six only, and I will give you no note of hand.  You shall be repaid at Venice, where I shall write of the pass to which you forced me, you cowardly wretch!”

“I beg your pardon! take the sixty sequins, I entreat you.”

“No, no more.  I am going on my way, and I advise you not to hinder me, lest in my despair I come back and burn your house about your ears.”

I went out and walked for two hours, until the approach of night and weariness made me stop short at the house of a farmer, where I had a bad supper and a bed of straw.  In the morning, I bought an old overcoat, and hired an ass to journey on, and near Feltre I bought a pair of boots.  In this guise I passed the hut called the Scala.  There was a guard there who, much to my delight, as the reader will guess, did not even honour me by asking my name.  I then took a two-horse carriage and got to Borgo de Valsugano in good time, and found Father Balbi at the inn I had told him of.  If he had not greeted me first I should not have known him.  A great overcoat, a low hat over a thick cotton cap, disguised him to admiration.  He told me that a farmer had given him these articles in exchange for my cloak, that he had arrived without difficulty, and was faring well.  He was kind enough to tell me that he did not expect to see me, as he did not believe my promise to rejoin him was made in good faith.  Possibly I should have been wise not to undeceive him on this account.

I passed the following day in the inn, where, without getting out of my bed, I wrote more than twenty letters to Venice, in many of which I explained what I had been obliged to do to get the six sequins.

The monk wrote impudent letters to his superior, Father Barbarigo, and to his brother nobles, and love-letters to the servant girls who had been his ruin.  I took the lace off my dress, and sold my hat, and thus got rid of a gay appearance unsuitable to my position, as it made me too much an object of notice.

The next day I went to Pergina and lay there, and was visited by a young Count d’Alberg, who had discovered, in some way or another, that we had escaped from the state-prisons of Venice.  From Pergina I went to Trent and from there to Bolzan, where, needing money for my dress, linen, and the continuation of my journey, I introduced myself to an old banker named Mensch, who gave me a man to send to Venice with a letter to M. de Bragadin.  In the mean time the old banker put me in a good inn where I spent the six days the messenger was away in bed.  He brought me the sum of a hundred sequins, and my first care was to clothe my companion, and afterwards myself.  Every day I found the society of the wretched Balbi more intolerable.  “Without me you would never have escaped” was continually in his mouth, and he kept reminding me that I had promised him half of whatever money I got.  He made love to all the servant girls, and as he had neither the figure nor the manners to please them, his attentions were returned with good hearty slaps, which he bore patiently, but was as outrageous as ever in the course of twenty-four hours.  I was amused, but at the same time vexed to be coupled to a man of so low a nature.