Before leaving the house, Juliette took me apart, and told me, in the most decided and impressive manner, that if I had any fancy for being thrown out of the window, I could enjoy that pleasure whenever I liked to enter her dwelling, and that she would have me murdered if this night’s adventure ever became publicly known.  I took care not to give her any cause for the execution of either of her threats, but I could not prevent the fact of our having exchanged shirts being rather notorious.  As I was not seen at her house, it was generally supposed that she had been compelled by M. Querini to keep me at a distance.  The reader will see how, six years later, this extraordinary woman thought proper to feign entire forgetfulness of this adventure.

I passed Lent, partly in the company of my loved ones, partly in the study of experimental physics at the Convent of the Salutation.  My evenings were always given to M. de Malipiero’s assemblies.  At Easter, in order to keep the promise I had made to the Countess of Mont-Real, and longing to see again my beautiful Lucie, I went to Pasean.  I found the guests entirely different to the set I had met the previous autumn.  Count Daniel, the eldest of the family, had married a Countess Gozzi, and a young and wealthy government official, who had married a god-daughter of the old countess, was there with his wife and his sister-in-law.  I thought the supper very long.  The same room had been given to me, and I was burning to see Lucie, whom I did not intend to treat any more like a child.  I did not see her before going to bed, but I expected her early the next morning, when lo! instead of her pretty face brightening my eyes, I see standing before me a fat, ugly servant-girl!  I enquire after the gatekeeper’s family, but her answer is given in the peculiar dialect of the place, and is, of course, unintelligible to me.

I wonder what has become of Lucie; I fancy that our intimacy has been found out, I fancy that she is ill—­dead, perhaps.  I dress myself with the intention of looking for her.  If she has been forbidden to see me, I think to myself, I will be even with them all, for somehow or other I will contrive the means of speaking to her, and out of spite I will do with her that which honour prevented love from accomplishing.  As I was revolving such thoughts, the gate-keeper comes in with a sorrowful countenance.  I enquire after his wife’s health, and after his daughter, but at the name of Lucie his eyes are filled with tears.

“What! is she dead?”

“Would to God she were!”

“What has she done?”

“She has run away with Count Daniel’s courier, and we have been unable to trace her anywhere.”

His wife comes in at the moment he replies, and at these words, which renewed her grief, the poor woman faints away.  The keeper, seeing how sincerely I felt for his misery, tells me that this great misfortune befell them only a week before my arrival.