willingly told him the circumstances under which she had become his
ward. The prudent Spaniard was led to make this confidence because he
had heard of Montefiore in Italy, and knowing his reputation was
desirous to let him see how strong were the barriers which protected
the young girl from the possibility of seduction. Though the good-man
was gifted with a certain patriarchal eloquence, in keeping with his
simple life and customs, his tale will be improved by abridgment.

At the period when the French Revolution changed the manners and
morals of every country which served as the scene of its wars, a
street prostitute came to Tarragona, driven from Venice at the time of
its fall. The life of this woman had been a tissue of romantic
adventures and strange vicissitudes. To her, oftener than to any other
woman of her class, it had happened, thanks to the caprice of great
lords struck with her extraordinary beauty, to be literally gorged
with gold and jewels and all the delights of excessive wealth,
--flowers, carriages, pages, maids, palaces, pictures, journeys (like
those of Catherine II.); in short, the life of a queen, despotic in
her caprices and obeyed, often beyond her own imaginings. Then,
without herself, or any one, chemist, physician, or man of science,
being able to discover how her gold evaporated, she would find herself
back in the streets, poor, denuded of everything, preserving nothing
but her all-powerful beauty, yet living on without thought or care of
the past, the present, or the future. Cast, in her poverty, into the
hands of some poor gambling officer, she attached herself to him as a
dog to its master, sharing the discomforts of the military life, which
indeed she comforted, as content under the roof of a garret as beneath
the silken hangings of opulence. Italian and Spanish both, she
fulfilled very scrupulously the duties of religion, and more than once
she had said to love:--