of joy; then, taking his poor cloak, he called his daughter, told her to
keep me company, and went out.

Alone with the countess, I examined the door of communication between the
two rooms and found it slightly open.

"Your father," I said, "would have surprised me, and it is easy to guess
what he would have done with the two sbirri who were with him. The plot
is clear, and I have only escaped from it by the happiest of chances."

She denied, wept, called God to witness, threw herself on her knees; but
I turned my head away, and taking my cloak went away without a word. She
kept on writing to me, but her letters remained unanswered, and I saw her
no more.

It was summer-time, and between the heat, her passions, hunger, and
wretchedness, her head was turned, and she became so mad that she went
out of the house stark naked, and ran up and down St. Peter's Place,
asking those who stopped her to take her to my house. This sad story went
all over the town and caused me a great deal of annoyance. The poor
wretch was sent to an asylum, and did not recover her reason for five
years. When she came out she found herself reduced to beg her bread in
the streets, like all her brothers, except one, whom I found a cadet in
the guards of the King of Spain twelve years afterwards.

At the time of which I am speaking all this had happened a year ago, but
the story was dug up against me, and dressed out in the attire of
fiction, and thus formed part of those clouds which were to discharge
their thunder upon me to my destruction.