M. De Bernis Goes Away Leaving Me the Use of His Casino--His Good Advice:
How I Follow It--Peril of M. M. and Myself--Mr. Murray, the English
Ambassador--Sale of the Casino and End of Our Meetings--Serious Illness
of M. M.--Zorzi and Condulmer--Tonnie

Though the infidelities of C---- C---- made me look at her with other eyes
than before, and I had now no intention of making her the companion of my
life, I could not help feeling that it had rested with me to stop her on
the brink of the stream, and I therefore considered it my duty always to
be her friend.

If I had been more logical, the resolution I took with respect to her
would doubtless have been of another kind. I should have said to myself:
After seducing her, I myself have set the example of infidelity; I have
bidden her to follow blindly the advice of her friend, although I knew
that the advice and the example of M---M---- would end in her ruin; I had
insulted, in the most grievous manner, the delicacy of my mistress, and
that before her very eyes, and after all this how could I ask a weak
woman to do what a man, priding himself on his strength, would shrink
from at tempting? I should have stood self-condemned, and have felt that
it was my duty to remain the same to her, but flattering myself that I
was overcoming mere prejudices, I was in fact that most degraded of
slaves, he who uses his strength to crush the weak.

The day after Shrove Tuesday, going to the casino of Muran, I found there
a letter from M---- M----, who gave me two pieces of bad news: that
C---- C---- had lost her mother, and that the poor girl was in despair; and
that the lay-sister, whose rheum was cured, had returned to take her
place. Thus C---- C---- was deprived of her friend at a time when she would