This truly heroic action was known all over the town, and it was Murray
himself who made it known, citing me as his witness.

This famous courtezan, whose beauty was justly celebrated, feeling
herself eaten away by an internal disease, promised to give a hundred
louis to a doctor named Lucchesi, who by dint of mercury undertook to
cure her, but Ancilla specified on the agreement that she was not to pay
the aforesaid sum till Lucchesi had offered with her an amorous
sacrifice.

The doctor having done his business as well as he could wished to be paid
without submitting to the conditions of the treaty, but Ancilla held her
ground, and the matter was brought before a magistrate.

In England, where all agreements are binding, Ancilla would have won her
case, but at Venice she lost it.

The judge, in giving sentence, said a condition, criminal per se, not
fulfilled, did not invalidate an agreement--a sentence abounding in
wisdom, especially in this instance.

Two months before this woman had become disgusting, my friend M. Memmo,
afterwards procurator, asked me to take him to her house. In the height
of the conversation, what should come but a gondola, and we saw Count
Rosemberg, the ambassador from Vienna, getting out of it. M. Memmo was
thunderstruck (for a Venetian noble conversing with a foreign ambassador
becomes guilty of treason to the state), and ran in hot haste from
Ancilla's room, I after him, but on the stair he met the ambassador, who,
seeing his distress, burst into a laugh, and passed on. I got directly
into M. Memmo's gondola, and we went forthwith to M. Cavalli, secretary