whom died at an early age, while the other married in Dresden, where she
still lived in 1798. I had also a posthumous brother, who became a
priest; he died in Rome fifteen years ago.

Let us now come to the dawn of my existence in the character of a
thinking being.

The organ of memory began to develop itself in me at the beginning of
August, 1733. I had at that time reached the age of eight years and four
months. Of what may have happened to me before that period I have not the
faintest recollection. This is the circumstance.

I was standing in the corner of a room bending towards the wall,
supporting my head, and my eyes fixed upon a stream of blood flowing from
my nose to the ground. My grandmother, Marzia, whose pet I was, came to
me, bathed my face with cold water, and, unknown to everyone in the
house, took me with her in a gondola as far as Muran, a thickly-populated
island only half a league distant from Venice.

Alighting from the gondola, we enter a wretched hole, where we find an
old woman sitting on a rickety bed, holding a black cat in her arms, with
five or six more purring around her. The two old cronies held together a
long discourse of which, most likely, I was the subject. At the end of
the dialogue, which was carried on in the patois of Forli, the witch
having received a silver ducat from my grandmother, opened a box, took me
in her arms, placed me in the box and locked me in it, telling me not to
be frightened--a piece of advice which would certainly have had the
contrary effect, if I had had any wits about me, but I was stupefied. I
kept myself quiet in a corner of the box, holding a handkerchief to my
nose because it was still bleeding, and otherwise very indifferent to the