Two days before his death, feeling that his end was at hand, my father
expressed a wish to see us all around his bed, in the presence of his
wife and of the Messieurs Grimani, three Venetian noblemen whose
protection he wished to entreat in our favour. After giving us his
blessing, he requested our mother, who was drowned in tears, to give her
sacred promise that she would not educate any of us for the stage, on
which he never would have appeared himself had he not been led to it by
an unfortunate attachment. My mother gave her promise, and the three
noblemen said that they would see to its being faithfully kept.
Circumstances helped our mother to fulfill her word.

At that time my mother had been pregnant for six months, and she was
allowed to remain away from the stage until after Easter. Beautiful and
young as she was, she declined all the offers of marriage which were made
to her, and, placing her trust in Providence, she courageously devoted
herself to the task of bringing up her young family.

She considered it a duty to think of me before the others, not so much
from a feeling of preference as in consequence of my disease, which had
such an effect upon me that it was difficult to know what to do with me.
I was very weak, without any appetite, unable to apply myself to
anything, and I had all the appearance of an idiot. Physicians disagreed
as to the cause of the disease. He loses, they would say, two pounds of
blood every week; yet there cannot be more than sixteen or eighteen
pounds in his body. What, then, can cause so abundant a bleeding? One
asserted that in me all the chyle turned into blood; another was of
opinion that the air I was breathing must, at each inhalation, increase
the quantity of blood in my lungs, and contended that this was the reason
for which I always kept my mouth open. I heard of it all six years
afterward from M. Baffo, a great friend of my late father.