equals, and was not only respected by them for what I was, but came
myself to respect them in spite of what they were. Virginia taught me
much here. With her it never was, "Such-and-such is a woman of infamous
life," but rather, "Such-and-such has a fine ear for music, or can make
a complicated risotto." I learned, with astonishment, that with the most
deplorable degradation of life there could consist an ability to share
the interests of the most refined persons. These associates of ours made
no secret of their avocations (except to the police), nor were they
abashed or confounded if I happened to meet them in the exercise of
them; but, business done, they were to be treated like Mr. Councillor or
My Lady. Nor was this an arbitrary exaction or a curious foppery on
their part; not at all, but as they expected to be taken, so they
behaved themselves. There was not, I am bound to say, one of those women
who did not hear Mass three times a week, recite the daily rosary,
confess herself, take the sacrament. Nor do I remember a single man of
those whom I met in various houses of call or thieves-kitchens in the
town who was without his mental activity of some honest kind, who had
not a shrewd interest in politics, a passion for this or that science--
as botany, mineralogy, or optics, or an appreciation keenly critical of
the fine arts. Philosophers, too, some of them were, acute reasoners,
sophists, casuists. We had no doubts, fears or suspicions of them, and
they thought no evil of us. Some of them we invited to a reading in our
tower; and once we enacted the "Aminta" with great applause: Beltramo, a
very engaging boy (afterwards hanged for highway robbery and prison-
breaking), Violante, an unfrocked priest called Il Corvo, Virginia and I
took parts. Beltramo I never saw again but once, and that against my
will. I saw him hanged at Genoa in 1742. A curious life indeed, which,
to one so addicted to research into the ways of men as I always was,
would have needed violence for its termination. Violence, indeed, did
end it, and with humiliating detail.