r? You never answer her letters, and you let her be in want."

"I cannot marry her, your excellency, before I have enough to support
her. That will come in three or four years, thanks to a situation which
M. de Bragadin, my only protector, promises to obtain for me. Until then
she must live honestly, and support herself by working. I will only marry
her when I am convinced of her honesty, and particularly when I am
certain that she has given up all intercourse with the abbe, her cousin
in the fourth degree. I do not visit her because my confessor and my
conscience forbid me to go to her house."

"She wishes you to give her a legal promise of marriage, and
sustentation."

"Monsignor, I am under no obligation to give her a promise of marriage,
and having no means whatever I cannot support her. She must earn her own
living with her mother"

"When she lived with her cousin," said her mother, "she never wanted
anything, and she shall go back to him."

"If she returns to his house I shall not take the trouble of taking her
out of his hands a second time, and your excellency will then see that I
was right to defer my marriage with her until I was convinced of her
honesty."

The judge told me that my presence, was no longer necessary. It was the
end of the affair, and I never heard any more about it. The recital of
the dialogue greatly amused my friends.

At the beginning of the Carnival of 1750 I won a prize of three thousand
ducats at the lottery. Fortune made me that present when I did not
require it, for I had held the bank during the autumn, and had won. It
was at a casino where no nobleman dared to present himself, because one
of the partners was an officer in the service of the Duke de Montalegre,
the Spanish Ambassador. The citizens of Venice felt ill at ease with the
patricians, and that is always the case under an aristocratic government,
because equality exists in reality only between the members of such a
government.

As I intended to take a trip to Paris, I placed one thousand sequins in
M. de Bragadin's hands, and with that project in view I had the courage
to pass the carnival without risking my money at the faro-table. I had
taken a share of one-fourth in the bank of an honest patrician, and early
in Lent he handed me a large sum.

Towards mid-Lent my friend Baletti returned from Mantua to Venice. He was
engaged at the St. Moses Theatre as ballet-master during the Fair of the
Assumption. He was with M