tch on the brink of the precipice. Twenty years ago I told Cagliostro
(who called himself Count Pellegrini in those days) not to set his foot
in Rome, and if he had followed this counsel he would not have died
miserably in a Roman prison.

Thirty years ago a wise man advised me to beware visiting Spain. I went,
but, as the reader knows, I had no reason to congratulate myself on my
visit.

A week after my arrival at Bologna, happening to be in the shop of
Tartuffi, the bookseller, I made the acquaintance of a cross-eyed priest,
who struck me, after a quarter of an hour's talk as a man of learning and
talent. He presented me with two works which had recently been issued by
two of the young professors at the university He told me that I should
find them amusing reading, and he was right.

The first treatise contended that women's faults should be forgiven them,
since they were really the work of the matrix, which influenced them in
spite of themselves. The second treatise was a criticism of the first.
The author allowed that the uterus was an animal, but he denied the
alleged influence, as no anatomist had succeeded in discovering any
communication between it and the brain.

I determined to write a reply to the two pamphlets, and I did so in the
course of three days. When my reply was finished I sent it to M. Dandolo,
instructing him to have five hundred copies printed. When they arrived I
gave a bookseller the agency, and in a fortnight I had made a hundred
sequins.

The first pamphlet was called "Lutero Pensante," the second was in French
and bore the title "La Force Vitale," while I called my reply "Lana
Caprina." I treated the matter in an easy vein, not without some hints of
deep learning, and made fun of the lucubrations of the two physicians. My
preface was in French, but full of Parisian idioms which rendered it
unintelligible to all who had not visited the gay capital, and this
circumstance gained me a good many friends amongst the younger
generation.

The squinting priest, whose name was Zacchierdi, introduced me to the
Abbe Severini, who became my intimate friend in the course of ten or
twelve days.

This abbe made me leave the inn, and got me two pleasant rooms in the
house of a retired artiste, the widow of the tenor Carlani. He also made
arrangements with a pastrycook to send me my dinner and supper. All this,
plus a servant, only cost me ten sequins a month.

Severini was the agreeable cause of my