e called for cards, and placed one hundred Louis on the
table before him; he dealt, and took care to make C---- C---- win the whole
of that sum. It was the best way to make her accept it as pin-money. The
young girl, dazzled by so much gold, and not knowing what to do with it,
asked her friend to take care of it for her until such time as she should
leave the convent to get married.

When the game was over, M---- M---- complained of a headache, and said that
she would go to bed in the alcove: she asked me to come and lull her to
sleep. We thus left the new lovers free to be as gay as they chose. Six
hours afterwards, when the alarum warned us that it was time to part, we
found them asleep in each other's embrace. I had myself passed an amorous
and quiet night, pleased with M---- M----, and with out giving one thought
to C---- C----.

CHAPTER XXII

M. De Bernis Goes Away Leaving Me the Use of His Casino--His Good Advice:
How I Follow It--Peril of M. M. and Myself--Mr. Murray, the English
Ambassador--Sale of the Casino and End of Our Meetings--Serious Illness
of M. M.--Zorzi and Condulmer--Tonnie

Though the infidelities of C---- C---- made me look at her with other eyes
than before, and I had now no intention of making her the companion of my
life, I could not help feeling that it had rested with me to stop her on
the brink of the stream, and I therefore considered it my duty always to
be her friend.

If I had been more logical, the resolution I took with respect to her
would doubtless have been of another kind. I should have said to myself:
After seducing her, I myself have set the example of infidelity; I have
bidden her to follow blindly the advice of her friend, although I knew
that the advice and the example of M---M---- would end in her ruin; I had
insulted, in the most grievous manner, the delicacy of my mistress, and
that before her very eyes, and after all this how could I ask a weak
woman to do what a man, priding himself on his strength, would shrink
from at tempting? I should have stood self-condemned, and have felt that
it was my duty to remain the same to her, but flattering myself that I
was overcoming mere prejudices, I was in fact that most degraded of
slaves, he who uses his strength to crush the weak.

The day after Shrove Tuesday, going to the casino of Muran, I found there
a letter from M---- M----, who gave me two pieces of bad news: that
C---- C---- had lost her mother, and that the poo