ght her once in her own box, and Juliette having
acted disrespectfully to her, she slapped her face, and the affair having
caused a good deal of noise, Juliette gave up the stage altogether. She
came back to Venice, where, made conspicuous by her banishment from
Vienna, she could not fail to make her fortune. Expulsion from Vienna,
for this class of women, had become a title to fashionable favour, and
when there was a wish to depreciate a singer or a dancer, it was said of
her that she had not been sufficiently prized to be expelled from Vienna.

After her return, her first lover was Steffano Querini de Papozzes, but
in the spring of 1740, the Marquis de Sanvitali came to Venice and soon
carried her off. It was indeed difficult to resist this delightful
marquis! His first present to the fair lady was a sum of one hundred
thousand ducats, and, to prevent his being accused of weakness or of
lavish prodigality, he loudly proclaimed that the present could scarcely
make up for the insult Juliette had received from his wife--an insult,
however, which the courtesan never admitted, as she felt that there would
be humiliation in such an acknowledgment, and she always professed to
admire with gratitude her lover's generosity. She was right; the
admission of the blow received would have left a stain upon her charms,
and how much more to her taste to allow those charms to be prized at such
a high figure!

It was in the year 1741 that M. Manzoni introduced me to this new Phryne
as a young ecclesiastic who was beginning to make a reputation. I found
her surrounded by seven or eight well-seasoned admirers, who were burning
at her feet the incense of their flattery. She was carelessly reclining
on a sofa near Querini. I was much struck with her appearance. She eyed
me from head to foot, as if I had been exposed for sale, and telling me,
with the air of a princess, that she was not sorry to make my
acquaintance, she invited me to take a seat. I began then, in my turn, to
examine her closely and deliberately, and it was an easy matter, as the
room, although small, was lighted with at least twenty wax candles.

Juliette was then in her eighteenth year; the freshness of her complexion
was dazzling, but the carnation tint of her cheeks, the vermilion of her
lips, and the dark, very narrow curve of her eyebrows, impressed me as
being produced by art rather than nature. Her teeth--two rows of
magnificent pearls--made one overlook the fact th