tied; in short,
I still drew my breath, when the crucial incision made me give such a
frightful scream that my surgeon fell flat upon his back, and imagining
that he had been dissecting the devil he ran away, dying with fear, and
fell down the staircase in his flight. His wife, hearing the noise,
flew from the next room. She saw me stretched out upon the table with my
crucial incision. She was seized with yet greater fear than her husband,
fled, and tumbled over him. When they came to themselves a little, I
heard the wife say to her husband: 'My dear, how could you take it into
your head to dissect a heretic? Do you not know that these people always
have the devil in their bodies? I will go and fetch a priest this minute
to exorcise him.' At this proposal I shuddered, and mustering up what
little courage I had still remaining I cried out aloud, 'Have mercy on
me!' At length the Portuguese barber plucked up his spirits. He sewed up
my wounds; his wife even nursed me. I was upon my legs at the end of
fifteen days. The barber found me a place as lackey to a knight of Malta
who was going to Venice, but finding that my master had no money to pay
me my wages I entered the service of a Venetian merchant, and went with
him to Constantinople. One day I took it into my head to step into a
mosque, where I saw an old Iman and a very pretty young devotee who was
saying her paternosters. Her bosom was uncovered, and between her
breasts she had a beautiful bouquet of tulips, roses, anemones,
ranunculus, hyacinths, and auriculas. She dropped her bouquet; I picked
it up, and presented it to her with a profound reverence. I was so long
in delivering it that the Iman began to get angry, and seeing that I was
a Christian he called out for help. They carried me before the cadi, who
ordered me a hundred lashes on the soles of the feet and sent me to the
galleys. I was chained to the very same galley and the same bench as the
young Baron. On board this galley there were four young men from
Marseilles, five Neapolitan priests, and two monks from Corfu, who told
us similar adventures happened daily. The Baron maintained that he had
suffered greater injustice than I, and I insisted that it was far more
innocent to take up a bouquet and place it again on a woman's bosom than
to be found stark naked with an Ichoglan. We were continually disputing,
and received twenty lashes with a bull's pizzle when the concatenation
of universal events brought you