VII. COVIELLO (1550) 256

VIII. GRATAROL'S INTERVIEW WITH GOZZI (_etching_) 284

IX. LEANDRE 320

CARLO GOZZI.

XXXI.

_Concerning my Physical and Mental Qualities._

In the course of these Memoirs I have promised more than once to give an
exact description of my external appearance and internal qualities, and
also to narrate the story of my love-affairs.

In stature I am tall. Of this I am made conscious by the large amount of
cloth needed for my cloaks, and by the frequent knocks I give my
forehead on entering rooms with low doors. I have the good luck to be
neither crook-backed, lame, blind, nor squint-eyed. I call this good
luck; and yet if I were afflicted with one or other of these
deformities, I should bear it with the same lightness of heart at Venice
as Scarron put up with his deformities in Paris.

This is all I know or have to say about my physical frame. From early
youth I have left to women the trouble of telling me that I was
handsome with a view to flatter me, or that I was ugly with a view to
irritate, in neither of which attempts have they succeeded. Dirt and
squalor I always loathed. Otherwise, if I ever chanced to wear clothes
of a new cut, this was due to my tailor, and not to my orders. Ask
Giuseppe Fornace, my rogue of a snip for over forty years, if I ever
racked my brains about such matters, as so many do. From the year 1735
to 1780, at which date I am writing, I stuck to the same mode of
dressing my hair with heroic constancy. Fashion has changed perhaps a
hundred times during this period, yet I have never deviated from my
adopted style of coiffure. In like manner I have worn the same type of
buckles; except when I happened to break a pair, and was forced to
change them from square to oval; and then I did so at the instance of
the goldsmith, who made me take the lightest in his shop, because they
would break sooner and give him more to do in mending them.

Men who talk little and think much, to which class, peradventure, I
belong, being immersed in their own meditations, catch the habit of
knitting their brows in the travail of reflection. This gives them an
air of savagery, sternness, almost ferocity. Though I am gay by nature,
as appears from my published writings, yet the innumerable thoughts
which kept my brains in a turmoil, through anxieties about our family,
lawsuits, schemes