the playbill published
this morning proclaims you on the face of it to be no gentleman and
a liar.

"Go on, I pray. Satiate your vengeance--vengeance begotten by an
amorous passion, in part concealed from the public gaze, possibly
not credited by some folk, and which is known to only me in all its
real extent. Continue, I say, to rear your masked forehead in the
front rank of all those foes who envy, calumniate, persecute, and
hate me. To-day it is your turn to laugh. Perhaps this will not
always be so. Perhaps the vicissitudes of human life will one day
reverse your unworthy triumph and my unmerited oppression.

"From my house, the 18th of January 1776/1777,

"PIETRO ANTONIO GRATAROL."

Having perused this fine flower of Pietro Antonio Gratarol, nobleman of
Padua, his eloquence, I folded up the paper, and told the footman, with
a smile which concealed my boiling indignation, and saved him from
being kicked down the staircase at the risk of his neck, that he might
go back to his master and say that I fully understood the contents of
his note.

Returning to the room where I had left Balbi and Todeschini, I put
Gratarol's letter into the hands of the former, and said: "Your
Excellency will learn from this to what annoyances I am exposed by the
recall of my comedy." He turned pale, and so did Todeschini, when they
gathered the contents of the cowardly, disgusting document.

Balbi asked me what I meant to do. I replied, putting the last touches
to my toilet, that the right thing for me to do would be to compel
Sacchi at once to play my comedy every night until the end of the
Carnival. "Gratarol's letter has certainly been spread broadcast before
now over Venice. I do not mean to give him an answer. What I propose
would be the best means of punishing Sacchi for his want of faith--since
the theatre will certainly be empty--and Gratarol for his delirious
importunity. But, if your Excellency permits me, I shall walk abroad. I
should like to let a certain lady, who bolstered up my comedy against my
will, and who protected a reckless avaricious comedian--I should like
her to see and read in this letter to what she has condemned my
peaceable nature, incapable of injuring a fly, by her wrong-headed,
whimsical, unbecoming pique against a madman."

While I spoke thus to my friend Balbi, the blood was boiling in my
veins. Concealed from him, I had