of
friendly interest, and kept quite cool, despite the ardour of her
embraces. Seeing that her trouble was of no avail, she sighed, shed some
tears, and, taking her daughter, she bid me adieu, promising once more to
send me her son.

Therese was two years older than I. She was still pretty, and even
handsome, but her charms no longer retained their first beauty, and my
passion for her, having been a merely physical one, it was no wonder that
she had no longer any attraction for me. Her adventures during the six
years in which I had lost her would certainly interest my readers, and
form a pleasing episode in my book, and I would tell the tale if it were
a true one; but not being a romance writer, I am anxious that this work
shall contain the truth and nothing but the truth. Convicted by her
amorous and jealous margarve of infidelity, she had been sent about her
business. She was separated from her husband Pompeati, had followed a new
lover to Brussels, and there had caught the fancy of Prince Charles de
Lorraine, who had obtained her the direction of all the theatres in the
Austrian Low Countries. She had then undertaken this vast responsibility,
entailing heavy expenditure, till at last, after selling all her diamonds
and lace, she had fled to Holland to avoid arrest. Her husband killed
himself at Vienna in a paroxysm caused by internal pain--he had cut open
his stomach with a razor, and died tearing at his entrails.

My business left me no time for sleep. M. Casanova came and asked me to
dinner, telling me to meet him on the Exchange--a place well worth
seeing. Millionaires are as plentiful as blackberries, and anyone who is
not worth more than a hundred thousand florins is considered a poor man.
I found M. d'O---- there, and was asked by him to dinner the following day
at a small house he had on the Amstel. M. Casanova treated me with the
greatest courtesy. After reading my pedigree he went for his own, and
found it exactly the same; but he merely laughed, and seemed to care
little about it, differing in that respect from Don Antonio of Naples,
who set such store by my pedigree, and treated me with such politeness on
that account. Nevertheless, he bade me make use of him in anything
relating to business if I did anything in that way. I thought his
daughter pretty, but neither her charms nor her wit made any impression
on me. My thoughts were taken up with Esther, and I talked so much about
her at dinner that at last