to
confess, somebody will ask me, upon this subject? Yes: I have something
to say upon it, and I will proceed to the confession with the same
ingenuousness with which I have made my former ones.

I always had a disinclination to girls of pleasure, but at Venice those
were all I had within my reach; most of the houses being shut against me
on account of my place. The daughters of M. le Blond were very amiable,
but difficult of access; and I had too much respect for the father and
mother ever once to have the least desire for them.

I should have had a much stronger inclination to a young lady named
Mademoiselle de Cataneo, daughter to the agent from the King of Prussia,
but Carrio was in love with her there was even between them some question
of marriage. He was in easy circumstances, and I had no fortune: his
salary was a hundred louis (guineas) a year, and mine amounted to no more
than a thousand livres (about forty pounds sterling) and, besides my
being unwilling to oppose a friend, I knew that in all places, and
especially at Venice, with a purse so ill furnished as mine was,
gallantry was out of the question. I had not lost the pernicious custom
of deceiving my wants. Too busily employed forcibly to feel those
proceeding from the climate, I lived upwards of a year in that city as
chastely as I had done in Paris, and at the end of eighteen months I
quitted it without having approached the sex, except twice by means of
the singular opportunities of which I am going to speak.

The first was procured me by that honest gentleman, Vitali, some time
after the formal apology I obliged him to make me. The conversation at
the table turned on the amusements of Venice. These gentlemen reproached
me with my indifference with regard to the most delightful of them all;
at the same time extolling the gracefulness and elegant manners of the
women of easy virtue of Venice; and adding that they were superior to all
others of the same description in any other part of the world.
"Dominic," said I, "(I)must make an acquaintance with the most amiable of
them all," he offered to take me to her apartments, and assured me I
should be pleased with her. I laughed at this obliging offer: and Count
Piati, a man in years and venerable, observed to me, with more candor
than I should have expected from an Italian, that he thought me too
prudent to suffer myself to be taken to such a place by my enemy. In
fact I had no inclination to do i