“I hope that when you hear of my past and present misfortunes, and my anxiety about those perhaps still to come, it will serve as an excuse to you and my other friends and patrons there (at Paris), for my long delay in answering your letter, and to them for my entire silence, as they can learn from you the unhappy turn which my affairs have taken. According to the sentence pronounced on me by the Holy Office, I was condemned to imprisonment during the pleasure of his Holiness, who was pleased, however, to assign the palace and gardens of the Grand Duke near the Trinità dei Monti, as my place of imprisonment. As this was in June of last year, and I had been given to understand that if I asked for a full pardon after the lapse of that and the following month, I should receive it, I asked meanwhile, to avoid having to spend the whole summer and perhaps part of the autumn there, to be allowed, on account of the season, to go to Siena, where the Archbishop’s house was assigned to me as a residence. I staid there five months, when this durance was exchanged for banishment to this little villa, a _miglio_ from Florence, with a strict injunction not to go to the city, and neither to receive the visits of many friends at once, nor to invite any. Here, then, I was living, keeping perfectly quiet, and paying frequent visits to a neighbouring convent, where two daughters of mine were living as nuns; I was very fond of them, especially of the eldest, who possessed high mental gifts, combined with rare goodness of heart, and she was very much attached to me. During my absence, which she considered very perilous for me, she fell into a profound melancholy, which undermined her health, and she was at last attacked by a violent dysentery, of which she died after six days’ illness, just thirty-three years of age, leaving me in the deepest grief, which was increased by another calamity. On returning home from the convent, in company with the doctor who visited my sick daughter shortly before her death, and who had just told me that her situation was desperate, and that she would scarcely survive till the next day, as indeed it proved, I found the Inquisitor’s Vicar here, who informed me of a mandate from the Holy Office at Rome, which had just been communicated to the Inquisitor in a letter from Cardinal Barberini, that I must in future abstain from asking permission to return to Florence, _or they would take me back there (to Rome), and put me in the actual prison of the Holy Office_. This was the answer to the petition, which the Tuscan ambassador had presented to that tribunal after I had been nine months in exile! From this answer it seems to me that, in all probability, my present prison will only be exchanged for that narrow and long-enduring one which awaits us all.