"At midnight, I had retired to a bed eight feet square, hallowed by Bonaparte; a night-light hardly illumined the darkness of my room; suddenly, a little door opened, and I saw a man enter mysteriously, bringing with him a veiled woman. I raised myself on my elbow and looked at them; he approached my bed and lost no time, bowing down to the ground, in offering me a thousand excuses for thus disturbing the rest of His Excellency the Ambassador: but he was a widower; he was a poor steward; he wished to marry his _ragazza_, here present: unfortunately he fell somewhat short of the dowry. He lifted up the orphan's veil: she was pale, very pretty, and kept her eyes lowered with becoming modesty. This family man looked as though he wanted to go away and leave the affianced bride with me to finish her story. In this urgent danger, I did not ask the obliging and unhappy man, as the good knight asked the mother of the young girl of Grenoble, if she was a maid; very much flurried, I took some pieces of gold off the table by my bed and gave them, to do credit to the King my master, to the _zitella_, 'whose eyes were not swollen by dint of weeping.' She kissed my hand with infinite gratitude. I did not utter a word, and, upon my falling back on my immense couch, as though I wanted to sleep, the vision of St. Anthony disappeared. I thanked my patron saint, St. Francis, whose feast it was; I remained in the darkness, half smiling, half regretting, and rapt in a profound admiration of my virtues. [Sidenote: Loretto.] "It was thus, however, that I 'scattered gold,' that I was an ambassador, entertained in pomp and state by the Governor of Loretto, in the same town where Tasso was lodged in a sorry den and where, for want of a little money, he was unable to continue his journey. He payed his debt to Our Lady of Loretto by his _canzone_: Ecco fra le tempeste e i fieri venti. "Madame de Chateaubriand made amends for my transient fortune by climbing the steps of the Santa Chiesa[540] on her knees. After my victory of the night, I had a better right than the King of Saxony to deposit my wedding-coat in the Treasury of Loretto; but I shall never forgive myself, a puny child of the Muses, for having been so powerful and so happy in the spot where the singer of Jerusalem had been so weak and so miserable! Torquato, do not take me in this unusual moment of my inconstant prosperity; riches are not my habit; see me on my way to Namur, in my attic in London, in my infirmary in Paris, in order to find in me some distant resemblance to thyself!