"The Venetian girl is astonished that some one should have had the courage to write against her two scenes of a novel built up and filled with impious falsehoods. She complains bitterly of the author, who might have made use of another person to give scope to his talent and not made a plaything of an honest young woman of education and religion, known to all and universally loved and esteemed. "How can Silvio say that, at my age of 13 years (which was my age at the time when he says that he knew me), how can he say that I used to go daily to see him in his abode, when I swear that I went there only a very few times and always accompanied by my father, mother, or brother? How can he say that I confided a love to him, when I was always at my classes, and when I had hardly begun to know anything, and could know nothing of love or the world, being devoted only to the duties of religion, to those of a dutiful daughter, and occupied with my studies, which were my only pleasures? I swear that I never spoke to him of love, nor of anything else whatsoever. Only, if sometimes I saw him, I looked upon him with eyes of pity, because my heart was full of compassion for my fellow-creatures, and I hated the place in which my father by ill-chance found himself: he had always occupied another position; but, after being a brave soldier and well serving the Republic and, afterwards, his Sovereign, he was given this employment against his will and that of his family. "It is most false (_falsissimo_) to say that I ever took the hand of the aforesaid Silvio, either as a father's or a brother's; first, because, although very young and without experience, I had had enough education to know my duties. How can he say that I kissed him, I who would not have done that even to a brother: so great were the scruples imprinted in my heart by the education which I had received in the convents, where my father had always kept me? [Sidenote: The manuscript translated.] "Truly he must have known me more thoroughly than I could know him! I remained daily in the company of my brothers in a room next to his own, which was the place where my aforesaid brothers slept and studied: now, since I was free to remain with them, how can he say that I talked to him of the affairs of my family, that I relieved my heart about my mother's severity and my father's kindness, when I had no motive whatever to complain of the former, but always loved her? "And how can he say that he shouted at me for bringing him bad coffee? I know of no one who can say that he dared to shout at me, all having shown their esteem for me by their kindness alone.