"That is the only thing that chance saved him the trouble of stealing," Henryet replied. "His name is really Leone Leoni, and he belongs to one of the noblest families of Venice. His father had a small fortune and occupied the palace in which you recently lived. He had an unbounded fondness for this only son, whose precocious talents indicated a superior mental organization. Leoni was educated with care, and, when he was fifteen years old, travelled over half of Europe with his tutor. In five years he learned with incredible ease the language, literature and manners of the countries he visited. His father's death brought him back to Venice with his tutor. This tutor was Abbé Zanini, whom you must have seen frequently at your house last winter. I do not know whether you formed an accurate judgment of him; he is a man of vivid imagination, of exquisite mental keenness, of immense learning, but inconceivably immoral and extremely cowardly beneath a hypocritical exterior of tolerance and sound common-sense. He had naturally depraved his pupil's conscience, and had replaced a proper understanding of justice and injustice in his mind by an alleged knowledge of life, which consisted in committing all the amusing escapades, all the profitable sins, all the actions, good and evil, which can possibly tempt the human heart. I knew this Zanini at Paris, and I remember hearing him say that one must know how to do evil in order to know how to do good, and that one must be able to find enjoyment in vice in order to be able to find enjoyment in virtue. This man, who is more prudent, more adroit and more cold-blooded than Leoni, is much superior to him in knowledge; and Leoni, carried away by his passions or baulked by his caprices, follows him at a distance, making innumerable false moves which are certain to ruin him in society, and which indeed have already ruined him, since he is at the mercy of a few grasping confederates and a few honest men, whose generosity he will soon tire out." A deathlike chill froze my blood while Henryet was speaking thus. I had to make an effort to listen to the rest. XVI