This is the most interesting way of
picking it up, and before I was thirty I could speak nearly every
tongue in Europe; but it must be confessed that what you learn is
not of much use for the ordinary purposes of life. My business,
for example, has usually been with soldiers and peasants, and
what advantage is it to be able to say to them that I love only
them, and that I will come back when the wars are over?
Never have I had so sweet a teacher as in Venice. Lucia was her
first name, and her second--but a gentleman forgets second names.
I can say this with all discretion, that she was of one of the
senatorial families of Venice and that her grandfather had been
Doge of the town.
She was of an exquisite beauty--and when I, Etienne Gerard, use
such a word as "exquisite," my friends, it has a meaning. I have
judgment, I have memories, I have the means of comparison. Of
all the women who have loved me there are not twenty to whom I
could apply such a term as that. But I say again that Lucia was
exquisite.
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