“The next year he was attacked by some slight malady, and one day, as I went to see him pretty frequently, he confessed to me that he had a great burden on his conscience. I tried in vain to make him listen to some words of comfort; nothing could cure his melancholy.
“Another time, the talk having turned on the same subject, I said that if he had not been guilty of theft—a sin God does not pardon without restitution—all else could be expiated by repentance. At that he made a clean breast of everything, and confided to me that, having been in his youth keeper of the prisons at Modigliana, he exchanged his firstborn son for the daughter of a foreign nobleman, and that it was that daughter who was married in London, and that he should feel never-ending regret for so having helped to deprive her of her birthright.
“Having strongly advised him to reveal such a secret to his generous benefactress, who must most certainly rejoice over it because of the honour and profit it would bring her, he said that he had already thought of doing so, and only wanted to avoid any sort of fuss during his life; but he should manage so that everything should be discovered after his death. He added that this seemed sufficient reparation due to the lady, considering her present condition of grandeur and opulence.
“He talked after the same fashion to me on several other occasions, and I always found him fixed in that resolve.
“This is what I heard from Chiappini’s own lips, and I am prepared to confirm it, if necessary, legally and by oath.
“In testimony whereof,
“Louis Courtilly,
“Lawyer.”
This very clear and precise deposition was far from compensating me for all the disagreeables brought upon me by my harmless advertisements.
Researches made in the Public Archives of the town I was living in brought to light almost nothing about the year 1773; the Keeper of the Records declared that the books relating to that period had been put together in a place I must not enter without special permission, and where, he told me, memorandums of great importance were kept.