“Who are you?” I said at length. “I think I have seen you before, and yet . . .”
“I will soon tell you my name and the story of my woes; but first give me something to eat, for I am dying of hunger. I have had nothing but bad soup for the last few days.”
“Certainly; go downstairs and have your dinner, and then come back to me; you can’t eat and speak at the same time.”
My man went down to give him his meal, and I gave instructions that I was not to be left alone with him as he terrified me.
I felt sure that I ought to know him, and longed to hear his story.
In three quarters of an hour he came up again, looking like some one in a high fever.
“Sit down,” said I, “and speak freely.”
“My name is Albergoni.”
“What!”
Albergoni was a gentleman of Padua, and one of my most intimate friends twenty-five years before. He was provided with a small fortune, but an abundance of wit, and had a great leaning towards pleasure and the exercise of satire. He laughed at the police and the cheated husbands, indulged in Venus and Bacchus to excess, sacrificed to the god of pederasty, and gamed incessantly. He was now hideously ugly, but when I knew him first he was a very Antinous.