To attend lectures at the university—the famous Bo—I had to go alone. The privilege felt momentous; it was the first thread of liberty placed in my hands.
The first morning I walked to the Bo alone, I felt absurdly tall. The streets of Padua opened before me like a stage that had waited for my cue.
Bells called to prayer; the smell of ink and roasting chestnuts mingled in the air.
For the first time, I went where I pleased, when I pleased — and believed myself a free man.
But I soon discovered that liberty is a weight you carry lightly the first hour and heavily thereafter.
It was not long before I made the worst acquaintances among the most renowned students.
As a matter of course, the most renowned were the most worthless—gamblers, frequenters of disorderly houses, hard drinkers and tormentors of honest girls, wholly incapable of any virtuous feeling.
In the company of such men did I begin my apprenticeship of the world, learning my lesson from the hard book of experience.
Moral instruction, like the index of a book, tells us where wisdom may be found and what it says. But each of us insists on reading our own edition, at our own cost.
Sermons warn us; experience invoices us.
And when we attempt to teach others, they smile, pay their own tuition, and repeat the course.
Thus, the world remains in status quo, or grows worse and worse.
And so when Doctor Gozzi granted me the privilege of going out alone, he gave me an opportunity for the discovery of several truths which, until then, were not only unknown to me, but the very existence of which I had never suspected.
On my first appearance, the boldest scholars got hold of me and sounded my depth.
Finding that I was a thorough freshman, they undertook my education, and with that worthy purpose in view they allowed me to fall blindly into every trap.
They led me to a café where the tables were stained with wine and dice.
One taught me écarté before I had finished my chocolate; another offered me advice on women before I had ever met one.
Their talk was easy, their laughter generous, and my purse lightened with admirable speed.
When I rose to go, they pressed me back into my chair — friends don't part on losses, they said, not when credit is such a simple invention.
Thus began my first course in practical philosophy.
I learned that friendship can bankrupt a man faster than enmity, and that the only honest thing about gambling is the despair that follows it.
My tutors were thorough: they showed me how to cheat as compensation for being cheated.
It was a curriculum admirably suited to youth — bold, noisy, and without prerequisites.
There was, I confess, some profit in my ruin.
I learned to distrust the smile that flatters too readily and the man who talks of honor while counting coins.
I also learned that quarrelsome men, like wasps, demand either distance or a steady hand.
As for professional women, I escaped their nets for reasons less noble than I pretend. None of them, with all their powders and ribbons, looked half so pretty as Bettina.
Vanity kept me virtuous.
Padua in those years was a haven for scholars. The students formed a privileged species, their misdemeanors shielded equally by tradition and by the city's appetite for their fees.
They elected a syndic from among foreign nobles — who answered to Venicia when mischief grew too noisy.
His chief duty was to defend the scholars he was meant to discipline, and therefore he excelled at both.
Among their privileges, no customhouse officer dared search a student's trunk, and no ordinary policeman would attempt to arrest one.
They carried forbidden weapons, seduced helpless girls, and disturbed the public peace with their nighttime brawls and impudent practical jokes.
In one word, they were a body of young fellows, whom nothing could restrain, who would gratify every whim, and enjoy their sport without regard or consideration for any human being.
I was proud to belong to that impudent fraternity. It flattered the vanity of youth to be counted among the untouchables.
It was about that time that a curious incident took place.
A policeman stepped into a coffee-room—a man of buttons and stiffness—and two students were already installed at a corner table, their cups cooling beside a pack of greasy cards.
"Out! You don't belong here," said one, with the authority of youth and wine.
The officer did not move.
The student drew a pistol, fired, and broke a mirror.
The policeman replied with better aim; his shot tore the boy's sleeve and flesh together before he bolted through the doorway amid shouts, overturned chairs, and the maid's scream at the sight of blood.
By noon the alarm had reached the Bo.
Students poured into the courtyard, formed themselves into bands, and swore on honor to cleanse Padua of police.
They patrolled the town with rapiers and pistols.
In two encounters, two scholars were killed—martyrs to the right of making noise—and the rest, assembling in one troop, vowed not to lay down arms while a single policeman breathed inside the city walls.
The authorities, seeing that no one studied and everyone carried firearms, sought peace.
The syndic — a nobleman whose duty was to defend us even when wrong — persuaded the Senate that the police had erred.
The officer who had fired the fatal shot was hanged, and public order was pronounced restored.
During that fine week I was anxious to seem no less brave than my friends. Doctor Gozzi met me at the door, spectacles lowered.
"You carry a gun to a lecture?"
"A carbine and a pair of pistols," I said. "The times demand it."
"The times demand composure and good sense," he replied, but his irony could not restrain my heroism.
I ran about the town with the others, boots wet, powder dry, heart noisier than my weapon.
Fortune, a humorist, denied me even the decency of danger: the troop to which I belonged never met a single policeman.
We fired twice into the fog to keep our courage warm.
When the war ended, the doctor laughed at me; Bettina, who preferred valor in the abstract, admired me without asking for particulars.
Valor, however, eats and drinks more than prudence can pay for.
Unwilling to appear poorer than my new companions, I spent beyond my purse, pledged what I had, and contracted debts which I could not possibly pay.
This state of things caused my first sorrows, and they are the most poignant sorrows under which a young man can smart.
Not knowing which way to turn, I wrote to my excellent grandmother, begging her assistance.
Instead of money, she came herself. On the first of October, 1739, she appeared at Gozzi's door.
She thanked the good doctor and Bettina for their care, declared my "education complete," and marched me home to Venice.
As he embraced me, dear Gozzi wept, and pressed into my hand what he prized most on earth: a relic of some saint, handsomely set in gold.
I might have kept it to this day had the setting been of tin. It performed one miracle only— that of being of service to me in a moment of great need.
Whenever I visited Padua, to complete my study of the law, I stayed at the house of the kind doctor, but I was always grieved at seeing near Bettina the brute to whom she was engaged, and who did not appear to me deserving of such a wife.
I have always regretted that a prejudice, of which I soon got rid, should have made me preserve for that man a flower which I could have plucked so easily.
Virtue, when it comes dressed as timidity, rarely thanks us later.