I had also a posthumous brother, who became a priest; he died in Rome fifteen years ago.
Let us now come to the dawn of my existence in the character of a thinking being.
The organ of memory began to develop itself in me at the beginning of August, 1733.

I had at that time reached the age of eight years and four months.

Of what may have happened to me before that period I have not the faintest recollection.

This is the circumstance.
I was standing in the corner of a room bending towards the wall, supporting my head, and my eyes fixed upon a stream of blood flowing from my nose to the ground.

My grandmother, Marzia, whose pet I was, came to me, bathed my face with cold water, and, unknown to everyone in the house, took me with her in a gondola as far as Muran, a thickly-populated island only half a league distant from Venice.
Alighting from the gondola, we enter a wretched hole, where we find an old woman sitting on a rickety bed, holding a black cat in her arms, with five or six more purring around her.