Monsieur,<\/p>\n
One might have thought two years ago, judging by the ap\u00adpearance of the favorable progress of my affairs that, contrary to my deserts, fortune was endeavoring only to make me more envied than imitated<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>; but alas! it was only to make of me an exam\u00adple of her vicissitudes and inconstancy, changing her favor into disfavor and her good luck into misfortune.<\/p>\n You may have heard, Monsieur, since you are well acquainted with my affairs, how I found, on my return from Bordeaux<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, a will drawn up in my favor by a good old woman from Toulouse. Her property consisted of some furniture and some land that the bipartite court of Castres<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> had awarded to her in place of three or four hundred \u00e9cus<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> owed to her by a wicked rogue. In order to obtain part of it, I set out for the place to sell the goods, as was recommended by my best friends and by my need for money to meet the debts I had contracted and the great expense I foresaw as proper for me to make in the pursuit of the affair that my temerity does not allow me to mention<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n On my arrival, I found out that the fox had left the locality because the good woman had a warrant out for his arrest for the same debt. I was informed that he was doing very well in Marseilles and had considerable means. Whereupon my attorney decided (as indeed was also dictated by the nature of the affair) that I should proceed to Marseilles. He thought that, once I had him arrested, I would be able to get two or three hundred ecus from him. Since I bad no money at all to carry out this plan, I sold the horse I had hired in Toulouse. I intended to pay for it on my return, which misfortune delayed so long that I am in great disgrace for having left my affairs in such disorder. I would never have done so had the Lord given me as much success in my undertaking as appearances led me to expect.<\/p>\n I set out, therefore, on this advice, caught my man in Mar\u00adseilles, had him arrested, and agreed to three hundred exus, which he gave me in cash<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. Just as I was about to leave by land, I was persuaded by a gentleman with whom I had lodged to go with him by boat as far as Narbonne since the weather was so favorable. I did this in order to get there sooner and to save money, or, to be more exact, so as never to get there and to lose everything.<\/p>\n The wind was as favorable as was necessary to take us to Narbonne that same day, which meant covering fifty leagues<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, if God had not allowed three Turkish brigantines<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> to bear down upon us. They were sailing along the coast of the Gulf of Lion in order to seize the ships coming from Beaucaire where there was a fair considered to be one of the finest in Christendom<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. They attacked us so violently that two or three of our men were killed and all the rest wounded, including myself. I received an arrow wound that will serve me as a clock for the rest of my life<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. We were forced to surrender to those criminals worse than tigers whose first bursts of rage caused them to hack our pilot into a hundred thousand pieces because they had lost one of their leaders in addition to four or five of their galley slaves whom our men had killed.<\/p>\n Once that was done, they chained us, after crudely dressing our wounds, and continued their course, committing a thousand rob\u00adberies. However, they allowed those who surrendered without fighting to go free after they had robbed them. And finally, at the end of seven or eight days, laden with booty, they set sail for Barbary, a lair and den of thieves, though the Grand Turk<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> does not admit it. On arriving there, they put us up for sale with a report of our capture, which they said had been made on a Spanish ship because, without that lie, we would have been released by the consul whom the King maintains there to assure free trade for the French<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n Their procedure for selling us was thus: after stripping us naked, they gave each of us a pair of pants, a linen jacket, and a small cap, and walked us up and down through the city of ‘Timis where they had purposely come to sell us. When they had had us make five or six rounds through the city with a chain around our neck, they took us back to the boat so that the merchants could come and see who could eat well and who could not, so as to show that our wounds were not mortal. That being done, they brought us back to the square where the merchants came to examine us just as one does when buying a horse or an ox. They made us open our mouths in order to look over our teeth; felt our ribs; probed our wounds; and made us walk, trot, and run; then carry loads and wrestle to judge each one’s strength; and a thousand other kinds of brutalities<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n I was sold to a fisherman who was soon obliged to get rid of me because I found nothing so repugnant as the sea; then by the fisherman to an old man, a Spagirite doctor<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, a master at drawing out quintessences, a most benevolent and amenable man. From what he told me, he had worked for fifty years in his quest for the philosophers’ stone. He had searched for the stone in vain, but was quite successful with another kind of transmutation of metals. In proof of this, I often saw him melt together equal parts of gold and silver, place them in thin sheets, and then put on a layer of some powders, then another layer of the sheets, and then another layer of the powders. He would put them in a crucible or goldsmith’s melting vessel, keep it on the fire for twenty-four hours, and then open it to find that the silver had become gold. More often still, he would congeal or fix mercury into fine silver and sell it in order to give alms to the poor. My job was to maintain the fire in ten or twelve furnaces; doing so, thank. God, was as much a pleasure as it was an affliction for me. He loved me dearly, and took great delight in speaking to me about alchemy and even more about his law, putting forth all his efforts to win me over to it, promising me copious wealth and all his knowledge.<\/p>\n God always kept alive in me the conviction that I would be freed because of my unceasing prayers to Him and to the Blessed Virgin Mary, through whose sole intercession I firmly believe I was delivered. The hope and firm belief, therefore, that I had of seeing you again, Monsieur, made me persistent in asking him to teach me how to cure gravel, for which I used to see him working miracles every day. This he <\/em>did; indeed, he had me prepare and administer the ingredients. Oh! how many times I have wished since then that I had been a slave before the death of your late brother and commaecenas<\/em><\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> in doing good for me<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, and that I had had the secret I am sending you<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. I beg you to accept it with as much pleasure as my belief is firm that, if I had known what I am sending you, death would not already have triumphed over him (at least by that means), although it is said that man’s days are num\u00adbered before God. That is true, but it is not because God had calculated his days to be a certain number, but the number was calculated before God because it came about that way; or, to speak more clearly, he did not die when he did because God had antici\u00adpated it that way or had calculated the number of his days to be so many, but he had anticipated it that way and the number of his days was known to be so many, because he died when he did.<\/p>\n I was, therefore, with this old man from the month of Sep\u00adtember 1605<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> until the following August when he <\/em>was seized and taken away to the Grand Sultan<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> to work for him, but in vain; he died of grief on the way. He left me to one of his nephews, a real anthropomorphist<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, who sold me again soon after his uncle’s death, because he heard that M. de Br\u00e9ves<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, the Kings’ Ambas\u00adsador in ‘flukey, was coming with valid and explicit letters patent from the Grand Thrk to reclaim the Christian slaves.<\/p>\n A renegade<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> from Nice in Savoy, hostile by nature, bought me and took me to his temat<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span>;that is what they call the land that one holds as a sharecropper of the Grand Lord, because the people own nothing; everything belongs to the Sultan. This man’s temat <\/em>was in the mountains, where the country is extremely hot and forsaken. One of the three wives that he had (she was like a Greek-Christian, but schismatic) possessed a fine mind and be\u00adcame very fond of me; and nearer the end, another of them, a native Thrk, who served God’s immense mercy as an instrument in recalling her husband from apostasy and restoring him to the bosom of the Church, brought about my deliverance from slavery. As she was interested in knowing our way of life, she used to come to see me every day in the fields where I was digging. At the end, she ordered me to sing praises to my God. The memory of the Quomodo cantabimus in terra aliena <\/em>of the children of Israel, captives in Babylon, made me begin, with tears in my eyes, the psalm<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Super flumina Babylonis, <\/em>and then the Salve, Regina <\/em>and several other hymns. The pleasure she received from these was as great as her admiration of them. She did not fail to tell her hus\u00adband in the evening that he had been wrong to give up his religion, which she considered exceedingly good because of what I had told her about our God and some praises I had sung to Him in her presence. She said that these latter gave her such divine pleasure that she did not believe the paradise of her fathers, which she was awaiting, was as glorious or accompanied by so much joy as the pleasure she felt while I was praising my God. She concluded that there was something marvelous about it.<\/p>\n This other Caiphas or Balaarn’s ass, by her words, caused her husband to tell me the very next day that our escaping to France depended only upon an opportunity<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, but that he would remedy matters so well within a short time that God would be praised by it. A few days became ten months, during which he kept alive in me these vain but finally realized hopes. At the end of that time, we escaped in a little skiff and made our way, on June 28, to Aigues-Mortes<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and soon after to Avignon, where the Vice\u00adLegate<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a><\/span> received the renegade publicly, with tears in his eyes and his voice broken by sobs, in the church of Saint-Pierre, to the honor of God and the edification of the congregation. The above-mentioned prelate has kept us both with him in order to take us to Rome. He is going there just as soon as his successor to the three-year term of office<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a><\/span> \u2014which he completed on the feast of Saint John\u2014 has arrived<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.He has promised the penitent that he would have him admitted into the austere convent of the Fate ben fra\u00adtelli<\/em><\/span>30<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, to which he has vowed himself<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, and see that I was pro\u00advided with some good benefice. He does me the honor of loving me very much and treating me with affection because of a few alchemy secrets that I have taught him. He values these more, he says, than if 10 li averse datto un monte di oro<\/em><\/span>32<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, because he has worked on them his whole lifetime and desires no other satisfac\u00adtion. This same Bishop, since he knows that I am a churchman, has ordered me to send for my letters of ordination, assuring me that he will help me and provide me with a very good benefice. I was at a loss to find a trustworthy man to do this, when a friend of mine from the household of this same Bishop recommended to me Monsieur Canterelle, the bearer of this letter, who was going to Toulouse. I asked him to take the trouble of riding as far as Dax to deliver this letter to you and to obtain the above-mentioned papers and the ones I received in Toulouse as a Bachelor of Theology<\/span>33<\/sup><\/a><\/span>. I entreat you to give them to him. I am sending you a voucher for them for that purpose. The said Monsieur Canterelle is of the household and has been expressly ordered by the Bishop to carry out his commission faithfully and to send the papers to me in Rome, if indeed we have set out.<\/p>\n I brought from ‘flukey two stones that nature has faceted like diamonds. I am sending one of them to you. May your pleasure in accepting it equal my feeling of unworthiness in offering it to you.<\/p>\n It is impossible, Monsieur, for you and my relatives not to have been slandered by my creditors on my account. I would already have partly satisfied them with one hundred or one hundred twenty ecus given me by our penitent, had I not been advised by my best friends to keep them until my return from Rome so as to avoid the mishaps that might be mine for want of money (although I eat at the Bishop’s table and enjoy his favor), but I think that all this disgrace will turn to good.<\/p>\n I am writing to Monsieur D’Arnaudirt<\/span>34<\/sup><\/a><\/span> and to my mother. I beg you to have my letters sent to them by a man whom Monsieur Canterelle will pay. If, by chance, my mother has withdrawn the letters, they are filed as a measure of precaution with Monsieur Rabel<\/span>35<\/sup><\/a><\/span>.I have nothing else to say except that, entreating you to continue your holy affection for me, I remain, Monsieur, your most humble and obedient servant.<\/p>\n DEPAUL<\/span>36<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\n Avignon, July 24, 1607<\/p>\n