The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi Volume the Second

Excerpt

In the course of these Memoirs I have promised more than once to give an exact description of my external appearance and internal qualities, and also to narrate the story of my love-affairs.

In stature I am tall. Of this I am made conscious by the large amount of cloth needed for my cloaks, and by the frequent knocks I give my forehead on entering rooms with low doors. I have the good luck to be neither crook-backed, lame, blind, nor squint-eyed. I call this good luck; and yet if I were afflicted with one or other of these deformities, I should bear it with the same lightness of heart at Venice as Scarron put up with his deformities in Paris.

This is all I know or have to say about my physical frame. From early youth I have left to women the trouble of telling me that I was handsome{2} with a view to flatter me, or that I was ugly with a view to irritate, in neither of which attempts have they succeeded. Dirt and squalor I always loathed. Otherwise, if I ever chanced to wear clothes of a new cut, this was due to my tailor, and not to my orders. Ask Giuseppe Fornace, my rogue of a snip for over forty years, if I ever racked my brains about such matters, as so many do. From the year 1735 to 1780, at which date I am writing, I stuck to the same mode of dressing my hair with heroic constancy. Fashion has changed perhaps a hundred times during this period, yet I have never deviated from my adopted style of coiffure. In like manner I have worn the same type of buckles; except when I happened to break a pair, and was forced to change them from square to oval; and then I did so at the instance of the goldsmith, who made me take the lightest in his shop, because they would break sooner and give him more to do in mending them.

Men who talk little and think much, to which class, peradventure, I belong, being immersed in their own meditations, catch the habit of knitting their brows in the travail of reflection. This gives them an air of savagery, sternness, almost ferocity. Though I am gay by nature, as appears from my published writings, yet the innumerable thoughts which kept my brains in a turmoil, through anxieties about our family, lawsuits, schemes of economy, literary plans,{3} and so forth, bred in me a trick of contracting my forehead and frowning, which, combined with my slow gait, taciturnity, and preference for solitary places, won me the reputation among those who were not my familiar friends of being a surly, sullen, unapproachable fellow, perhaps even an enemy of mankind. Many who have come upon me, pondering, with knitted brows and gloomy downcast eyes, will have suspected that I was planning how to kill an enemy, while really I was constructing the plot of my Green Bird.

In the society of people new to me, I always appeared drowsy, stupid, silent, and lethargic, until I had studied their characters and ways of thinking. Afterwards I turned out quite the opposite; not, however, that I may not have remained a fool; but I was one of those fools who utter laconisms, less tiresome to the company than interminable flowery speeches.

I was not miserly, because I always loathed that vice, nor prodigal, for the sole reason that I was not rich....