I have not always been blear-eyed. My nose did not always touch my
chin; nor was I always a servant. You must know that I am the daughter
of Pope Urban X, and of the Princess of Palestrina. To the age of
fourteen I was brought up in a castle, compared with which all the
castles of the German barons would not have been fit for stabling, and
one of my robes would have bought half the province of Westphalia. I
grew up, and improved in beauty, wit, and every graceful
accomplishment; and in the midst of pleasures, homage, and the highest
expectations. I already began to inspire the men with love. My
breast began to take its right form, and such a breast! white, firm,
and formed like that of the Venus de’ Medici; my eyebrows were as
black as jet, and as for my eyes, they darted flames and eclipsed
the luster of the stars, as I was told by the poets of our part of the
world. My maids, when they dressed and undressed me, used to fall into
an ecstasy in viewing me before and behind; and all the men longed
to be in their places.

“I was contracted in marriage to a sovereign prince of Massa
Carrara. Such a prince! as handsome as myself, sweet-tempered,
agreeable, witty, and in love with me over head and ears. I loved him,
too, as our sex generally do for the first time, with rapture,
transport, and idolatry. The nuptials were prepared with surprising
pomp and magnificence; the ceremony was attended with feasts,
carousals, and burlesques: all Italy composed sonnets in my praise,
though not one of them was tolerable.

“I was on the point of reaching the summit of bliss, when an old
marchioness, who had been mistress to the Prince, my husband,
invited him to drink chocolate. In less than two hours after he
returned from the visit, he died of most terrible convulsions.

“But this is a mere trifle. My mother, distracted to the highest
degree, and yet less afflicted than I, determined to absent herself
for some time from so fatal a place. As she had a very fine estate
in the neighborhood of Gaeta, we embarked on board a galley, which was
gilded like the high altar of St. Peter’s, at Rome. In our passage
we were boarded by a Sallee rover. Our men defended themselves like
true Pope’s soldiers; they flung themselves upon their knees, laid
down their arms, and begged the corsair to give them absolution in
articulo mortis.

“The Moors presently stripped us as bare as ever we were born. My
mother, my maids of honor, and myself, were served all in the same
manner. It is amazing how quick these gentry are at undressing people.
But what surprised me most was, that they made a rude sort of surgical
examination of parts of the body which are sacred to the functions
of nature. I thought it a very strange kind of ceremony; for thus we
are generally apt to judge of things when we have not seen the
world. I afterwards learned that it was to discover if we had any
diamonds concealed. This practice had been established since time
immemorial among those civilized nations that scour the seas. I was
informed that the religious Knights of Malta never fail to make this
search whenever any Moors of either sex fall into their hands. It is a
part of the law of nations, from which they never deviate.

“I need not tell you how great a hardship it was for a young
princess and her mother to be made slaves and carried to Morocco.
You may easily imagine what we must have suffered on board a
corsair. My mother was still extremely handsome, our maids of honor,
and even our common waiting-women, had more charms than were to be
found in all Africa.

“As to myself, I was enchanting; I was beauty itself, and then I had
my virginity. But, alas! I did not retain it long; this precious
flower, which had been reserved for the lovely Prince of Massa
Carrara, was cropped by the captain of the Moorish vessel, who was a
hideous Negro, and thought he did me infinite honor. Indeed, both
the Princess of Palestrina and myself must have had very strong
constitutions to undergo all the hardships and violences we suffered
before our arrival at Morocco. But I will not detain you any longer
with such common things; they are hardly worth mentioning.

“Upon our arrival at Morocco we found that kingdom deluged with
blood. Fifty sons of the Emperor Muley Ishmael were each at the head
of a party. This produced fifty civil wars of blacks against blacks,
of tawnies against tawnies, and of mulattoes against mulattoes. In
short, the whole empire was one continued scene of carnage.

“No sooner were we landed than a party of blacks, of a contrary
faction to that of my captain, came to rob him of his booty. Next to
the money and jewels, we were the most valuable things he had. I
witnessed on this occasion such a battle as you never beheld in your
cold European climates. The northern nations have not that
fermentation in their blood, nor that raging lust for women that is so
common in Africa. The natives of Europe seem to have their veins
filled with milk only; but fire and vitriol circulate in those of
the inhabitants of Mount Atlas and the neighboring provinces. They
fought with the fury of the lions, tigers, and serpents of their
country, to decide who should have us. A Moor seized my mother by
the right arm, while my captain’s lieutenant held her by the left;
another Moor laid hold of her by the right leg, and one of our
corsairs held her by the other. In this manner almost all of our women
were dragged by four soldiers.

“My captain kept me concealed behind him, and with his drawn
scimitar cut down everyone who opposed him; at length I saw all our
Italian women and my mother mangled and torn in pieces by the monsters
who contended for them. The captives, my companions, the Moors who
took us, the soldiers, the sailors, the blacks, the whites, the
mulattoes, and lastly, my captain himself, were all slain, and I
remained alone expiring upon a heap of dead bodies. Similar
barbarous scenes were transacted every day over the whole country,
which is of three hundred leagues in extent, and yet they never missed
the five stated times of prayer enjoined by their prophet Mahomet.

“I disengaged myself with great difficulty from such a heap of
corpses, and made a shift to crawl to a large orange tree that stood
on the bank of a neighboring rivulet, where I fell down exhausted with
fatigue, and overwhelmed with horror, despair, and hunger. My senses
being overpowered, I fell asleep, or rather seemed to be in a
trance. Thus I lay in a state of weakness and insensibility between
life and death, when I felt myself pressed by something that moved
up and down upon my body. This brought me to myself. I opened my eyes,
and saw a pretty fair-faced man, who sighed and muttered these words
between his teeth, ‘O che sciagura d’essere senza coglioni!”‘