THERE WAS A PLAGUE in Venice that year.  But I did not leave.  I might well have left; I had every intention of doing so.  But I was dissuaded by Madame de Mentou.
     I had arrived in Venice in early September 1786, just fifty years ago, to the week, as I write these words. I took rooms in a hotel while I looked around for a house to rent for the winter.
     At first, all seemed well. True, the bells of the church nearby were for ever ringing; and there seemed to be frequent funerals. But I paid little attention, being distracted by the sights and sounds of a new and extraordinary city.
     But then I began to notice (or fancied I did) that the hotel staff were muttering to themselves in the corridors. They had quiet conversations which I could not quite hear, and which in any case were hastily broken off as I approached. And finally, of course, I was told the truth by my French friend, Monsieur Charleroi.
     Monsieur Charleroi had been in Venice for some time. Like me, he was a young man on the grand tour, and he had kindly acted as something of a guide to me in my early days. But one afternoon, when I returned to the hotel after a walk, I found him surrounded by bags in the lobby.
     ‘Monsieur Charleroi,’ I exclaimed in surprise. ‘Surely you are not leaving?’
     ‘I am,’ he said abruptly. ‘And so should you.’
     He pulled me to one side, where we could not be overheard. ‘You remember,’ he enquired, ‘the manager of this hotel, the man who admitted you when you first arrived?’
     ‘I remember him well.’
     Monsieur Charleroi nodded. ‘Three days ago he was as cheerful as you or I. Today he is dead.’
     I was shocked into silence. ‘It is la peste,’ Charleroi whispered to me. ‘The plague. You understand? You should leave at once.’
     At this, my heart beat faster and I am sure that the blood faded from my cheeks. The plague! Something like panic filled my mouth with hot saliva, and I became as wide-eyed and pale as Charleroi himself.
     Charleroi said no more, apart from, ‘Be warned, mon ami,’ and he continued his arrangements to depart. And I, after bidding him farewell, went upstairs to my room to consider what to do.
     Now I was nothing in those days if not a well trained English gentleman; and while I had a healthy sense of concern for my own welfare, I also thought of others. And I immediately remembered Madame de Mentou, the French lady to whom I had been introduced by Charleroi himself a week or so earlier.
     I went downstairs to find that Charleroi had already gone, depriving me of the opportunity to ask him if he had spoken to Madame de Mentou already. So, in case he had not, and filled with a sense of civic duty, I immediately left the hotel and made my way to the house where the lady was living.
     At the door I was told that Madame was with her dressmaker, and that it was not convenient for me to call, but I rudely demanded to see her anyway, insisting that it was an urgent matter. Eventually I was admitted, albeit with a great deal of tutting and handwaving in protest.
     Fortunately, Madame de Mentou was quite unflustered by my sudden entry – though few ladies, I am sure, would have welcomed my intrusion upon such an important domestic scene. Venice, I had already been told, was particularly demanding in the number of dresses that a lady must have, and the seamstress was down on her knees, with a mouthful of pins, when I burst in upon them.
     ‘Why Mr Fenman,’ said Madame. ‘How kind of you to honour us with your presence.’
     The gentle irony, and the implicit (and deserved) rebuke, went unnoticed.
     ‘Madame,’ I blurted out. ‘We must leave Venice at once!’
     Madame turned to look at me. ‘Must we?’ she enquired. And she gave me one of her mocking smiles. It was clear that she, at least, was not about to panic, no matter how dreadful the news. ‘And why would we do that?’
     I took the liberty – quite unlike a nervous and callow young Englishman – of approaching her closely and whispering in her ear, so that the seamstress should not hear.
     ‘It is not safe,’ I told her. ‘There is plague in the city.’
     I stepped back, astounded by my own boldness.
     Madame took the news with remarkable calmness. ‘Is that so?’ she said. ‘And you believe we should leave?’
     ‘Yes.’
     ‘And where do you think we should go, Mr Fenman?’
     This was not an unreasonable question, but it was one which, in the ten minutes or so it had taken me to rush to her house, I had not had the wit to address.
     ‘Why, anywhere,’ I spluttered. ‘Rome, Paris, London. Anywhere will be safer than here.’
     Madame gave me one of her marvellous laughs; her face lit up with amusement. ‘And what makes you think that?’
     ‘Why… because there is no… There is not the same… not the same risk there as there is here.’
     Madame moved her position, to allow the seamstress to work on a different part of the dress, around the waist.
     ‘Do you really think so, Mr Fenman? Does no one ever die, then, in Rome, or Paris, or London?’
     I was beginning to feel foolish. I could feel myself going red.
     Madame was enjoying my discomfiture immensely. ‘I perceive, Mr Fenman, that you do not know the story that the Arabs tell, about the man who tried to run away from Death.’
     I did not know it then, though I have heard it several times since, and indeed have used it in my own work. So Madame proceeded to tell me.
     In this story, a rich man in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace to buy food. But almost immediately the servant comes back, empty-handed and trembling with fear. He tells his master that in the marketplace he bumped into a pale-faced man, whom he recognised as Death – and, what was worse, says the servant, Death recognised him and made a threatening gesture.
     The servant begs his master to let him take a horse, and he gallops away to Samarra, which is far enough away, he believes, for him to be safe.
     Later, the rich man goes into the town himself, and he too meets the pale-faced man. Taking his courage in both hands, the rich man asks Death why he had made the threatening gesture to his servant.
     ‘That was not a threatening gesture,’ says Death. ‘It was merely an expression of surprise. I was astonished to come across your servant here in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’
     Madame laughed out loud when she had finished this story, as if it amused her greatly. And she clearly was not remotely alarmed by the prospect of plague in Venice.
     ‘So you see, Mr Fenman,’ Madame continued, ‘it would be quite wrong to think that you might do yourself any good by running away from here.’
     She approached me, a warm smile on her face: a smile which filled me with admiration and longing. How fortunate I was that this beautiful and sophisticated woman should see fit even to converse with me.
     Madame placed her hand on my shoulder, to reassure me.
     ‘While you are in this city, Mr Fenman, you should think of yourself as being under my protection. No harm will come to you here, I promise you that.’
     The seamstress had now either finished her work, or had given up the attempt in the face of my distractions, and was packing away her things.
     ‘And besides, you have work to do here in Venice. And so have I. We shall work together.’ She smiled again. ‘I have decided to take you under my wing, Mr Fenman. And when I take a young man under my wing, he tends to do rather well. In fact, very well indeed.’
     And then she came closer still, and kissed me full on the lips.
     After that, of course, I remained.