Ah!, but it wasn’t only the seminarists who arose from the old pages of the Panegyric. They also brought back old sensations to me, so many and varied that I couldn’t recount them all without taking space from the rest of what I have to tell. One of these sensations, and one of the first, I would have preferred to tell in Latin. It’s not that the subject hasn’t got good honest words in our language, which is chaste for the chaste, as it is foul for the foul. Yes, “most chaste” lady reader, as my late-lamented José Dias would have said, you can read the chapter to the end, without fear of being shocked or embarrassed.
In fact, now I’ll put the story into another chapter. However respectable it may turn out, there’s still something less than austere about the subject, which demands a few lines of rest and preparation. This chapter can serve that purpose. And that is already a great deal, dear reader and friend; the heart, when it anticipates what is to come—the importance and number of the events themselves—is strengthened and forearmed, and the evil is much the less for it. It is also true if this doesn’t happen now, then it never will. You can even see a degree of ingenuity on my part here; for, as you read what you are about to read, it is probable that you will find it much less crude than you expected.