a facility, which makes her the charming and exquisite
creature she is, and for which her reputation is known outside Italy.
Under the graces of a woman she conceals vast learning, thanks to the
excessively monotonous and almost monastic life she led in the castle of
the old Colonnas.

This rich heiress was at first intended for the cloister, being the
fourth child of Prince and Princess Colonna; but the death of her two
brothers, and of her elder sister, suddenly brought her out of her
retirement, and made her one of the most brilliant matches in the Papal
States. Her elder sister had been betrothed to Prince Gandolphini, one
of the richest landowners in Sicily; and Francesca was married to him
instead, so that nothing might be changed in the position of the family.
The Colonnas and Gandolphinis had always intermarried.

From the age of nine till she was sixteen, Francesca, under the
direction of a Cardinal of the family, had read all through the library
of the Colonnas, to make weight against her ardent imagination by
studying science, art, and letters. But in these studies she acquired
the taste for independence and liberal ideas, which threw her, with her
husband, into the ranks of the revolution. Rodolphe had not yet learned
that, besides five living languages, Francesca knew Greek, Latin, and
Hebrew. The charming creature perfectly understood that, for a woman,
the first condition of being learned is to keep it deeply hidden.

Rodolphe spent the whole winter at Geneva. This winter passed like a
day. When spring returned, notwithstanding the infinite delights of the
society of a clever woman, wonderfully well informed, young and lovely,
the lover went through cruel sufferings, endured indeed with courage,
but which were sometimes legible in his countenance, and betrayed
themselves in his manners or speech, perhaps because he believed that
Francesca shared them. Now and again it annoyed him to admire her
calmness. Like an Englishwoman, she seemed to pride herself on
expressing nothing in her face; its serenity defied love; he longed to
see her agitated; he accused her of having no feeling, for he
believed in the tradition which ascribes to Italian women a feverish
excitability.

"I am a Roman!" Francesca gravely replied one day when she took quite
seriously some banter on this subject from Rodolphe.

There was a depth of tone in her reply which gave it the appearance of
scathing irony, and which set Rodolphe's