, on the subject of
marriage; nor must we give to a girl who was probably still too much of
a child, too much of an unromantic little woman of the world, undeserved
pity on account of degradation which she had most probably, as yet, not
sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her husband was old, he was ugly,
he was not attractive; he may have been tiresome and rather loathsome in
his constant attendance; he may even have smelt of brandy every now and
then; but as marriages had been invented in order to give young women a
position in the world, husbands were not expected to be much more than
drawbacks to the situation; and as to the sense of life-long dependence
upon an individual, as to the desire for love and sympathy, it was still
too early in the eighteenth century, and perhaps, also, too early in the
life of a half-Flemish, half-German girl, very childish still in aspect,
and brought up in the worldly wisdom of a noble chapter of canonesses,
to expect anything of that kind.

There must, however, from the very beginning, have been something unreal
and uncanny in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, crammed with
properties of dead Stuarts and Sobieskis, with its royal throne and dais
in the ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of England, must
have been full of rather lugubrious memories. Here James III. of England
and VIII. of Scotland had moped away his bitter old age; here, years
and years ago, Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and brilliant
grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had pined away, bullied and cajoled back
from the convent in which she had taken refuge, perpetually outraged by
the violence of her husband and the insolence of his mistress; it was an
ill-omened sort of place for a bride. Around extended the sombre and
squalid Rome of the second half of the eighteenth century, with its
huge ostentatious rococo palaces and churches, its straggled, black
and filthy streets, its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its
population seemingly composed only of monks and priests (for all men of
the middle-classes wore the black dress and short hair of the clergy),
or of half-savage peasants and workmen, bearded creatures, in wonderful
embroidered vests and scarves, looking exceedingly like brigands, as
Bartolomeo Pinelli etched them even some thirty years later. A town
where every doorway was a sewer by day and a possible hiding-place for
thieves by night; where no woman durst cross the street