ghtmare life she had left behind, she hoped for ever. She would pursue
and find pleasure at whatever cost.

In September, within five weeks of leaving England, we find her at
Geneva, installed in a suite of rooms next to those occupied by Marie
Louise, late Empress of France, a fugitive and exile like herself, and
animated by the same spirit of reckless revolt against destiny--Marie
Louise, we read, "making excursions like a lunatic on foot and on
horseback, never even seeming to dream of making people remember that,
before she became mixed up with a Corsican adventurer, she was an
Archduchess"; the Princess of Wales, equally careless of her dignity and
position, finding her pleasure in questionable company.

"From the inn where she was stopping she heard music, and, quite
unaccompanied, immediately entered a neighbouring house and disappeared
in the medley of dancers." A few days later, at Lausanne, "she learned
that a little ball was in progress at a house opposite the 'Golden
Lion,' and she asked for an invitation. After dancing with everybody and
anybody, she finished up by dancing a Savoyard dance, called a
_fricassee_, with a nobody. Madame de Corsal, who blushed and wept for
the rest of the company, declares that it has made her ill, and that she
feels that the honour of England has been compromised." Thus early did
Caroline begin that career of indiscretion, to call it by no worse name,
which made of her six years' exile "a long suicide of her reputation."

In October we find the Princess entering Milan, with her retinue of
ladies-in-waiting, chamberlains, equerry, page, courier, and coachman,
and with William Austin for companion--a boy, now about thirteen, whom
she treated as her son, and who was believed by many to be the child of
her imprudence at Blackheath, although the Commission of the "Delicate
Investigation" had pronounced that he was son of a poor woman at
Deptford. At Milan, as indeed wherever she wandered in Italy, the
"vagabond Princess" was received as a Queen. Count di Bellegarde, the
Austrian Governor, was the first to pay homage to her; at the Scala
Theatre, the same evening, her entry was greeted with thunders of
applause, and whenever she appeared in the Milan streets it was to an
accompaniment of doffed hats and cheers.

One of her first visits was to the studio of Giuseppe Bossi, the famous
and handsome artist, whom she requested to paint her portrait. "On
Thursday," Bossi records, "I sk