Thus the routine continued. The Count and Countess of Albany, cured by this time of any affectation of royalty, had gradually got domesticated in Florentine society. People began to go to their house, the newly-bought palace in Via San Sebastiano. People came to the opera-box where Charles Edward lay stretched, dozing or snoring, his bottle of Cyprus wine by his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read through the lines of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tittle-tattle, that Florence, frivolous and unintellectual and corrupt though it was, and, perhaps, almost in proportion to its frivolity, emptiness, and corruption, felt a strange sort of interest, experienced a vague, mixed feeling, pity, fear, and general surprise and want of comprehension towards this beautiful young woman, with her dazzling white complexion, dark hazel eyes and blonde hair, her childish features grown, perhaps not less young, but more serious and solemn for her five years of wasted youth and endured misery, with her reputation for coldness, her almost legendary eccentricities of intellectual interests. Women like this one are apt to be regarded not so much with dislike and envy, as with the mixed awe and pity which peasants feel towards an idiot, by frivolous and immoral people like those powdered Florentines of a hundred years ago, whose brocaded trains and embroidered coats have long since found their way into the cupboards of curiosity shops, and been cut up into quaint room decoration by æsthetically-minded foreigners; pity and awe the more natural when, as in the case of Louise d'Albany, it is evident to every man and woman, however heartless and stupid, that the creature in question is a victim, and an innocent one. People were led, perhaps to some extent by impertinent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have some opinion to give upon that now legendary household of the besotten, sleepy, nauseous old King of England and his terribly virtuous and intellectual young Queen, to the palace in Via San Sebastiano; and men and women of fashion led thither, as to one of the curious sights of Florence, their country cousins and their distinguished visitors from other parts. And thus, one day in the autumn of 1777, there was brought, we know not by whom, half-curious and half-indifferent, to the _salon_ of the Countess of Albany a certain very tall, thin, pale young man of twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, rather hard aquiline features, choleric, flashing blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair; a man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardinian uniform, but with something strange, untamed, morose about his whole aspect which contrasted singularly with the effete gracefulness and amiability of young Florentine dandies. He had heard of the Countess of Albany's eccentricities long before; she had doubtless heard of his.