Daughters of Eve (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Choiseuls went to Frascati, where they spent the summer with their intimate friends, " in a villa with a vast garden filled with fountains and plane trees," the Abbe was in ecstasies. Here antiquities were to be found at every step. One day some workmen unearthed a marble tomb containing twelve terra-cotta figures. The Abbe" was no sooner informed of this discovery than he flew to the spot to purchase the treasure. But the price demanded was beyond his purse. At dinner he mentioned the incident, and sighed over his bad luck. The next day, to his surprise, he found the twelve terra-cottas on a table in his room. "It was such graceful attentions," he says, " that Madame de Choiseul constantly paid to all who surrounded her." Needless to say, the sentiments she inspired were not always as purely platonic as the honest Abba's, though they never dared express themselves openly. So great was the dread of losing her esteem that even the boldest sought to disguise their passion under the respectable name of friendship. Among these discreet lovers, no one, with the exception of the Abbe, was ever so unselfishly devoted to her as a certain Baron Gleichen, who was visiting Rome in the suite of the Margrave and Margravine of Bayreuth. " A quarrel," he says, " instead of breaking our acquaintance at the start, cemented it into a friendship that lasted thirty years." He had been invited to Frascati, and the episode to which he refers took place on the day of his arrival. At dinner the conversation turned on the Margravine of Bayreuth, the Princess of Prussia and the favourite sister of Frederick the Great. Choiseul, " who loved to be daring," regardless of thepresence of his guest, expressed his opinion in so disrespectful a manner that Gleichen, who was under the greatest obligations to ...