Yet few can have ever experienced a more violent change than that suffered by this strong-willed woman in passing from a life so filled with movement, excitement, activity, danger, pains, pleasures, and vicissitudes, to the dead tranquillity of a secure cloister cell. Her priest biographer[146] hints that the macerations, fasts, and austerities practised by her during her residence at the Murate, were such as in all probability to have shortened her life. Having followed with infinite complacency the worldly triumphs and grandeurs of his heroine, as long as devoutly worshipped Mammon had rewards to shower on his votary, the greedy biographer seeks to finish off his picture by adding a little halo of sanctity, and thus claims double honours for his client. But there is reason to think that these severe penances are wholly the creatures of the writer's priestly invention. The Murate, at the period of Catherine's retirement there, was not the place any penitent would have selected for the leading of an austere life. The convent was inhabited exclusively by noble ladies, and some picture of the life led there by them, has been given by the present writer in speaking of the residence there of another Catherine[147] a few years afterwards. Her childhood was passed within the same cloister-wall that had sheltered the decline of that namesake whose character presented so many striking points of similarity to her own. It is not likely that the Murate convent was the scene of any severe austerities. But if no spiritual excitement of this sort supplied for Catherine the place of that which she had lost, the hours of the long day, however diversified by matins, lauds, complines, and vesper amusements, must surely have passed heavily. A very curious MS. volume,[148] copied from one in Catherine's own handwriting, may perhaps indicate the disposal of some of those weary hours. It consists of more than five hundred receipts and experiments in medicine, chemistry, cosmetics, perfumery, alchemy, &c. The practice of forming and preserving such collections seems to have been a common one among the ladies of that time; and various similar volumes may be met with. In a short preface, the copier of Catherine's manuscript, a certain Messer Lucantonio Cuppani, declares that he has tested many of the receipts and found the results perfectly satisfactory, and that he doubts not that the rest are equally trustworthy, seeing that so great a woman had recorded them; wherefore he has made the present copy, lest the knowledge of such wonderful secrets might be lost. [Sidenote: COINING SECRETS.]