Anne D'Este, Olympia's friend and companion, though five years her junior, was now seventeen. And her father, the Duke, who had in the earlier part of this year been to Turin for the purpose of meeting there Henry II. of France, the nephew of the Duchess Renée, had then arranged with the King a marriage between her and Francis of Lorraine, afterwards well known to history as the Duc de Guise. On the return of Duke Hercules to Ferrara the marriage was solemnised on the 29th of July, 1548, Louis of Bourbon standing proxy for the bridegroom. "The citizens of Ferrara," we are told,[73] "were not altogether well pleased with this marriage; but they constrained themselves to put on an air of festivity." There was but little of this, we may be sure, or we should have had the usual accounts of feastings and processions, with the details of the dishes and the dresses, and the cost thereof. The marriage seems to have been done with business–like simplicity; and the young Princess, regretted by a whole city, "who," says Muratori,[74] "loved and reverenced her beyond all belief," was sent off, to find shortly enough,—she too, as well as her old playmate,—that life had other things in store for her than classical philosophy and dilettante poetry. The Duke, her father, accompanied her as far as the frontier of his states, her mother and two sisters as far as Mantua, and certain ladies of the court as far as Grenoble; and there, the links of the chain that bound her to her home having been thus gradually severed, she was launched into the strange life before her. Thus, when Olympia had paid the last duties to her father, and returned to the palace, her friend was no longer there, and she found herself dismissed under circumstances that showed her to have fallen under the displeasure of the Duke. This blow followed the other so closely that Olympia admits herself to have been beaten down to the ground by them. And in truth the burden suddenly laid on those young shoulders, which had never yet learned that life had any burdens which could gall the bearer, was a heavy one. A sick mother, three young sisters, and an infant brother in that poverty–stricken mourning home, all looking up to Olympia, the pride of the family, the admired, successful Olympia, the inmate of the palace, whose friends and intimate companions were the great ones of the land, and she driven forth into the cold shade of disgrace, just at the moment when there was so much need that some gleams from the brilliant sunshine of her prosperity should have cheered the cold home of the widow and orphaned sisters;—the burden was a heavy one for that young heart, making her first acquaintanceship with sorrow. [Sidenote: FIRST SORROWS.] But Olympia struggled bravely with her difficulties.[75] "Haunts of the Muses," and brilliant heathen Undine–life were all left far behind; and that salvation question began to be answered.