Olympia little understood yet the nature of the power against which she hoped to prevail. How grimly Caraffa would have smiled at the notion, that his prey could be thus taken from him. A Duke of Ferrara release a convicted and relapsed heretic to pleasure a silly woman, herself more than suspected of sympathy with his errors! Or that that contemptible voluptuary at Rome, simoniacal usurper of Peter's keys, dare to absolve him whom the Holy Inquisition has condemned! Not while John Peter Caraffa keeps watch, as Inquisitor, over the interests of the Church! As to the Duke, it would have been saying that his soul was his own, contrary to all contract, and saying so in a most dangerous and blasphemous manner. And had even indolent, easy–going Julius III. dreamed of dipping the tips of his jewelled fingers in such troubled waters, he would have found, as many a Pope has found, that powerful as the _Servus Servorum_ might be while working in accordance with the powers of the machinery of which he is a part, he was powerless to stop the operation of it. Lavinia della Rovere, her sister–in–law Maddalena Orsini, and the other generous and gentle souls, who dreamed of attempting the absurd quixotism of speaking mercy to a Church in danger, succeeded only in leaving to other and happier times a record, still by no means unneeded, of womanly protest against priestly intolerance. [Sidenote: WITH JOHN SINAPI.] In the same letter to Curione, in which Olympia speaks of her intention not to give up her classical studies, she says that she and her husband would willingly settle at Bâle if there were any prospect of Grünthler's being able to obtain either medical practice or teaching there. For still the future was all uncertain before them; and yet the time was come when they determined on no longer trespassing on the hospitality of their generous host. John Sinapi, now established as physician to the prince–bishop at Würzburg, had pressed them to stay awhile with him; and they accordingly removed from Augsburg to that city. Sinapi had been the master of both husband and wife at Ferrara. His wife, Francesca Bucyronia, had been Olympia's friend at court there; and the reunion of the party, under circumstances so widely different from all that surrounded them in Italy, must have brought back many a recollection of those old times and brilliant scenes, which every one of the party was so thankful to have exchanged for their present pale, and sometimes difficult, northern life. Sinapi and Francesca had several children. A niece, Bridget, also lived with them; and in one of Olympia's letters of this time we find a Leonora mentioned as one of the inmates of the family, and we get a fleeting glimpse of the party gathered round the good physician's hearth in the evening, with books and learned talk, while Leonora taught the girls embroidery,—"docens ambas acu pingere."