"Don Fortunato and I are already a couple of excellent friends," he said. "Wait till you see what a comical little fellow he is with his knee-breeches and big hat. You know him, Marchesa, so you can imagine. I am already his _figlio mio_!--As for you, Andryana, he worships you. He has written, specially for you, an epithalamium in fifty-eight cantos!--And yet this religious marriage without the civil ceremony disquiets him.--What would Count Camillo Cavour, whose walking-stick and portrait he piously cherishes, have said of it? Between Cavour and the Marchesa, the Marchesa and Cavour, he has been hard pushed to make a choice. However, he has thrown in his lot with the Marchesa, a decision that I understand very easily. All the same, he is now afraid to even glance at the portrait and the stick, and will not dare to do so until we have complied with all the requirements of the Italian law.--I vowed to him that there would only be a delay of a few days, and then Prince Pierre reassured him.--That is another character.--You will have to visit the museum and see his favorites there.--But, here we are!" The landau stopped before the imposing door of a palace, having, like its neighbors, a marble peristyle, and brilliantly painted, like the other houses. The balustrade of the balcony upon the first floor bore a huge carved escutcheon, displaying the three stars of the Fregosi, an emblem that was once dreaded all over the Mediterranean when the vessels of the Republic swept the seas of the Pisans, the Venetians, the Catalans, Turks, and French. The new arrivals were received by a _concierge_ wearing the livery, very much soiled, of the Fregosi, the buttons stamped with armorial bearings. He carried a colossal silver pommelled cane in his hand, and led the visitors into a vaulted vestibule at the foot of a huge staircase. Beyond they could see an enclosed garden, planted with orange trees. Ripe fruit glowed among the sombre foliage, through which glimpses could be obtained of an artificial grotto peopled with gigantic statuary. Several sarcophagi embellished the entrance, characterized by that air of magnificence and decay common to old Italian mansions. How many generations had mounted that worn staircase since the gifted genius designed the white moulding upon a yellow background that decorated the ceiling! How many visitors had arrived here from the distant colonies with which the great Republic traded! And yet probably no more singular spectacle had been seen for three centuries, than that presented by the noble Venetian lady arriving from Cannes upon the yacht of an American, for the purpose of marrying a ruined would-be gentleman from Barbentane, and accompanied by a young American girl, and the morganatic wife of an Austrian archduke with her lover, one of the most artless, most provincial Frenchmen of the best school of French chivalry.