I have become acquainted with Lord Dillon[102] and his family, who are residing here and from whom I have received much civility. I met at his house the Marchese Giuliani, one of the adherents of King Joachim, a very amiable and clever man who speaks English fluently. Lord Dillon is a man of much reading and information and his conversation is at all times a great treat. His lady too is very amiable and accomplished. I went one day with a friend of mine to a _pique-nique_ party at the Cascino, where a laughable adventure occurred perfectly in the stile of the _novelle_ of Boccacio. As it is not the custom in Florence that husbands and wives should go together to places of public amusement, the lady is generally accompanied by her _cavalier servente:_ but it by no means follows that the _cavalier servente_ is the favored lover: one is often adopted as a cover to another who enjoys the peculiar favors of the lady. A gentleman who arrived at the hall where the supper table was laid out, somewhat earlier than the rest of the company and before the chamber was lighted, observed a gentleman and lady ascend the staircase, turn aside by a corridor and enter a chamber together. It was dark and he could not distinguish their persons. He waited fifteen or twenty minutes and observed them leave the chamber together, pass along the corridor and disappear. He had the curiosity to go into the chamber they had just left and found on the bed a lady's glove. He took up the glove and put it in his pocket, determined that this incident should afford him some amusement at supper and the company also by putting some fair one to the blush. Accordingly, when the supper was nearly over, he held up the glove and asked with a loud voice if any lady had lost a glove; when his own wife who was sitting at the same table at some distance from him called out with the utmost _sangfroid: E il mio! dammelo: l'ho lasciato cadere._ You may conceive what a laugh there was against him, for he had related the circumstances of his finding it to several of the company before they sat down to supper. This reminded me of an anecdote mentioned by Brantôme as having occurred at Milan in his time, a glove being in this case also the cause of the _désagrément_. A married lady had been much courted by a Spanish Cavalier of the name of Leon: one day, thinking he had made sure of her, he followed her into her bedroom, but met with a severe and decided repulse and was compelled to leave her _re infectà_. In his confusion he left one of his gloves on the bed which remained there unperceived by the lady. The husband of the lady arrived shortly afterwards and as he was aware of the attentions of the Spaniard to his wife and had noticed his going into the house, he went directly to his wife's chamber, where the first thing that captivated his attention was a man's military glove on the bed. He, however, said nothing, but from that moment abstained from all conjugal duty.