THE COURTS OF ITALY I was at Genoa, and one spring morning I strolled through a network of narrow streets to the harbour. The sea was as blue as a turquoise, gleaming like a jewel in the sunshine, and I could not resist the temptation to hire a boat and waste an hour gliding over the enchanted waves. The boatman who rowed me was a lively fellow. Luckily for me, as I afterwards realised, he had not the faintest idea who I was, and I let him chatter to his heart’s content. “The old Duke of Galliera gave many million lire to make that,” he said, indicating, with a jerk of his head, the new harbour, hidden from sight by the building on the Molo Vecchio. “The Duke of Galliera,” he went on, “was a fine gentleman. The Duchess was left a widow, and inherited the enormous, the colossal fortune of her husband. And what did she do? Does the signora know what she did?” I did know, but I thought it prudent to shake my head. The man leant on his oars, and looked intently at me. “The Duchess,” he said, “left the title and every lira she had, and her palace in Bologna, and all the estates of her Duchy, to foreigners. A curse on them! And the Duchess belonged to Genoa; she had relatives in Genoa. Everything went to the Duca di Montpensier, a Frenchman who had become a Spaniard, and now it belongs to his son.” “Really,” I said; and I did not mention that the Duc de Montpensier was my father-in-law, and that I was actually Duchess of Galliera. “If I could get hold of that man and his wife, although she is an Infanta of Spain, I would kill them,” he shouted at me fiercely. “I would show them no mercy.”