The young sovereigns found an exhausted treasury and an impoverished peasantry, and were forced to make a loan of 800,000 francs at the enormous interest of 37 per cent., to pay which they pledged the revenues of the post-office and the custom house. Lodovico had never been strong. He died in May, 1802, leaving Maria Louisa Regent, who presented the little King to his subjects from a window of the Palazzo Pitti. In the autumn Pauline Bonaparte and her husband, Prince Borghese, came to Florence, and nothing was spoken of but the beauty and grace of the woman of whom Canova declared “that her figure, the shape of her skull, and the way her head was set on her shoulders, had never been equalled since the days of Diana and Calypso.” The Queen of Etruria received her with royal honours, and memoirs of that time describe her entrance into the throne room as a wonderful sight. Dressed in flowing white robes and covered from head to foot with jewels, Pauline slowly walked, or rather glided, towards fat little Maria Louisa who, weighed down by a heavy black velvet dress, looked anything but royal. In 1807 the Emperor Napoleon curtly signified to the Queen that Etruria had ceased to exist, and now formed part of the French Empire. Her prayers and entreaties were in vain, and on the 10th December again a sad little procession left the palace, escorted by French cavalry. General Menou, who now governed Tuscany, made himself ridiculous by his passion for an awkward and vulgar dancer, to whom, when at last convinced that dancing was not her strong point, he had singing lessons given in his apartments in the Pitti palace, at which he assisted. He ostentatiously attended mass and affected great deference to the clergy, but his conversion to Islam in Egypt, where he had changed his name to Abdallah and married a Turkish lady, Zebedeeh el-Bahouad, had made too great a sensation for his new-born piety to have much effect. The Emperor’s sister Elisa, married to Felix Baciocchi, who was already Princess of Piombino, was created Grand Duchess of Tuscany in March, 1809. She despatched her favourite equerry, Cenami, to Florence with orders to turn General Menou and his mistress out of the Palazzo Pitti, and prepare for her arrival. But with Napoleonic impulsiveness she left Lucca the following evening with her husband, escorted by a few French soldiers, and at daybreak entered the Palazzo Pitti. The shutters were thrown open and Elisa walked proudly through the magnificent rooms which were now to be her home. An officer was sent to order a salvo of twenty-one cannon to be fired as an intimation to her astonished subjects of her arrival. That evening she went in state to the Pergola and was vociferously cheered. Her likeness to the Emperor was remarkable, and she held herself majestically. “Of all our three sisters,” said Joseph Bonaparte, “Elisa was the one who, morally and physically, most resembled Napoleon.”