A message from H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester, delivered at the theatre last night, and saying that he wished to honour the Michiel with his presence, has filled her with lively exaltation. She much desired to see him again. If H.R.H. had not become the great Prince he is in virtue of his birth; if he were still that amiable little boy whom she so often embraced, she would have let him know by this time that she desired to embrace him affectionately. And indeed she might have said so now, since the difference of ages is always the same. Then he was a child and she was young and pretty; now he is young and charming and she is a little old woman, and also somewhat deaf. There might therefore still be the purest innocence in the sweetest embrace. But setting aside this jesting, which is indeed too familiar, H.R.H. will please to accept in advance the thanks of Giustina Renier Michiel for the honour which he intends to do her this evening, and she is impatiently awaiting that desired moment. Though Giustina had begun life by giving signs of being emancipated, she behaved with the greatest devotion to her daughter and her grandchildren. ‘I have hardly any company but that of children,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘I think very highly of their patience, since there is between me and them the same distance of age which exists between them and me. I find I have nothing in common with them but the taste for “anguria,” and this is a good argument for the truth of what I say.’ Her most intimate friend was Isabella Teodochi Albrizzi. This lady was born in Greece, and was a passionate worshipper of the beautiful; her taste in all matters seems to have been more delicate than Giustina’s and her character was much more gay and forgetful. Giustina lived in the past, Isabella in the present. Everything about Giustina was Venetian, the mantilla she wore on her head, the furniture she had in her house, the refreshments she offered her friends; to the very last everything connected with her belonged to the eighteenth century. With Isabella Albrizzi nothing, on the contrary, was Venetian, nothing was durable; at one moment the French taste ordered her furniture, her bibelots, and her books, and provided her with subjects of conversation; at another, everything about her was English. ‘When you left the Michiel’s drawing-room you had learned to love Venice,’ says her biographer; ‘when you left Madame Albrizzi’s drawing-room you had learned to love Madame Albrizzi.’ They died nearly at the same time. Giustina breathed her last at the age of seventy-seven on April sixth, 1832, surrounded by her grandchildren and her friends. Andrea Maffei wrote that the death of Giustina Michiel was indeed a public loss. ‘To the excellence of her mind she united in a high degree the beauty of her character, and I know of no writer who more dearly loved his country than she.’ [Illustration] XI