Was Zenobia Jewess, Christian, polytheist or idealist? Greedy to know everything, she had drawn to her Court a disciple of Plotinus, Longinus, who professed the purest neo-Platonism, and Paul of Samosata, Archbishop of Antioch, a not very edifying Christian, whose subtle discussions on the mystery of the Incarnation prepared the coming of Nestorius. She had made of these two men who represented each two currents of ideas, if not hostile, at least dissimilar, her civil counsellors. In default of confession, deeds speak; and in this astonishing choice is betrayed the descendant of the Greeks dowered with that marvellous faculty of assimilation appropriate to her race which skims over everything without adhering to anything. And that is why at Palmyra they walked on the ruins of a temple of Baal and a synagogue, of a church and of a temple of Diana. And Lady Hester, had she beliefs more solidly established? She had grown and lived, she also, in the midst of a disturbance and tumult of ideas too contradictory to preserve a firm religion. The great breath of revolutionary theories set in motion by Rousseau had turned other heads better balanced than hers. If she did not founder, she contracted a sort of exalted misanthropy, peculiar to women, in which Byron and Goethe had a large share. The ground was prepared for the innumerable sects of the East, which multiply like mushrooms on a stormy day, to make spring up there the harvest of their philosophies and their revelations hostile and divine. She was no longer Anglican and not yet Mohammedan. Under cover of the good and accommodating Protestant arbitrator, she was able to invent a religion adapted to circumstances. As a country in danger launches a national loan, she will make an appeal every time. From some, she will borrow Fatalism; from others, the belief in the coming of a Messiah; from others, Biblical prophecies; from others, again, the existence of evil spirits. And what resemblances between these two beautiful Amazons of the East! Soul intrepid and pride insensate. It is Zenobia, whose father a magistrate of Palmyra, a simple curule edile charged with the policing of the frontiers, calling herself a King's daughter and of the lineage of Cleopatra, and exhibiting the table service of gold plate on which the Queen of Egypt was served at festivals at Alexandria! It is Hester Stanhope, in her last years, deceived, robbed, devoured, despoiled by a pack of servants both numerous and greedy, replying to the doctor who was entreating her to reduce this clique: "Yes, but my rank!"