It was different with regard to society. By insisting upon royal honours such as had been enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal Court, anxious to keep on good terms with England, absolutely refused to give him, the Pretender had virtually cut himself and his wife out of all Roman society; for he would not know the nobles on a footing of equality, and they, on the other hand, dared know him on no other. The great entertainments in the palaces where Charles Edward had so often danced, the admired of all beholders, in his boyhood, were not for the Count and Countess of Albany. There remained the theatres and public balls, to which the Pretender conducted his wife with the assiduity of a man immensely vain of having on his arm a woman far too young and too pretty for his deserts. And, besides this, there was a certain amount of vague, shifting foreign society, nobles on the loose, and young men on their grand tour, who mostly considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or at least a seemingly accidental meeting and introduction in the lobby of a theatre or the garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of their sight-seeing. Such people as these were the guests of the Palazzo Muti; and, together with a few Jacobite hangers-on, constituted the fluctuating little Court of Louise, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, whom the people of Rome, hearing of the throne and dais in the ante-room and of the royal ceremonial in the palace near the Santissimi Apostoli, usually spoke of as the _Regina Apostolorum_; while only a very few, who had approached that charming little blonde lady, corrected the title to that of Queen of Hearts, Regina dei Cuori. Among the few who bowed before Charles Edward's wife, in consideration of this last-named kingdom, was a brilliant, wayward young man, destined to remain a sort of brilliant, wayward, impracticable child until he was eighty; and destined, also, to cherish throughout the long lives of both, the sort of half genuine, half affected, boy's, or rather page's, passion with which Queen Louise had inspired him. Karl Victor von Bonstetten, of a patrician family of Bern, a Frenchified German, more French, more butterfly-like than any real Frenchman, even of the old _regime_, came to Rome, already well-known by his romantic friendship with the Swiss historian Mueller, and by the ideas which he had desultorily and gaily aired on most subjects, in the year 1773. In his memoirs he wrote as follows of the "Queen of Hearts": "She was of middle height, fair, with dark-blue eyes, a slightly turned-up nose, and a dazzling white English complexion. Her expression was gay and _espiegle_, and not without a spice of irony, on the whole more French than German. She was enough to turn all heads. The Pretender was tall, lean, good-natured, talkative. He liked to have opportunities of speaking English, and was given to talking a great deal about his adventures--interesting enough for a