But something better soon offered itself. The Duke Grimaldi had had a small theatre constructed in the Spanish palace, his residence as Ambassador from the Catholic King, and a small company of high-born amateurs had been playing in it translations of French comedies and tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Alfieri offered his _Antigone_, which was accepted with fervour. The beautiful and majestic Duchess of Zagarolo was to act the part of the heroine; her brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Ceri, respectively the parts of Haemon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, the villain of the piece, was reserved for Alfieri himself. The performance of _Antigone_ was a great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the Spanish Embassy were crowded with the fashionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782, included priests and princes of the Church quite as much as painted ladies and powdered cavaliers. A contemporary diary, kept by the page of the Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, enables us to form some notion of the assembly. Foremost among the ladies were the two rival beauties, equally famous for their conquests in the ecclesiastical as well as the secular nobility, the Princess Santacroce and the Princess Altieri, vying with each other in the magnificence of their diamonds and of their lace, and each upon the arm of a prince of the Church who had the honour of being her orthodox _cavaliere servente_; the Princess Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan Francesco Albani, the very gallant and art-loving nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro; the Princess Santacroce escorted by the French Ambassador Cardinal de Bernis, the amiable society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom Frederick the Great had surnamed _Babet la bouquetiere_. In the front row sat the wife of the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being the niece of the late Pope Clement XIII., affected an almost royal pomp, and by her side sat the wittiest and most literary of the Sacred College, the still very flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The hall was nearly full when the stir in the crowd, and the general looking in one direction, announced the arrival of a guest who excited unwonted attention. A young woman, who scarcely looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very simply and elegantly dressed, with something still girlish in her small irregular features and complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted along the gangway between the rows of chairs, and, as if she were the queen of the entertainment, solemnly installed by the side of the Princess Rezzonico in the first row. Was it because her husband had called himself King of England, or because her lover was the author of the play about to be performed? Be it as it may, the Countess of Albany was the object of universal curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed during the play was a second and perhaps more interesting performance for the scandal-loving Romans.