_Naples, about the middle of_ ’98, _was in a last state of ferment. Jacobinism threatened it within and without, the former but awaiting the advance of the French under Championnet to arise and hand over the city to its sympathisers. In September Nelson came sweeping to its sea-gates in his_ Vanguard; _in October General Mack posted from Vienna to take command of its rabble army of resistance; in November its king led another army to Rome, nominally to restore the Pope his kingdom, and, having done some ineffective mischief, returned ingloriously, to find his capital in a state of anarchy. Finally, in December, the whole royal family sneaked on board the_ Vanguard, _and transferred itself_ pro tempore _to Palermo, where it remained until the danger was laid, when it returned to exact a bloody vengeance._ _Therewithin lies the whole tragedy of Pissani and a little English maid. Early in the February of that year the man had written, hurried and agitated, to Mrs. Please, to announce that the moment was ripe, the tree of despotism tottering to its fall, to be replaced by the more fruitful one of Liberty; and to urge her to come at once, if she would see consummated the glorious work for which they had both laboured so long and so self-sacrificially. No doubt that he believed in her single-heartedness, as she, in another way, in his. He assured her that she might be, if she would, a second Pucelle. He fired her vanity: he rekindled her passion. With characteristic impetuosity, she broke up her household, and_ (_here figures either her blindness or her imperious self-confidence_) _prepared to transport it, stock and block, to the scene of her anticipated triumphs. She had no difficulty in procuring passports. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that she was intrusted with despatches for General Berthier, then occupying Rome. At any rate she, in company with Mademoiselle Grant and her inseparable Gogo, embarked at Marseilles for Civita Vecchia; were in the Eternal City before the end of the month; and had thence, travelling again by sea, reached Naples without accident by the middle of March. Here, by preconcerted arrangement_ (_as regarded only herself and the Neapolitan, however_) _they were met by Pissani, who conducted them in the first instance to a little cabaret in the dark quarters near the Arsenal. And here, from the glooms of that dingy rendezvous, Mrs. Please is pleased to enter again upon her own story._ _B. C._ [_Note_.--To the curious in matters of personal appearance, the following extract from the _Roper Correspondence_ (Hicks & Beach, London, 1832) may be of interest. The passage occurs in a letter--dated Paris, January 1798--from the Hon. Robert Roper to his cousin Lord Carillon, and runs as follows:--