Before the disputed ball took place, Stanhope and his brother had journeyed on to Rome. On the road thither they again ran great danger from robbers; indeed, at the first town in the Pope's dominions, where they were obliged to submit their baggage to the examination of the custom house officials, a soldier informed them that he had orders not to let an Englishman pass without an efficient guard, and he begged them, to their astonishment, to take an escort of fifty-two men. "We, however," Stanhope relates, "passed the next stage safely without seeing any robbers, but we were informed that our danger was not yet over, as we had to pass near a wood which was one of their regular haunts. We saw nothing to alarm us in this wood, but, shortly after, we were startled by seeing two men lying in the middle of the road, swimming in blood. We learnt that these were two robbers whom the gendarmes had been conveying to Turin, when a rescue was attempted. The gendarmes immediately shot these men and pursued the others. This had happened only a quarter of an hour before we passed." In Rome Stanhope wrote, "I frequently meet Lucien Bonaparte. We have also some excellent English society--the Duke of Bedford, Lords Holland and Cawdor, Sir H. Davy, Mrs Rawdon, etc., and most of them give parties, so that I could sometimes fancy myself in London, I see so many London faces." At Milan he was shown how the French soldiers had playfully made the fresco of "The Last Supper," by Leonardo da Vinci, the butt of their bullets; and at Turin he was struck by the strange sight in the Museum of a black man in _puris naturalibus_. He had been a favourite servant of the King of Sardinia, who had left nothing undone to cure him of the disorder from which he suffered; but having failed in this endeavour, he had the deceased nigger stuffed and affectionately preserved thus! The travellers next crossed the Mont Cenis by walking up the mountain and sledging down the other side. And now, at length, they again approached Paris. With strangely mingled feelings, not unmixed with a sense of premonition, did John Stanhope once more draw near the scene of his former captivity. A transformation had taken place in the surroundings which he knew so well; Napoleon was now himself a prisoner in the hands of his enemies, and Louis XVIII. was seated upon the throne of his ancestors. But Stanhope was not long in discovering that the metamorphosis was far more apparent than actual. The eleven months' Sovereignty of Louis had not served to render the monarchy secure, and the spirit of Napoleon brooded like an unseen presence over the land which it still dominated.