Sophie Dorothea was now in her nineteenth year, and every year seemed to add to her beauty. She had warm French blood in her veins, and her spirits rose to overflowing at this opportunity of seeing the world; it was her first experience of foreign life, and she threw herself into the pleasures of the carnival with a zest that delighted her uncle and slightly shocked the prim Mistress of the Robes. Yet Sophie Dorothea’s gaiety was innocent enough; it was merely the expression of a young girl’s delight, and a rebound after having been shut up so long with her grim mother-in-law. Ernest Augustus, whose taste for pleasure was somewhat dulled by time, was so pleased at the keenness with which his daughter-in-law enjoyed everything, and the praises he heard on all sides of her wit and beauty, that he decided to give her a further treat and take her to Rome for the Easter festivities. Madame Ilten was unable to accompany the Princess, as her duties as Mistress of the Robes compelled her to return to the Duchess Sophia at Hanover, but Eléonore Knesebeck went in attendance. Prince George Louis did not travel to Rome with his wife, some trifling difficulty about a point of etiquette arose, he seized it as an excuse, and went to Naples instead. While she was at Rome Sophie Dorothea met the Marquis de Lassaye, and about their short acquaintance much has been written which has no foundation in fact. Lassaye was a personage. He had served with distinction in the Imperial army against the Turks, and, when the campaign was over, journeyed to Italy like Prince George Louis; he may have travelled with him. He was a French nobleman, wealthy, and brilliant, and exceedingly given to amours and adventures. Brunet, in his edition of the _Correspondence of the Duchess of Orleans_, writes of him: “The life of the Marquis de Lassaye was filled with adventures romantic enough to form the substance of a most improbable novel”; and the _Biographie Universelle_ says he was “well known by reason of his birth, his wit, his marriages, his law suits, but still more by an uninterrupted series of love affairs, which occupied the greater portion of an extremely lengthy career”. This gay Lothario died in 1738, at the age of eighty-seven, without having experienced any misfortunes, or, as he happily expressed it, “without having unpacked his goods”.