It was a memorable event when the seventeenth century deputed its greatest Protestant poet and its most serious genius to visit great Catholic Rome in 1638. Leaning against the Cross, holding the Old and New Testaments in her hands, with the guilty generations driven from Eden behind her and the redeemed generations descended from the Garden of Olives before her, she said to the heretic born of yesterday: "What do you want of your old mother?" Leonora[611], the Roman, bewitched Milton[612]. Has it ever been remarked that Leonora appears once again in the Memoirs of Madame de Motteville[613], at the concerts of Cardinal Mazarin[614]? [Sidenote: Milton, the Abbé Arnold.] The order of dates brings the Abbé Arnauld[615] to Rome after Milton. This abbé, who had borne arms, relates an anecdote which is curious on account of the name of one of its persons, while, at the same time, it brings before us the manners of the courtesans. The "hero of the fable," the Duc de Guise[616], grandson of the Balafré, going in search of his Naples adventure, passed through Rome, in 1647: he there knew Nina Barcarola. Maison-Blanche, secretary to M. Deshayes[617], Ambassador to Constantinople, took it into his head to become the rival of the Duc de Guise. It was a bad business for him; they substituted (it was at night, in an unlighted room) a hideous old hag for Nina: "If the laughter was great on one side," says Arnauld, "the confusion on the other side was as great, as may well be imagined. The Adonis, extricating himself with difficulty from his divinity's embraces, ran quite naked out of the house, as though the devil were at his heels." The Cardinal de Retz tells us nothing on the subject of Roman manners. I prefer "little" Coulanges[618] and his two journeys of 1656 and 1689: he celebrates those "vineyards" and "gardens" whose mere names possess a charm. When I walk to the Porta Pia, I meet almost all the persons named by Coulanges: those persons? No: their grandsons and grand-daughters! Madame de Sévigné receives verses from Coulanges; she replies to him from the Château des Rochers in my poor Brittany, at ten leagues from Combourg: "What a sad date after yours, my amiable cousin! It suits a solitary like myself, and that of Rome suits you, whose star is a wandering one. How gently has fortune treated you, as you say, even though it have fastened a quarrel on you!!!" Between Coulanges' first journey to Rome, in 1656, and his second journey, in 1689, thirty-three years elapsed: I reckon only twenty-five years wasted between my first journey to Rome, in 1803, and my second journey, in 1828. If I had known Madame de Sévigné, I should have cured her of the grief of growing old. Spon[619], Misson[620], Dumont[621], Addison[622] successively follow Coulanges. Spon, with Wheler, his companion, acted as my guide over the ruins of Athens. [Sidenote: Dumont, Addison, Labat.]