severely strained the resources even of the wealthiest.  The Marquise Philippine sold the family plate and the splendid hangings of silk brocade which adorned the walls of the Palazzo Cavour at Turin.  Napoleon from the first looked upon Italy as the bank of the French army.  This idea had been impressed upon him before he started for the campaign which was to prove the corner-stone of his career.  “He was instructed,” writes the secret agent Landrieux, “as to what might well be drawn from this war for the French treasury.”

After the pillage and the war contributions came the blood-tax.  The Marquise Philippine’s son, sixteen years old, was ordered to join General Berthier’s corps, and to provide him with L10 pocket money she sold what till then she had religiously kept, a silver holy water stoup, which belonged to her saintly ancestor, Francois de Sales.

The last sacrifices, imposed not in the name of the country, but to the advantage of an insatiable invader, were not likely to inspire the old nobility of Piedmont with much love for the new order of things, nor was love the feeling with which the Marquise regarded it, but she had the insight to see what few of her class perceived, that the hour of day cannot be turned back; the future could not be as the past had been.  When Prince Camillo Borghese was appointed governor of Piedmont (on account of his being the husband of Napoleon’s sister, the beautiful Pauline Bonaparte, who was the original of Canova’s Venus), the Marquise Philippine was commanded to accept the post of dame d’honneur to the Princess.  A refusal would have meant the ruin of both the Cavours and her own kin, the De Sales, whose estates in Savoy were already confiscated.  She bowed to necessity, and in a position which could not have been one of the easiest, she knew how to preserve her own dignity, and to win the friendship of the far from demure Pauline, whom she accompanied to Paris for the celebration of the marriage of Napoleon with Marie Louise.  It is characteristic of the epoch that in the French capital the Marquise took lessons in the art of teaching from a French pedagogue then in repute, to qualify her to begin the education of her little grandchildren, Gustave and Camille.

These two boys were the sons of the Marquis Michele Benso; who had married a daughter of the Count de Sellon of Geneva.  While on a tour in Switzerland to recover his health from a wound received in the French service, the Marquis met the Count and his three daughters, of whom he wished to make the eldest, Victoire, his wife; but on his suit not prospering with her, he proposed to and was accepted by the second daughter, Adele.  After an unfortunate first marriage, Victoire became the Duchess de Clermont Tonnerre, and the youngest sister, Henriette, married a Count d’Auzers of Auvergne.  All these relatives ended by taking up their abode in the Palazzo Cavour at Turin.  Victoire was the cleverest, but her sisters as well