From the age of nine till she was sixteen, Francesca, under the direction of a Cardinal of the family, had read all through the library of the Colonnas, to make weight against her ardent imagination by studying science, art, and letters.  But in these studies she acquired the taste for independence and liberal ideas, which threw her, with her husband, into the ranks of the revolution.  Rodolphe had not yet learned that, besides five living languages, Francesca knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.  The charming creature perfectly understood that, for a woman, the first condition of being learned is to keep it deeply hidden.

Rodolphe spent the whole winter at Geneva.  This winter passed like a day.  When spring returned, notwithstanding the infinite delights of the society of a clever woman, wonderfully well informed, young and lovely, the lover went through cruel sufferings, endured indeed with courage, but which were sometimes legible in his countenance, and betrayed themselves in his manners or speech, perhaps because he believed that Francesca shared them.  Now and again it annoyed him to admire her calmness.  Like an Englishwoman, she seemed to pride herself on expressing nothing in her face; its serenity defied love; he longed to see her agitated; he accused her of having no feeling, for he believed in the tradition which ascribes to Italian women a feverish excitability.

“I am a Roman!” Francesca gravely replied one day when she took quite seriously some banter on this subject from Rodolphe.

There was a depth of tone in her reply which gave it the appearance of scathing irony, and which set Rodolphe’s pulses throbbing.  The month of May spread before them the treasures of her fresh verdure; the sun was sometimes as powerful as at midsummer.  The two lovers happened to be at a part of the terrace where the rock arises abruptly from the lake, and were leaning over the stone parapet that crowns the wall above a flight of steps leading down to a landing-stage.  From the neighboring villa, where there is a similar stairway, a boat presently shot out like a swan, its flag flaming, its crimson awning spread over a lovely woman comfortably reclining on red cushions, her hair wreathed with real flowers; the boatman was a young man dressed like a sailor, and rowing with all the more grace because he was under the lady’s eye.

“They are happy!” exclaimed Rodolphe, with bitter emphasis.  “Claire de Bourgogne, the last survivor of the only house which can ever vie with the royal family of France—­”

“Oh! of a bastard branch, and that a female line.”

“At any rate, she is Vicomtesse de Beauseant; and she did not—­”

“Did not hesitate, you would say, to bury herself here with Monsieur Gaston de Nueil, you would say,” replied the daughter of the Colonnas.  “She is only a Frenchwoman; I am an Italian, my dear sir!”