y have shown her, and on hearing explanations which he would
willingly have omitted. For though she set herself up as a profound
critic and a super-refined aesthetic, her real nature was at once coarse
and slightly Sadie, and she took pleasure in tales of bloodshed and
suffering which would have disgusted a healthy-minded woman of ordinary
sensitiveness. Indeed, as her Italian contemporaries knew her during
those long years she spent in Rome, she was very far from being the
royal Christina of the playwrights and poets. Her knowledge of art was
not that of the critic, but of the professional dealer in antiquities,
and though her opinion on the beauty of anything, from a picture to an
inlaid cabinet, was often mere nonsense, she was never mistaken as to
the price of the object. She was not an amateur, but an expert, and
though anything that was really fashionable pleased her, she would buy
nothing that had not an intrinsic value. In those first years of her
permanent residence in Rome she was rich, for in voluntarily abdicating
the throne she had reserved to herself a liberal income, which
afterwards dwindled to very little, and she kept up a considerable state
in the Palazzo Riario, that overlooks the river from the Trastevere
side. There was hardly an artist or a literary man in Rome, or a student
of science or a musician, who did not regularly pay his court to her,
and dedicate to her something of his best work. Not rarely, too, she
gave her advice; Bernini should finish his last statue in such and such
a way, Guidi should avoid one rhyme and introduce another, on pain of
her displeasure. Bernini yielded politely, because of all Italy's
artists of genius he was the most thoroughly cynical in following the
fashion of his time; Guidi obeyed because a dinner was always a dinner
to a starving youth of twenty, and a rhyme was no great price to pay for
it; but he quietly enclosed her suggestions in quotation marks, thereby
disclaiming any responsibility for them.

The young Paluzzo Altieri was nephew to the Cardinal who governed Rome
as the 'real' Pope, while the octogenarian Clement X., who was called
the 'nominal' Pope, spent most of his days more or less in his bed. The
Cardinal and all his relations had been adopted by him as 'nephews,' and
as he was the last of his race he had bestowed on them and their heirs
all his vast private possessions instead of enriching them out of the
treasury, as many popes did by their famili