lf; and I own I have a
little vanity in it, because the French ambassador told me when I first
came, that though the Procurator Grimani might persuade them to visit
me, he defied me to enter into any sort of intimacy with them: instead
of which they call me out almost every day on some diversion or other,
and are desirous to have me in all their parties of pleasure. I am
invited to-morrow to the Foscarini to dinner, which is to be followed
by a concert and a ball, where I shall be the only stranger, though here
are at present a great number come to see the regatta, which is fixed
for the 29th of this month, N.S. I shall see it at the Procurator
Grimani's, where there will be a great entertainment that day. My own
house is very well situated to see it, being on the Grand Canal; but I
would not refuse him and his niece, since they seem desirous of my
company, and I shall oblige some other ladies with my windows. They are
hired at a great rate to see the show."

There was just one fly in the ointment. "I am impatient to hear good
sense pronounced in my native tongue; having only heard my language out
of the mouths of boys and governors for these five months" (she
complained to Lady Pomfret). "Here are inundations of them broke in upon
us this carnival, and my apartment must be their refuge; the greater
part of them having kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their
nurses taught them; their whole business abroad (as far as I can
perceive) being to buy new clothes, in which they shine in some obscure
coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another; and after
the important conquest of some waiting gentlewoman of an opera queen,
whom perhaps they remember as long as they live, return to England
excellent judges of men and manners. I find the spirit of patriotism so
strong in me every time I see them, that I look on them as the greatest
blockheads in nature; and, to say truth, the compound of booby and
_petit maitre_ makes up a very odd sort of animal."

It was not until the middle of August (1740) that Lady Mary left Venice,
going first to Bologna, where she stayed a day or two "to prepare for
the dreadful passage of the Apennines." On her way to Florence, she
visited the monastery of La Trappe--her account of which may be given as
a companion portrait to that of the nunnery printed in an earlier
chapter.

"The monastery of La Trappe, is of French origin, and one of the most
austere and self-denying