the
Portuguese minister, that he drew his sword on Catarina upon one
occasion, and had it not been for her whalebone bodice she would have
lost her life. As it was, she received a slight scratch, which calmed
the enraged diplomat and brought him to his knees. She would pardon him
only on condition that he would present her with his sword, on which
were to be inscribed the following words: "Sword of M..., who dared
strike La Gabrielli." Through the intervention of friends, however, this
heavy penalty was never imposed, and the Frenchman was spared the
ridicule which would have surely followed. Catarina, after a long and
somewhat reckless career, passed her last years in Bologna, where she
died, in 1796, at the age of sixty-six, after having won general esteem
and admiration by her charities and by her steadiness of character,
which was in notable contrast to the extravagance of her earlier life.

Perhaps the three most distinguished Italian women in all the century
were Clelia Borromeo, Laura Bassi, and Gaetana Agnesi. The Countess
Clelia was a veritable _grande dame_, who exerted a wide influence for
good in all the north of Italy; Laura Bassi was a most learned and
distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna; and
the last member of this illustrious triad, Gaetana Agnesi, became so
famous in the scholarly world that her achievements must be recounted
with some attention to detail. At the time of her birth, in 1718, her
father was professor of mathematics at Bologna, and it appears that she
was so precocious that at the age of nine she had such command of the
Latin language that she was able to publish a long and carefully
prepared address written in that classic tongue, contending that there
was no reason why women should not devote themselves to the pursuit of
liberal studies. By the time she was thirteen she knew--in addition to
Latin--Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, and several other
languages, and was so renowned for her linguistic attainments that she
was called, familiarly, the "walking polyglot." When she was fifteen,
her father began to invite the most learned men of Bologna to assemble
at his house and listen to her essays and discussions upon the most
difficult philosophical problems; in spite of the fact that this
display of her learning was known to be distasteful to the young girl,
it was not until she reached her twentieth year that she was allowed to
withdraw from society.