d had innumerable adventures--some of them famous--as,
for instance, that with the Marchesa di Bugnano who poisoned herself out
of jealousy, and with the Countess of Chesterfield who died of
consumption, and whom he mourned in a series of odes, sonnets and
elegies--very moving, if perhaps somewhat overladen with metaphor.

Count Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi d'Ugenta, sole heir to the family, carried
on its traditions. He was, in truth, the ideal type of the young Italian
nobleman of the nineteenth century, a true representative of a race of
chivalrous gentlemen and graceful artists, the last scion of an
intellectual line.

He was, so to speak, thoroughly impregnated with art. His early youth,
nourished as it was by the most varied and profound studies, promised
wonders. Up to his twentieth year, he alternated between severe study
and long journeys, in company with his father, and could thus complete
his extraordinary aesthetic education under paternal direction, without
the restrictions and constraints imposed by tutors. And it was to his
father that he owed his taste for everything pertaining to art, his
passionate cult of the Beautiful, his paradoxical disdain of prejudice,
and his keen appetite for the sensuous.

That father, who had grown up in the midst of the last expiring
splendours of the Bourbon court of Naples, understood life on a large
scale, was profoundly initiated into all the arts of the voluptuary,
combined with a certain Byronic leaning towards fantastic romanticism.
His marriage had occurred under _quasi_ tragic circumstances, the finale
of a mad passion; then, after disturbing and undermining the conjugal
peace in every possible fashion, he had separated from his wife, and,
keeping his son always with him, had travelled about the whole of
Europe.

Andrea's education had thus been a living one; that is to say, derived
less from books than from the study of life as he had seen it. His mind
was corrupted not only by over-refined culture, but also by actual
experiments, and in him curiosity grew keener in proportion as his
knowledge grew wider. From the beginning, he had ever been prodigal of
his powers, for the great nervous force with which nature had endowed
him was inexhaustible in providing him with the treasures he dispensed
so lavishly. But the expansion of that energy caused in him the
destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had
not scrupled to repress in him. And he neve