By origin Aurelia was a Sienese, the daughter of the ancient, noble but
reduced family of Gualandi, and had, without knowing it, caught the
fancy of Dr. Lanfranchi when he was in her native city upon some
political question or another. At the age of eighteen she had been made
the subject of a marriage treaty between her mother and this learned man
of fifty--a treaty conducted by correspondence and without any by-or-
with-your-leave of hers. It may be doubted whether she had done much
more than see and quiz her husband until she was brought to his house,
to be mistress of that and slave of its master. Doing violence to the
imaginations of a lover, I can look back upon her now with calmness, and
yet see no flaw upon her extraordinary perfections. I can still see her
lovely in every part, a bright, glancing, various creature, equally
compounded of simplicity and common sense. Her greatest charm was
precisely what we call charm--a sweetly willing, pliant disposition, an
air of gay seriousness, such as a child has, and a mood which could run
swiftly, at the touch on some secret spring, from the ripple of laughter
to the urgency of tears. She was very devout, but not at all in our way,
who must set our God very far off if we are to consider His awful
nature; she carried her gaiety with her into church, and would laugh in
the face of the Blessed Virgin or our Saviour just as freely as in that
of the greatest sinner of us all. Her carriage and conversation with
Heaven were, indeed, exactly those which she held towards the world, and
were such that it was impossible not to love her, and yet, for an honest
man who desired to remain one, equally impossible to do it. For although
she was made in shape, line and feature to be a man's torment and
delight, she carried her beauties so easily, valued them so staidly, and
considered them so unaffectedly her husband's property, that he would
have been a highway thief who had dared anything against her.