ladies, chattering bad French, or among the lower classes, as 'cute and
cold as money-lenders; so I steer clear of Italian womankind, its
shrill voice and gaudy toilettes. I am wedded to history, to the Past,
to women like Lucrezia Borgia, Vittoria Accoramboni, or that Medea da
Carpi, for the present; some day I shall perhaps find a grand passion,
a woman to play the Don Quixote about, like the Pole that I am; a woman
out of whose slipper to drink, and for whose pleasure to die; but not
here! Few things strike me so much as the degeneracy of Italian women.
What has become of the race of Faustinas, Marozias, Bianca Cappellos?
Where discover nowadays (I confess she haunts me) another Medea da
Carpi? Were it only possible to meet a woman of that extreme
distinction of beauty, of that terribleness of nature, even if only
potential, I do believe I could love her, even to the Day of Judgment,
like any Oliverotto da Narni, or Frangipani or Prinzivalle.

_Oct. 27th.--_

Fine sentiments the above are for a professor, a learned man! I thought
the young artists of Rome childish because they played practical jokes
and yelled at night in the streets, returning from the Caffe Greco or
the cellar in the Via Palombella; but am I not as childish to the
full--I, melancholy wretch, whom they called Hamlet and the Knight of
the Doleful Countenance?

_Nov. 5th.--_

I can't free myself from the thought of this Medea da Carpi. In my
walks, my mornings in the Archives, my solitary evenings, I catch
myself thinking over the woman. Am I turning novelist instead of
historian? And still it seems to me that I understand her so well; so