Can we wonder that, under such remorseless persecutions, the Princess became more and more defiant; that she gave herself up to a life of recklessness and extravagance; that, more and more isolated from her own world, she sought her pleasure and her companions in undesirable quarters, finding her chief intimates in a family of Italian musicians; or that finally, heart-broken and despairing, she determined once for all to shake off the dust of a land that had treated her so cruelly?

In August, 1814, with the approval of King and Parliament, the Princess left England to begin a career of amazing adventures and indiscretions, the story of which is one of the most remarkable in history.

CHAPTER XIX

THE INDISCRETIONS OF A PRINCESS—­continued

When Caroline, Princess of Wales, shook the dust of England off her feet one August day in the year 1814, it was only natural that her steps should first turn towards the Brunswick home which held for her at least a few happy memories, and where she hoped to find in sympathy and old associations some salve for her wounded heart.

But the fever of restlessness was in her blood—­the restlessness which was to make her a wanderer over the face of the earth for half a dozen years.  The peace and solace she had looked for in Brunswick eluded her; and before many days had passed she was on her way through Switzerland to the sunny skies of Italy, where she could perhaps find in distraction and pleasure the anodyne which a life of retirement denied her.  She was full of rebellion against fate, of hatred against her husband and his country which had treated her with such unmerited cruelty.  She would defy fate; she would put a whole continent between herself and the nightmare life she had left behind, she hoped for ever.  She would pursue and find pleasure at whatever cost.

In September, within five weeks of leaving England, we find her at Geneva, installed in a suite of rooms next to those occupied by Marie Louise, late Empress of France, a fugitive and exile like herself, and animated by the same spirit of reckless revolt against destiny—­Marie Louise, we read, “making excursions like a lunatic on foot and on horseback, never even seeming to dream of making people remember that, before she became mixed up with a Corsican adventurer, she was an Archduchess”; the Princess of Wales, equally careless of her dignity and position, finding her pleasure in questionable company.

“From the inn where she was stopping she heard music, and, quite unaccompanied, immediately entered a neighbouring house and disappeared in the medley of dancers.”  A few days later, at Lausanne, “she learned that a little ball was in progress at a house opposite the ’Golden Lion,’ and she asked for an invitation.  After dancing with everybody and anybody, she finished up by dancing a Savoyard dance, called a fricassee, with a nobody.  Madame de Corsal, who blushed and wept for the rest of the company, declares that it has made her ill, and that she feels that the honour of England has been compromised.”  Thus early did Caroline begin that career of indiscretion, to call it by no worse name, which made of her six years’ exile “a long suicide of her reputation.”