Wherever the Countess (as we must now call her) went on her Italian tour she drew men to her feet by the magnetism of her beauty, who would have paid no homage to her as chere amie of a King; for she was now in the early thirties, in the full bloom of the loveliness that had its obscure budding in the Potsdam barrack-rooms.  Young and old were equally powerless to resist her fascinations.  She had, indeed, no more ardent slave and admirer than my Lord Bristol, the octogenarian Bishop of Londonderry, whose passion for the Countess, young enough to be his granddaughter, was that of a lovesick youth.

From “dear Countess and adorable friend,” he quickly leaps in his letters to “my dear Wilhelmine.”  He looks forward with the impatience of a boy to seeing her at “that terrestrial paradise which is called Naples, where we shall enjoy perpetual spring and spend delightful days in listening to the divine Paesiello.  Do you know,” he adds, “I passed two hours of real delight this morning in simply contemplating your elegant bedroom where only the elegant sleeper was missing.”

“It is in Crocelle,” he writes a little later, “that you will make people happy by your presence, and where you will recuperate your health, regain your gaiety, and forget an Irishman; and a holy Bishop, more worthy of your affection, on account of the deep attachment he has for you, will take his place.”

In June, 1796, this senile lover writes, “In an hour I depart for Germany; and, as the wind is north, with every step I take I shall say:  ’This breeze comes perhaps from her; it has touched her rosy lips and mingled its scent with the perfume of her breath which I shall inhale, the perfume of the breath of my dear Wilhelmine.’”

But these days of dallying with her legion of lovers, of regal fetes and pleasure-chasing, were brought to an abrupt conclusion when news came to her at Venice that her “husband,” the King, was dying, with the Royal family by his bedside awaiting the end.  Such news, with all its import of sorrow and tragedy, set the Countess racing across the Continent, fast as horses could carry her, to the side of her beloved King, whom she found, if not in extremis, “very dangerously ill and pitifully changed” from the robust man she had left.  Her return, however, did more for him than all the skill of his doctors.  It gave him a new lease of life, in which her presence brought happiness into days which, none knew better than himself, were numbered.

For more than a year the Countess was his tender nurse and constant companion, ministering to his comfort and arranging plays and tableaux for his entertainment.  She watched over him as jealously as any mother over her dying child; but all her devotion could not stay the steps of death, which every day brought nearer.  As the inevitable end approached, her friends warned her to leave Charlottenburg while the opportunity was still hers—­to escape with her jewels and her money (a fortune of L150,000)—­but to all such urging she was deaf.  She would stay by her lover’s side to the last, though she well knew the danger of delay.