Lady Login's handwritten travel diary, recounting part of the four-month tour accompanying Maharajah Duleep Singh through France and Italy Europe, December 1856-early 1857 manuscript on lined paper in a bound notebook, 63 leaves, with 8 blanks, first page dated 17th December [1856], dark blue cloth with leather spine 228 x 157 mm. Footnotes: Maharajah Duleep Singh, living first at Wimbledon and then Roehampton in houses secured for him by the East India Company, became disaffected with his lifestyle and asked to be allowed to return to India. To distract him from this he was taken on a 'continental tour' by Dr and Lady Login. Amidst the prolix thoughts of a Victorian lady, there are several vivid depictions of Duleep Singh, all the more effective for their mostly mundane nature (feeding the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco), and his apparent reluctance to go out very much. One may reasonably speculate that as well as occasional physical illness during the tour, he may have been mentally depressed as his hopes of returning to India had been dashed - along with the strange circumstances of his upbringing and early life. The party embarked at Folkestone and sailed to Boulogne, and thence to Paris, where they saw the usual tourist sights - Versailles, the Louvre, Notre Dame - but also (29th December) Houdini's Christmas Fantasmagoria, 'which pleased the Maharajah excessively'. Making their way south, at Dijon the Maharajah slept in a bed recently used by Napoleon III. The weather was very cold: Duleep Singh would not go out and sat indoors swathed in a fur hooded cape, 'for all the world like a tame domestic bear!' They moved on through the south of France, to Marseilles, Cannes and Nice (January 6th), where an English child asked her parents, in front of Duleep Singh and the Logins, 'Is he really a blackamoor?', to the horror and embarrassment of her parents. They also endured the arrogant behaviour of the Empress of Russia and her suite, which annoyed the English community. By the 14th January they were in Genoa, where a few days later Sir John Login slipped on some marble steps and had to take a bath and rest for a day or two to avoid further injury. By the 24th they had arrived in Florence, via Pisa, and took in the galleries, churches and sculptures of the city. Duleep Singh and Ronald Login were forced to beat an embarrassed retreat after insulting an artist's sketching from the life, not realising that he could understand English! On the 7th February they reached Rome, where Lady Login was overwhelmed by St Peter's, and they spent a week or more seeing the sights (described in often exhaustive detail by Lady Login, echoing the serious musings of thousands of Victorian ladies in Italy). On 13th February they visited the studio of the English sculptor William Gibson (1790-1866), who was later, in 1859-60, to produce a marble portrait bust of Duleep Singh which remained in the Maharajah's possession, or that of his family, until 1957 - and which was sold for £1.5 million by Bonhams thirteen years ago (see Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 19th April 2007, lot 385). Lady Login, however, comments that she did not think very highly of his recent bust of Queen Victoria. They later went with Gibson to the studios of the principal artists in Rome, and dined with him. On the 16th they attended a ball at Princess Doria's, at which the King of Bavaria and Queen Christina of Spain were present, amongst other personages. A certain Mr Bright was 'very eloquent about the wrongs of India, to the Maharajah's infinite amusement, and Colonel Caldwell giving us histories of what was done in Lord Wellesley's and Bentinck's time!' On Ash Wednesday (25th) the party went to the Sistine Chapel for a service performed by the Pope - but 'we could not persuade the Maharajah to go with us, as he declared when he went to bed the night before, that now the Carnival was over he did not know when he would get up again'. On the 11th they had luncheon in the gardens of the Villa d'Este, sitting in the basin of a dried-up fountain: 'the Maharajah seated himself in the centre in a stone gallery, acting Neptune discussing game pie!' After lunch they went for a walk: 'I observed the Maharajah toiling along with his coat off in his shirtsleeves'. They left Rome for Naples (though not before a trip on a steamer at Livorno which was plagued by seasickness), and also climbed Mount Vesuvius (19th), and from there went on to Bologna (where Lady Login heartily disliked the sausages), Padua and Venice, where they went sightseeing by boat: 'the Maharajah did not accompany us as he has not forgottten the steamer yet'. They spent some time in Venice: 'the Maharajah has finally fed the pigeons in St Mark's daily and now they know him and follow him whenever he appears'. However, both Duleep Singh and Ronald Login fell quite badly ill in Venice and the party became anxious to leave the city. They moved on to Padua, and then to Milan, where Lady Login complains mildly of being stuck with the two invalids, though Duleep Singh was better than Ronald. They then went to Turin and crossed the Alps ('luckily we had some hermetically-sealed soup for the Maharajah with us'). 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