Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/268

 was sentenced to death, once being reprieved when at the very gallows) she was involved in a fierce night-quarrel in a gaming-house in Guamanga. She was demanded by the police, but fought the officers like a tigress. The Bishop of the place protected her, and when in his care, a fugitive from justice, she confessed her story to him. He was thrown into such consternation and admiration as few ecclesiastics experience. He begged Catalina to resume her womanly station in life. She consented, and entered a cloister. Her kind adviser dying while she was in this humour, she passed to. another convent, in Lima. After two years of this retirement, she decided to return to Spain. During the voyage, she wrote her autobiography. There is no reason to suppose its details much exaggerated; many of even the most extraordinary facts have been verified. In Spain, she became a sort of wonder. Her story was noised abroad all Europe. Still, she does not seem to have been as notorious a visitor as she expected to find herself. She went to Rome, and was received by the Pope. She entertained him with her autobiography, was forgiven her sins, and received papal license to wear male attire, a permission that she had not much troubled herself about, till then. After Rome, she went to Naples. She managed to get into a scandalous street-fight, with ready blade, as usual. From that time, her history is wholly unknown. It is not clear whether she returned to South America, nor where so restless a mortal died. Her appearance during her Roman visit was described in a letter from the noted Italian traveller, Pietro Delle Valle. He speaks of her as a tall, strong, dark, and "eunuch-like" person of some thirty-five or forty years, "in no wise suggesting a woman."

A masculine soul in feminine physique is found in the famous Franziska Skanagatta, one of the heroines of modern Austrian history She was educated in the Military Academy at