'"/..„ V^^' ./^"/^ 
 
 * N O'^ S 
 
 ■^y-^ v^ 
 
 ■^oo^ 
 
 xO^^. 
 
 
 
 ,/ 
 
 ^ . «. ^ ^^^ « 
 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers^ Publications. 
 
 jFamous aEomen Series* 
 
 ELIZABETH FRY 
 
 By Mrs. E. R. PITMAN, 
 
 One vol. i6mo. Cloth. Price ^i.oo. 
 
 " In the records of famous women there are few more noble examples of 
 Christian womanhood and philanthropic enthusiasm than the life of Elizabeth 
 Fry presents. Her character was beautifully rounded and complete, and if she 
 had not won fame through her public benefactions, she would have been no less 
 esteemed and remembered by all who knew her because of her domestic virtues, 
 her sweet womanly charms, and the wisdom, purity, and love which marked her 
 conduct as wife, mother, and friend. She came of that sound old Quaker stock 
 which has bred so many eminent men and women. The time came when her 
 home functions could no longer satisfy the yearnings of a heart filled with the 
 tenderest pity for all who suffered ; and her work was not far to seek. The prisons 
 of England, nay, of all Europe, were in a deplorable condition. In Newgate, 
 dirt, disease, starvation, depravity, drunkenness, &c., prevailed. All who sur- 
 veyed the situation regarded it as hopeless ; all but Mrs. Fry. She saw here the 
 opening she had been awaiting. Into this seething mass she bravely entered, 
 Bible in hand, and love and pity in her eyes and upon her lips. If any one 
 should ask which of all the famous women recorded in this series did the most 
 practical good in her day and generation, the answer must be, Elizabeth Fry." — 
 New York Tributie. 
 
 " Mrs. Pitman has written a very interesting a-nd appreciative sketch of the 
 life, character, and eminent services in the causes of humanity of one of Eng- 
 land's most famous philanthropists. She was known as the prison philanthropist, 
 and probably no laborer in the cause of prison reform ever won a larger share of 
 success, and certainly none ever received a larger meed of reverential love. No 
 one can read this volume without feelings of admiration for the noble woman who 
 devoted her life to befriend sinful and suffering humanity." — Chicago Evening 
 Journal. 
 
 " The story of her splendid and successful philanthropy is admirably told by 
 her biographer, and every reader should find in the tale a breath of inspiration. 
 Not every woman can become an Elizabeth Fry, but no one can fail to be im- 
 pressed with the thought that no woman, however great her talent and ambition, 
 can fail to find opportunity to do a noble work in life without neglecting her own 
 feminine duties, without ceasing to dignify all the distinctive virtues of her sex» 
 without fretting and crying aloud over the restrictions placed on woman's field of 
 work." — Eclectic Monthly. 
 
 * 
 
 Our piiblications are for sale by all booksellers ^ or will be 
 sent post-paid on receipt of advertised price. 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
The next volumes in the Famous Women Series 
 will be: 
 
 . Harriet Martineau. By Mrs. Fenwick Miller. 
 Mary Wollstonecraft. By Elizabeth Robins 
 Pennell. 
 
 Already published : 
 
 George Eliot. By Miss Blind. 
 Emily Bronte. By Miss Robinson. 
 George Sand. By Miss Thomas. 
 Mary Lamb. By Mrs. Gilchrist. 
 Margaret Fuller. By Julia Ward Howe. 
 Maria Edgeworth. By Miss Zimmern. 
 Elizabeth Fry. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman. 
 The Countess of Albany. By Vernon Lee. 
 
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 BY 
 
 VERNON LEE. 
 
 % 
 
 w 
 
 BOSTON: 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 

 
 ^"^ 
 
 Copyright, 1S84, 
 By Roberts Brothers. 
 
 Presswork by 
 John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 
 
TO THE MEMORY OF MY FRIEND 
 
 MADAME JOHN MEYER 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME, 
 
 SO OFTEN AND SO LATELY TALKED OVER TOGETHER, 
 
 IN GRATEFUL AND AFFECTIONATE REGRET. 
 
 By tJie Author of '' The Countess of Albany T 
 
 EUPHORION: Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval 
 in the Renaissance. 2 vols. 8vo. Cloth, extra. Price $6.50. 
 *' Vernon Lee has taken the title of her book from Goethe. In the son of Faust 
 and Helena she recognizes the offspring of the middle ages born of the spirit of An- 
 tiquity, to which significant accident has given the name of Renaissance. Her book 
 is a series of essays all centring round the Renaissance in Italy, and having for their 
 general object an explanation of the manner in wliich mediseval art and life were 
 influenced by the remains of antiquity." — London Saturday Review. 
 
 MISS BROWN. A Novel. (In the press.) 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, 
 
 Bostofi. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In preparing this volume on the Countess 
 of Albany (which I consider as a kind of 
 completion of my previous studies of 
 eighteenth-century Italy) I have availed 
 myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reu- 
 mont^s large work Die Grafin von Albany 
 (published in 1862) ; and of the mono- 
 graph, itself partially founded on the fore- 
 going, of M. Saint Rene Taillandier, en- 
 titled La Comtesse (T Albany^ published in 
 Paris in 1862. Baron von Reumont^s two 
 volumes, written twenty years ago, and 
 when the generation which had come 
 into personal contact with the Countess 
 of Albany had not yet entirely died out ; 
 and M. Saint Rene Taillandier^s volume, 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 which embodied the result of his re- 
 searches into the archives of the Musee 
 Fabre at MontpelHer ; might naturally be 
 expected to have exhausted all the infor- 
 mation obtainable about the subject of 
 their and my studies. This has proved 
 to be the case very much less than might 
 have been anticipated. The publication, 
 by Jacopo Bernardi and Carlo Milanesi, 
 of a number of letters of Alfieri to Sienese 
 friends, has afforded me an insight into 
 Alfieri^s character and his relations with 
 the Countess of Albany such as was un- 
 attainable to Baron von Reumont and to 
 M. Saint Rene Taillandier. The examina- 
 tion, by myself and my friend Signor 
 Mario Pratesi, of several hundreds of MS. 
 letters of the Countess of Albany existing 
 in public and private archives at Siena and 
 at Milan, has added an important amount 
 of what I may call psychological detail, 
 overlooked by Baron von Reumont and un- 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 guessed by M. Saint Rene Talllandler. I 
 have, therefore, I trust, been able to recon- 
 struct the Countess of Albany's spiritual 
 likeness during the period — that of her 
 early connection with Alfieri — which my 
 predecessors have been satisfied to despatch 
 in comparatively few pages, counterbalanc- 
 ing the thinness of this portion of their bi- 
 ographies by a degree of detail concerning 
 the Countess' latter years, and the friends 
 with whom she then corresponded, which, 
 however interesting, cannot be considered 
 as vital to the real subject of their works. 
 Besides the volumes of Baron von Reu- 
 mont and M. Saint Rene Taillandier I have 
 depended mainly upon Alfieri's autobiog- 
 raphy, edited by Professor Teza, and sup- 
 plemented by Bernardi's and Milanesi's 
 Lettere di Vittorio Alfieri, published by 
 Le Monnier in 1862. Among English 
 books that I have put under contribution 
 I may mention Klose's Memoirs 0/ Prince 
 
X PREFACE, 
 
 Charles Edward Stuart (Colburn, 1845), 
 Ewaid's Life and Times of Prince Charles 
 Stuart (Chapman and Hall, 1875), and Sir 
 Horace Mann's Letters to Walpole, edited 
 by Dr. Doran. A review, variously attri- 
 buted to Lockhart and to Dennistoun, in 
 the Quarterly, for 1847, has been all the 
 more useful to me as I have been unable to 
 procure, writing in Italy, the Tales of a 
 Century, of which that paper gives a mas- 
 terly account. 
 
 For various details I must refer to 
 Charles Dutens' Memoires d'un Voyageur 
 qui se repose (Paris, 1806); to Silvagni's 
 La Corte e la Societa Romana nel secolo 
 XVIII.; to Foscolo's Correspondence, Gino 
 Capponi's Ricordi and those of d'Azeglio ; 
 to Giordani's works and Benassii Montan- 
 ari's Life of Ippolito Pindemonti, besides 
 the books quoted by Baron Reumont ; and 
 for what I may call the general pervading 
 historical coloring (if indeed I have sue- 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 ceeded in giving any) of the background 
 against which I have tried to sketch the 
 Countess of Albany, Charles Edward and 
 Alfieri, I can only refer generally to what 
 is now a vague mass of detail accumulated 
 by myself during the years of preparation 
 for my Studies of the Eighteenth Century 
 in Italy, 
 
 My debt to the kindness of persons who 
 have put unpublished matter at my dis- 
 posal, or helped me to collect various in- 
 formation, is a large one^ In the first cat- 
 egory, I wish to express my best thanks 
 to the Director of the Public Library at 
 Siena ; to Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri, a great 
 collector of autographs, in the same city ; 
 to the Countess Baldelli and Cavaliere 
 Emilio Santarelli of Florence, who possess 
 some most curious portraits and other 
 relics of the Countess of Albany, Prince 
 Charles Edward and Alfieri ; and also to 
 my friend Count Pierre Boutourline, whose 
 
xil PREFACE. 
 
 grandfather and great-aunt were among 
 Mme. d' Albany's. friends. Among those 
 who have kindly given me the benefit of ' 
 their advice and assistance, I must mention 
 foremost my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, 
 the eminent novelist ; and next to him the 
 learned Director of the State Archives at 
 Florence, Cavaliere Gaetano Milanese, and 
 Doctor Guido Biagi, of the Biblioteca Vit- 
 torio Emanuel of Rome, without whose 
 kindness my work would have been quite 
 impossible. 
 
 Florence, 1884. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. • 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 The Bride 15 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Bridegroom 32 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Regina Apostolorum 46 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Heir 56 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Florence 73 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Alfieri Sy 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The Cavaliere Servente 106 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Escape 116 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 Rome 130 
 
XIV 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PAGE, 
 
 Antigone 
 
 
 . 145 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Separation 168 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 COLMAR . . . .186 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 Rue de Bourgoyne 196 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 Before the Storm 213 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 England 227 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 The Misogallo 240 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 Casa Gianfigliazzi 259 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 Fabre 270 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 The Salon of the Countess . . . .281 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 Santa Croce 299 
 
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE BRIDE. 
 
 On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week 
 of the year 1772 the inhabitants of the squahd 
 and dilapidated little mountain towns between 
 Ancona and Loreto were thrown into great 
 excitement by the passage of a travelling 
 equipage, doubtless followed by two or three 
 dependent chaises, of more than usual magnifi- 
 cence. 
 
 The people of those parts have little to do 
 now-a-days, ^nd must have had still less during 
 the pontificate of his Holiness Pope Clement 
 XIV. ; and we can imagine how all the windows 
 of the unplastered houses, and all the black 
 and oozy doorways, must have been lined with 
 heads of women and children ; how the prin- 
 cipal square of each town, where the horses 
 were changed, must have been crowded with 
 inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, 
 
l6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 as they hung about the carriages, that the 
 great traveller was the young Queen of Eng- 
 land going to meet her bridegroom ; a thing to 
 be remembered in such world-forgotten places 
 as these, and which must have furnished the 
 subject of conversation for months and years, 
 till that Queen of England and her bridegroom 
 had become part and parcel of the tales of the 
 ** Three Golden Oranges," of the " King of 
 Portugal's Cowherd," of the " Wonderful Little 
 Blue Bird," and such-like stories in the minds 
 of the children of those Apennine cities. The 
 Queen of England going to meet her bride- 
 groom at the Holy House of Loreto ! The no- 
 tion, even to us, does savor strangely of the 
 fairy tale. 
 
 What were, meanwhile, the thoughts of the 
 beautiful little fairy princess, with laughing 
 dark eyes and shining golden hair, and brilliant 
 fair skin, more brilliant for the mysterious 
 patches of rouge upon the cheeks, and vermil- 
 ion upon the lips, whom the more audacious or 
 fortunate of the townsfolk caught a glimpse of, 
 seated in her gorgeous travelling dress (for the 
 eighteenth century was still in its stage of 
 pre-revolutionary brocade and gold lace and 
 powder and spangles) behind the curtains of 
 the coach ? Louise, Princess of Stolberg-Ged- 
 ern, and ex-Canoness of Mons, was, if we may 
 
THE BRIDE. 1/ 
 
 judge by the crayon portrait and the miniature 
 done about that time, much more of a child 
 than most women of nineteen. A clever and 
 accomplished young lady, but, one would say, 
 with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired 
 pretty little habits and ideas than character ; a 
 childish woman of the world, a bright, light 
 handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides 
 the confusion, the unreality due to precipita- 
 tion of events and change of scene, the sense 
 that she had (how long ago — days, weeks, or 
 years } in such a state time becomes a great 
 muddle and mystery) been actually married 
 by proxy, that she had come the whole way 
 from Paris, through Venice and across the 
 sea, besides being in this dream-like, phan- 
 tasmagoric condition, which must have made 
 all things seem light — it is probable that the 
 young lady had scarcely sufficient conscious- 
 ness of herself as a grown-up, independent, 
 independently feeling and thinking creature, to 
 feel or think very strongly over her situation. 
 It was the regular thing for girls of Louise of 
 Stolberg's rank to be put through a certain 
 amount of rather vague convent education, as 
 she had been at Mons ; to be put through a 
 certain amount of balls and parties ; to be put 
 through the formality of betrothal and marriage ; 
 all this was the half -conscious dream — then 
 
1 8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 would come the great waking up. And Louise 
 of Stolbergwas, most likely, in a state of feeling 
 like that which comes to us with the earliest 
 light through the blinds : pleasant or unpleas- 
 ant ? We know not which ; still drowsing, 
 dreaming, but yet strongly conscious that in a 
 moment we shall be awake to reality. 
 
 There was, nevertheless, in the position of 
 this girl something which, even in these circum- 
 stances, must have compelled her to think, or 
 at all events, to meditate, however confusedly, 
 upon the present and the future. If she had in 
 her the smallest spark of imagination she must 
 have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of contin- 
 uous surprise, recurring like the tick of a clock, 
 which haunts us sometimes with the fact that it 
 really does just happen to be ourselves to whom 
 some curious lot, some rare combination of the 
 numbers in life's lottery, has come. For the 
 man whom she was going to marry — nay, to 
 whom, in a sense, she was married already — the 
 unknown whom she would see for the first time 
 that evening, was not the mere typical bride- 
 groom, the mere man of rank and fortune, to 
 whom, whatever his particular individual shape 
 and name, the daughter of a high-born but 
 impoverished house had known herself, since 
 her childhood, to be devoted. 
 
 Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, 
 
THE BRIDE. 1 9 
 
 daughter of the late Prince Gustavus Adolphus 
 of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who 
 had died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the 
 battle of Leuthen ; and of Elisabeth Philippine, 
 Countess of Horn, born at Mons in Hainaut, 
 the 20th September, 1752, educated there in 
 a convent, and subsequently admitted to the 
 half-ecclesiastic, half-worldly dignity of Canoness 
 of Ste. Wandru in that town : Louise, Princess 
 of Stolberg, now in her twentieth year, had 
 been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married 
 by proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, 
 known to history as the younger Pretender, to 
 popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, 
 and to society in the second half of the eight- 
 eenth century as the Count of Albany. The 
 match had been made up hurriedly — most prob- 
 ably without consulting, or dreaming of con- 
 sulting, the girl — by her mother, the dowager 
 Princess Stolberg, and the Duke of Fitz-James, 
 Charles Edward's cousin. The French Min- 
 ister, Due d'Aiguilon, in one of those fits of 
 preparing Charles Edward as a weapon against 
 England, which had more than once cost the 
 Pretender so much bitterness, and the Court of 
 Versailles so much brazenly endured shame, 
 had intimated to the Count of Albany that he 
 had better take unto himself a wife. Charles 
 Edward had more than once refused ; this time 
 
20 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 he accepted, and his cousin Fitz-James looked 
 around for a possible future Queen of England. 
 Now it happened that the eldest son of Fitz- 
 James, the Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of 
 Berwick, had just married Caroline, the second 
 daughter of the widow of Prince Gustavus 
 Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern ; so that the 
 choice naturally fell upon this lady's elder sis- 
 ter, Louise of Stolberg, the young Canoness of 
 Ste. Wandru of Mons. 
 
 The alliance, short of royal birth, was, in the 
 matter of dignity, all that could be wished ; the 
 Stolbergs were one of the most illustrious 
 families of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose 
 ser\dce they had discharged many high offices ; 
 the Horns, on the other hand, were among the 
 most brilliant of the Flemish aristocracy, allied 
 to the Gonzagas of Mantua, the Colonna, Or- 
 sinis, the Medina Cells, Croys, Lignes, Hohen- 
 zollerns, and the house of Lorraine, reigning 
 or quasi-reigning families ; and Louise of 
 Stolberg's mother was, moreover, on the 
 maternal side, the grand-daughter of the Earl 
 of Elgin and Ailesbury, a Bruce, and a staunch 
 follower of King James H. Such had been 
 the inducements in the eyes of the Duke of 
 Fitz-James ; and therefore in the eyes of 
 Charles Edward, for whom he was commis- 
 sioned to select a wife. The inducements to 
 
THE BRIDE. 21 
 
 the Princess of Stolberg had been even greater. 
 Foremost among them was probably the mere 
 desire of ridding herself, poor and living as she 
 was on the charity of the Empress-Queen, of 
 another of the four girls with whom she had 
 been left a widow at twenty-five. It had been 
 a great blessing to get the two eldest girls, 
 Louise and Caroline, educated, housed for a 
 time, and momentarily settled in the world by 
 their admission to the rich and noble chapter 
 of Ste. Wandru : it must have been a great 
 blessing to see the second girl married to the 
 son of Fitz-James ; it would be a still greater 
 one to get Louise safely off her hands, now 
 that the third and fourth daughters required to 
 be thought of. So far for the desirability of 
 any marriage. This particular marriage with 
 Prince Charles Edward was, moreover, such as 
 to tempt the vanity and ambition of a lady like 
 the widowed Princess of Stolberg, conscious of 
 her high rank, and conscious, perhaps painfully 
 conscious, of the difficulty of living up to its 
 requirements. The Count of Albany's grand- 
 father had been King of England ; his father, 
 the Pretender James, had lived with royal state 
 in his exile at Rome, recognized as reigning 
 sovereign by the Pope, and even, every now 
 and then, by France and Spain. No Govern- 
 ment had recognized Charles Edward as King 
 
22 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 of England ; but, on the other hand, Charles 
 Edward had virtually been King of Scotland 
 during the '45 : he had been promised the help 
 of France to restore him to his rights ; and 
 although that help had never been satisfactorily 
 given in the past, who could tell whether it 
 might not be given at any moment in the 
 future ? The ups and downs of politics brought 
 all sorts of unexpected necessities ; and .why 
 should the French Government, which had 
 ignominiously kidnapped and bundled off 
 Charles Edward in 1748, have sent for him 
 again only a year ago, have urged him to 
 marry, unless it had some scheme for reinstat- 
 ing him in England? The Duke of Fitz-James 
 had doubtless urged these considerations ; he 
 had not laid much weight on the fact that 
 Charles Edward was thirty-two years older than 
 his proposed wife ; still less is it probable that 
 he had bade the Princess ofStolberg consider 
 that his royal kinsman was said to be neither 
 of very good health, nor of very agreeable dis- 
 position, nor of very temperate habits ; or, if 
 such ideas were presented to the Princess 
 Stolberg, she put them behind her. Be it as it 
 may, these were matters for the judicious con- 
 sideration of a mother ; not, certainly, for the 
 thoughts of a daughter. The judicious mother 
 decided that such a match was a good one ; 
 
THE BRIDE. 23 
 
 perhaps, in her heart, she was even over- 
 whelmed by the glory which this daughter of 
 hers was permitted by Heaven to add to all the 
 glories of the illustrious Stolbergs and Horns. 
 Anyhow, she accepted eagerly ; so eagerly as 
 to forget both gratitude and prudence : for so 
 far from consulting her benefactress, Maria 
 Theresa, about the advisability of this marriage, 
 or asking her sovereign permission for a step 
 which might draw upon the Empress-Queen 
 some disagreeable diplomatic correspondence 
 with England, the Princess of Stolberg kept 
 the matter close, and did not even announce 
 the marriage to the Court of Vienna; yet she 
 must have foreseen what occurred, namely, 
 that Maria Theresa, mortified not merely in 
 her dignity as a sovereign, but also, and per- 
 haps more, in her ruling passion of benevolent 
 meddlesomeness, would suspend the pension 
 which formed a large portion of the Princess' 
 income, and compel her to the abject apology 
 before restoring it. The marriage with Charles 
 Edward Stuart was worth all that ! 
 
 Louise of Stolberg was probably well aware 
 of the extreme glory of the marriage for which 
 she had been reserved. The Fitz-Jameses, in 
 virtue of their illegitimate descent from James 
 H., considered themselves and were considered 
 as a sort of princes of the blood ; and as such 
 
24 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 they doubtless impressed Louise with a great 
 notion of the glory of the Stuarts, and the 
 absolute legitimacy of their claims. On his 
 marriage Charles Edward assumed the title, 
 and attempted to assume the position, of King 
 of England ; so his bride must have consid- 
 ered herself as the wife not merely of the 
 Count of Albany, but of Charles III., King of 
 Great Britain, France and Ireland. She was 
 going to be a queen ! We must try, we demo- 
 cratic creatures of a time when kings and 
 queens may perfectly be adventurers and 
 adventuresses, to put ourselves in the place of 
 this young lady of a century ago, brought up 
 as a dignitary of a chapter into which admis- 
 sion depended entirely upon the number and 
 quality of quarterings of the candidate's 
 esutcheon, under a superior — the Abbess of 
 Ste. Wandru — who was the sister of the late 
 Emperor Francis, the sister-in-law of Maria 
 Theresa ; we must try and conceive an institu- 
 tion something between a school, a sisterhood 
 and a club, in which the ruling idea, the 
 source of all dignity, jealousy, envy and tri- 
 umph, was greatness of birth and connection ; 
 we must try and do this in order to understand 
 what, to Louise of Stolberg, was the full value 
 of the fact of becoming the wife of Charles 
 Edward Stuart. One hundred and twelve years 
 
THE BRIDE. 2$ 
 
 ago, and seventeen years before the great 
 revolution which yawns, an almost impass- 
 able gulf, between us and the men and women 
 of the past, a woman, a girl of nineteen, and a 
 Canoness of Ste. Wandru of Mons, need have 
 been of no base temper, if, on the eve of such 
 a wedding as this one, her mind had been full 
 of only one idea ; the idea, monotonous and 
 drowningly loud like some big cathedral bell, 
 ** I shall be a queen. " But if Louise of Stol- 
 berg was, as is most probable, in some such a 
 state of vague exultation, we must remember 
 also that there may well have entered into 
 such exultation an element with which even 
 we, and even the most austerely or snobbishly 
 democratic among us, might fully have sympa- 
 thized. Her mother, her sister, her brother-in- 
 law, and the old Duke of Fitz-James, who had 
 made up her marriage and married her by 
 proxy, and every other person who had 
 approached her during the last month, must 
 have been filling the mind of Louise of Stol- 
 berg with tales of the '45 and of the heroism of 
 Prince Charlie. And her mind, which, as after- 
 wards appeared, was romantic, fascinated by 
 eccentricity and genius, may easily have 
 become enamored of the bridegroom who 
 awaited her, the last of so brilliant and ill-fated 
 a race, the hero of Gladsmuir and Falkirk, at 
 
26 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 whose approach the Londoners had shut their 
 shops in terror, and the Hanoverian usurper 
 ordered his yacht to lie ready moored at the 
 Tower steps ; the more than royal young man 
 whom (as the Jacobites doubtless told her) 
 only the foolish and traitorous obstinacy of 
 his followers had prevented from reinstating 
 his father on the throne of England. Histori- 
 cal figures, especially those of a heroic sort, 
 remain pictured in men's minds at their 
 moment of glory ; and this was the case partic- 
 ularly with the young Pretender, who had dis- 
 appeared into well-nigh complete mystery after 
 his wonderful exploits and hairbreadth escapes 
 of the '45 ; so that in the eyes of Louise of 
 Stolberg the man she was about to fnarry ap- 
 peared most probably but little changed from 
 the brilliant youth who had marched on foot at 
 the head of his army towards London, who had 
 held court at Holyrood and roamed in disguise 
 about the Hebrides. 
 
 Still, it is difficult to imagine that as the 
 hours of meeting drew nearer, the little Prin- 
 cess, as her travelling carriage toiled up the 
 Apennine valleys, did not feel some terror of 
 the future and the unknown. The spring 
 comes late to those regions ; in the middle of 
 April the blackthorn is scarcely budding on 
 the rocks, the violets are still plentiful under- 
 
THE BRIDE. 27 
 
 neath the leafless roadside hedges ; scarcely a 
 faint yellow, more like autumn than spring, is 
 beginning to tinge the scraggy outlines of the 
 poplars, which rise in spectral regiments out of 
 the river beds. Wherever the valley widens, 
 or the road gains some hill-crest, a huge peak 
 white with newly-fallen snow confronts you, 
 closes in the view, bringing bleakness and bit- 
 terness curiously home to the feelings. These 
 valleys, torrent-tracks betwen the steep rocks 
 of livid basalt or bright red sandstone, bare as 
 a bone or thinly clothed with ilex and juoiper 
 scrub, are inexpressibly lonely and sad, espe- 
 cially at this time of the year. You feel impri- 
 soned among the rocks in a sort of catacomb 
 open to the sky, where the shadows gather in 
 the early afternoon, and only the light on the 
 snow-peaks and on the high-sailing clouds tells 
 you that the sun is still in the heavens. Vil- 
 lages there seem none ; and you may drive for 
 an hour without meeting more than a stray 
 peasant cutting scrub or quarrying gravel on 
 the hill-side, a train of mules carrying charcoal 
 or fagots ; the towns are far between, bleak, 
 black, filthy, and such as only to make you feel 
 all the more poignantly the utter desolateness 
 of these mountains. No sadder way of enter- 
 ing Italy can well be imagined than landing 
 at Ancona and crossing through the Apen- 
 
28 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 nines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl 
 accustomed to the fat flatness of Flanders, to 
 the market bustle of a Flemish provincial town, 
 this journey must have been overwhelmingly 
 dreary and dismal. During these long hours, 
 dragging up these Apennine valleys, did a 
 shadow fall across the mind of the pretty, fair- 
 haired, brilliant-complexioned little Canoness of 
 Mons, a shadow like the cold melancholy blue 
 which filled the valleys between the sun-smitten 
 peaks ? And did it ever occur to her, as the 
 horses were changed in the little post-towns, 
 that it was in honor of Holy Week that the 
 savage-looking bearded men, the big, brawny. 
 Madonna-like women, had got on their best 
 clothes ? Did it strike her that the unplas- 
 tered church fronts were draped in black, the 
 streets strewn with laurel and box as if for a 
 funeral, that the bells were silent in their tow- 
 ers ? Perhaps not ; and yet when a few years 
 later the Countess of Albany was already wont 
 to say that her married life had been just such 
 as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar 
 on Good Friday, she must have remembered, 
 and the remembrance must have seemed 
 fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girl- 
 hood, travelling through the black deserted 
 valleys of the March, through the world-for- 
 gotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells 
 
THE BRIDE, 29 
 
 and black-draped churches and funereally- 
 strewn streets. 
 
 At Loreto — where, as a good Catholic, the 
 Princess Louise of Stolberg doubtless prayed 
 for a blessing on her marriage, in the great 
 sanctuary which encloses with silver and carved 
 marble the little house of the Virgin — at Lo- 
 reto the bride was met by a Jacobite dignitary, 
 Lord Carlyle, and five servants in the crimson 
 liveries of England. At Macerata, one of the 
 larger towns of the March of Ancona, she was 
 awaited by her bridegroom. A noble family 
 of the province, the Compagnoni-Marefoschis, 
 one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of 
 the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the dis- 
 posal of the royal pair. We most of us know 
 what such palaces, in small Italian provincial 
 towns south of the Apennines, are apt to be ; 
 huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of brickwork and 
 mouldering plaster, something between a me- 
 diaeval fortress and a convent ; great black arch- 
 ways, where the refuse of the house and the 
 filth of the town have peaceably accumulated 
 (and how much more in those days) ; magnifi- 
 cent statued staircases given over to the few 
 servants who have replaced the armed bravos of 
 two centuries ago ; long suites of rooms, vast, 
 resounding like so many churches, glazed in the 
 last century with tiny squares of bad glass^ 
 
30 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 through which the light comes green and thick 
 as through sea-water ; carpets still despised as 
 a new-fangled luxury from France ; the walls, 
 not cheerful with eighteenth-century French 
 panel and hangings, but covered with big naked 
 frescoed men and women, or faded arras ; few 
 fire-places, but those few enormous, looking like 
 a huge red cavern in the room. The Mare- 
 foschis had got together all their best furniture 
 and plate, and the palace was filled with torches 
 ai\d wax lights ; a funereal illumination in a 
 funereal place, it must have seemed to the lit- 
 tle Princess of Stolberg, fresh from the brilliant 
 nattiness ot the Parisian houses of the time of 
 Louis XV. 
 
 The bride alighted ; a small, plump, well- 
 proportioned, rather childish creature, with still 
 half-formed childish features, a trifle snub, a 
 trifle soulless, very pretty, tender, light-hearted ; 
 a charming little creature, very well made to 
 steal folks' hearts unconscious to themselves 
 and to herself. 
 
 The bridegroom met her. A faded, but 
 extremely characteristic crayon portrait, the 
 companion of the one of which I have already 
 spoken, now in the possession of Cavaliere 
 Emilio Santarelli (the only man still living who 
 can remember that same Louise d'Albany), a 
 portrait evidently taken at this time, has shown 
 
THE BRIDE. 3 1 
 
 me what that bridegroom must have been. The 
 man who met Louise of Stolberg at Macerata 
 as her husband and master, the man who had 
 once been Bonnie Prince Charlie, was tall, big- 
 boned, guant, and prematurely bowed for his 
 age of fifty-two ; dressed usually, and doubtless 
 on this occasion, with the blue ribbon and star, 
 in a suit of crimson watered silk, which threw 
 up a red reflection into his red and bloated face. 
 A red face, but of a livid, purplish red suffused 
 all over the heavy furrowed forehead to where 
 it met tht white wig, all over the flabby cheeks, 
 hanging in big loose folds upon the short, loose- 
 folded red neck ; massive features, but coars- 
 ened and drawn ; and dull, thick, silent-looking 
 lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the red 
 skin ; pale blue eyes tending to a watery gray- 
 ness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streak- 
 ings of red ; something inexpressibly sad, 
 gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the 
 whole face: such was the man who awaited 
 Louise of Stolberg in the Compagnoni-Marefos- 
 chi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good 
 Friday, the 17th of April, 1772, wedded her 
 in the palace chapel and signed his name in the 
 register as Charles IIL, King of Great Britain, 
 France and Ireland. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 THE BRIDEGROOM. 
 
 On the Wednesday after Easter the bride and 
 bridegroom made their solemn entry into 
 Rome; the two travelling carriages of the 
 Prince and of the Princess were drawn by six 
 horses ; four gala coaches, carrying the attend- 
 ants of Charles Edward and of his brother the 
 Cardinal Duke of York, followed behind, and 
 the streets were cleared by four outriders 
 dressed in scarlet with the white Stuart cock- 
 ade. The house to which Louise of Stolberg, 
 now Louise d' Albany, or rather, as she signed 
 herself at this time, Louise R., was conducted 
 after her five days' wedding journey, has passed 
 through several hands since belonging to the 
 Sacchettis, the Muti Papazzurris, and now-a- 
 days to the family of About' s charming and 
 unhappy ToUa Ferraldi. Clement XI. had 
 given or lent it to the elder Pretender : James 
 III., as he was styled in Italy, had settled in it 
 about 1 7 19 with his beautiful bride, Maria 
 Clementina Sobieska, romantically filched by 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM, 33 
 
 her Jacobites from the convent at Innsbruck, 
 where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to 
 restrain her from so compromising a match ; 
 here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had 
 been born and had his baby fingers kissed by 
 the whole sacred college ; and here the so-called 
 King of England had died at last, a melancholy 
 hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in 
 the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi 
 Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various 
 palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else 
 their names, and its pillared church front. 
 There is a certain aristocratic serenity about 
 that square, separated, like a big palace yard, 
 from the bustling Corso in front ; yet to me 
 there remains, a tradition of my childhood, a 
 sort of grotesque and horrid suggestiveness 
 connected with this peaceful and princely 
 corner of Rome. For, many years ago, when 
 the square of the Santissimi Apostoli was still 
 periodically strewn with sand that the Pope 
 might not be jolted when his golden coach 
 drove up to the church, and when the names of 
 Charles Edward and his Countess were curious- 
 ly mixed up in my brain with those of Charles 
 the First and Mary Queen of Scots, there used 
 to be in a little street leading out of the square 
 towards the Colonna Gardens, a dark recess in 
 the blank church wall, an embrasure, sheltered 
 
34 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 by a pent-house roof and raised like a stage a 
 few steep steps above the pavement ; and in it 
 loomed, strapped to a chair, dark in the shadow, 
 a creature in a long black robe and a skull- 
 cap drawn close over his head ; a vague, con- 
 torted, writhing and gibbering horror, of whose 
 St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children 
 scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we 
 hurried up the narrow street, followed by the 
 bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. 
 This weird and grotesque sight, more weird 
 and more grotesque seen through a muddled 
 childish fancy and through the haze of years, 
 has remained associated in my mind with that 
 particular corner of Rome, where, with windows 
 looking down upon that street, upon that blank 
 church wall with its little black recess, the 
 palace of the Stuarts closes in the narrow end 
 of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli. And 
 now, I cannot help seeing a certain strange ap- 
 propriateness in the fact that the image of that 
 mouthing and gesticulating half-witted creature 
 should be connected in my mind with the house 
 to which, with pomp of six-horse coaches and 
 scarlet outriders, Charles Edward Stuart con- 
 ducted his bride. 
 
 For the beautiful and brilliant youth who had 
 secretly left that palace twenty-four years 
 before to reconquer his father's kingdom, the 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. 35 
 
 gentle and gallant and chivalric young prince 
 of whose irresistible manner and voice the 
 canny chieftains had vainly bid each other 
 beware, when he landed with his handful of 
 friends and called the Highlanders to arms ; the 
 patient and heroic exile, singing to his friends 
 when the sea washed over their boat and the 
 Hanoverian soldiers surrounded their cavern or 
 hovel, who had silently given Miss Macdonald 
 that solemn kiss which she treasured for more 
 than fifty years in her strong heart — that 
 Charles Edward Stuart was now a creature not 
 much worthier and not much less repulsive than 
 the poor idiot whom I still see, flinging about 
 his palsied hands and gobbling with his speech- 
 less mouth, beneath the windows of the Stuart 
 palace. The taste for drinking, so strange in a 
 man brought up to the age of twenty-three 
 among the proverbially sober Italians, had 
 arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable 
 ill habit in one continually exposed to wet and 
 cold, frequently sleeping on the damp ground, 
 ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in 
 flying before his enemies, during those frightful 
 months after the defeat at Culloden, when, 
 with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his 
 head, he had lurked in the fastnesses of the 
 Hebrides. We hear that on the eve of his final 
 escape from Scotland, his host, Macdonald of 
 
36 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Kingsburgh, prevented the possible miscarriage 
 of all their perilous plans only by smashing the 
 punch-bowl over which the Pretender, already 
 more than half drunk, had insisted upon spend- 
 ing the night. Still more significant is the 
 fact, recorded by Hugh Macdonald of Balshair, 
 that when Charles Edward was concealed in a 
 hovel in the isle of South Uist, the prince and 
 his faithful followers continued drinking (the 
 words are Balshair's own) " for three days and 
 three nights." Hard drinking was, we all know, 
 a necessary accomplishment in the Scotland of 
 those days ; and hard drinking, we must all of 
 us admit, may well have been the one comfort 
 and resource of a man undergoing the frightful 
 mental and bodily miseries of those months of 
 lying at bay. But Charles Edward did not 
 relinquish the habit when he was back again in 
 safety and luxury. Strangely compounded of 
 an Englishman and a Pole, the Polish element, 
 the brilliant and light-hearted chivalry, the 
 cheerful and youthfully wayward heroism which 
 he had inherited from the Sobieskis, seemed to 
 constitute the whole of Charles Edward's na- 
 ture when he was young and for all his reverses 
 still hopeful : as he grew older, as deferred and 
 disappointed hopes, and endured ignominy, 
 made him a middle-aged man before his time, 
 then also did the other hereditary strain, the 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. Z7 
 
 morose obstinacy, the gloomy brutality of James 
 II. and of his father begin to appear, and grad- 
 ually obliterated every trace of what had been 
 the splendor and charm of the Prince Charlie 
 of the '45. Disappointed of the assistance of 
 France, which had egged him to this great 
 enterprise only to leave him shamefully in the 
 lurch, Charles Edward had, immediately upon 
 the peace of Aix la Chapelle, become an em- 
 barrassing guest of Louis XV., and a guest of 
 whom the victorious English were continually 
 requiring the ignominious dismissal ; until, 
 wearied by the indifference to all hints and 
 orders to free France from his compromising 
 presence, the Court of Versailles had descended 
 to the incredible baseness of having the Prince 
 kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound 
 hand and foot, carried like a thief to the fortress 
 of Vincennes, and then conducted to the fron- 
 tier like a suspected though unconvicted swin- 
 dler or other public nuisance. 
 
 This indignity, coming close upon the 
 irreparable blow dealt to the Jacobite cause by 
 the stupid selfishness which impelled Charles 
 Edward's younger brother to become a Romish 
 priest and a cardinal, appears to have definitive- 
 ly decided the extraordinary change in the 
 character of the young Pretender. During the 
 many years of skulking, often completely lost 
 
38 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 to the sight both of Jacobite adherents and of 
 Hanoverian spies, which followed upon that 
 outrage of the year 1748, the few glimpses 
 which we obtain of Charles Edward show us 
 only a precociously aged, brutish and brutal sot, 
 obstinate in disregarding all efforts to restore 
 him to a worthier life, yet not obstinate enough 
 to refuse unnecessary pecuniary aid from the 
 very government and persons by whom he had 
 been so cruelly outraged. We hear that 
 Charles Edward's confessor, with whom, despite 
 his secret abjuration of Catholicism, he con- 
 tinued to associate, was a notorious drunkard ; 
 and that the mistress with whom he lived for 
 many years, and whom he even passed off as 
 his wife, was also addicted to drinking; nay. 
 Lord Elcho is said to have witnessed a tipsy 
 squabble between the young Pretender and 
 Miss Walkenshaw, the lady in question, across 
 the table of a low Paris tavern. 
 
 The reports of the many spies whom the 
 English Government set everywhere on his 
 traces are constant and unanimous in one item 
 of information : the Prince began to drink 
 early in the morning, and was invariably dead 
 drunk by the evening ; nay, some letters of 
 Cardinal York, addressed to an unknown Jacob- 
 ite, speak of the "nasty bottle, that goes on 
 but too much, and certainly must at last kill 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. 39 
 
 him." But, although drunkenness undoubtedly 
 did much to obliterate whatever still remained 
 of the hero of the '45, it was itself only one of 
 the proofs of the strange metamorphosis which 
 had taken place in his character. We cannot 
 admit the plea of some of his biographers, who 
 would save his honor at the price of his reason. 
 Charles Edward was the victim neither of a 
 hereditary vice nor of a mental disease ; drink 
 was in his case not a form of madness, but 
 merely the ruling passion of a broken-spirited 
 and degraded nature. He had the power when 
 he married, and even much later in life, when 
 he sent for his illegitimate daughter, of refrain- 
 ing from his usual excesses ; his will, impaired 
 though it was, still existed, and what was 
 wanting in the sad second half of his career 
 was not resolution, but conscience, pride, an 
 ideal, anything which might beget the desire of 
 reform. The curious mixture of brow-beating 
 moroseness with a brazen readiness to accept 
 and even extort favors, he would appear, as he 
 ceased to be young, to have gradually inherited 
 from his father; he was ready to live on the 
 alms of the French Court, while never losing an 
 opportunity of declaiming against the ignoble 
 treatment which that same Court had inflicted 
 on him. He became sordid and grasping in 
 money matters, basely begging for money, 
 
40 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 which he did not require, from those who, like 
 Gustavus III. of Sweden, discovered only too 
 late that he was demeaning himself from avarice 
 and not from necessity. While keeping a cer- 
 tain maudlin sentiment about his exploits and 
 those of his followers, which manifested itself 
 in cruelly pathetic scenes — when, as in his old 
 age, people talked to him of the Highlands 
 and the Rebellion — he was wholly without any 
 sense of his obligation towards men who had 
 exposed their life and happiness for him, of the 
 duty which bound him to repay their devotion 
 by docility to their advice, by sacrifice of his 
 inclinations, or even by such mere decency of 
 behavior as would spare them the bitterness of 
 allegiance to a disreputable and foul-mouthed 
 sot. But until the moment when, too old and 
 dying, he placed himself in the strong hands 
 of his natural daughter, Charles Edward seems 
 to have been, however obstinate in his favor- 
 itism, incapable of any real affection. When 
 his brother Henry became a priest Charles held 
 aloof for long years both from him and from 
 his father ; and this resentment of what was 
 after all a mere piece of bigoted folly, may be 
 partially excused by the fact that the identifica- 
 tion of his family with Popery had seriously 
 damaged the prospects of Jacobitism. But the 
 lack of all lovingness in his nature is proved 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. 41 
 
 beyond possibility of doubt by the brutal manner 
 in which, while obstinately refusing to part with 
 his mistress at the earnest entreaty of his 
 adherents, he explained to their envoy Macna- 
 mara that his refusal was due merely to resent- 
 ment at any attempted interference in his 
 concerns ; but that, for the rest, he had not the 
 smallest affection or consideration remaining 
 for the woman they wished to make him relin- 
 quish. As if all the stupid selfishness bred of 
 centuries of royalty had accumulated in this 
 man who might be king only through his own and 
 his adherents' magnanimity, Charles Edward 
 seemed, in the second period of his life, to feel 
 as if he had a right over everything, and 
 nobody else had a right over anything ; all 
 sense of reciprocity was gone ; he would accept 
 devotion, self-sacrifice, generosity, charity — 
 nay, he would even insist upon them ; but he 
 would give not one tittle in return ; so that, 
 forgetful of the heroism and clemency and 
 high spirit of his earlier days, one might almost 
 think that his indignant answer to Cardinal de 
 Tencin, who offered him England and Scotland 
 if he would cede Ireland to France, " Every- 
 thing or nothing, Monsieur le Cardinal ! " was 
 dictated less by the indignation of an English- 
 man than by the stubborn graspingness of a 
 Stuart. 
 
42 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 His further behavior towards Miss Walken- 
 shaw shows the same indifference to everything 
 except what he considered his own rights. He 
 had crudely admitted that he cared nothing for 
 her, that it was only because his adherents 
 wished her dismissal that he did not pack her 
 off ; and subsequently he seems to have given 
 himself so little thought either for his mistress 
 or for his child by her, that, without the benev- 
 olence of his brother the Cardinal, they might 
 have starved. But when, after long endurance 
 of his jealousy and brutality, after being watched 
 like a prisoner and beaten like a slave, the 
 wretched woman at length took refuge in a con- 
 vent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds ; 
 and he summoned the French Government, 
 despite his old quarrel with it, to kidnap and 
 send back the woman over whom he had no 
 legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with 
 the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy 
 clamoring for the wife whom he has well-nigh 
 done to death. Beyond the mere intemperance 
 and the violence born of intemperance which 
 made Charles Edward's name a by-word and 
 served the Hanoverian dynasty better than all 
 the Duke of Cumberland's gibbets, there was 
 at the bottom of the Pretender's character — ■ 
 his second character at least, his character after 
 the year 1750 — heartlessness and selfishness, 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. 43 
 
 an absence of all ideal and all gratitude, much 
 more morally repulsive than any mere vice, and 
 of which the vice which publicly degraded him 
 was the result much more than the cause. The 
 curse of kingship in an age when royalty had 
 lost all utility, the habit of irresponsibility, of 
 indifference, the habit of always claiming and 
 never giving justice, love, self-sacrifice, all the 
 good things of this world, this curse had lurked, 
 an evil strain, in the nature of this king without 
 a kingdom, and had gradually blighted and 
 made hideous what had seemed an almost heroic 
 character. Royal-souled Charles Edward Stuart 
 had certainly been in his youth ; brilliant with 
 all those virtues of endurance, clemency and 
 affability which the earlier eighteenth century 
 still fondly associated with the divine right of 
 kings ; and royal-souled, hard and weak with all 
 the hardness and weakness, the self-indulgence, 
 obstinacy, and thoughtlessness for others of 
 effete races of kings, he had become, no less 
 certainly, in the second part of his life ; branded 
 with God's own brand of unworthiness, which 
 signifies that a people, or a class, or a family is 
 doomed to extinction. 
 
 Such was the man to whom the easy-going 
 habit of the world, the perfectly self-righteous 
 indifference to a woman's happiness or honor 
 of the well-bred people of that day, gave over 
 
44 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 as a partner for life a half-educated, worldly- 
 ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of 
 nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered 
 herself extremely fortunate in being chosen for 
 so brilliant a match. 
 
 There is a glamor, even for us, connected 
 with the name of Charles Edward Stuart ; in 
 his youth he forms a brilliant speck of roman- 
 tic light in that dull eighteenth century, a spot 
 of light surrounded by the halo of glory of the 
 devotion which he inspired and the enthusiasm 
 which he left behind him. We feel, in a way, 
 grateful to him almost as we might feel grateful 
 to a clever talker, a beautiful woman, a bright 
 day, as to something pleasing and enlivening 
 to our fancy. But the brilliant effect which 
 has pleased us is like some gorgeous pagearlt 
 connected with the worship of a stupid and 
 ferocious divinity ; nay, rather, if we let our 
 thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remem- 
 ber how, while the prisons and ship-holds were 
 pestilent with the Jacobite men and women 
 penned up like cattle in obscene promiscuity, 
 while the mutilated corpses were lying still 
 green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, 
 while so many of the bravest men of Scotland, 
 who had supplicated the young Pretender not 
 to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were 
 cheerfully mounting the scaffold "for so 
 
THE BRIDEGROOM. 45 
 
 sweet a prince," Charles Edward was dancing 
 at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and dia- 
 monds, with his black-eyed boast, the eldest- 
 born Princess of France; — nay, worse, if we 
 remember how the man, for whose love and 
 whose right so much needless agony had been 
 expended, let himself become a disgrace to the 
 very memory of the men who had died for him : 
 if we bear all this in mind, Charles Edward 
 seems to have become a mere irresponsible and 
 fated representative of some evil creed ; the 
 idol, at first fair-shapen and smiling, then hide- 
 ous and loathsome, to which human sacrifices 
 are brought in solemnity ; a glittering idol of 
 silver, or a foul idol of rotten wood, but without 
 nerves and mind to perceive the weeping all 
 around, the sop of blood at its feet. And now 
 after the sacrifice of so many hundreds of brave 
 men to this one man comes the less tragic, less 
 heroic, perfectly legitimate and correct sacrifice 
 to him of a pretty young woman, not brave and 
 not magnanimous, but very fit for innocent 
 enjoyment and very fit for honorable love. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 
 
 Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or 
 at least refrained from any excesses, in honor 
 of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that 
 P'rance was again taking him up, a notion well 
 founded, since France had bid him marry and 
 have an heir, and the recollection of the near 
 miscarriage of all his projects, thanks to having 
 presented himself, a year before, to the French 
 Minister so drunk that he could neither speak 
 nor be spoker^ to, perhaps the old hope of be- 
 coming after all a real king, had turned the 
 Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. 
 Or, perhaps, weary of the -life of melancholy 
 solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral 
 pig-sty in which he had been rotting so many 
 years, the idea of decency, of dignity, of society, 
 of a wife and children and friends, may have 
 made him capable of a strong resolution. Per- 
 haps, also, the unfamiliar, wonderful presence 
 of a beautiful and refined young woman, of 
 something to adore, or at least to be jealous and 
 
REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 47 
 
 vain of, may have wakened whatever still 
 remained of the gallant and high-spirited Polish 
 nature in this morose and besotten old Stua'rt. 
 Be this as it may, Charles Edward, however 
 degraded, was able to command himself when 
 he chose, and, for one reason or another, he did 
 choose to command himself and behave like a 
 tolerably decent man and husband during the 
 first few months following on his marriage. 
 Besides the redness of his face, the leaden suf- 
 fused look of his eyes, the vague air of degrada- 
 tion all about him, there was perhaps nothing, 
 at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen of 
 Great Britain, France and Ireland, that her 
 husband was a drunkard and well-nigh a 
 maniac. Engaging he certainly could not have 
 been, however much he tried (and we know he 
 tried hard) to show his full delight at having 
 got so charming a little wife ; indeed, it is easy 
 to imagine that if anything might inspire even 
 a properly educated and high-born young 
 Flemish or German lady of the eighteenth 
 century with somewhat of a sense of loathing, 
 it must have been the assiduities and endear- 
 ments of a man such as Charles Edward. But 
 Louise of Stolberg had doubtless absorbed, 
 from her mother, from her older fellow-can- 
 onesses, nay, from the very school-girls in the 
 convent where she had been educated, all 
 
48 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 proper views, negative and positive, on the 
 subject of marriage; nor must we give to a 
 girl who was probably still too much of a child, 
 too much of an unromantic little woman of the 
 world, undeserved pity on account of degrada- 
 tion which she had most probably, as yet, not 
 sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her 
 husband was old, he was ugly, he was not 
 attractive ; he may have been tiresome and 
 rather loathsome in his constant attendance; 
 he may even have smelt of brandy every now 
 and then ; but as marriages had been invented 
 in order to give young women a position in the 
 world, husbands were not expected to be much 
 more than drawbacks to the situation ; and as to 
 the sense of life-long dependence upon an indi- 
 vidual, as to the desire for love and sympathy, 
 it was still too early in the eighteenth, century, 
 and perhaps, also, too early in the life of a half- 
 Flemish, half-German girl, very childish still in 
 aspect, and brought up in the worldly wisdom 
 of a noble chapter of canonesses, to expect 
 anything of that kind. 
 
 There must, however, from the very begin- 
 ning, have been something unreal and uncanny 
 in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, 
 crammed with properties of dead Stuarts and 
 Sobieskis, with its royal throne and dai's in the 
 ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of 
 
REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 49 
 
 England, must have been full of rather lugu- 
 brious memories. Here James III. of England 
 and VI 1 1, of Scotland had moped away his 
 bitter old age ; here, years and years ago, 
 Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and 
 brilliant grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had 
 pined away, bullied and cajoled back from the 
 convent in which she had taken refuge, per- 
 petually outraged by the violence of her 
 husband and the insolence of his mistress ; it 
 was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. 
 Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome 
 of the second half of the eighteenth century, 
 with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and 
 churches, its strangled, black and filthy streets, 
 its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its 
 population seemingly composed only of monks 
 and priests (for all men of the middle classes 
 wore the black dress and short hair of the 
 clergy), or of half-savage peasants and work- 
 men, bearded creatures, in wonderful em- 
 broidered vests and scarfs, looking exceedingly 
 like brigands, as Bartolomeo Pinelli etched them 
 even some thirty years later; — a town where 
 every doorway was a sewer by day and a possi- 
 ble hiding-place for thieves by night ; where no 
 woman durst cross the street alone after dusk, 
 and no man dared to walk home unattended 
 after nine or ten ; where, driving about in her 
 
so COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 gilded state coach of an afternoon, the Pre- 
 tender's bride must often have met a knot of 
 people conveying a stabbed man (the average 
 gave more than one assassination per day) to 
 t^e nearest barber or apothecary, the blood of 
 file murdered man mingling, in the black ooze, 
 about the rough cobble-stones over which the 
 coaches jolted, with the blood trickling from 
 the disembowelled sheep hanging, ghastly in 
 their fleeces, from the hooks outside the 
 butchers' and cheesemongers' shops ; or re- 
 turning home at night from the opera, amid the 
 flare of the footmen's torches, must have heard 
 the distant cries of some imprudent person 
 struggling in the hands of marauders ; or, again, 
 on Sundays and holidays have been stopped by 
 the crowd gathered round the pillory where 
 some too easy-going husband sat crowned with 
 a paper cap in a hail-storm of mud and egg- 
 shells and fruit-peelmgs, round the scaffold 
 where some petty offender was being flogged 
 by the hangman, until the fortunate appearance 
 of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sym- 
 pathizing mob put a stop to the proceedings. 
 Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the 
 Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times 
 more barbarous, more squalid, picturesque, 
 filthy and unsafe if we would know what it was 
 a hundred years ago. 
 
REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 5 1 
 
 But in this barbarous Rome there were 
 things more beautiful and wonderful to a young 
 Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than 
 they could possibly be to us, indifferent and 
 much-cultured creatures of the nineteenth 
 century, who know that most art is corrupt and 
 most music trashy. 
 
 The private galleries of Rome were then in 
 process of formation ; pictures which had hung 
 in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in 
 those beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, 
 with their outlook on to the cloisters of a court, 
 or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden, 
 filled with the faint splash of the fountains 
 outside, the spectral, silvery chiming of musical 
 clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of 
 beings who would crowd in there armed with 
 guide-books and opera-glasses in the days to 
 come, only stray foreigners were to be met, 
 foreigners who most likely were daintily em- 
 broidered and powdered aristocrats from Eng- 
 land or Germany, if they were not men like 
 Wincklemann, or Goethe, or Beckford. It was 
 the great day, also, for excavations ; the vast 
 majority of antiques which we now see in 
 Rome having been dug up at that period ; and 
 among the ilexes of the Ludovisi and Albani 
 gardens, among the laurels and rough grass of 
 the Vatican hill, porticoes were being built, and 
 
52 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 long galleries and temple-like places, where a 
 whole people of marble might live among the 
 newly-found mosaics and carved altars and 
 vases. Moreover, there was at that time in 
 Rome a thing of which there is now less in 
 Rome than anywhere, perhaps, in the world — 
 a thing for which English and Germans came 
 expressly to Italy : there was music. A large 
 proportion of the best new operas were brought 
 out in Rome — always four or five new ones in 
 each season ; and the young singers from the 
 conservatorios of Naples came to the ecclesias- 
 tical city, where no actresses were suffered, to 
 begin their career in the hoop skirts and stom- 
 achers and toiLpes with which the eighteenth 
 century was wont to conceive the heroines of 
 ancient Greece and Rome. The bride of 
 Charles Edward was herself a tolerable musi- 
 cian and she had a taste for painting and sculp- 
 ture which developed into a perfect passion in 
 after-life ; so, with respect to art, there was 
 plenty to amuse her. 
 
 It was different with regard to society. By 
 insisting upon royal honors such as had been 
 enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal 
 Court, anxious to keep on good terms with 
 England, absolutely refused to give him, the 
 Pretender had virtually cut himself and his 
 wife out of all Roman society ; for he would. 
 
REGINA APOSrOLORUM. 53 
 
 not know the nobles on a footing of equality, 
 and they, on the other hand, dared know him 
 on no other. The great entertainments in the 
 palaces where Charles Edward had so often 
 danced, the admired of all beholders, in his 
 boyhood, were not for the Count and Countess 
 of Albany. There remained the theatres and 
 public balls to which the Pretender conducted 
 his wife with the assiduity of a man immensely 
 vain of having on his arm a woman far too 
 young and pretty for his deserts. And, besides 
 this, there was a certain amount of vague, shift- 
 ing foreign society, nobles on the loose, and 
 young men on their grand tour, who mostly 
 considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or 
 at least a seemingly accidental meeting and 
 introduction in the lobby of a theatre or the 
 garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of 
 their sight-seeing. Such people as these were 
 the guests of the Palazzo Muti ; and, together 
 with a few Jacobite hangers-on, constituted the 
 fluctuating little Court of Louise, Queen of 
 Great Britain, France and Ireland, whom the 
 people of Rome, hearing of the throne and dai's 
 in the ante-room and of the royal ceremonial in 
 the palace near the Santissimi Apostoli, usually 
 spoke of as the Regina Apostoloruin ; while 
 only a very few, who had approached that 
 charming little blonde lady, corrected that title 
 
54 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 to that of Queen of Hearts, Regina dei Cuori. 
 Among the few who bowed before Charles 
 Edward's wife, in consideration of this last- 
 named kingdom, was a brilliant, wayward young 
 man, destined to remain a sort of brilliant, way- 
 ward, impracticable child until he was eighty ; 
 and destined, also, to cherish throughout the 
 long hves of both, the sort of half genuine, 
 half affected boy's, or rather page's, passion 
 with which Queen Louise had inspired him. 
 Karl Victor von Bonstetten, of a patrician fam- 
 ily of Bern, a Frenchified German, more French, 
 more butterfly-like than any real Frenchman, 
 even of the old regime, came to Rome, already 
 well known by his romantic friendship with the 
 Swiss historian Miiller, and by the ideas which he 
 had desultorily and gaily aired on most subjects, 
 in the year 1773. In his memoirs he wrote as 
 follows of the " Queen of Hearts : " '' She was 
 of middle height, fair, with dark-blue eyes, a 
 slightly turned-up nose, and a dazzling white 
 English complexion. Her expression was gay 
 and espiegle, and not without a spice of irony, 
 on the whole more French than German. She 
 was enough to turn all heads. The Pretender 
 was tall, lean, good-natured, talkative. He 
 liked to have opportunities of speaking English, 
 and was given to talking a great deal about his 
 adventures — interesting enough for a visitor, 
 
REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 55 
 
 but not equally so for his intimates, who had 
 probably heard those stories a hundred times 
 over. After every sentence almost he would 
 ask, in Italian, ' Do you understand ? ' His 
 young wife laughed heartily at the story of his 
 dressing up in woman's clothes. " A dull, 
 garrulous husband, boring people with stories 
 of which they were sick ; a childish little wife, 
 trying to make the best of things, and laughing 
 over the stale old jokes; this is what may be 
 called the idylic moment in the wedded life of 
 Charles Edward and Louise. What would she 
 have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far 
 off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see 
 what Bonstetten saw ; had she heard the Count 
 and Countess of Albany laughing, the one 
 with the laughter of an old sot, the other with 
 the laughter of a giddy child, over the adven- 
 tures of that heroic Prince Charlie whose mem- 
 ory was safe in her heart, as the sheets he 
 had slept in were safe in her closet, waiting 
 to be her grave-clothes } 
 
 Forty-four years later, when the Queen of 
 Hearts was a stout, dowdy old lady, with no 
 traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable 
 old gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstet- 
 ten wrote to the Countess of Albany from 
 Rome : " I never pass through the Apostles' 
 square without looking up at that balcony, at 
 that house where I saw vou for the first time." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE HEIR. 
 
 In 1765 Horace Walpole, mentioning the now- 
 ascertained fact of the Pretender's abjuration 
 of Catholicism, informed his friend Mann that 
 a rumor was about that Charles Edward had 
 declared his intention of never marrying, in 
 order that no more Stuarts should remain to 
 embroil England. This magnanimous resolu- 
 tion, which was a mere repetition of an answer 
 made years ago by the Pretender's father, did 
 not hold good against the temptations of the 
 Cabinet of Versailles. There is something 
 particularly disgusting in the thought that, 
 merely because the French Government thought 
 it convenient to keep a Stuart in reserve with 
 whom, if necessary, to trip up England, the 
 once magnanimous Charles Edward consented 
 to marry in consideration of a certain pension 
 from Versailles ; to make money out of any 
 possible or probable son he might have. This, 
 however, was the plain state of the case ; and 
 Louise of Stolberg had been selected, and 
 
THE HEIR. 57 
 
 married to a drunkard old enough to be her 
 father, merely that this honorable bargain be- 
 tween the man outraged in 1748, and the 
 Government which had outraged him, might be 
 satisfactorily fulfilled. 
 
 The Court of Versailles wasted its money ; 
 the officially-negotiated baby was never born. 
 Nay, Sir Horace Mann, the English Minister at 
 Florence, whose spies watched every movement 
 of the Count and Countess of Albany, was able 
 to report to his Government, in answer to a 
 vague rumor of the coming of an heir, that the 
 wife of Charles Edward Stuart had never, at 
 any moment, had any reasons for expecting to 
 become a mother. And when, in the first years 
 of this century, Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, 
 the younger brother of Charles Edward, was 
 buried where the two melancholy genii of 
 Canova kept watch in St. Peter's, opposite to 
 the portrait of Maria Clementina Sobieski in 
 powder and paint and patches, a certain solemn 
 feeling came over most Englishmen with the 
 thought that the race of James H. was now 
 extinct. 
 
 But the world had forgotten that the children 
 of Edward IV. were resuscitated ; that the son 
 of Louis XVI., whose poor little dead body had 
 been handled by the Commissary of the Re- 
 public, had returned to earth in the shape of 
 
58 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 five or six perfectly distinct individuals, Bruneau, 
 Hervagault, Naundorff, whatever else their 
 names ; that King Arthur is still living in the 
 kingdom of Morgan le Fay ; and Barbarossa 
 still asleep on the stone table, waiting till the 
 rooks which circle around the Kiefhauser hill 
 shall tell him to arise ; and the world had, 
 therefore, to learn that a Stuart still existed. 
 The legend runs as follows : 
 
 In 1773 a certain Dr. Beaton, a staunch Jacob- 
 ite, who had fought at Culloden, was attracted, 
 while travelling in Italy, by the knowledge that 
 his legitimate sovereigns were spending part of 
 the summer at a villa in the neighborhood, to 
 a vague place somewhere in the Apennines 
 between Parma and Lucca, distinguished by the 
 extremely un-Tuscan name of St. Rosalie. 
 Here, while walking about *'in the deep quiet 
 shades," the doctor was one day startled by a 
 "calash and four, with scarlet liveries," which 
 dashed past him and up an avenue. During 
 the one moment of its rapid passage, the 
 Scotch physician recognized in the rather 
 apocalyptic gentleman wearing the garter and 
 the cross of St. Andrew, who sat by the side of 
 a beautiful young woman, ** the Bonnie Prince 
 Charlie of our faithful beau ideal, still the same 
 eagle-featured, royal bird which I had seen on 
 his own mountains, when he spread his wings 
 
THE HEIR. 59 
 
 towards the south." Towards dusk of that 
 same day, as Dr. Beaton was pacing up and 
 down the convent church of St. Rosalie, doubt- 
 less thinking over that " eagle-featured, royal 
 bird," whom he had seen driving in the calash 
 and four, he was startled in his meditations by 
 the jingle of spurs on the pavement, and by 
 the approach of a man '' of superior appearance." 
 
 This person was dressed in a manner which 
 was '*a little equivocal," wore a broad hat and 
 a thick moustache, which, joined with the stern- 
 ness of his pale cheek and the piercingness of 
 his eye, must indeed have suggested something 
 extremely eerie to a well-shaven, three-corner- 
 hat, respectable man of the eighteenth century ; 
 so that we are not at all surprised to hear that 
 the doctor's imagination was crossed by *'a sud- 
 den idea of the celebrated Torrifino," who, al- 
 though his name sounds like a sweetmeat, was 
 probably one of the many mysterious Italians, 
 brothers of the Count of Udolpho and Spalatro 
 and Zeluco, who haunted the readers of the ro- 
 mances of the latter eighteenth century. This 
 personage inquired whether he was addressing 
 " il Dottor Betoni Scozzere." 
 
 The physician having answered this question, 
 asked, for no conceivable reason, in bad Italian 
 of a Scotchman by a Scotchman (for we learn 
 that the unknown was a Chevalier Graham), the 
 
60 COiTNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 mysterious moustached man requested him to 
 attend at once upon " one who stood in immedi- 
 ate need." Dr. Beaton's inquiries as to the na- 
 ture of the assistance and the person who re- 
 quired it having been answered with the solemn 
 remark that " the relief of the malady, and not 
 the circumstances of the patient, is the province 
 of the physician," and the proposal being made 
 that he should go to the sick person blindfolded 
 and in a shuttered carriage, the doctor's pru- 
 dence and the thought of the famous Torrifino 
 dictated a flat refusal; but the mysterious 
 stranger would not let him off. " Signor," he 
 exclaimed (persistently talking bad Italian), '' I 
 respect your doubts ; by one word I could dispel 
 them ; but it is a secret which would be embar- 
 rassing to the possessor. It concerns the inter- 
 est and safety of one — the most illustrious and 
 unfortunate of the Scottish Jacobites." " What ! 
 Whom .? " exclaimed Dr. Beaton. " I can say 
 no more," replied the stranger ; " but if you 
 would venture any service for one who was once 
 the dearest to your country and your cause, fol- 
 low me." *'Let us go," cried Dr. Beaton, the 
 enthusiasm for Prince Charlie entirely getting 
 the better of the thought of the famous Torri- 
 fino ; and so, blindfolded, he was conveyed, 
 partly by land and partly by water (what water, 
 in those Apennine valleys where there are no 
 
THE HEIR. 6 1 
 
 streams save torrents in which even a punt 
 would be impossible, it is difficult to understand), 
 to a house standing in a garden. That it did 
 stand in a garden appears to have been a piece 
 of information volunteered by the mysterious 
 Chevalier Graham, for Dr. Beaton expressly 
 states that it was not till the two had passed 
 through " a long range of apartments " that the 
 bandage was removed from his eyes. 
 
 The doctor found himself in a " splendid 
 saloon, hung with crimson velvet, and blazing 
 with mirrors which reached from the ceiling to 
 the floor. At the farther end a pair of folding 
 doors stood open, and showed the dim perspec- 
 tive of a long conservatory. " The mysterious 
 Chevalier Graham rang a silver bell, which 
 summoned a little page dressed in scarlet, with 
 whom he exchanged a few rapid words in 
 German. The communication appeared to agi- 
 tate the Chevalier ; and after dismissing the 
 page, he turned to the doctor. "Signor Dot- 
 tore, " he said, "the most important part of 
 your occasion is past. The lady whom you 
 have been unhappily called to attend met with 
 an alarming accident in her carriage, not half 
 an hour before I found you in the church, and 
 the unlucky absence of her physician leaves 
 her entirely under your charge. Her accouche- 
 ment IS over, apparently without any result 
 
62 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 more than exhaustion ; but of that you will be 
 the judge." 
 
 It was only at the mention of the carriage 
 accident that Dr. Beaton, whose wits appear to 
 be wool-gathering, suddenly guessed at a possi- 
 ble connection between these " most illustrious 
 and unfortunate of Scottish Jacobites," to 
 whose house he had been thus mysteriously 
 introduced, and the lady and gentleman in 
 whom he had that same afternoon recog- 
 nized Charles Edward and his wdfe. The page 
 reappeared and conducted Dr. Beaton through 
 another suite of splendid apartments, till they 
 came to an ante-room decorated with the por- 
 traits of no less remarkable persons than the 
 rebel Duke of Perth and King James VIII. — 
 a fact which shows that the Stuarts must have 
 carried their furniture with them, from Rome 
 to a Lucchese villa hired for a few months, 
 with more recklessness than one might have 
 imagined likely in those days of post-chaises. 
 Out of this ante-room the physician was ush- 
 ered into a large and magnificent bed-room, lit 
 with a single taper. From the side of a crim- 
 son-draped bed stepped a lady, who saluted Dr. 
 Beaton in English, and led him up to the 
 patient, while a female attendant nursed an 
 infant enveloped in a mantle. The lady drew 
 aside the curtain, and by the faint light the 
 
THE HEIR. 63 
 
 doctor was able to distinguish a pale, delicate 
 face, and a slender white arm and hand lying 
 upon the blue velvet counterpane. The lady 
 in waiting said some words in German, in 
 answer to which the sick woman feebly 
 attempted to stretch out her hand to the phy- 
 sician. Having ascertained that the patient 
 was in a dangerous condition, Dr. Beaton asked 
 for pen and paper to write out a prescription, 
 which, in that Apennine wilderness, would 
 doubtless be made up with the greatest exact- 
 ness and rapidity. By the side of the writing- 
 desk was a dressing-table ; and on what should 
 the doctor's casual glance not rest but a minia- 
 ture, thrown carelessly among the scent bottles 
 and jewels, and in which he instantly recog- 
 nized a portrait of Charles Edward such as he 
 had seen him riding on the field of Culloden ! But 
 in a moment, when he glanced again from his 
 writing to the toilet-table, the miniature was 
 no longer visible. 
 
 The lady having apparently recovered. Dr. 
 Beaton was dismissed, blindfolded as he had 
 come, but only after having taken an oath upon 
 the crucifix "never to speak of what he had 
 heard, or seen, or thought, that night, except it 
 should be in the service of King Charles," and 
 also to quit Tuscany immediately. He repaired, 
 therefore, to the nearest seaport, but was de- 
 
64 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 tained there three days before the departure of 
 the ship. One moonlight evening, as he was 
 walking on the sands, he was surprised by seeing 
 an English man-of-war at anchor. In answer to 
 his inquiries she proved to be the Albma^ Com- 
 modore O'Haloran. While he was lying in a 
 sequestered corner, watching the frigate, he was 
 startled by the sudden appearance of a small 
 closed carriage and of a horseman, in whom, by 
 the moonlight, he immediately recognized the 
 moustached stranger of St. Rosalie. The cav- 
 alcade stopped at the water's brink and the 
 horseman blew a shrill whistle. Immediately a 
 man-of-war's boat shot from behind some rocks 
 and pulled straight towards them. A man with 
 glimmering epaulettes sprang from the boat to 
 the beach, and helped into it a lady, who had 
 alighted from the carriage, and carried some- 
 thing wrapped in a shawl. Dr. Beaton heard 
 the cry of an infant, the soothing voice of the 
 lady ; and a moment later, after a word and 
 shake of the hand with the moustached man, 
 the boat pulled off from shore. " For more 
 than a quarter of an hour the tall black figure 
 of the cavalier continued fixed upon the same 
 spot and in the same attitude ; but soon the 
 broad gigantic shadow of the frigate swung 
 round in the moonshine, her sails filled to the 
 breeze, and dimly brightening in the light, she 
 
THE HEIR. 65 
 
 bore off slow and still and stately towards the 
 west." 
 
 Such is the adventure of Dr. Beaton, and thus 
 he is said to have related it, in the year 1831, 
 eighty-five years after the battle of Culloden, 
 where he had himself seen Charles Edward ; 
 whence it is presumable that the doctor was 
 considerably over a hundred when he made the 
 disclosure. The story of Doctor Beaton was 
 published, not in a historical work, but in a vol- 
 ume entitled Tales of the Century ; or. Sketches of 
 the Romance of History between the Years 1 746 
 a7id I'^A^d, pubUshed at Edinburgh in 1847. ^^t 
 although this book might pass as a work of im- 
 agination, and could, therefore, scarcely be im- 
 pugned as a historical document, there is every 
 reason for supposing that, while not officially 
 claiming to reveal the existence of an heir of 
 the Stuarts, it was deliberately intended to con- 
 vey information to that effect ; and as such, an 
 anonymous writer (either Lockhart or Dennis- 
 toun) made short work of it in the Quarterly 
 Review for June, 1847, from which I have de- 
 rived the greater part of my knowledge of this 
 curious *' romance of history." 
 
 Nay, the Tales of the Century were undoubt- 
 edly intended to insinuate a further remarkable 
 fact ; not merely that there still existed heirs of 
 Stuarts in the direct male line, but that these 
 3 
 
66 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 heirs of the Stuarts were no others but the joint 
 authors of the book. The two brothers styHng 
 themselves on the title-page John Sobieski 
 Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, but whose 
 legal names were respectively John Hay Allan 
 and Charles Stuart Allan, had been known for 
 some years in the Highlands as persons envel- 
 oped in. a degree of romantic mystery, and claim- 
 ing to be something much more illustrious than 
 what they were officially supposed to be, the 
 grandsons of an admiral in the service of George 
 HI. According to the information collected b)'' 
 Baron von Reumont, the joint authors of the 
 Tales of the Ceiitiijy \\2id made themselves con- 
 spicuous by their affectation of the Stuart tar- 
 tan, to which, as Hay Allans, they could have 
 no right ; by a certain Stuart make-up (by the 
 help of a Charles I. wig which was once found 
 and mistaken for a bird's nest by an irreverent 
 Highlander), on the part of the elder, and by a 
 habit of bowing to his brother whenever the 
 King's health was drank, on the part of the 
 younger. 
 
 Moreover, the family circumstances of these 
 gentlemen's father coincided exactly with those 
 of the hero of this book, of the supposed 
 son of Charles Edward Stuart and Louise 
 of Stolberg. Their father, Thomas Hay Allan, 
 once a lieutenant in the navy, was known before 
 
THE HEIR. 67 
 
 the law as the younger son of a certain Admiral 
 Carter Allan, who laid claims to the earldom 
 of Errol ; and the Jolair Dhearg (for such was 
 the Keltic appellation of the hero of the 
 Tales of the CeiiUiry) was the reputed son of a 
 certain Admiral O'Haloran, who laid claim to 
 the earldom of Strathgowrie, to which curious 
 parallel the writer in the Quarterly adds the 
 additional point that Errol being in the district 
 of Gowrie, the earldom of Strathgowrie claimed 
 by the imaginary Admiral O'Haloran was evi- 
 dently another name for the earldom of Errol 
 claimed by the real Admiral Carter Allan — 
 two names, by the way, O'Haloran and Carter 
 Allan, of which the first seems intended to 
 reproduce in some measure the sound of the 
 other. The father of Messrs. John Hay and 
 Charles Stuart Allan was married in 1792, and 
 the hero of the Tales of the Century was mar- 
 ried somewhere about 1791, both to ladies 
 more suited to the sons of an admiral than to 
 the sons of the Pretender. Taking all these 
 circumstances into consideration, it becomes 
 obvious that when the two brothers Hay 
 Allan assumed respectively the names of 
 John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, they 
 distinctly, though unofficially, identified them- 
 selves with the sons of Jolair Dhearg of their 
 book, with the sons of that mysterious infant 
 
6S COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 at whose birth Dr. Beaton had been present, 
 who had been conveyed by night on board 
 the Albina and educated as the son of Admiral 
 O'Haloran ; in other words, with the sons of the 
 child, unknown to history, of the Count and 
 Countess of Albany. 
 
 Now, not only are we assured by Sir Horace 
 Mann, whose spies surrounded the Pretender 
 and his wife, and included even their physi- 
 cians, that there never was the smallest 
 or briefest expectation of an heir to the 
 Stuarts ; but, added to this positive evidence, 
 we have an enormous bulk of even more con- 
 vincing negative evidence by which it is com- 
 pletely corroborated. This negative evidence 
 consists of a heap of improbabilities and 
 impossibilities, of which even a few will serve 
 to convince the reader. The Pretender mar- 
 ried, and was pensioned for marrying, merely 
 that the French Court might have another 
 possible Pretender to use as a weapon against 
 England : is it likely, therefore, that such an 
 heir would be hid away so as to lose his iden- 
 tity, and be completely and utterly forgotten } 
 The Pretender, separated from his wife in con- 
 sequence of circumstances which will be related 
 further on, called to him, as sole companion for 
 his old age, his illegitimate daughter by Miss 
 Walkenshaw, after neglecting and apparently 
 
THE HEIR. 69 
 
 forgetting both her and her mother for twenty 
 years : is it Hkely he would have done this had 
 he possessed a legitimate son ? Cardinal York 
 assumed the title of Henry IX. immediately 
 on the decease of his brother : is it likely that 
 he, always indifferent to royal honors, always 
 faithful to his brother, and now almost dying, 
 would have done so had he known that his 
 brother had left a son ? The Countess of 
 Albany, who never relinquished her Stuart 
 position, and who was extremely devoted to 
 children, left her fortune to the painter Fabre : 
 is it likely she would have done so had she been 
 aware that she possessed a child of her own? 
 But there is yet further evidence — I scarcely 
 know whether I should say positive or nega- 
 tive, but in point of fact perhaps both at once, 
 since it is evident that the word of one, at 
 least, of the joint authors of the Tales of the 
 Century cannot outweigh the silence of all 
 other authorities. Five years before the 
 brothers Allan, or Stuart, whichever they 
 should be called, mysteriously informed the 
 world of the adventures of the Jolair Dhearg, 
 the elder of the two, once John Hay Allan, 
 now John Sobieski Stuart, had brought out a 
 magnificent volume, price five guineas, entitled 
 Vestiarium Scoticitm, and purporting to be a 
 treatise on family tartans written somewhere 
 
70 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 in the sixteenth century, and now edited for 
 the first time. The history of this work, as 
 stated in the preface, was well-nigh as compli- 
 cated and as romantic as the history of the 
 Jolair Dhearg. The only reliable copy of 
 three known by Mr. Sobieski Stuart, of which 
 one was said to exist in the library of the Mon- 
 astery of St. Augustine at Cadiz, and another 
 had been obtained from an Edinburgh sword- 
 player and porter named John Ross, was in the 
 possession of the learned editors, and had 
 been given by the fathers of the Scots College 
 at Douay to Prince Edward Stuart, from whom 
 it had, in some unspecified but doubtless 
 extremely romantic manner (probably sown in 
 the swaddling clothes in which the Jolair 
 Dhearg was consigned to Admiral O'Haloran), 
 descended to Mr. John Sobieski Stuart. This 
 venerable heraldic document appears, if one 
 might judge by the review in the Qttarterly, to 
 have been well deserving of publication, owing 
 to the extremely new and unexpected informa- 
 tion which it contained upon Scottish archaeol- 
 ogy. Among such information may be men- 
 tioned that it derived several clans from other 
 clans with which they were well known to have 
 no possible connection ; that it extended the 
 use of tartans to border families who had never 
 heard of such a thing ; that it contained many 
 
THE HEIR. 71 
 
 words and expressions hitherto entirely 
 unknown in the particular dialect in which it 
 was written ; and moreover, that it multiplied 
 complicated and recondite patterns of tartans 
 in a manner so remarkable that Sir Walter 
 Scott, to whom part of Mr. Sobieski Stuart's 
 transcript of the ancient manuscript was sub- 
 mitted, was led to suspect ''that information 
 as to its origin might be obtained even in a less 
 romantic site than the cabin of a Cowgate por- 
 ter (or the Scots College at Douay), even behind 
 the counter of one of the great clan-tartan 
 warehouses which used to illuminate the prin- 
 cipal thoroughfare of Edinburgh. 
 
 This important and well-nigh unique doc- 
 ument was apparently never submitted in its 
 original manuscript to any one ; the copy from 
 the Scots College at Douay, and the copy from 
 the old sword-player of Cowgate, remained 
 equally unknown to every one save their fort- 
 unate possessor. But transcripts of some por- 
 tions of the work were submitted, at the 
 request of the Antiquarian Society, to Sir 
 Walter Scott, and as he dismissed the deputa- 
 tion which had met to hear his opinion upon 
 the Vestiarium Scoticum^ the author of Waver- 
 ley was pleased to remark by way of summing 
 up: ''Well, I think the March of the next 
 rising" (alluding to the part of the Highlanders 
 
72 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 in the '45) "■ must be not * Hey tuttie tattie,' 
 but 'The Devil among the Tailors.' " 
 
 However, perhaps the Vestiaritim Scoticiini 
 may have come out of the Scots College at 
 Douay, and perhaps also the son of Charles 
 Edward Stuart and of Louise of Stolberg may 
 have been born in the room hung with red 
 brocade, and have been handed over to a British 
 admiral one moonlight night, in the presence of 
 the venerable Dr. Beaton, whom Providence 
 permitted to attain the unusual age of a hundred 
 years or more, in order that, with unimpaired 
 faculties and unclouded memory, he might 
 transmit to posterity this strange romance of 
 history. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 FLORENCE. 
 
 It is quite impossible to tell the precise mo- 
 ment at which began what Horace Mann, most 
 light-hearted and chirpy of diplomatists, called 
 the Countess of Albany's martyrdom. As we 
 have seen, Charles Edward had momentarily 
 given up all excessive drinking at the time of 
 his marriage. Bonstetten thought him a good- 
 natured, garrulous bore, and his wife a merry, 
 childish young woman, who laughed at her 
 husband's oft-told stories. This was the very 
 decent exterior of the Pretender's domestic life 
 in the first year of his marriage. But who can 
 tell what there may have been before beneath 
 the surface ^ Who can say when Louise d'Al- 
 bany, hitherto apparently so childish, became 
 suddenly a woman with the first terrible sus- 
 picion of the nature of the bondage into which 
 she had been sold } Such things are unromantic, 
 unpoetical, coarse, commonplace ; yet if the 
 fears and the despair of a guiltless and charm- 
 ing girl have any interest for us, the first whiff 
 
74 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 of brandy-tainted breath which met the young 
 wife in her husband's embraces, the first qualms 
 and reekings after dinner which came be- 
 fore her eyes, the first bestial and unquiet 
 drunkard's sleep which kept her awake in 
 disgust and terror, these things, vile though 
 they be, are as tragic as any more ideal horrors. 
 At the beginning, most probably, Charles 
 Edward drank only in the evening, and slept 
 off his drunkenness overnight ; nor does Bon- 
 stetten appear to have guessed that there was 
 any skeleton in the palace at the Santissimi 
 Apostoli. But the spies of the English Min- 
 ister soon reported that Charles Edward' was 
 returning to his old ways; that the *' nasty 
 bottle," as Cardinal York called it, had got the 
 better of the young wife ; and when, two years 
 after their marriage, the Count and Countess 
 of Albany had left Rome and settled in Flor- 
 ence, Charles Edward seems very soon to have 
 acquired in the latter place the dreadful notori- 
 ety which he had long enjoyed in the former. 
 
 Circumstances also had conduced to replunge 
 the Pretender into the habits to which the re- 
 newed hope of political support, the novelty of 
 married life, and perhaps whatever of good may 
 still have been conjured up in his nature by the 
 presence of a beautiful young wife, had mo- 
 mentarily broken through. The French Gov- 
 
FLORENCE. 75 
 
 ernment, after its sudden pre-occupation about 
 the future of the Stuarts, seemed to have com- 
 pletely forgotten the existence of Charles Ed- 
 ward, except as regarded the payment of the 
 pension granted on his marriage. The child 
 that had been prepaid by that wedding pension, 
 who was to rally the Jacobites round a man 
 whose claims must otherwise devolve legiti- 
 mately in a few years to the Hanoverian usurp- 
 ers, the heir, was not born, and, as month went 
 by after month, its final coming became less and 
 less likely. Nor was this all. Charles Edward 
 seems to have expected that the sudden interest 
 taken by the Court of Versailles in his affairs, 
 and his new position as a married man and the 
 possible father of a line of Stuarts, would bring 
 the obdurate sovereigns of Italy, and especially 
 the Pope, to grant him those royal honors en- 
 joyed by his father, but hitherto obstinately 
 denied to the moody drunkard whose presence 
 in the paternal palace had been occasionally re- 
 vealed only by the rumor of some more than or- 
 dinarily gross debauch, or the noise of some 
 more than ordinarily violent scene of black- 
 guardly altercation. 
 
 Charles Edward, as I have already had occa- 
 sion to remark, while absolutely callous to the 
 rights which self-sacrifice and heroism might 
 give others over him, was extremely alive to the 
 
^(i COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 rights which, as a Stuart and as an obstinate 
 and wilful man, he imagined himself to possess 
 over other folk ; and while it never occurred to 
 him that there might be something slightly 
 ungentlemanly in a prince who had secretly ab- 
 jured the Catholic faith for political reasons 
 continuing to live in a house and on a pension 
 granted him by the unsuspecting sovereign 
 Pontiff in consideration of his being a martyr 
 for the glory of the Church, he was fully per- 
 suaded of the cowardly meanness which pre- 
 vented Clement XIV., whose interest it was to 
 jog on amicably with England, from acknowl- 
 edging the grandson of James II. as a legitimate 
 king of Great Britain and Ireland. It is there- 
 fore easy to conceive the accumulation of disap- 
 pointment and anger with which Charles Ed- 
 ward saw his hopes deluded. He had, immedi- 
 ately on his return to Rome, officially announced 
 to Clement XIV. the arrival in the Eternal City 
 of King Charles III. and his Queen, and the 
 Pope had condescended no answer save that he 
 had hitherto been unaware of the existence of 
 such persons, and that he would suffer none such 
 to live under his jurisdiction. He had for more 
 than a year imposed upon his wife (despite Car- 
 dinal York's and her own entreaties, if we may 
 credit Sir Horace Mann) the title and etiquette 
 of a queen, and had flaunted his scarlet liveries 
 
FLORENCE. 7/ 
 
 along the Corso day after day, with no result 
 save that of making the Roman nobles keep 
 carefully out of the way whereVer he and his 
 wife might go ; nay, more, he had replaced over 
 the doorway of his residence the royal escut- 
 cheon of Great Britain, only to return from the 
 country one day and find that the Pontifical 
 police had taken it down during his absence. 
 After this we can understand, as I said, the dis- 
 appointment and rage which must have accumu- 
 lated in his heart, and which, fifteen months after 
 his wedding, made him abandon the base town of 
 the popes and seek sympathy and dignity in the 
 capital of Tuscany. But he was destined only to 
 further disappointment. The Grand Duke, Peter 
 Leopold, the practical, economical, priest-hating, 
 paternally-meddlesome, bustling and tyrannical- 
 ly-reforming son of Maria Theresa, was not the 
 man to console so mediaeval and antiquated and 
 unphilosophical a thing as a Stuart. The arri- 
 val, the presence of Charles Edward in Florence, 
 was absolutely ignored by the Court, and no in- 
 vitations of any sort were sent out either to 
 King Charles III. or to the Count of Albany. 
 Except the Corsinis, old friends of the Stuarts, 
 who had known Charles Edward in his brilliant 
 boyhood, and who politely placed at his disposal 
 their half-suburban palace or casino, opening on 
 to the famous Oricellari Gardens, no one seemed 
 
78 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 inclined to pay any particular respects to the 
 new-comers. There was, indeed, no pressure 
 from the Government (as had been the case in 
 Rome), and the Florentine nobles, whose exclu- 
 siveness and pride had been considerably dimin- 
 ished by the inroad of swaggering Lorenese 
 favorites under the Grand Duke Francis, and of 
 cut-and-dry Austrian officials under his son 
 Peter Leopold, showed a sort of lukewarm wil- 
 lingness to receive the Count and Countess of 
 Albany on equal terms into their society. But 
 Charles Edward wanted royal honors ; he for- 
 bade his wife demeaning her queenly position 
 by returning the visits of Florentine ladies, and 
 the nobles of the Tuscan court gradually left the 
 would-be King and Queen of England to their 
 own resources. 
 
 These resources, with the exception of receiv- 
 ing such few visitors as might care to know 
 them on unequal terms, and a dogged pushing 
 into notice in every place, promenade, theatre, 
 or nobles' club, where no invitation was required, 
 these resources consisted on the part of Charles 
 Edward in the old, old consoler, the flask of Cy- 
 prus or bottle of brandy, in the even grosser 
 pleasures of excessive eating, the indefatigable, 
 assiduous courtship of his young wife, and the 
 occasional rows with his servants and acquaint- 
 ances. The Count and Countess of Albany 
 
FLORENCE. 79 
 
 appear to have inhabited the Casino Corsini 
 until 1777, when they sent for the greater part 
 of the furniture of their Roman house, and es- 
 tablished themselves in a palace, bought of the 
 Guadagnis and later sold to the Duke of San 
 Clemente, between the now suppressed Porta 
 San Sebastiano and the Garden of St. Mark's. 
 In both these places Sir Horace Mann, tke vig- 
 ilant Minister to the Tuscan Court and head 
 spy over the Stuarts in Italy, kept the Pretender 
 well in sight ; but, in fact, things had now be- 
 come so public that spying had grown unneces- 
 sary. 
 
 Already, the year following the removal from 
 Rome to Florence, Sir Horace Mann wrote to 
 Walpole that the Pretender's health was giving 
 way beneath his excesses of eating and drink- 
 ing ; dyspepsia and dropsy were beginning, 
 and a sofa had been ordered for his opera-box, 
 that he might conveniently snooze through the 
 performance, — for neither drunkenness nor 
 ailments would induce Charles Edward to let 
 his wife out of his sight for a minute. His 
 systematic jealousy may possibly have origina- 
 ted, as the English Minister reports Charles 
 Edward to have himself declared, from fear 
 lest there might attach to the birth of any 
 possible heir of his those doubts of legitimacy 
 which are almost invariably the lot of a pre- 
 
80 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 tender; but there can be no doubt that jea-tousy 
 was an essential feature of his character, in 
 which it amounted almost to a monomania. He 
 had caged his mistress long after he had ceased, 
 by his own avowal, to care for her ; he now 
 caged his wife, and with probably about as 
 much or as little affection. He had fenced up 
 Miss Walkenshaw's bed with tables and chairs 
 fitted with bells which the slightest touch set 
 ringing; he now (and so early as 1775) barri- 
 caded all avenues to his wife's room excepting 
 the one through his own. Very soon, also, the 
 gross and violent language, the blows which 
 had fallen to the lot of the half-tipsy mistress, 
 were to be shared by the virtuous and patient 
 wife. 
 
 For virtuous and patient all accounts unite in 
 showing the young Countess of Albany to have 
 been. In that corrupt Florence of the corrupt 
 eighteenth century, where every married woman 
 was furnished, within two years of her marriage, 
 with an officially appointed lover who sat in 
 her dressing-room while she was finishing her 
 toilet, who accompanied her on all her visits, 
 who attended her to balls and theatres, and, in 
 fact, entirely replaced, by the strict social 
 necessities of the system of cicisbeism, the 
 husband, who was similarly employed about the 
 wife of another; in this society where conjugal 
 
FLORENCE. 8 1 
 
 infidelity was a social organization supplemented 
 by every kind of individual caprice of gallantry ; 
 where women were none the worse thought of 
 if they added to the official cavaliere servante a 
 whole string of other lovers, varying from the 
 cardinals of the Holy Church to the singers 
 who played women's parts, in powder and 
 hoops, at the opera; in this world of jog-trot 
 immorality, where jealousy was tolerated in 
 lovers, but ridiculous in husbands, such a couple 
 as the Count and Countess of Albany was 
 indeed a source of pity, wonder and amazement. 
 But if a husband who barricaded his wife's 
 room never went out without her, nor permitted 
 her to go out without him, who was never 
 further off than the next room during the pres- 
 ence of any visitor, was a marvellous sight, 
 still more marvellous was a beautiful and 
 charming woman of twenty-three or twenty- 
 four, who cast no glances of longing at the 
 brilliant cavaliers all round her, who consoled 
 her dreary prison-hours with reading hard 
 enough for a professor at the university, and 
 who showed towards the peevish, violent, dis- 
 gustingly-ailing old toper who overshadowed 
 her life with his presence, nothing, as Horace 
 Mann tells us, but -attention and tenderness. 
 The fact is that Louise of Stolberg, much as 
 her subsequent life and ways of thought proved 
 
82 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 her to be a woman of the eighteenth century, 
 and not at all above the eighteenth century's 
 easy-going habits and conventional ideas, was a 
 kind of woman rare at all times and rarest of 
 all in a time like her own. With a kindly and 
 affectionate temper, the immense bulk of her 
 nature, the overbalance, the top-heaviness of it, 
 was intellectual ; and intellectual not in the 
 sense of the ready society intelligence, so com- 
 mon among eighteenth-century women, but in 
 the sense of actual engrossing interest and in 
 abstract questions and ideals. The portraits 
 done of her immediately after her marriage 
 show, as I have said, a remarkably childish per- 
 son ; and childish, without much ballast of 
 ■passion or even likings, the likeness sketched 
 by Bonstetten seems certainly to show her. 
 But there are women who, while immature as 
 women and human beings, are precocijous as 
 intellects, and in whom the character, instead 
 of rapidly developing itself by the force of its 
 own emotions and passions, seems in a manner 
 to be called into existence by the intelligence ; 
 retarded natures, in whom the thoughts seem 
 to determine the feelings. Of this sort, I 
 think, we must imagine the Countess of Albany, 
 if we would understand the anomalies of her 
 life ; a person rather deficient in sensitiveness ; 
 indifferent, light-hearted, in her girlhood; not 
 
FLORENCE. 83 
 
 rebelling against the frightful negativeness of 
 existence, the want of love, of youth, of bright- 
 ness, of all that a young girl can want in the 
 early part of her married life ; not rebelling 
 against the positive miseries, the constant pres- 
 ence of everything that was mentally and 
 physically loathsome in the second period of 
 this wedded slavery : a woman of cold tempera- 
 ment, and even, you might say, of cold heart, 
 and safe, safe in the routine of duty and suffer- 
 ing, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, 
 white and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. 
 A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or 
 awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her 
 books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical 
 problems ; and going through life by the side 
 of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, 
 in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, per- 
 haps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and 
 probably not envying other women their mean- 
 ingless liberty, their inane lovers, their empty 
 wholeness of life. 
 
 Thus the routine continued. The Count and 
 Countess of Albany, cured by this time of any 
 affectation of royalty, had gradually got domes- 
 ticated in Florentine society. People began to 
 go to their house, the newly-bought palace in 
 Via San Sebastiano. People came to the opera- 
 box where Charles Edward lay stretched, doz- 
 
84 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ing or snoring, his bottle of Cyprus wine by 
 his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read, through 
 the Hnes of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tit- 
 tle-tattle, that Florence, frivolous and unintellec- 
 tual and corrupt though it was, and, perhaps, 
 almost in proportion to its friyolity, emptiness 
 and corruption, felt a strange sort of interest, 
 experienced a vague, mixed feeling, pity, fear, 
 and general surprise and want of comprehension 
 towards this beautiful young woman, with her 
 dazzling white complexion, dark, hazel eyes and 
 blonde hair, her childish features grown, per- 
 haps not less young, but more serious and sol- 
 emn for her five years of wasted youth and 
 endured misery, with her reputation for cold- 
 ness, her almost legendary eccentricities of 
 intellectual interests. Women like this one 
 are apt to be regarded not so much with dislike 
 and envy, as with the mixed awe and pity 
 which peasants feel towards an idiot, by frivo- 
 lous and immoral people like those powdered 
 Florentines of a hundred years ago, whose bro- 
 caded trains and embroidered coats have long 
 since found their way into the cupboards of 
 curiosity shops, and been cut up into quaint 
 room decoration by aesthetically-minded for- 
 eigners ; pity and awe the more natural when, 
 as in the case of Louise d' Albany, it is evi- 
 dent to every man and woman, l^iowever heart- 
 
FLORENCE. 85 
 
 less and stupid, that the creature in question 
 is a victim, and an innocent one. People 
 were led, perhaps to some extent by imperti- 
 nent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have some 
 opinion to give upon that now legendary house- 
 hold of the besotten, sleepy, nauseous old King 
 of England and his terribly virtuous and 
 intellectual young Queen, to the palace in Via 
 San Sebastiano ; and men and women of fashion 
 led thither, as to one of the curious sights of 
 Florence, their country cousins and their dis- 
 tinguished visitors from other parts. And 
 thus, one day in the autumn of i j'jjy there was 
 brought, we know not by whom, half-curious 
 and half -indifferent, to the salon of the Countess 
 of Albany, a certain very tall, thin, pale young 
 man of twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, 
 rather hard aquiline features, choleric, flashing 
 blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair ; 
 a man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardin- 
 ian uniform, but with something strange, 
 untamed, morose about his whole aspect which 
 contrasted singularly with the effete graceful- 
 ness and amiability of young Florentine dan- 
 dies. He had heard of the Countess of 
 Albany's eccentricities long before ; she had 
 doubtless heard of his. 
 
 One can imagine the curiosity with which 
 the wild, moody young officer fixed those 
 
S6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 bright, hard, steel, flashing blue eyes upon the 
 beautiful young woman of whom he had heard 
 that she was what no woman of his acquaintance 
 (and his acquaintance was but too large) had 
 been — intellectual and virtuous. One can 
 imagine the curiosity, much vaguer and more 
 indifferent, with which the woefully cold and 
 woefully weary young woman met the scrutiny 
 of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the 
 moral measure of this eccentric creature, come 
 from Turin to Florence with some ten or 
 twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn 
 Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing trage- 
 dies. The common friend, whose name has 
 been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced 
 to the Countess of Albany Count Vittorio 
 Alfieri. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ALFIERI. 
 
 The childhood and early youth of Vittorio 
 Alfieri had been strangely vacant, dreary, one 
 might almost say intellectually and morally 
 sordid : and the strangest, the dreariest cir- 
 cumstance about them was exactly that this 
 vacuity, this dreariness, this total want of all 
 that can make the life of a boy and of a young 
 man pleasant to our fancy or attractive to our 
 sympathy, did not in the least depend upon any 
 harshness or stinginess of fate. Indeed, per- 
 haps no man had ever prepared for him an eas- 
 ier existence ; no man had ever less misfortune 
 sent to him by Providence, or less unkindness 
 shown towards him by mankind, than this con- 
 stantly struggling, this pessimistic and misan- 
 thropic man. The only son of Count Alfieri of 
 Cortemiglia, of one of the richest and noblest fam- 
 ilies of Asti in Piedmont, his early childhood was 
 spent under the care of his mother, a woman 
 of almost saintly simplicity and kindness, 
 unworldly, charitable, devoted to her children 
 
88 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and to the poor of the place ; and of her third 
 husband, also an Alfieri, who appears to have 
 been, in his affection and generosity towards 
 his wife's children, everything that a step- 
 father is usually supposed not to be. Being 
 delicate in health, the boy was treated with 
 every degree of consideration, never worried 
 with lessons, never exasperated with punish- 
 ments, as long as he remained at home. He 
 was sent, under the care of an uncle, the emi- 
 nent architect, Benedetto Alfieri, who appears 
 to have been the ideally amiable uncle as Gia- 
 cinto Alfieri appears to have been the ideally 
 amiable step-father, to the academy or nobles' 
 college at Turin, where again, provided with 
 plenty of money, and a most accommodating 
 half-tutor, half-valet, he enjoyed, or might 
 have enjoyed, every advantage possible to a 
 young Piedmontese noble, either in the way of 
 study or of idleness. And, finally, when still in 
 his teens, he had been supplied with ample 
 money, horses and fine clothes ad libitum^ and 
 almost unlimited liberty to wander all over the 
 world from Naples to Holland, from St. Peters- 
 burg to Cadiz, in search of experience or amuse- 
 ment. Nor during those years of youthful 
 wanderings does he ever seem, except on one 
 memorable occasion, to have been made to suf- 
 fer from the unconscientiousness, the harsh- 
 
ALFIERI. 89 
 
 ness, the infidelity, the indifference of the men 
 and women whom he met, any more than in 
 his boyhood he had suffered from the severity 
 of his masters, the brutaHty of his tutor-ser- 
 vants, or the ill nature of his fellow pupils. 
 
 Fate and the world were extremely kind to 
 Vittorio Alfieri, giving him every advantage 
 and comfort, and teaching him no cruel lessons. 
 But Vittorio Alfieri was nevertheless one of the 
 least happy of little boys, and one of the least 
 happy of young men. He was born with an 
 uncomfortable and awkward and unwieldy char- 
 acter, as some men are born lame, or scrofulous, 
 or dyspeptic. The child of a father over sixty, 
 and of a very young mother, there was in him 
 some indefinable imperfection of nature, some 
 jar of character, or some great want, some 
 original sin of mental constitution, which made 
 him different from other men, disabled him 
 from getting pleasure or profit out of the cir- 
 cumstances which gave pleasure or profit to 
 them ; and turned his youth into a long period 
 of mental weakness and suffering, from which 
 he recovered, indeed, by a system of moral and 
 intellectual cold water, meagre diet and excess- 
 ive exercise, but only to remain for the rest of 
 his days in a condition of character absolutely 
 analogous to the bodily condition of those self- 
 martyring invalids who keep the gout down by 
 
90 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 taking exhausting walks, eating next to no 
 dinner, and filling the lives of others with their 
 excitable cantankerousness and gloomy fore- 
 bodings. There was a numbness and yet a 
 sort of over-sensitiveness about his youth ; a 
 strangeness which, without giving the least 
 promise of superior genius, merely made him 
 less happy than other lads. 
 
 The word numbness returns to my mind in 
 connection with this young Alfieri ; it certainly 
 does not express the exact impressions left in 
 me by his own narrative of his boyhood and 
 youth, and yet I can find no better word ; there 
 was in him something like those irregularities 
 of the circulation due to dyspepsia, which, 
 while making some part of the body, say the 
 head, throb and ache at the least sound, yet 
 leave the whole man dull, heavy, only half 
 awake. 
 
 As a child he had vague and wistful cravings, 
 untempered, unbeautified by such imaginative 
 visions as usually accompany the eccentric 
 feelings of such children as are subject to them. 
 Obstinate and taciturn, he tells us of the curi- 
 ous passion which he experienced for the little 
 choristers, boys of twelve or thirteen, whom he 
 saw serving mass, or heard singing the re- 
 sponses, in the Carmine Church at Asti. 
 Silently, painfully, he seems to have yearned 
 
ALFIEIU. 91 
 
 for them in solitude ; the daily visit to the 
 church where they shone out in their white 
 surplices being the only pleasure in this black, 
 blind httle life of seven or eight. Some physi- 
 cal ailment, some want of change and movement, 
 may have underlain this morbid and sombre 
 passionateness ; and we learn that when he was 
 still a tiny boy, having heard that the poison- 
 ous hemlock was a sort of grass which brought 
 death, and with no clear notion what death was, 
 but with a vague longing for it, he gorged him- 
 self with grass out of the garden, in the belief 
 that there would be some hemlock in it. 
 
 At school he learned nothing. The education 
 given at the Academy of Turin may, indeed, 
 have been poor in quantity and quality ; still 
 it was the best which a young Piedmontese 
 nobleman could obtain, and Alfieri himself 
 confesses that of his school-fellows most came 
 away with more profit, and some afterwards be- 
 came cultured and even learned men. He 
 learned hothing because he felt interest, em- 
 ulation, curiosity about nothing. His nature 
 was still dull, dumb, dormant ; and what he 
 calls a period of vegetation might more fitly be 
 termed a moral and intellectual hibernation. 
 His school life is a weary, colorless, featureless 
 part of his autobiography. He would seem to 
 have made neither friends nor enemies. The 
 
92 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 tricks practised by or upon other school-boys 
 are never mentioned by him ; never a practical 
 joke, a lark, a scrape. Of his intellectual ten- 
 dencies, which were but little developed, we 
 learn only that he exchanged a copy of Ariosto, 
 finally confiscated by the authorities, for a cer- 
 tain number of helpings of chicken, relinquished 
 by him to its possessor ; and that he bribed, 
 with eatables also, a certain other boy to tell 
 him stories. 
 
 The one incident which sheds light upon the 
 lad's morbid constitution or condition, which re- 
 veals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that vis 
 inerticB which was the spring even of his most 
 decided actions in after-life, and which at the 
 same time raises grave doubts in my mind 
 whether there may not have been an actual 
 taint of insanity in this extraordinary being, is 
 the incident of his having submitted, rather 
 than give in after some misdemeanor, to being 
 confined to his room in the academy for nearly 
 three months at a stretch. Alfieri was fifteen ; 
 he might have been let loose for the asking, 
 since there was no real severity in the school. 
 He slept nearly all day long, rose in the even- 
 ing, but refused to let himself be combed or 
 dressed, and lay for hours on a mattress before 
 the fire, cooking a squalid meal of polenta in- 
 stead of his dinner, which he regularly sent 
 
ALFIERI. 93 
 
 down ; receiving the visits of his school-fellows 
 without speaking or even moving ; deaf and 
 dumb, as he describes himself, by the hour to- 
 gether, his eyes fixed on the ground, brimful 
 with tears, but never permitting himself to cry 
 or complain — a strange sort of savage animal 
 rather than a human being. 
 
 After leaving school at eighteen he began his 
 long series of journeys, his series of passions 
 for women and for horses, passions dull and 
 dumb, but violent, yet never such as to break 
 through the spell of inarticulateness which 
 seemed to freeze his nature. Nothing more 
 curious can be fancied than his journeys. He 
 went from place to place without being attracted 
 to any, without feeling the smallest interest in 
 anything which he saw, without contracting the 
 faintest attachment for any person or thing, 
 driven along by a sort of fury of restlessness and 
 sombre vacuity. Many youths have doubtless 
 been to the full as indifferent as Vittorio Alfieri 
 to all the objects of interest on their road ; but 
 they have been so from frivolity or giddiness, and 
 no one was ever less frivolous or giddy than the 
 young Alfieri. With no particular purity of na- 
 ture or principles of conduct to restrain him 
 from vice, his dissipation could yet scarcely be 
 called dissipation; so little did it wake up this 
 lethargic, ailing, restless nature. Despite the 
 
94 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 furious passion which he had for horses, and the 
 hysterical, one might almost say epileptic pas- 
 sions which he experienced for women, he re- 
 mained characterless, chaotic, only half alive. 
 His many journeys gave him only the negative 
 pleasure of getting away from already known 
 places, the negative wisdom of seeing through a 
 variety of things, military and diplomatic dis- 
 tinctions and national prejudices. He remained 
 joyless and ignorant, and, what was worse, with- 
 out longing for pleasure or desire for knowledge. 
 More than once kindly men of the world and 
 scholars were smitten with pity for this strange 
 lad, in whom they could not but recognize cer- 
 tain negative qualities rare in the eighteenth 
 century — an intense and cruel truthfulness, an 
 absolute disinterestedness, a constitutional con- 
 tempt for all the vanities and baseness of the 
 world. They tried to talk to him, to lend him 
 books, to awaken him out of this dormouse sleep 
 of the intellect, to break the spell which weighed 
 him down. All in vain. He continued his life 
 of dull dissipation and dull wanderings through 
 Italy, Germany, France, England, far into Spam, 
 Portugal, Russia, and even Finland. Periodic 
 fits of depression and of almost sordid avarice 
 showed that he was still the same person as the 
 boy of fifteen who had spent those three months 
 unwashed, unkempt, in savage squalor, by his 
 
ALFIERL 95 
 
 fireside ; and fits of brutal and almost maniac 
 violence, as when, because a hair was sharply- 
 pulled out by the roots during the elaborate 
 process of frizzling, he cut open with a blow of 
 a heavy silver candlestick the temple of his 
 faithful valet Elia, who had nursed him like a 
 mother, and whose only revenge, after this fear- 
 ful scene, was to keep the two handkerchiefs 
 steeped with his blood as a memorial and a 
 warning to his master. 
 
 Still seeing nothing, learning nothing, taking 
 interest in nothing, by turns morosely apathetic 
 and brutally violent, continually intriguing 
 with women, mercenary or depraved, Vittorio 
 Alfieri had, at twenty-five, less things to be 
 proud of, but perhaps less also to regret as 
 absolutely dishonorable, than most young men 
 of his time. He had never lied, never seduced, 
 never stooped to anything which seemed to 
 him demeaning. He was splashed with vice 
 from head to foot, but he was neither unnerved 
 nor warped by it. A subject of constant gos- 
 sip, of frequent scandal, with his teams of 
 half-tame horses, his flashy clothes, his furious 
 passions for worthless women, his moroseness 
 and violence, he was still, so far, a very neg- 
 ative character, a mere mass of rough material, 
 out of which a man might be made. But who 
 should mould that matter t It is extremely 
 
96 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 difficult to understand how it came about, as 
 difficult almost as to understand how a certain 
 amount of inorganic molecules will sometimes 
 suddenly seem to obey an impulse from within, 
 and become an organism, a yeast plant, or a 
 microscopic animal ; but whether or not we 
 succeed in understanding the how and why of 
 the phenomenon, the phenomenon nevertheless 
 took place ; and this unorganized mass of 
 passions called Vittorio Alfieri, this chaotic 
 thing without a higher life or a purpose in the 
 world, only partially sensitive, and seemingly 
 quite impervious to external influence, suddenly 
 obeyed some inner impulse (perhaps some 
 accumulation of unnoticed effects from with- 
 out), and organized itself into a man, a thinker 
 and a writer. 
 
 Alfieri had always been capable of contempt 
 for others, and largely also of contempt for 
 himself ; blind and dull, impulsive and indif- 
 ferent by turns, he had yet felt acutely the 
 ignominy of certain excesses, whether of avar- 
 ice, or brutality, or love (if love it may be 
 called), which had ever and anon broken the 
 monotony of his aimless life. Of these igno- 
 minies the one he had felt most, perhaps because 
 it deprived him of the independence which 
 even in his stupidest times he put his pride in, 
 was the ignominy of love ; that is to say, of 
 
ALFIERI. 97 
 
 what love was to him, unworthy incapacity of 
 doing without a woman whom he despised and 
 even occasionally hated. The very fits of moral 
 hysterics, nay, of moral St. Vitus' dance, of 
 which such love maladies largely consisted, 
 sickened him, degraded him in his own eyes 
 like some disgusting physical infirmity. In his 
 twenty-second year he had such a love malady : 
 he had been the scandal of all London in an 
 intrigue with a certain very lovely Lady Ligo- 
 nier, who, divorced by her husband for her 
 guilt with the young Italian, was on the point 
 of being joyfully taken to wife by Alfieri, 
 when it came out that before being his mis- 
 tress she had been the mistress of her own 
 groom ; a termination *of the adventure which, 
 much as it distressed the writer of Alfieri's 
 autobiography, is extremely satisfactory to the 
 reader. A few years later, after a variety of minor 
 love affairs, he became entangled at Turin in 
 the nets of a Marchesa di Prie, a rather faded 
 Armida of very tarnished reputation, and whom 
 he thoroughly despised and even disliked at 
 the very height of his attachment. The strug- 
 gles between his sense of weariness and deg- 
 radation and his unworthy love for this woman 
 half wore him out, and brought on a severe 
 malady, from which he recovered only to swear 
 he would never enter her house again, and to 
 4 
 
98 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 return to it as soon as he could stand on his 
 feet. 
 
 The beautiful social customs of eighteenth- 
 century Italy authorized and even imposed upon 
 a man who had accepted the position of cava- 
 liere sei'vente (a sort of pseudo-platonic vice- 
 husbandship which covered illicit connections 
 with a worldly propriety) to attend upon his 
 lady from the moment of her getting up in the 
 morning to the moment when she returned 
 home or dismissed her guests at night, with 
 only a few intervals during which the lover 
 might have his meals or pay his visits ; so, 
 when the Marchesa di Prie fell ill of a malady 
 which required absolute repose and silence, 
 Alfieri was bound to spend the whole morning 
 seated at the foot of her bed. During one of 
 these weary watches it came into his head to 
 kill time by scribbling some dramatic scenes 
 on loose sheets of paper, which he hid during 
 the intervals of his visits under the cushion of 
 an arm-chair. A Piedmontese and a thorough 
 ignoramus, he had scarcely ever attempted to 
 write even so much as a letter in Italian ; and 
 as to a literary composition in any language, 
 such a thing had never occurred to him. The 
 Cleopatra thus written in his lady's bed-room 
 and secreted under the chair cushion was a 
 most worthless performance, but it made 
 
ALFIERI. 99 
 
 Alfieri an author. Always devoured by a 
 desire to shine, hitherto by the excellence of 
 his get-up, the beauty of his person, and the 
 number of his horses, it suddenly flashed 
 across him that he might shine in future as a 
 poet. This was the turning-point in his life, 
 or what he called his liberation. But, like a 
 man bound in all his limbs, and who at length 
 has slipped the cord from off one hand, there 
 still remained to Alfieri an infinite amount of 
 struggle, of bitter effort, of hopeless inaction, 
 before he could completely liberate himself 
 from the bonds of sloth, of worldly vanity, dis- 
 sipation and unworthy love, before he could 
 step forth and walk steadily along the new 
 road which had appeared to him. His igno- 
 rance was appalling. He could no longer con- 
 strue a line of Latin ; he had not for months 
 opened a book ; and as to Italian, he knew it 
 no better than any Piedmontese street porter. 
 His idleness, his habit of absolute vacuity, was 
 even worse : his desire to shine before the 
 frivolous women, the inane young men of 
 Turin, nay, merely to have himself, his well-cut 
 coat, his well-frizzled hair, the horse he rode or 
 drove, noticed by any chance loafer in the 
 street, was another almost incredible obstacle ; 
 and, worst of all, there was his degrading serf- 
 dom to a woman whom he knew he neither 
 
100 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 loved nor respected, and who had never loved, 
 still less respected, him. But Alfieri, once 
 awakened out of that strange, long torpor of 
 his youth, was able to put forth as active and 
 invincible forces all that extraordinary obsti- 
 nacy, that morose doggedness, that indifference 
 to comfort and" pleasure, that brutal violence 
 which had more than once in their negative 
 condition made him seem more like some wild 
 animal or half-savage monomaniac than an ordi- 
 nary young man under five-and-twenty. He 
 had, moreover, at this moment, when all the en- 
 ergies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power 
 of deliberate, complacent and pitiless moral self- 
 vivisection, a power of performing upon his 
 character such cutting and ripping-open opera- 
 tions as he thought beneficial to himself, which 
 makes one think of the abnormal faculty of 
 enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel 
 satisfaction in examining the mechanism of 
 one's own suffering, occasionally displayed by 
 hysterical women ; and which brings back the 
 impression already conveyed by the morbid 
 sensitiveness, the frenzied violence, the moody 
 torpor of his youth, that there was something 
 abnormal in Alfieri's whole nature. He was 
 now employing that very hysterical satisfaction 
 in pain and impatience of half measures, to 
 reduce himself, by heroic means, to at least 
 
ALFIERI. lOI 
 
 such moral and mental health as would permit 
 the full exercise of his faculties. There exists 
 a diary of his, written in 1777, which is an 
 almost unique example of the seemingly cold, 
 but really excited and hysterical kind of self- 
 vivisection of which I have spoken. Alfieri 
 had always been extraordinarily truthful, not 
 merely for his time and country, but truthful 
 quite beyond the limits of a mere negative 
 virtue. But he was also, what seems almost 
 incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness, 
 excessively self-conscious and morally attitudi- 
 nizing, a thin-skinned poseur. To reconcile 
 these seemingly contradictory characteristics, 
 to become what he wished to appear, to pose 
 as what he was, to make himself up (if I may 
 say so) as himself, to intensify what he recog- 
 nized as his main characteristics and efface all 
 his other ones, now became to Alfieri a sort of 
 unconscious aim of life, closely connected with 
 his avowed desire to become a great poet ; ''the 
 reason of which desire," he himself wrote in his 
 diary, ''is my immoderate ambition, which, 
 finding no other field, has devoted itself entirely 
 to literature." Nothing can be more serious, 
 as I have already remarked, than this diary of 
 Alfieri's struggles, where he notes, day by day, 
 the laziness, the meanness, the want of frank- 
 ness to himself and others, the despicable van- 
 
I02 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ity, the attempt to appear what he is not, the 
 indulged unfounded suspiciousness towards his- 
 friends, all the little base defects which must 
 have pained a nature like his more than any- 
 real sinfulness, as the prodding of a surgeon's 
 instruments would have agonized such a man 
 more than an actual amputation. He narrates 
 in extenso all his vacillations about nothing at 
 all, all his givings way to laziness, all his insin- 
 cere confidences made to others. One morning 
 is consumed in debating whether or not he will 
 buy a certain Indian walking-stick : *' Torn by 
 avarice and the ambition of having it, I go away 
 without deciding whether I will buy it or not, 
 yet I know full well that before two days are 
 out I shall have bought it. Seeking to under- 
 stand this contradiction, I discover a thousand 
 ridiculous dirtinesses in my character {mille 
 ridicole porcheide)'' Another day he notes 
 down, after describing the mean envy with 
 which he has listened to the praises of another 
 member of his little club of dilettante authors : 
 '* I do believe that as much praise as is being 
 given and will ever be given to all mankind for 
 every sort of praiseworthy thing, I should like 
 to snap up for myself alone." Again, another 
 day he writes : '' More lazy than ever. Walking 
 with a friend, and talking about our incomes, 
 etc. I thought I was giving him a perfectly 
 
ALFIERL 103 
 
 open account of my money matters ; but, with 
 the best intention of telling him the truth, I 
 find that, in order to deceive myself as well 
 as him, I increased my fortune by one-fifth." 
 Again : '' I had some doubts whether, as it was 
 blowing hard on the promenade, I would go 
 on as far as where the ladies were walking; 
 because, knowing that I was looking pale and 
 ill, and that the wind had taken the powder 
 out of my hair, I was unwilling to show myself 
 in a condition so unsuitable to my pretensions 
 to beauty." 
 
 But while thus analyzing himself, while work- 
 ing at Latin and grammar like a school-boy, 
 this fashionable young man, ashamed of being 
 seen when he was not in good looks, ashamed 
 of having one horse less than usual, was contin- 
 ually ruminating over the glory for which he in- 
 tended living, and which he appears never for a 
 moment to have doubted of attaining. " In my 
 mind, which is completely given up to the idea 
 of glory, I frequently go over the plan of my 
 life. I determine that at forty-five I will write 
 no more, but merely enjoy the fame which I 
 shall have obtained, or imagine that I have ob- 
 tained, and prepare myself for death. One 
 thing only makes me uneasy : I fear that as I 
 approach the prescribed limit, I may push it 
 continually back, and that at forty-five I may 
 
104 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 still be thinking only of continuing to live, and, 
 perhaps, of continuing to scribble. Hard as I 
 try to think, or to make others think, that I am 
 different from the rest of mankind, I fear, I 
 tremble lest I be extremely like them." 
 
 But in order to devote himself to the pursuit 
 of literary glory, one thing remained to be 
 achieved by this strange, self-conscious, frank, 
 contemptuous and vain creature, by this young 
 man who, even in his weaknesses, has a certain 
 heroic air about him. It was necessary to break 
 through the bonds of unworthy love. Unable 
 to trust any longer to his often-baffled resolution 
 and self-command, Alfieri devised a primitive 
 and theatrical remedy too much in harmony with 
 his whole nature to be otherwise than effica- 
 cious. The lady occupied a house in the great 
 rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one 
 which he rented ; she could not go in or out of 
 her door without being seen by Alfieri, and the 
 sight of her was too much for him ; he invari- 
 ably broke all his resolves and went across the 
 square to his Armida. Knowing this, Alfieri 
 obliged a friend of his to receive from him a sol- 
 emn written promise to the effect that he would 
 not merely never go to the lady, nor take any no- 
 tice of her messages, but that, until he felt him- 
 self absolutely indifferent and beyond her reach, 
 he would go out only in solitary places and at 
 
ALFIERI. 105 
 
 unlikely hours, and spend the greater part of 
 the day seated at his window, looking at her 
 house, seeing her pass, hearing her, spoken of, 
 receiving her letters, without ever approaching 
 her or sending her the smallest message. As a 
 pledge of this engagement, Alfieri cut off his 
 long red hair, and sent the plait to his friend, 
 leaving himself in a state of crop-headedness, 
 which made it utterly impossible, in that day 
 when wigs had been given up but short hair had 
 not yet been adopted, for him to appear any- 
 where. And then he had himself tied to his 
 chair with ropes hidden under his cloak, and 
 spent day after day looking at his mistress' win- 
 dows, quite unable to read a word or attend to 
 conversation, raging and sobbing and howling 
 like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied : 
 until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, 
 he was rewarded, most characteristically, by 
 being at once delivered of all love for his lady, 
 and inspired with the idea for a sonnet. 
 
 Alfieri worked harder and harder at his Latin 
 and Italian lessons, sketched out the plan of 
 several plays, and then, in the early summer of 
 1776, got together his horses, procured a per- 
 mission to travel from the King of Sardinia, and 
 set out for Tuscany in order to learn the lan- 
 guage in which he was to achieve that great lit- 
 erary glory to which he had dedicated his life. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. 
 
 Alfieri's greatest terror in life was to fall in 
 love once more. All his love affairs had been 
 degrading to his good sense, his will and his 
 manhood : they had been odious, even at the 
 moment, to his extraordinary innate passion, or, 
 one might almost say, monomania for independ- 
 ence ; he who even in his dullest and most inane 
 years had hated the thought of any sort of mili- 
 tary or diplomatic position which should imply 
 subjection to a despotic government, whose only 
 strong feeling about the world in general had 
 long been a fierce hatred and contempt both for 
 those who tyrannized and those who were tyran- 
 nized over, this Alfieri had always, as he tells 
 us, fled, though unsuccessfully, from the pres- 
 ence of women whose social position (though 
 the words sound like a sarcasm) was sufficiently 
 good to make any regular love intrigue possible 
 or probable. How much more must he not de- 
 fend his liberty, now that he saw before him the 
 direct road to glory, and felt within himself the 
 power to journey along it. 
 
THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. lO/ 
 
 Thus it was, as he explains in his autobiog- 
 raphy, that on his first arrival in Florence, hear- 
 ing every one praising the character and talents 
 of the wife of Charles Edward Stuart, and see- 
 ing the beautiful young woman at theatres and 
 in the pubHc promenade, he resolutely declined 
 to be introduced to her. The very charm of the 
 impression which she had thus accidentally 
 made upon him, the vivid image of those very 
 dark eyes (I am translating his words, and must 
 explain that her eyes, which seemed blue to 
 Bonstetten and dark to Alfieri, were in reality 
 of that hazel color which gives great prominence 
 to the pupil, and therefore leaves the idea of 
 black eyes), contrasting with the brilliant fair 
 skin and pale blonde hair, of the graciousness 
 and sweetness and perhaps even a certain sad 
 austerity in her whole appearance and manner 
 — all this made Alfieri determine to avoid all 
 personal acquaintance. 
 
 But after some months at Siena, where his 
 thoughts had been entirely absorbed in the lit- 
 erary projects which he discussed with his new 
 friend, the grave and good and serious-minded 
 Gori, and one or two Sienese professors, after 
 that first feeling of attraction had died away, 
 and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an 
 impenetrable armor of poetic interests, Alfieri 
 decided, on his return to Florence, that he was 
 
I08 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 quite sufficiently of a new man to expose him- 
 self without any danger to such a lady as the 
 Countess of Albany. He was, after all, a dif- 
 ferent individual from that inane, dull, violent 
 young man who in the vacuity of life had raged 
 and roared in the chains of unworthy love. 
 And she, she also, was quite a different woman 
 from the Lady Ligonier and from the Marchesa 
 di Prie, the shameless, unfaithful wives and 
 heartless, vain, worldly coquettes who had made 
 such havoc of his heart. She was a cold, virtu- 
 ous, extremely intellectual woman, trying to 
 find consolation for her quietly and bravely-sup- 
 ported miseries in study, in abstract interests 
 which should take away her thoughts from the 
 sickening reality of things ; a woman who would 
 be valuable as a friend to a poet, and who 
 would know how to value his friendship. And 
 he, continually seeking for people who could 
 understand his literary ambitions, with whom 
 he could discuss all his poetical projects, and 
 from whom he might receive assistance in this 
 new intellectual life, was he not in need of such 
 a friendship '^. Would he not appreciate its use- 
 fulness and uniqueness sufficiently to see that it 
 did not turn to a mere useless and demoralizing 
 love affair t There may also have been some- 
 thing very reassuring to Alfieri's apprehensions 
 in the knowledge that he would be dealing, not 
 
THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. 109 
 
 with an Italian woman, accustomed and almost 
 socially obliged to hold a man in the degrading 
 bonds of cicisbeism, but with a foreigner, the 
 jealously-guarded wife of a sort of legendary 
 ogre, with whom, however much the old fury of 
 love might awaken in him, there could by no 
 possibility be anything beyond the most strictly- 
 watched friendship. So Alfieri went to the 
 palace of the Count of Albany ; and, having 
 once been, returned there. 
 
 The palace bought by Charles Edward about 
 1776 stands in the most remote and peaceful 
 quarter of Florence. A few quiet streets, un- 
 broken by shop fronts and unfrequented by 
 vehicles, lead up to that quarter ; streets of 
 low whitewashed convent walls overtopped by 
 trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little 
 houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth cen- 
 tury, from behind whose iron window-gratings 
 and blistered green shutters one expects even 
 now, as one passes in the silence of the summer 
 afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some 
 harpischord-strummed minuet, the turns and 
 sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song 
 by Cimarosa or Paisello. It is a region of dead 
 walls, over which bend the acacias and elms, 
 over which shoot up the cypresses and cedars 
 of innumerable convent and palace-gardens, on 
 whose flower-beds and fountains and quincunxes 
 
no COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the first-floor windows look down. In the midst 
 of all this, at the corner of two very quiet streets, 
 stands the palace, now of the Duke of San 
 Clemente, an ungainly, yellow structure of vari- 
 ous epochs, with a pretty late sixteenth-century 
 belvedere tower on one side ; a lot of shuttered 
 and heavily-grated seventeenth-century win- 
 dows, ornamented with stone stay-laces and 
 tags, upon the dark street ; and to the back a 
 desolate old garden, where the vines have 
 crawled over the stonework, and the grotesque 
 seventeenth-century statues, green and yellow 
 with lichen, stand in niches among the ill- 
 trimmed hedges of ilex and laurel : the most old- 
 world house and garden in the old-world part 
 of the town. The eighteenth century still 
 seems very near as we walk in those streets and 
 look in, through the railings, at the ilex and 
 laurel quincunxes, the lichened statues of that 
 garden ; and from the roof of the house still 
 floats, creaking in the wind, regardless of the 
 triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of the 
 many banners which have been thrown, mere 
 heaps of obsolete colored tatters, on the dust- 
 heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the 
 initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the 
 standard that was raised in Glenfinnan. 
 
 In this house was now developing one of the 
 most singular loves that ever were. Shortly 
 
THE CAVA LIE RE SERVENTE. Ill 
 
 after his introduction to the Countess of Al- 
 bany, Alfieri, terrified lest he might be forfeit- 
 ing his spiritual liberty once more, took to flight 
 and tried to forget the lady in a mad journey to 
 Rome. But he had not forgotten her ; and on 
 his passage through Siena, returning to Flor- 
 ence, he had explained his feelings, his fears, to 
 his friend Francesco Gori. This Gori, a young 
 Sienese of the middle class, extremely cultured, 
 of "antique uprightness, " to use the eighteenth- 
 century phrase, seems to have taken to his 
 heart, as one might some wild younger brother, 
 or some eccentric, moody child, the strange, 
 self-engrossed, passionate Piedmontese. A 
 gentle, grave and quiet man, he had loved the 
 magnanimity and independence so curiously 
 mingled with mere vanity and egotism in 
 Alfieri's nature ; he had never tired of hearing 
 his friend's plans for the future, had never 
 smiled at his almost comic certainty of supreme 
 greatness ; he had never lost patience with the 
 self -meritorious egotism which made all Alfieri's 
 actions seem the one interest of the world in 
 Alfieri's own eyes. To Francesco Gori, there- 
 fore, Alfieri went for advice : ought he, or ought 
 he not, to fly from this new love while it was 
 still possible to do so } 
 
 The grave and virtuous Gori answered that 
 he should not : this new love had been sent to 
 
112 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 him as a cure for all baser loves ; instead of 
 crushing it as an obstacle to his higher life and 
 his glory, he should thankfully cultivate it as an 
 incentive and assistance in working out his in- 
 tellectual redemption. 
 
 Let us pause and consider for a moment the 
 meaning of Aliieri's question and the meaning 
 of Gori's answer; let us try and realize the ideas 
 and feelings of two honorable men, seeking a 
 higher life, in a country so near our own as 
 Italy, and so short a while ago as the year i///. 
 Here was Alfieri, passionately desirous to re- 
 deem his own existence by intellectual efforts, 
 and confident of a vague mission to awaken his 
 countrymen to his own nobler feelings ; to the 
 contempt of sensual pleasures and wordly vani- 
 ties, the hatred of political and religious servi- 
 tude, the love of truth and justice, the love of 
 Italy, Here was this Alfieri, at the very outset 
 of his new career, solemnly confiding to his 
 kindest and wisest friend the scruples, the fears, 
 which restrained him from seeking the company 
 of a woman whom he was beginning to love, 
 and who was beginning to love him, a young 
 woman married by mere worldly convention to a 
 sickly, brutal and brutish drunkard, old enough 
 to be her father. And what were these scru- 
 ples ? Merely that a new love might distract 
 Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a 
 
THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. II3 
 
 woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of 
 the tragic drama which would school her to 
 virtue. That there could be any other scruples 
 appears never to have crossed Alfieri's brain : 
 that there could be any reason to pause and ask 
 himself whether he was doing wrong or ill be- 
 fore exposing to temptation the woman whom 
 he loved, and the honor which he loved more 
 than her ; whether he had a right to return to 
 the palace of Charles Edward, and, while re- 
 ceiving his hospitality, while enjoying his con- 
 fidence, to teach the wife of his host how to 
 love another man than her husband ; whether he 
 had a right to return to the presence of that 
 beautiful and intellectual lady who had hitherto 
 suffered only from the brutishness of her hus- 
 band, and add to these sufferings the sufferings 
 of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty con- 
 science ? 
 
 But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, 
 even to the man who most thoroughly despised 
 and loathed his country's and century's corrup- 
 tion, no such scruple ever came. What consid- 
 eration need ai>y man or any woman waste 
 upon a husband 1 What possible disgrace could 
 come to a woman in having a lover.'* And did 
 not the frantic jealousy of the besotted old 
 husband, his continual attendance, his perpet- 
 ual spying, most effectually remove any fur- 
 ther consideration there might be for him ? 
 
114 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 I scarcely know whether it is a thing about 
 which to be cheerful or sad, proud or ashamed ; 
 but the more one studies the ideas and feelings 
 of even one's nearest neighbors, in place or in 
 time, the more is one impressed with the sense 
 that, say what people choose, men and women do 
 not think and feel, even upon the most important 
 subjects, in anything like a uniform manner. 
 Social misarrangements, which are crimes 
 towards the individual, are invariably partially 
 righted, made endurable, by individual re-ar- 
 rangements, which are crimes towards society. 
 The woman was not consulted by her parents 
 before her marriage ; she was not restrained by 
 her conscience afterwards ; she was given for 
 ambition to a man whose tenure of her received 
 legal and religious sanction ; she gave herself 
 for love to a man whose possession of her was 
 against society and against religion ; but society 
 received her to its parties and the Church gave 
 her its communion. And thus, in Italy and in 
 the eighteenth century, where no one had 
 found any fault at a girl of nineteen being mar- 
 ried by proxy to a man who turned out to be a 
 disgusting and brutal sot, no one also could find 
 any fault at a young man of twenty-eight seek- 
 ing and obtaining the love of a married woman 
 of twenty-five. The immoral law had produced 
 the immoral lawlessness. So, to the scruples 
 
THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. I15 
 
 of Alfieri Francesco Gori had answered: ''Re- 
 turn to Florence. " 
 
 We shall now see how, out of this vile piece 
 of prose, the higher nature of Alfieri and of the 
 Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon 
 poetic and platonic affection ! ) most of all, the 
 monomaniac jealousy of Charles Edward, con- 
 trived to make a sort of poetry. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE ESCAPE. 
 
 Alfieri's fears had been groundless. His love 
 for the wife of Charles Edward Stuart — a love, 
 he tells us, quite different from any he had pre- 
 viously experienced, quiet, pure and solemn — 
 was destined not to interfere with that austere 
 process of detaching his soul from the base pas- 
 sions of the world, and devoting it to the crea- 
 tion of a new style of poetry, to the achievement 
 of a new kind of glory ; nay, rather, by bringing 
 to the surface whatever capacity for tenderness 
 and self-restraint and respect for others had 
 hitherto lurked within this fantastic nature, 
 this new love helped to complete that strange 
 monumental personality of Alfieri — a personal- 
 ity more striking, more ideal, than any of those 
 plays by which he hoped to regenerate Italy, 
 and which has been far more potent than his 
 works in the moral regeneration of his country. 
 Alfieri's youth had been illiterate and stupid ; 
 and he required, in order to make up for so 
 much waste of time and waste of spirit, that 
 
THE ESCAPE. 11/ 
 
 he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere 
 as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in 
 which he had previously lived had been the re- 
 verse. After the long spiritual numbness of 
 his earlier years, this soul, if it was to be kept 
 alive, must be kept in an almost artificially high 
 spiritual temperature, and continually plied with 
 spiritual cordials. 
 
 These advantages he obtained in the love, or, 
 we ought rather to say, the friendship of the 
 Countess of Albany, and it is extremely improb- 
 able whether he would have obtained them other- 
 wise. Irritable and vain and moody, at once ex- 
 cessively persuaded of his own dramatic mission 
 and morbidly diffident of his actual powers of 
 carrying it out, contemptuous of others and of 
 himself, Alfieri, who required such constant sym- 
 pathy and encouragement in his work, was not 
 the man who could hope to obtain much of either 
 from other men, whom his excessive pretensions, 
 his ups and downs of humor, his very dissatis- 
 faction with himself, must have quickly ex- 
 hausted of the small amount of brotherly ten- 
 derness which seems to exist in the literary 
 brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of 
 sincere helpfulness and friendliness from the 
 members of the Turinese Literary Club ; from 
 Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian; from Parini, 
 the great Milanese satirist, and from one or two 
 
Il8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 other men of letters ; whicli shows that there is 
 more kindness in the world than he ever would 
 admit, and confirms me in my remark that he 
 was singularly well treated by fate and mankind. 
 But all this was very lukewarm sympathy ; and 
 except from his two great friends, Francesco 
 Gori and Tommaso di Caluso, a difficult-tem- 
 pered man like Alfieri could receive only luke- 
 warmness. Now what he required was sym- 
 pathy, admiration, adoration, of the most burning 
 description. This was possible, towards such a 
 man, only from a woman. But where find the 
 woman who could give it, among the convent- 
 educated, early-corrupted, frivolous ladies of 
 Italy, to whom love-making was the highest in- 
 terest in life, but an interest only a trifle higher 
 than card-playing, dancing or dressing } Where, 
 even among the very small number of women 
 like Silvia Verza at Verona, Isabella Albrizzi at 
 Venice, or Paolina Castiglione at Milan, who 
 actually had some amount of culture and actu- 
 ally prided themselves on it.? The rank and 
 file of Italian ladies could give him only another 
 Marchesa di Prie, a little better or a little worse, 
 another woman who would degrade him in the 
 sensual and inane routine of a cicisbeo. The 
 exceptional ladies were even worse. Fancy this 
 morbid, conceited, self-doubtful, violent, moody 
 Alfieri accepting literary sympathy in a room 
 
THE ESCAPE, IIQ 
 
 full of small provincial lions — sympathy which 
 had to be divided with half a dozen others; 
 learned persons who edited Latin inscriptions, 
 dapper poet priestlets, their pockets crammed 
 with sonnets on ladies' hats, opera-singers, ca- 
 nary birds, births, deaths and marriages, and 
 ponderous pedants of all sorts and descriptions ! 
 Why, a lady who set up as the muse of a hot- 
 tempered and brow-beating creature like Alfieri, 
 a man whom consciousness of imperfect educa- 
 tion made horribly sensitive — such a lady would 
 have lost all the accustomed guests of her salon 
 in ten days' time. Herein, therefore, consisted 
 the uniqueness of the Countess of Albany, in 
 the fact that she was everything to Alfieri, which 
 no other woman could be. Originally better edu- 
 cated than her Italian contemporaries, the ex- 
 Canoness of Mons, half-Flemish, half-German by 
 family, French by training, and connected with 
 England through her marriage with the Pre- 
 tender, had the advantage of open doors upon 
 several fields of culture. She could read the 
 books of four different nations — a very rare ac- 
 complishment in her day ; and she was, more- 
 over, one of those women, rarer even in the 
 eighteenth century than now-a-days, whose na- 
 ture, while unproductive in any particular line, 
 is intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, 
 and in the intellectual domain even more in- 
 
I20 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 tensely and almost exclusively literary — women 
 who are born readers, to whom a new poem is as 
 great an excitement as a new toilette, a treatise 
 of philosophy (we shall see the Countess de- 
 vouring Kant long before he had been heard of 
 out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful 
 than a symphony. And this woman, thus edu- 
 cated, with this immense fund of intellectual 
 energy, was living, not a normal life with the 
 normal distracting influences of an endurable 
 husband, of children and society, but a life of 
 frightful mental and moral isolation, by the side, 
 or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, 
 sordid, violent and jealous brute, from the real- 
 ity of whose beastly excesses and bestial fury, 
 of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and 
 blows, she could take refuge only in the unreal 
 world of books. 
 
 With such a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an 
 intimate by the husband, who doubtless thought 
 one hare-brained poet more easy to manage 
 than two or three fashionable gallants — with 
 such a woman as this, Alfieri might talk over 
 plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his 
 essays on liberty and literature, and all the 
 things by which he intended to redeem Italy 
 and make himself immortal, without any fear of 
 his listener ever growing weary : from her he 
 could receive that passionate sympathy and en- 
 
THE ESCAPE. 121 
 
 couragement without which life and work were 
 impossible to him. For we must bear in mind 
 what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his 
 youth, his beauty, and that genius which was 
 the indomitable energy and independence of 
 his nature, must have been in the eyes of the 
 Countess of Albany. She had been married at 
 nineteen — she was now twenty-six ; in those 
 seven years of suffering there had been ample 
 time to obliterate all traces of the frivolous, 
 worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen light- 
 heartedly laughing at her old husband's jokes ; 
 there had been plenty of time to produce in this 
 excessively intellectual nature that vague dis- 
 satisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is 
 the price too often paid for the consolation of 
 mere abstract and literary interests. The pres- 
 sure of constant disgust and terror at her hus- 
 band's doings, the terrible mental and moral 
 solitude of living by such a husband's side, had 
 probably wrought up Louise d' Albany to the 
 very highest and almost morbid refinement of 
 nature — a refinement far surpassing the normal 
 condition of her character, even as the extra 
 fining off of already delicate features by illness 
 will make them surpass by far their healthy 
 degree of beauty. In such a mental condition 
 the sense of what her husband was must have 
 exasperated her imagination quite as much as 
 
122 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 his actual loathsomeness must have repelled 
 her feelings ; the knowledge of the frightful 
 moral and intellectual fall of Charles Edward 
 must have been as bad as the filthy place to 
 which he had fallen. And opposite to the 
 image of the Pretender must constantly have 
 arisen the image of Alfieri — opposite to the 
 image of the man, once heroic and charming and 
 brilliant, who had sold his heroism and his 
 charm, his mind and his manhood, for the bes- 
 tial pleasure of drink — who had rewarded the 
 devotion and self-sacrifice and noble enthusiasm 
 of his followers by the sight, worse than the 
 scaffold on Tower Hill, of their idol turning into 
 a half -maniac, besotted brute ; opposite to this 
 image of degradation must have arisen the 
 image of the man who had wrestled with the 
 baser passions of his nature, who had broken 
 through the base habits of his youth, who had 
 fashioned himself into a noble moral shape as 
 the marble is fashioned by the hand of the 
 sculptor ; who was struggling still, not merely 
 with the difficulties of his art, but with what- 
 ever he thought mean and slothful in himself. 
 
 Some eighteen months after their first ac- 
 quaintance Alfieri announced to the wife of 
 Charles Edward that he had just happily settled 
 a most important piece of business, the success 
 of which was one of the most fortunate things 
 
THE ESCAPE. 123 
 
 of his life. He had made a gift of all his estates 
 to his sister, reserving for himself only a very- 
 moderate yearly income ; he had reduced him- 
 self from comparative wealth to comparative 
 poverty ; he had cut himself off from ever mak- 
 ing a suitable marriage ; he had made himself a 
 pensioner of his sister's husband: but at this 
 price he had bought independence — he was no 
 longer the subject of the King of Sardinia nor 
 of any sovereign or state in the world. 
 
 The passion for political liberty, the abhor- 
 rence of any kind of despotism, however glorious 
 or however paternal, had grown in Alfieri with 
 every journey he had made through France, 
 Spain, Germany, Russia — with every sojourn in 
 England ; it had grown with every page of Livy 
 and Tacitus, with every line of Dante and Pe- 
 trarch, which he had read ; it had grown with 
 every word that he himself had written. He had 
 determined to be the poet who should make men 
 ashamed of being slaves and ashamed of being 
 tyrants. But he was himself the subject of the 
 little military despotism of Piedmont, whose 
 nobles were required, every time they wished to 
 travel or live abroad, to beg civilly for leave of ab- 
 sence, which was usually most uncivilly granted ; 
 and one of those laws threatened any person who 
 should print books in foreign countries, and 
 without the permission of the Sardinian censor, 
 
124 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 with a heavy fine, and, if necessary, with corporal 
 chastisement. 
 
 In order to become a poet Alfieri required to 
 become a free agent ; and the only way to be- 
 come a free agent, to break through the bars of 
 what he called his " abominable native cage," 
 the only way to obtain the power of writing 
 what he wished to write, was to give up all his 
 fortune and live upon the charity of the relatives 
 whom he had enriched. So, during the past 
 months, he had been in constant correspondence 
 with his sister, his brother-in-law and his lawyer ; 
 and now he had succeeded in ridding himself of 
 all his estates and all his capital. The Countess 
 of Albany knew Alfieri sufficiently well by this 
 time to understand that this alienation of all 
 his property was a real sacrifice. Alfieri was 
 the vainest and most ostentatious of men ; young, 
 handsome, showy and eccentric, accustomed to 
 cut a grand figure wherever he went, it must 
 have cost him a twinge to be obliged to reduce 
 his hitherto brilliant establishment, to dismiss 
 nearly all his servants, to sell most of his horses, 
 to exchange his embroidered velvets and satins 
 for a plain black coat for the evening and a plain 
 blue coat for the afternoon. The worst sacrifice 
 of all he doubtless confided, with savage bitter- 
 ness, to the Countess, as he confided it to the 
 readers of his autobiography : it was to resign 
 
THE ESCAPE 1 25 
 
 the nominal service of Piedmont — to put aside, 
 for good and all, that brilliant Sardinian uniform 
 in which he looked to such advantage. 
 
 We can imagine how this subject was talked 
 over — how Alfieri, with that savage pleasure 
 of his in the self-infliction of pain and humili- 
 ation, exposed to the Countess all the little, 
 mean motives which had deterred him or which 
 had encouraged him in his liberation from po- 
 litical servitude ; we can imagine how she chid 
 him for his rash step, and how, at the same 
 time, she felt a delicious pride in the meanness 
 which he so frankly revealed, in the rashness 
 which she so severely reproved ; we can imag- 
 ine how the thought of Alfieri, who had thus 
 sacrificed fortune, luxury, vanity, to the desire 
 to be free, met in the Countess of Albany's 
 mind the thought of Charles Edward, living the 
 pensioner of a sovereign who had insulted him 
 and of a sovereign whom he had cheated, spend- 
 ing in liquor the money which France had paid 
 him to get himself an heir and the Stuarts 
 another king. 
 
 A strange and dangerous situation, but one 
 whose danger was completely neutralized. Of 
 all the various persons who speak of the extra- 
 ordinary friendship between Vittorio Alfieri 
 and Louise d'Albany which existed at this 
 time, not one even ventures to hint that the 
 
126 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 relations between them exceeded in the slight- 
 est degree the limits of mere passionate friend- 
 ship ; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom 
 truthfulness was not merely an essential part 
 of his natural character, but an even more es- 
 sential part of his self-idealized personality, 
 merely confirm the words of all contemporary 
 writers. Now, if there was a country where an 
 intrigue between a woman noted tor her virtue 
 and a poet noted for his eccentricity would, had 
 it existed, have been joyfully laid hold of by 
 gossip, it was certainly this utterly-demoralized 
 Italy of cavalieri serventi : every fashionable 
 woman and every fast man would have felt a 
 personal satisfaction in tearing to pieces the 
 reputation of a lady whose whole character and 
 life had been a censure upon theirs. But, as 
 there are women the intensity of whose pure- 
 mindedness, felt in every feature and gesture 
 and word, paralyzes even the most ribald wish 
 to shock or outrage, and momentarily drags up 
 towards themselves the very people who would 
 dearly love to drag them down even for a sec- 
 ond ; so also it would appear that there are 
 situations so strange, meetings of individuals so 
 exceptional, that calumny itself is unable to 
 attack them. No one said a word against 
 Alfieri and the Countess ; and Charles Edward 
 himself, jealous as he was of any kind of inter- 
 
THE ESCAPE, 12/ 
 
 ference in his concerns, appears never to have 
 attempted to rid himself of his wife's new 
 friend. 
 
 Much, of course, must be set down to the 
 very madness of the Pretender's jealousy, to 
 his more than Oriental systematic guarding and 
 watching of his wife. Mann, we must remem- 
 ber, had written, long before Alfieri appeared 
 upon the scene, that Charles Edward never 
 went out without his wife and never let her 
 go out without him ; he barricaded her apart- 
 ment and was never further off than the next 
 room. Charles Edward undoubtedly conferred 
 upon two people, living in a day of excessive 
 looseness of manners, the inestimable advantage 
 of confining their love within the bounds of 
 friendship, of crushing all that might have been 
 base, of liberating all that could be noble, of 
 turning what might have been merely a passion 
 after the pattern of Rousseau into a passion 
 after the pattern of Dante. But what Charles 
 Edward could not do, what no human being 
 or accidental circumstances could bring about, 
 was due to the special nature of Alfieri and of 
 the Countess ; namely, that this strange pla- 
 tonic passion, instead of dying out after a very 
 brief time, merely intensified, became long-lived, 
 inextinguishable, nay, continued in its absolute 
 austerity and purity long after every obstacle 
 
128 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and restraint had been removed, except the 
 obstacles and restraints which, from the very 
 ideahty of its own nature, increased for itself. 
 And, if we look facts calmly in the face, and, 
 letting alone all poetical jargon, ask ourselves 
 the plain psychological explanation, we see that 
 such things not only could, but, considering the 
 character of the Countess of Albany and of 
 Alfieri, must have been. The Countess had 
 found in Alfieri the satisfaction of those intel- 
 lectual and ideal cravings which in a nature like 
 hers, and in a situation like hers, must have 
 been the strongest and most durable necessi- 
 ties. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his 
 past life, mortally afraid of falling once more 
 under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking 
 on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle 
 of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar 
 cocoon in which it had lain torpid so long, was 
 wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of 
 enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual pas- 
 sion just in proportion as it was absolutely and 
 completely intellectual. 
 
 A poet especially in his conception of his own 
 personality, an artist who manipulated his own 
 nature, 2, poseur whose /<?i'^ was his concentrated 
 self cleared of all things which recalled the 
 vulgar herd; moreover, a furiously literary 
 temper with a mad devotion to Dante and Pe- 
 
THE ESCAPE. 1 29 
 
 trarch, — Alfieri must have found in this love, 
 which fate in the Pretender's person ordained 
 to be platonic, the crowning characteristic of 
 his present personaHty, the almost miraculous 
 confirmation of his mystic relationship to the 
 lover of Beatrice and the lover of Laura. And, 
 in the knowledge of what he was to this poor, 
 tormented young wife ; in the consciousness of 
 being the only ray of light in this close-shut- 
 tered prison — nay, rather bedlam-like exist- 
 ence ; in the sense of how completely the 
 happiness of Louise d' Albany depended upon 
 him, whatever there was of generous and dutiful 
 in the selfish and self-willed nature of Alfieri 
 must have become paramount, and enjoined 
 upon him never to vacillate or grow weary in 
 this strange mixture of love and of friendship. 
 
CHArXER IX. 
 
 ROME. 
 
 This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, 
 as it were, of two long-repressed, long-solitary 
 intellectual lives, austerely satisfied with itself 
 and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have 
 sufficed for the happiness of two such over- 
 wrought natures as were at that moment Vittorio 
 Alfieri and Louise d'Albany. 
 
 But there could be no happiness for the wife 
 of the Pretender, and no happiness, therefore, 
 for the man who saw her the daily victim of the 
 cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence 
 of her drunken husband. To an imaginative 
 mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the 
 reality, striving forever after some poetical or 
 heroic model of love and of life, trying to be at 
 once a patriot out of Plutarch and a lover after 
 the fashion of the Vita Nuova, there are few 
 trials more exasperating than to have to see the 
 real creature who for the moment embodies 
 one's ideal, the creature whom one carefully 
 garlands with flowers and hangs round with 
 
ROME. 131 
 
 lamps, raised above all vulgar things in the 
 niche in one's imagination, elbowed by brutish 
 reality, bespattered with ignoble miseries. And 
 this Alfieri had constantly to bear. Perhaps 
 the very knowledge of the actual suffering, of 
 the unjust recriminations, the cruel violence, 
 the absolute fear of death, among which Louise 
 d'Albany spent her life, was not so difficult for 
 her lover to bear as to see her, the beautiful 
 and high-minded lady of his heart, seated in 
 her opera-box near the sofa where the red and 
 tumid-faced Pretender lay snoring, waking up, 
 as Mann describes him, only to summon his 
 lackeys to assist him in a fit of drunken sick- 
 ness, or to be carried, like a dead swine, with 
 hanging, bloated head and powerless arms, 
 down stairs to his carriage ; not so difficult to 
 bear as to hear her, his Beatrice, his Laura, 
 made the continual victim of her bullying hus- 
 band's childish bad temper, of his foul-mouthed 
 abuse, to hear it and have to sit by in silence, 
 dependent upon the good graces of a besotted 
 ruffian against whom Alfieri's hands must have 
 continually itched. 
 
 A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri's lyrics, 
 written about this time, and complaining of 
 having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged 
 through ignoble filth, shows that Alfieri, like 
 most poetical minds, resented the vulgar and 
 
132 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the disgusting much more than he would have 
 resented what one may call clean tragedy. But 
 things got worse and worse, and the real tragedy 
 threatened. Charles Edward had outraged and 
 beaten his mistress ; older and much more pro- 
 foundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his 
 wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon 
 the "cruel and indecent behavior" of which 
 Mme. d'Albany was the victim. Ill treatment 
 and terror were beginning to undermine her 
 health, and there can be no doubt, I think, that 
 the symptoms of a nervous disorder, of which 
 she complained a couple of years later to Alfieri's 
 bosom friend Gori, must originally have been 
 produced in this unusually robust young woman 
 by the horrible treatment to which she was at 
 this time subjected. Mme. d'Albany, who had 
 astonished the world by her resignation, appears 
 to have fairly taken fright ; she wrote to her 
 brother-in-law. Cardinal York, entreating him 
 to protect her from her husband. The weak- 
 minded, conscientious cardinal was not the man 
 to take any bold step : he promised his sister-in- 
 law all possible assistance if she were driven to 
 extremities, but begged her to endure a little 
 longer and save him the pain of a scandal. So 
 the Countess of Albany, long since abandoned 
 by her own kith and kin, abandoned also by her 
 brother-in-law, alone in the world between a 
 
ROME. 133 
 
 husband who was daily becoming more and 
 more of a wild beast, and a lover who was fear- 
 ful of giving any advice which might compro- 
 mise her reputation or separate them forever, 
 went on suffering. 
 
 But the moment came when she could suffer 
 no more. At the beginning of the winter of 
 1780 the celebration of St. Andrew's Day by 
 Charles Edward and his drinking companions 
 was followed by a scene over which Alfieri drops 
 a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent bac- 
 chanal which endangered the life of his lady. 
 From the biographers of Charles Edward we 
 learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the 
 middle of the night with a torrent of insulting 
 language which provoked her to vehement re- 
 criminations ; that he beat her, committed foul 
 acts upon her, and finished off with attempting 
 to choke her in her bed, in which he would 
 probably have succeeded had the servants not 
 been waked by the Countess' screams and 
 dragged Charles Edward away.* 
 
 Alfieri, partly from an honorable reluctance 
 to see his lady made the heroine of a public 
 scandal, and partly, no doubt, from the more 
 selfish fear lest a separation from her husband 
 
 * I have purposely quoted, almost textually, the account 
 given by Ewald, lest I should be accused of following 
 Alfieri's vague version. 
 
134 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 might imply a separation also from her lover, 
 had long persisted in advising the Countess 
 against any extreme measure. Alfieri tells us 
 that with the desire for freedom of speech and 
 writing at the bottom of his act of self-spoliation 
 in his sister's favor, there had mingled a sense 
 also that by breaking all connections with Pied- 
 mont, and liberating himself from all temptation 
 of marrying for the sake of his family, he was, 
 in a manner, securing the continuation of his 
 relations with Mme. d' Albany. The Countess' 
 flight from her husband, they both well knew, 
 would in all probability put an end to these rela- 
 tions; the Catholic Church could grant no di- 
 vorce, and Charles Edward would probably 
 refuse a separation ; so that the honor, nay, the 
 life of the fugitive wife would be safe only in a 
 convent, whence Alfieri would be excluded to- 
 gether with Charles Edward. The choice was 
 a hard one to make ; the choice between a life 
 of peace and safety, but separated from all that 
 made life dear to her, and a life consoled by the 
 presence of Alfieri, but made wretched and ab- 
 solutely endangered by the violence of a drunken 
 maniac. But after that frightful night of St. 
 Andrew no choice remained ; to remain under 
 the Pretender's roof was equivalent for his wife 
 either to a violent death in another such fit of 
 madness, or to a lingering death from sheer mis- 
 
ROME. 135 
 
 ery and daily terror. The Countess of Albany 
 must leave her husband. 
 
 To effectuate this was the work of Alfieri — 
 of Alfieri, who, of all men, was most inter- 
 ested to keep Mme. d' Albany in her husband's 
 house ; of Alfieri, who, of all men, was the least 
 fitted for any kind of underhand practices. The 
 actual plot for escape was the least part of the 
 business ; the conspiracy would have utterly 
 miscarried, and Mme. d' Albany have been con- 
 demned to a life of much worse agony, had not 
 provision been made against the Pretender's cer- 
 tain efforts to get his wife back. Mme. d' Albany 
 may have remembered how her mother-in-law, 
 Clementina Sobieska, although protected by the 
 Pope, had been eventually got out of the con- 
 vent whither she had escaped, and had been re- 
 stored to her husband, the Pretender James ; 
 she was probably aware, also, how Charles Ed- 
 ward had stormed at the French Government to 
 have Miss Walkenshaw sent back to him from 
 the convent at Meaux. No government could 
 give a man back his mistress, but it was differ- 
 ent with a wife ; and both Alfieri and the Count- 
 ess must have known full well that however lax 
 the Grand Ducal Court might be on the subject 
 of conjugal infidelity, when quietly carried on 
 under the domestic roof and dignified by the 
 name of serventismo, no court, no society, could 
 
136 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 do otherwise than virtuously resent so great 
 a turpitude as a wife publicly running away by 
 herself from her husband's house. It became 
 necessary to win over the sympathies of those 
 in power, to secure their connivance, or at all 
 events their neutrality ; and the task of talking, 
 flattering, wheedling, imploring, fell to Alfieri, 
 whose sense of self-debasement appears to have 
 been mitigated only by the knowledge that he 
 was working for the good of a guiltless and mis- 
 erable woman, of the woman whom he loved 
 more than the whole world ; by the bitter knowl- 
 edge that the success of his efforts, the libera- 
 tion of his beloved, meant also the sacrifice of 
 that intercourse which made the happiness of 
 his life. 
 
 Alfieri succeeded ; the Grand Duke and the 
 Grand Duchess were won over. The actual 
 flight alone remained to be accomplished. 
 
 * In the first days of December, 1780, a cer- 
 tain Mme. Orlandini, a half-Irish lady connected 
 with the Jacobite Ormonds, was invited to 
 breakfast at the palace in the Via San Sebasti- 
 ano. She skilfully led the conversation into a 
 discussion on needlework, and suggested that 
 the Countess of Albany should go and see the 
 
 * The chief sources for this account are Mann's de- 
 spatches and the Memoires of Louis Dutens. Alfieri gives 
 no details. 
 
ROME. 137 
 
 last embroidery produced at the convent of Bi- 
 anchette, a now long-suppressed establishment 
 in the adjoining Via del Mandorlo. The Count- 
 ess of Albany ordered her carriage for immedi- 
 ately after breakfast, and the two ladies drove 
 off, accompanied, of course, by Charles Edward, 
 who never permitted his wife to go out without 
 him. Near the convent gate they met a Mr. 
 Gahagan, an Irish Jacobite and the official cav- 
 aliere scrvente of Mme. Orlandini, who, hearing 
 that they were going to pay a visit to the nuns, 
 offered to accompany them. Gahagan helped 
 out the Countess and Mme. Orlandini, who rap- 
 idly ran up the flight of steps leading to the con- 
 vent door; he then offered his arm to Charles 
 Edward, whose legs were disabled by dropsy. 
 Leaning on Gahagan's arm, the Pretender was 
 slowly making his way up the steps, when his 
 companion, looking up, suddenly exclaimed that 
 the two ladies had already entered the convent, 
 and that the nuns had stupidly and rudely shut 
 the door in his and the Count of Albany's face. 
 " They will soon have to open," answered 
 Charles Edward, and began to knock violently. 
 Mr. Gahagan doubtless knocked also. But no 
 answer came. At length the door opened, and 
 there appeared behind a grating no less a per- 
 son than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously 
 informed the Count that she was unable to let 
 
138 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 him in, as his wife had sought an asylum in her 
 convent under the protection of her Highness 
 the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. 
 
 Sir Horace Mann says that Alfieri, who is 
 not mentioned in the very circumstantial nar- 
 rative of Dutens, was hanging about the con- 
 vent, in order to prevent the Pretender, who 
 always carried pistols in his pockets, from com- 
 mitting any violence. This seems extremely 
 unlikely, as the first use to which Charles Ed- 
 ward would naturally have put his pistols would 
 have been shooting Alfieri, for whose murder 
 he immediately offered a thousand sequins. 
 At any rate, raging like a maniac, the discom- 
 fited husband went back to his empty house. 
 
 It would be pretty and pathetic to insert in 
 this part of my narrative a page of half-condem- 
 natory condolence with Charles Edward. But 
 this I find it perfectly impossible to do. Of 
 course, if we call to mind Falkirk and Skye, if 
 we conjure up in our fancy the Prince Charlie 
 who still lived in the thoughts of Flora McDon- 
 ald, there is something very frightful in this 
 tragic-comic flight of the Countess of Albany : 
 the slamming of that convent door in his face is 
 the worst injury, the worst injustice, the worst 
 ignominy reserved by fate for the last of the 
 unhappy Stuarts. 
 
 But of the Charles Edward of the '45 there 
 
ROME, 1 39 
 
 remained so little in this Count of Albany that 
 we have no right to consider them any longer 
 as one individual, to condone the brutishness 
 of the Count of Albany for the sake of the 
 chivalry of Prince Charles, to degrade our con- 
 ception of the young man by tacking on to it 
 the just ignominy inflicted upon the old man, 
 the man who had inherited his name and posi- 
 tion, but scarcely his personality. Above all, 
 we have no right to add to whatever reproaches 
 we may think fit to shower upon the Countess 
 of Albany and on Alfieri, the imaginary re- 
 proach that the husband whose rights they 
 were violating was the victor of Gladsmuir and 
 Falkirk. 
 
 There must always be something which 
 shocks us in the behavior, however otherwise 
 innocent and decorous, of a woman who runs 
 away from her husband with the assistance of 
 her lover; but this quality of offensiveness is 
 not, in such a case as the present one, a fault 
 of the woman ; it is one of her undeserved mis- 
 fortunes, as much as is the bad treatment, the 
 solitude, the temptation, to which she has been 
 subjected. The evil practice of the world, its 
 folly and wickedness in permitting that a girl 
 like Louise of Stolberg should be married to a 
 man like Charles Edward, its injustice and 
 cruelty in forbidding the legal breaking of such 
 
I40 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 an unrighteous contract ; the evil practice of 
 the world which condemned the Countess of 
 Albany to be for so much of her life an un- 
 happy woman, also condemned her to be in 
 some of her actions a woman deserving of 
 blame. We shall see further on how, in the 
 attempt to work out their happiness in despite 
 of the evil world in which they lived, the 
 Countess and Alfieri, infinitely intellectually 
 and morally superior to many of us whom cir- 
 cumstances permit to live blameless and com- 
 fortable, were splashed with the mud of un- 
 righteousness, which was foreign to their 
 nature, and remained spotted in the eyes of 
 posterity. 
 
 Charles Edward did what he had done once 
 before in his life : he applied to the Govern- 
 ment to put him again in possession of the 
 woman whom he had victimized ; but as the 
 French Government had refused to recognize 
 his claims over his fugitive mistress, so the 
 Government of the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
 now refused to give him back his fugitive wife. 
 The Countess of Albany had naturally taken no 
 clothes with her in her flight ; and she pres- 
 ently sent a maid to the palace in Via San 
 Sebastiano to fetch such things as she might 
 require. But Charles Edward would not per- 
 mit a single one of her effects to be touched ; if 
 
ROME. 141 
 
 she wanted her clothes and trinkets, she might 
 come and fetch them herself. However, after 
 a few days, a message came from the Pope, 
 ordering the Pretender to supply his wife with 
 whatever she might require ; a threat to sus- 
 pend the pension was probably expressed or 
 implied, for Charles Edward immediately 
 obeyed. 
 
 Meanwhile the Countess of Albany was anx- 
 iously awaiting at the convent of the Bianchette 
 a decision from her brother-in-law, to whom she 
 had written immediately after her flight. Those 
 first days must have been painfully unquiet. 
 What if the Tuscan Court should listen to the 
 Count of Albany's entreaties } What if Cardi- 
 nal York should take part with his brother.? 
 Return to the house of her husband would be 
 death or worse than death. Cardinal York 
 answered immediately : a long, kind, rather 
 weak-minded letter, the ideal letter of a well- 
 intentioned, rather silly priest, in curious Anglo- 
 Roman French. He informed her that for some 
 time past he had expected to hear of her flight 
 from her husband ; he protested that he had 
 had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and 
 begged her to believe that it had been out of 
 his power to protect her. He had informed the 
 Pope of the whole affair, and with his Holiness' 
 approval had prepared for his sister-in-law a 
 
142 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 temporary asylum in the Ursuline convent in 
 Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon 
 as possible. In January, 1781, the Countess of 
 Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan, 
 who appears to have formed part of her house- 
 hold, and two maids, started for Rome ; but 
 such had been the threats of Charles Edward 
 and his ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri 
 and Gahagan, armed and dressed as servants, 
 accompanied the carriage a considerable part of 
 its way. The Pretender, we must remember, 
 had offered a thousand sequins to any one who 
 would kill Alfieri ; and even in that humdrum 
 late eighteenth century a man of position might 
 easily hire a couple of ruffians to waylay a car- 
 riage and kidnap a woman. 
 
 The Countess of Albany was installed in the 
 Ursuline convent in Via Vittoria, a street near 
 the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family mem- 
 ory hung about the place : it had been the asy- 
 lum of Clementina Sobieska when she had fled 
 from the elder Pretender, as Louise d' Albany 
 had fled from the younger. But the wife of 
 Charles Edward was in a very different mood 
 from the wife of James III. ; and it is probable 
 that, despite the many charms of the convent 
 and the excellent manners of its aristocratic in- 
 mates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great 
 store, the Countess, with her heart full of the 
 
ROME. 143 
 
 thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined to 
 give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, 
 which he apparently expected, of developing a 
 sudden vocation for Heaven. 
 
 She had left Florence at the end of the year; 
 in the spring she saw Alfieri again. The quiet 
 work which had seemed so natural and easy, 
 while he was sure of seeing his lady every day, 
 had become quite impossible to him. He felt 
 that he ought to remain in Florence, that he 
 ought not to follow her to Rome. But Flor- 
 ence had become insufferable to him ; and he 
 determined to remove to Naples, because to get 
 to Naples it was necessary to pass through 
 Rome. The melancholy, barren approach to 
 the Eternal City, which, three years before, had 
 inspired Alfieri with nothing but melancholy 
 and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly 
 paradise ; and Rome, which he hated, as the 
 most delightful of places. He hurried to the 
 Ursuline convent and was admitted to speak to 
 the Countess of Albany. " I saw her, " he wrote 
 many years later, "but (O God! my heart 
 seems to break at the mere recollection) I saw 
 her a prisoner behind a grating ; less tormented 
 than in Florence, but yet not less unhappy. 
 We were separated, and who could tell how long 
 our separation might not last.^^ But, while cry- 
 ing, I tried to console myself with the thought 
 
144 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 that she might at least recover her health, that 
 she would breathe freely and sleep peacefully, no 
 longer trembling at every moment before the 
 indivisible shadow of her drunken husband ; 
 that she might, in short, live. " 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 ANTIGONE. 
 
 About three months after the Countess of 
 Albany's flight from her husband, the Pope 
 granted her permission to leave the Ursuline 
 convent ; and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, 
 offered her hospitality in his magnificent palace 
 of the Cancelleria. Alfieri was at Naples when 
 he received this news, riding gloomily along 
 the sea-shore, weeping profusely (for we must 
 remember that to an Italian, especially of the 
 eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a 
 would-be ancient Roman shedding love-sick 
 tears), unable to give his attention to work, 
 living, as he expresses it, on the coming in and 
 going out of the post. '' I wished to return to 
 Rome, " he writes, "and at the same time I felt 
 very keenly that I ought not to do it yet. The 
 struggles between love and duty which take 
 place in an honorable and tender heart are the 
 most terrible and mortal pain that a man can 
 suffer. I delayed throughout April, and I de- 
 termined to drag on through May ; but on the 
 
146 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 1 2th May I found myself, I scarcely know how, 
 back in Rome. " 
 
 Alfieri found the Countess of Albany estab- 
 lished in the palace of the Cancelleria, the 
 mistress of the establishment, for her brother- 
 in-law was living in his episcopal town of 
 Frascati. They were free to see each other as 
 much as they chose, to love each other as much 
 as they would ; for the Cardinal and the priestly 
 circles seem to have gone completely to sleep 
 in the presence of this critical situation ; and 
 the habits of Roman society, which were even 
 a shade worse than those of Florence, were not 
 such as to give umbrage to the lovers. 
 
 But those years during which they had 
 loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles 
 Edward had apparently fostered a love which 
 was accustomed and satisfied with being only a 
 more passionate kind of friendship ; the indom- 
 itable power of resistance to himself, the pas- 
 sion for realizing in himself some heroic attitude 
 which he admired, and the almost furious desire 
 to reverse completely his former habits of life, 
 kept Alfieri up to the point of a platonic con- 
 nection ; and the Countess of Albany, intel- 
 lectual, cold, passive, easily moulded by a more 
 vehement nature, loved Alfieri much more with 
 the head than with the heart, and loved in him 
 just that which made him prefer that they 
 
ANTIGONE. 147 
 
 should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch 
 and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the 
 Countess of Albany had much more mind than 
 personality, and that she was therefore mere 
 wax in the hands of a man who had become so 
 exclusively and violently intellectual as Alfieri ; 
 she had seen too much of the coarse realities of 
 life, of the brutal giving way to sensual im- 
 pulse : the heroic, the ideal, nay, the deliber- 
 ately made-up, the artificial, had a charm for 
 her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Al- 
 fieri continued, in the opinion of all contempo- 
 raries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri 
 himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are 
 equal, on the same footing as in Florence. 
 
 And these months in Rome seem to have 
 been the happiest months of Alfieri's life, the 
 happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess 
 of Albany. Alfieri hired the Villa Strozzi, on 
 the Esquiline, a small palace built by one of 
 Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, includ- 
 ing the use of furniture, stables and garden, he 
 paid the now incredibly small sum of ten scudi 
 a month, about two pounds of our money. Per- 
 mitting himself only two coats, the black one 
 for the evening and the famous blue one for 
 ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to 
 one dish of meat and vegetables, without wine 
 or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make the com- 
 
148 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 paratively small pension paid to him by his 
 sister go almost as far as had the fine fortune 
 of which he had despoiled himself. He spent 
 lavishly on books and more lavishly on horses, — 
 on horses which, according to his own account, 
 were his third passion, coming only after his 
 love for Mme. d' Albany, and sometimes usurp- 
 ing the place of his love of literary glory. 
 
 The mania for systematic division of his 
 time, the invincible tendency to routine, which 
 follows in most Italians after the disorder and 
 wastefulness of youth, had already got the better 
 of Alfieri. He had, almost at the moment 
 when the passion for literature first disclosed 
 itself, made up his mind to write a definite 
 number of tragedies, first twelve, then fourteen, 
 and no more ; and to devote a certain number 
 of years to the elaborate process of first con- 
 structing them mentally, then of writing them 
 full length in prose, and finally of turning this 
 prose into verse ; and he was later to devise a 
 corresponding plan of writing an equally fixed 
 number of comedies and satires in an equally 
 fixed number of years, after which, as we have 
 seen, he was to give up his thoughts, having 
 attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for 
 death. 
 
 This routine is a national characteristic, and 
 absorbs many an Italian, turning all the poetry 
 
ANTIGONE. ' 149 
 
 of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful 
 inevitableness ; but Alfieri did not merely sub- 
 mit to routine : he enjoyed it, he devised and 
 carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature. 
 To this man, who cared so much for the figure 
 he cut, and so little for all the things which sur- 
 rounded him, a life reduced to absolute monot- 
 ony of grinding work was almost an object of 
 aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual 
 delight; he enjoyed a dead level, an endless 
 w^hitewashed wall, as much as other men, and 
 especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, 
 the irregularities and mottled colors of existence. 
 So Alfieri arranged for himself in his house 
 near Santa Maria Maggiore what to him was a 
 life of exquisite delightfulness. 
 
 He spent the whole early morning reading 
 the Latin and Italian classics, and grinding 
 away at his tragedies, which, after repeated 
 sketching out, repeated writing out in prose, 
 were now going through the most elaborate 
 process of writing, re-writing, revising and re- 
 revising in verse. Then, before resuming his 
 solitary studies in the afternoon, he would have 
 one of his many horses saddled, and ride about 
 in the desolate tracts of the town, which in 
 papal times extended from Santa Maria Mag- 
 giore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, 
 and St. John Lateran : miles of former villa 
 
ISO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 gardens, with quincunxes and flower-bEds, cut 
 up for cabbage-growing, wide, open spaces 
 where the wall of a temple, the arch of an 
 aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and 
 weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and 
 nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plas- 
 ter, among which shone beneath the darting 
 lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips 
 of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine ; 
 long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by 
 arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the 
 withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of 
 clematis and wild vine ; solemn and solitary 
 wildernesses within the city walls, where the 
 silence was broken only by the lowing of the 
 herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on 
 his shaggy horse, by the long-drawn, guttural 
 chant of the carter stretched on the top of his 
 cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells ; places 
 inaccessible to the present, a border-land of 
 the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking of 
 those many times when he must have reined in 
 his horse, and vaguely and wistfully looked out 
 on to the green desolation islanded with ruins 
 and traversed by the vast procession of the 
 aqueducts, invited one to meditate, and cry, and 
 be a poet. And sometimes — we know it from 
 the sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri 
 tells us, carried the beloved burden of his lady 
 
AA'TIGONE. 151 
 
 — Alfieri did not ride out alone. One of the 
 horses of the Villa Strozzi was saddled for the 
 Countess of Albany : and this strange pair of 
 platonic lovers rode forth together among the 
 ruins, the wife of Charles Edward listening, 
 with something more than mere abstract inter- 
 est, to Alfieri's fiercest contemptuous tirades 
 against the tyranny of soldiers and priests, the 
 tyranny of sloth and lust which had turned 
 these spots into a wilderness, and which had 
 left the world, as Alfieri always felt, and a man 
 not unlike Alfieri in savage and destructive 
 austerity, St. Just, was later to say, empty since 
 the days of the Romans. 
 
 Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and 
 descended through the twilit streets of the up- 
 per city — where the troops of red and yellow 
 and blue seminarists, and black and brown 
 monks, passed by like ants, homeward bound 
 after their evening walk — into the busier parts 
 of Rome, and crossing the Corso filled with 
 painted and gilded coaches, and making his 
 way through the many squares where the peo- 
 ple gathered round the lemonade booths near 
 the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortu- 
 ous back streets filled with the noise of the an- 
 vils and hammers of the locksmiths and nailers 
 behind the Pantheon, made his way towards the 
 palace, grand and prim in its architecture of 
 
152 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Bramants, of the Cancelleria, perhaps not with- 
 out thinking that in the big square before its 
 windows, where the vegetable carts were un- 
 loaded every morning, and the quacks and dent- 
 ists and peddlers bawled all day, a man as 
 strange, as wayward and impatient of tyranny 
 as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been burned 
 two centuries before by Cardinal York's prede- 
 cessor in that big palace of the Cancelleria. 
 Fortunately there was no Cardinal York in the 
 Cancelleria, or at least only rarely ; but instead 
 only the beautiful blonde woman with the 
 dark ha-zel eyes, whom Alfieri spoke of as his 
 "lady," and, somewhat later, as "the sweet half 
 of himself," and in whose speech Alfieri was 
 never Alfieri, or Vittorio, or the Count, but 
 merely "the poet," so completely had these 
 strange, self-modelling, unconsciously-attitudin- 
 izing lovers arrayed themselves and their love 
 according to the pattern of Dante and Petrarch. 
 
 To the Countess, we may be sure, Alfieri 
 never failed to give a most elaborate* account of 
 his day's work, nor to read to her whatever 
 scenes of his plays he had blocked out in prose 
 or worked up in verse. By eleven o'clock, he 
 tells us, he was always back in his solitary little 
 villa on the Esquiline. 
 
 But this, although it is probably correct with 
 regard to his visits to Mme. d'Albany, with 
 
ANTIGONE. 153 
 
 whom consideration for gossip prevented his 
 staying much after ten at night, must not be 
 taken as the invariable rule; forAlfieri, devoted 
 as he was to his lady, by no means neglected 
 other society. He was finishing his allotted 
 number of tragedies, and as the solemn moment 
 of publication approached, he began to be tor- 
 mented with that same desire to display his 
 work to others, to hear their praises even if 
 false, to understand their opinion even if unfav- 
 orable, which came, by gusts, as one of the pas- 
 sions of his life. Rome was at that time, like 
 every Italian town, full of literary academies, 
 conventicles of very small intellectual fry meet- 
 ing in private drawing-rooms or at coffee-houses, 
 and swayed by the overlordship of the famous 
 Arcadia, which had now sunk into being a huge 
 club to which every creature who scribbled, or 
 daubed, or strummed, or had a coach and pair, or 
 a bad tongue, or a pretty face, or a title, belonged 
 without further claims. There were also several 
 houses of women who affected intelligence or 
 culture, having no claims to beauty or fashion ; 
 and foremost among these, but differing from 
 them by the real originality and culture of the 
 lady of the house, the charm of her young 
 daughter, and the superior quality of the con- 
 versation and music to be enjoyed there, was the 
 house of a Sic!:nora Maria Pizzelli, of all women 
 
154 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 in Rome the one to whom, after the Countess of 
 Albany, Alfieri showed himself most assiduous. 
 In her house and in many others Alfieri began to 
 give almost public readings of his plays ; trying 
 to persuade himself that his object in so doing 
 was to judge, from the expression of face and 
 even more from the restlessness or quiesence of 
 his listeners on their chairs, how his work might 
 affect the mixed audience of a theatre ; but ad- 
 mitting in his heart of hearts that the old desire 
 to be remarked had as much to do with these 
 exhibitions as with the six-horse gallops which 
 used to astonish the people of Turin and Flor- 
 ence. 
 
 But something better soon offered itself. The 
 Duke Grimaldi had had a small theatre con- 
 structed in the Spanish palace, his residence as 
 Ambassador from the Catholic King, and a small 
 company of high-born amateurs had been play- 
 ing in it translations of French comedies and 
 tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Al- 
 fieri offered his Antigone, which was accepted 
 with fervor. The beautiful and majestic Duch- 
 ess of Zagarolo was to act the part of the heroine ; 
 her brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and 
 Duchess of Ceri, respectively, the parts of Hae- 
 mon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, 
 the villain of the piece, was reserved for Alfieri 
 himself. The performance of Antigone was a 
 
ANTIGONE, 155 
 
 great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the 
 Spanish Embassy were crowded with the fash- 
 ionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782, 
 included priests and princes of the Church quite 
 as much as painted ladies and powdered cavaliers. 
 A contemporary diary, kept by the page of the 
 Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, 
 enables us to form some notion of the assembly. 
 Foremost among the ladies were the two rival 
 beauties, equally famous for their conquests in 
 the ecclesiastical as well as the secular nobility, 
 the Princess Santacroceandthe Princess Altieri, 
 vieing with each other in the magnificence of 
 their diamonds and of their lace, and each upon 
 the arm of a prince of the Church who had the 
 honor of \)^\Vi^\i^x ox\^o^Qy.cavalie7'e servente ; 
 the Princess Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan 
 Francesco Albani, the very gallant and art-loving 
 nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro ; 
 the Princess Santacroce escorted by the French 
 Ambassador Cardinal de Bernis, the amiable 
 society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom 
 Frederick the Great had surnamed Babet la 
 boiiqtietiere. In the front row sat the wife of 
 the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being 
 the niece of the late Pope Clement XIIL, affected 
 an almost royal pomp, and by her side sat the 
 wittiest and most literary of the sacred college, 
 the still very flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The 
 
156 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 hall was nearly full when the stir in the crowd, 
 and the general looking in one direction, an- 
 nounced the arrival of a guest who excited un- 
 wonted attention. A young woman, who scarcely 
 looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very 
 simply and elegantly dressed, with something 
 still girlish in her small, irregular features and 
 complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted 
 along the gangway between the rows of chairs, 
 and, as if she were the queen of the entertain- 
 ment, solemnly installed by the side of the Prin- 
 cess Rezzonico in the first row. Was it because 
 her husband had called himself King of England, 
 or because her lover was the author of the play 
 about to be performed } Be it as it may, the 
 Countess of Albany was the object of universal 
 curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed 
 during the play was a second and perhaps more 
 interesting performance for the scandal-loving 
 Romans. 
 
 While the ghosts of these long-dead men and 
 women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts 
 and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of 
 the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardi- 
 nals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with 
 well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with 
 their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman 
 nobles all in the strange old-world costumes, 
 
ANTIGONE. 157 
 
 with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned man- 
 tles, of the Pope's household and of the military 
 orde-rs of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies 
 in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waist- 
 coats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper 
 with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels 
 and inevitable two watches on the sober black 
 of their clothes ; — whil'e these ghosts whom we 
 have evoked in all their finery (long since gone 
 to the bric-d-h'ac shops) to fill the theatre-hall 
 of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the sym- 
 phony which Cimarosa himself has written for 
 Antigone^ sit and watch the magnificent Duchess 
 of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and 
 stomacher and piled-up, feathered hair, and the 
 red-haired, eccentric Piedmontese Count, the 
 d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon; 
 let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Al- 
 fieri are for us people of to-day, and what they 
 must have been for those people of a hundred 
 years ago. 
 
 While scribbling for mere pastime at his 
 earliest play, Alfieri had felt his mind illum- 
 ined by a sort of double revelation : he would 
 make his name immortal and he would create a 
 new kind of tragedy. These two halves of a 
 proposition, of which he appears never to have 
 entertained a single moment's doubt, had origin- 
 ated at the same time and developed in close 
 
158 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 connection : that he could be otherwise than an 
 innovator was as inconceivable to Alfieri as 
 that he could be otherwise than a genius, al- 
 though, in reality, he was as far from being the 
 one as from being the other. The fact was that 
 Alfieri felt in himself the power of inventing a 
 style and of producing works which should an- 
 swer to the requirements of his own nature : 
 considering himself as the sole audience, he 
 considered himself as the unique playwright. 
 Excessively limited in his mental vision, and 
 excessively strong in his mental muscle, it was 
 with his works as with his life : the ideal was 
 so comparatively within reach, and the will was 
 so powerful, that one feels certain that he 
 nearly always succeeded in behaving in the 
 way in which he approved, and in writing in 
 the style which he admired. And the most 
 extraordinary part of the coincidence was, that 
 as he happened to live in a time and country 
 which had entirely neglected the tragic stage, 
 and consequently had no habits or aspirations 
 connected with it, his own desires with refer- 
 ence to Italian tragedy preceded those of his 
 fellow-countrymen, his own ideal was thrust 
 upon them before they well knew where they 
 were ; and his own nature and likings became 
 the sole standard by which he measured his 
 works, his own satisfaction the only criterion 
 by which they could be judged. 
 
ANTIGONE. 159 
 
 In order, therefore, to understand the nature 
 of Alfieri's plays, it is necessary, first of all, to 
 understand what were Alfieri's innate likings 
 and dislikings in the domain of the drama. 
 Before all other things, Alfieri was not a poet : 
 he lacked all, or very nearly all, the faculties 
 which are really poetical. To begin with the 
 more gross and external ones, he had no in- 
 stinct for, no pleasure in, metrical arrange- 
 ments for their own sake ; he did not think nor 
 invent in verse, ideas did not come to him on 
 the wave of metre ; he thought out, he elabo- 
 rately finished, every sentence in prose, and 
 then translated that prose into verse, as he 
 might have translated (and in some instances 
 actually did translate) from a French version 
 into an Italian one. Moreover he was, to a 
 degree which would have been surprising even 
 in a prose writer, deficient in that which consti- 
 tutes the intellectual essence of poetry as metre 
 constitutes its material externality ; in that ten- 
 dency to see things surrounded by, disguised 
 in, a swarm, a masquerade of associated ideas ; 
 deficient in the power of suggesting images, of 
 conceiving figures of speech ; in fancy, imagin- 
 ation, in the metaphorical faculty, or whatever 
 else we may choose to call it. Nor did he per- 
 ceive or describe visible things, visible effects, 
 in their own unmetaphorical shapes and colors : 
 
l60 COl/NTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 not a line of description, not an adjective can 
 be found in his works except such as may be 
 absolutely indispensable for topographical or 
 similar intelligibility ; Alfieri obviously cared 
 as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful 
 sound. This being the case, everything that 
 we might call distinctly poetical, all those 
 things which are precious to us in Shakespeare, 
 or Marlowe, dr Webster, in Goethe or Schiller, 
 nay, even, occurring at intervals, in Racine 
 himself, at least as much as mere psychology 
 or oratory or pathos, appeared to Alfieri in the 
 light of mere meretricious gewgaws, which took 
 away from the interest of dramatic action with- 
 out affording him any satisfaction in return. 
 As it was with metre and metaphor and de- 
 scription, so it was also with the indefinable 
 something which we call lyric quality : the 
 something which sings to our soul, and which 
 sends a thrill of delight through our nerves or 
 a gust of emotion across our nature in the same 
 direct way as do the notes of certain voices, 
 the phrases of certain pieces of music : instan- 
 taneously, unreasoningly and unerringly. Of 
 this Alfieri had little, so little that we may also 
 say that he had nothing ; the presence of this 
 quality being evidently unnoticed by him and 
 unappreciated. So much for the absolutely 
 poetical qualities. Of what I may call the prose 
 
ANTIGONE. l6l 
 
 qualities of a playwright, only a certain number 
 appealed to Alfieri, and only a certain number 
 were possessed by him. In a time when the 
 novel was beginning to become a psychological 
 study more minute than any stage play could 
 ever be, Alfieri was only very moderately in- 
 terested in the subtle analysis or representation 
 of character and state of mind ; the fine touches 
 which bring home a person or a situation did 
 not attract his attention ; nor was he troubled 
 by considerations concerning the probability of 
 a given word or words being spoken at a par- 
 ticular moment and by a particular man or 
 woman ; realism had no meaning for him. As 
 it was with intellectual conception, so was it also 
 with instructive sympathy : Alfieri never subtly 
 analyzed the anatomy of individual nature, nor 
 did he unsconsciously mimic its action and tones ; 
 what most of us mean by pathos did not appeal to 
 him. Neither metrical nor imaginative pleas- 
 urableness, nor descriptive charm, nor lyric 
 poignancy, nor psychological analysis or inten- 
 tion entered, therefore, into Alfieri's conception 
 of a desirable tragedy, any more than any of 
 these things fell within the range of his special 
 talents ; for we must always bear in mind that 
 with this man, whose feelings and desires were 
 in such constant action and reaction, with this 
 man whose will imposed his intellectual notions 
 6 
 
1 62 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 on his feelings, and his emotional tendencies on 
 his thoughts, the thing which he enjoys is al- 
 ways as the concave to the convex of the thing 
 which he produces. But although Alfieri was 
 not a poet, and was not even a potential novel 
 writer, he was, in a sense, essentially a drama- 
 tist ; though even here we must distinguish 
 and diminish. Alfieri was not a man who cared 
 for rapid action or for intricate plot : he never 
 felt the smallest inclination to violate the old 
 traditions of the pseudo-classic stage by those 
 thrilling scenes or sights which had to be de- 
 scribed and not shown, nor by those complica- 
 tions of interest which require years for an ac- 
 tion instead of the orthodox twenty-four hours. 
 He was perfectly satisfied with the no-place, 
 no-where — with the vague temple, or palace 
 hall, or public square, where, as in the country 
 of the abstract, the action of pseudo-classic trag- 
 edy always takes place, or, more properly speak- 
 ing, the talking of pseudo-classic tragedy 
 always goes on ; he was perfectly satisfied 
 with sending in a servant or a messenger to 
 inform the public of a murder or suicide com- 
 mitted behind the scenes ; he was perfectly 
 satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at 
 the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its 
 original causes or developing it through its 
 various phases. In such matters Alfieri was 
 
ANTIGONE, 163 
 
 as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Never- 
 theless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense : an 
 intense poseur himself, enjoying nothing so 
 much as working himself up to produce a given 
 effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had 
 an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical, for 
 the moral attitude which may be struck so as to 
 be effective, and for the arrangement of subor- 
 dinate parts so that this attitude surprise and 
 move the audience. The moral attitude, the 
 psychological gesture, which thus became the 
 main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be 
 expected from such a man, nearly always his 
 own moral attitude, his own psychological 
 gesture ; he himself, his uncompromising, un- 
 hesitating, unflinching, curt and emphatic na- 
 ture, is always the hero or heroine of the play, 
 however much the situation, the incidents, the 
 other characteristics may vary. Antigone is 
 generous and tender, Creon is inhuman in all 
 save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious mad- 
 man, Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, 
 Clytaemnestra is sinful and self-sophisticating, 
 Virginia pure and open-minded ; yet all these 
 different people, despite all their differences, 
 speak and act as Alfieri would speak and act, 
 could he, without losing his peculiar character- 
 istics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues 
 which would become quite secondary matters 
 
1 64 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 by the side of his essential qualities of pride, 
 narrowness, decision, violence and self-impor- 
 tance. Whether he paint his face into a smile 
 or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of 
 innocence or the black wig of villainy, the 
 man's movement and gesture, the tone of his 
 voice, the accent of his words, the length of his 
 sentences, are always the same : so much so 
 that in one play there may be two or three 
 Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly 
 virtuous or perfectly vicious ; but anything 
 that is not an Alfieri in some tolerably trans- 
 parent disguise is sure to be a puppet, a lay 
 figure with as few joints as possible, just able 
 to stretch out its arms and clap them to its sides, 
 but dangling suspended between heaven and 
 earth. 
 
 The attitude and the gesture, which are the 
 things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I 
 have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri. 
 But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri 
 happened to be just those which were rarest in 
 the eighteenth century in all countries, and 
 more especially rare in Italy ; and they were 
 the moral attitude and gesture which the 
 eighteenth century absolutely required to be- 
 come the nineteenth, and which the Italy of 
 Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and 
 Goldoni absolutely required to become the 
 
ANTIGONE. 165 
 
 Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of 
 Foscolo and Leopardi ; they were the attitude 
 and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughti- 
 ness, indifference to one's own comfort and 
 one's neighbors' opinion, the attitude and 
 gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of 
 heroism. 
 
 To have written tragedies whose whole value 
 depended upon the striking exhibition of these 
 qualities ; and to have made this exhibition in- 
 teresting, nay, fascinating to the very people, to 
 the amiable, humane, indifferent, lying, feeble- 
 spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, 
 till these very men were ashamed of what they 
 had hitherto been ; to stamp the new generation 
 with the clear-cut die of his own strong charac- 
 ter ; this was the reality of the mission which 
 Alfieri had felt within himself; a reality which 
 will be remembered when his plays shall have 
 long ceased to be acted, and shall long have 
 ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined himself to 
 be a great poetic genius and a great dramatic 
 innovator ; he scorned with loathing the works 
 of Corneille, of Racine and of Voltaire, all im- 
 measurably more valuable as poetry and drama 
 than his ov/n ; he hated the works of Metastasio, 
 a poet and playwright by 'the divine right of 
 genius ; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest 
 Shakespeare should spoil the perfection of his 
 
l66 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 own conceptions. He slaved for months and 
 years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the 
 action, and curtailing the dialogue and polishing 
 the verse ; yet the action was always heavy, the 
 dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse 
 unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-suf- 
 ficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordi- 
 nary labor was not a waste ; Alfieri, who never 
 had a single poetical thought nor a single art- 
 revolutionizing notion, was yet a great genius 
 and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first 
 moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of 
 the nineteenth century. His use consisted in 
 his mere existence among men so different from 
 himself ; and his dramas, his elaborately con- 
 structed and curtailed and corrected dramas, 
 were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which 
 the image of this strange, new-fangled personal- 
 ity might be flashed everywhere into the souls of 
 his contemporaries. To perceive the moral atti- 
 tude and gesture specially characteristic of him- 
 self, to artificially correct and improve and isolate 
 them in his own reality, and then to multiply 
 their likeness for all the world, to know himself 
 to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and 
 to write plays whereof the heroes and heroines 
 were mere repetitions of Alfieri ; such was the 
 mission of this powerful and spontaneous na- 
 ture, of this self-conscious and self-manipulating 
 posezir. 
 
ANTIGONE. 167 
 
 The success of that performance of Antigojie 
 on the amateur stage in the Spanish palace was 
 very great. A young man, half lay, half ecclesi- 
 astic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, 
 accustomed to write not the most sincere poetry, 
 and to execute, perhaps, not the most creditable 
 errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke 
 Braschi — a young man named Vincenzo Monti, 
 was present at this performance, or one of the 
 succeeding ones ; and from that moment became 
 the author of the revolutionary tragedy of A^ds- 
 todeino, the potential author of that famous ode 
 on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners 
 of new Italy. Nay, even when, some few 
 months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate 
 Metastasio, and his death brought home to a 
 rather forgetful world what a poet and what a 
 dramatist that old Metastasio had been ; even 
 then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a 
 worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Ta- 
 ruffi, could find no better winding up for the fu- 
 neral oration, delivered before all the pedants and 
 prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome as- 
 sembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, 
 than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and 
 prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor 
 greater than himself. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SEPARATION. 
 
 Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, 
 perhaps, than at any other time of their Hves ; 
 but this happiness had to be paid for. The false 
 position in which, however faultlessly, they were 
 placed, the illegitimate affection in which, how- 
 ever blamelessly, they were indulging ; these 
 things, offensive to social institutions, although 
 in no manner wrong in themselves, had produced 
 their fruit of humiliation, nay, of degradation. 
 Fate is more of a conservative than we are apt to 
 think ; it resents the efforts of any individual, be 
 he as blameless as possible, to resist for his own 
 comfort and satisfaction the uncomfortable and 
 unsatisfactory arrangements of the world ; it pun- 
 ishes the man who seeks to elude an un j ust law by 
 condemning him' to the same moral police depot, 
 to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who 
 has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed ; 
 and Fate, therefore, soiled the poetic passion of 
 Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the base 
 practices of any illicit love. The manner in 
 
SEPARATION. 1 69 
 
 which Fate executes these summary lynchings 
 of people's honor could not usually be more in- 
 genious ; there seems to be a special arrange- 
 ment by which offenders are punished in their 
 most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri 
 and of Mme. d' Albany for refusing to sacrifice 
 their happiness to the proprieties of a society 
 which married girls of nineteen to drunkards 
 whom they had never seen, but which would not 
 hear of divorce ; this punishment, falling directly 
 only upon the man, but probably just as heavy 
 upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation 
 of the person whom she most loved and respect- 
 ed, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who 
 was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, 
 unflinching, into a toady, a liar and an intriguer. 
 The Countess of Albany, living in the palace 
 of her brother-in-law. Cardinal York, and under 
 the special protection of the Pope, was entirely 
 dependent on the good pleasure of the priestly 
 bureaucracy of the Rome of Pius VI., that is to 
 say, of about the most contemptible and vilest 
 set of fools and hypocrites and sinners that can 
 well be conceived ; the Papacy, just before the 
 Revolution, had become one of the most corrupt 
 of the many corrupt governments of the day. 
 Cardinal York himself was a weak and silly, 
 but honest and kind-hearted man ; but Cardinal 
 York was entirely swayed by the prelates and 
 
I/O COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 priests and priestlets and semi-priestly, semi-lay 
 nondescripts among whom he lived. He was 
 responsible for the honor of the Countess of 
 Albany, that is to say, of her husband and his 
 brother ; and the honor of the Countess of Al- 
 bany depended exactly upon the remarks which 
 the most depraved and hypocritical clergy in 
 Europe, the people who did or abetted all the 
 dirty work of Pius VI . and his sacred college, 
 chose to make or not to make about her 
 conduct. 
 
 Such were the persons upon whom depended 
 the liberty and happiness of Alfieri's lady, the 
 possibility of that high-flown platonic inter- 
 course which constituted Louise d'Albany's 
 whole happiness and Alfieri's strongest incent- 
 ive to glory ; a word from them could exile 
 Alfieri and lock the Countess up in a convent. 
 The consequence of this state of things is hu- 
 miliating to relate, since it shows to what base- 
 ness the most high-minded among us may be 
 force to degrade themselves. Already, during 
 those few days' sojourn in Rome, before his 
 stay in Naples and Mme. d'Albany's release 
 from the Ursuline convent, Alfieri had spent his 
 time running about flattering and wheedling 
 the powers in command (that is to say, the cor- 
 rupt ministers of the Papacy and their retinue 
 of minions and spies), in order to obtain leave 
 
SEPARATION. I/I 
 
 to inhabit the same city as his beloved and to 
 see her from time to time ; doing everything, 
 and stooping to everything, he tells us, in order 
 to be tolerated by those priests and priestlets 
 whom he abhorred and despised from the 
 bottom of his heart. " After so many frenzies 
 and efforts to make myself a free man, " he 
 writes in his autobiography, " I found myself 
 suddenly transformed into a man paying calls, 
 and making bows and fine speeches in Rome, 
 exactly like a candidate on promotion in prel- 
 atedom. " At this price of bitter humiliation, 
 nay, of something more real than mere humilia- 
 tion, Alfieri bought the privilege of frequenting 
 the palace of Cardinal York. But it was a privi- 
 lege for which you could not pay once and for 
 all ; its price was a blackmail of humbugging, 
 wheedling and dirt-eating. ' 
 
 Alfieri hated and despised all sovereigns and 
 all priests ; and if there were a sovereign and a 
 priest whom he despised and hated more than 
 the rest, it was the then reigning Pius VI., a 
 vain, avaricious, weak-minded man, stickling not 
 in the least at humiliating Catholicism before 
 any one who asked him to do it, by no means 
 clean-handed in his efforts to enrich his family, 
 without courage, or fidelity to his promise ; a 
 man whose miserable end as the brutally- 
 treated captive of the French Republic has not 
 
1/2 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 been sufficient to raise to the dignity of a 
 martyr. 
 
 Of this Pope Pius VI. did Alfieri crave an 
 audience, and to him did he offer the dedication 
 of one of his plays ; nay, the man who had sac- 
 rificed his fortune in order to free himself from 
 the comparatively clean-handed despotism of 
 Sardinia, who had stubbornly refused to be pre- 
 sented to Frederick the Great and Catherine 
 II., who had declined making Metastasio's 
 acquaintance on account of a too deferential 
 bow which he had seen the old poet make to 
 Maria Theresa; 'the man who had in his port- 
 folios plays and sonnets and essays intended to 
 teach the world contempt for kings and priests, 
 this man, this Alfieri, submitted to having his 
 cheek patted by Pope Braschi. This stain of 
 baseness and hypocrisy with which, as he says, 
 he contaminated himself, ate like a hidden and 
 shameful sore into Alfieri's soul ; yet, until the 
 moment of writing his autobiography, he had 
 not the courage to display this galling thing of 
 the past even to his most intimate friends. To 
 Louise d' Albany, to the woman between whom 
 and himself he boasted that there was never the 
 slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the 
 force to tell the tale of that interview only some 
 time later. Alfieri, honest enough to lay bare 
 his own self-degradation, was not generous 
 
SEP A RA TION, 1 73 
 
 enough to hide the fact that this self-dcgrada- 
 tion was incurred out of love for her. That her 
 hero should have stooped so low, so low that he 
 scarcely dared to tell even her, surely this must 
 have been as galling to the Countess of Albany 
 as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself ; 
 this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dan- 
 tesque passion, had been dragged down, by the 
 impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating 
 punishment which awaited all the basest love 
 intrigues in this base Rome of the base eight- 
 eenth century. 
 
 And, after some time, the stock of toleration 
 bought at the price of this baseness was ex- 
 hausted. The clerical friends and advisers of 
 Cardinal York, who had hitherto assured the 
 foolish prince of the Church that he was act- 
 ing for the honor of his brother and his broth- 
 er's wife in leaving a young woman of thirty-one 
 to the sole care of a young poet of thirty-four, 
 each being well known to be over head and ears 
 in love with the other ; these prudent ecclesi- 
 astics, little by little, began to change their 
 minds, and the success of Alfieri's plays, the 
 general interest in him and his lady which that 
 success produced, suggested to them that there 
 really might be some impropriety in the fami- 
 liarity between the wife of Charles Edward and 
 the author of Antigone. The train was laid and 
 
174 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the match was soon applied. In April, 1783, 
 the Pretender fell ill in Florence, so ill that his 
 brother was summoned at once to what seemed 
 his death-bed. Charles Edward recovered. 
 But during that illness the offended husband, 
 who, we must remember, had offered a reward 
 for Alfieri's murder, poured out to his brother, 
 moved and reconciled to him by the recent fear 
 of his death, all his grievances against the Tus- 
 can Court, against his wife and against her 
 lover. A letter of Sir Horace Mann makes it 
 clear that Charles Edward persuaded his brother 
 that his ill usage of his wife (which, how- 
 ever, Mann, with his spies everywhere, had 
 vouched for at the time) was a mere invention, 
 and part of an odious plot by which Alfieri 
 had imposed upon the Grand Duke, the Pope, 
 the society of Florence and Rome, nay, upon 
 Cardinal York himself, in order to obtain their 
 connivance in a shameful intrigue develop- 
 ment. 
 
 The Cardinal returned to Rome in a state of 
 indignation proportionate to his previous saintly 
 indifference to the doings of Alfieri and Mme. 
 d'Albany : he discovered that he had been 
 shutting his eyes to what all the world (by 
 Alfieri's own confession) saw as a very hazard- 
 ous state of things ; and, with the tendency to 
 run into extremes of a foolish and weak-minded 
 
SEPARATION, 1/5 
 
 creature, he immediately published from all the 
 housetops the dishonor whose existence had 
 never occurred to him before. To the Count- 
 ess of Albany he intimated that he would not 
 permit her to receive Alfieri under his roof; 
 and of the Pope (the Pope who had so recently 
 patted Alfieri's cheek) he immediately implored 
 an order that Alfieri should quit the Papal 
 States within a fortnight. The order was 
 given ; but Alfieri, in whose truthfulness I 
 have complete faith, says that, knowing that 
 the order had been asked for, he forestalled the 
 ignominy of being banished by spontaneously 
 bidding farewell to the Countess of Albany and 
 to Rome. ''This event," says Alfieri, "upset 
 my brains for nearly two years, and upset and 
 retarded also my work in every way." In 
 speaking of Alfieri's youth I have already had 
 occasion to remark that there was in this man's 
 character something abnormal ; he was, as I 
 have said, a moral invalid from birth ; his very 
 energy and resolution had somewhat of the 
 frenzy and rigidity of a nervous disease, and 
 though he would seem morally stronger than 
 other men when strictly following his self-pre- 
 scribed rule of excessive intellectual exercise, 
 and when surrounded by a soothing atmosphere 
 of affection and encouragement, his old malady 
 of melancholy and rage (melancholy and rage 
 
176 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 whom he represents in one of his sonnets as 
 two horrible-faced women seated on either side 
 of him), his old incapacity for work, for interest 
 in anything, his old feverish restlessness of place, 
 returned, as a fever returns with its heat and 
 cold and impotence and delirium, whenever he 
 was shut out of this atmosphere of happiness, 
 whenever he was exposed to any sort of moral 
 hardship. On leaving Rome Alfieri went to 
 Siena, where, years before, when he had come 
 light-hearted and bent only upon literary fame, 
 to learn Tuscan, he had been introduced into a 
 little circle of men and women whom he faith- 
 fully loved, and to that Francesco Gori who 
 shared with Tommaso di Caluso the rather try- 
 ing honor of being his bosom friend. This 
 Gori, "an incomparable man," writes Alfieri, 
 " good, compassionate, and with all his auster- 
 ity and ruggedness of virtue {con tanta altezza 
 e ferocia di sensi) most gentle," appears literally 
 to have nursed Alfieri in this period of moral 
 sickness as one might nurse a sick or badly- 
 bruised child. "Without him," writes Alfieri, 
 " I think I should most likely have gone mad. 
 But he, although he saw in me a would-be hero 
 so disgracefully broken in spirit and inferior to 
 himself" (this passage is characteristic, as show- 
 ing that Alfieri considered himself, when in a 
 normal condition, far superior to his much-praised 
 
SEPARATION. ' 1 7/ 
 
 Gori), ''although he knew better tnan any the 
 meaning of courage and endurance, did not, 
 therefore, cruelly and inopportunely oppose his 
 severe and frozen reason to my frenzies, but, 
 on the contrary, diminished my pain by divid- 
 ing it with me. O rare, O truly heavenly gift, 
 this of being able both to reason and to feel." 
 
 Weeping and raving, Alfieri was living once 
 more upon letters received and sent as during 
 his previous separation from Mme. d' Albany; 
 and of all these love-letters, none appear to have 
 come down to us. Carefully preserved by Mme. 
 d' Albany and by her heir Fabre, they fell into 
 the hands of a Mr. Gache of Montpellier, who 
 assumed the grave responsibility of destroying 
 them and of thus suppressing forever the most 
 important evidence in the law-suit which poster- 
 ity will forever be bringing against Alfieri and 
 Mme. d'Albany in favor of Charles Edward, or 
 against Charles Edward in favor of Alfieri and 
 Mme. d'Albany. But some weeks ago, among 
 the pile of the Countess' letters to Sienese 
 friends preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri 
 at Siena, I had the good fortune to discover what 
 are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously 
 intended for Alfieri, although addressed to his 
 friend Francesco Gori. I confess that an eerie 
 feeling came over me as I unfolded these five 
 closely-written, unsigned and undated little 
 
1 78 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 squares of yellow paper, things intended so ex- 
 clusively for the mere moment of writing and 
 reading, all that long-dead momentary passion 
 of a long-dead man and woman quivering back 
 into reality, filling, as an assembly of ghosts 
 might fill a house and drive out its living occu- 
 pants, this present hour which so soon will itself 
 have become, with all its passions and worries, 
 a part of the past, of the indifferent, the passion- 
 less. One is frightened on being admitted to 
 witness, unperceived, as by the opening of a 
 long-locked door, or by some spell said over a 
 crystal globe or a beryl stone, such passion as 
 this ; one feels as if one would almost rather 
 not. These five letters, as I have said, are ad- 
 dressed to a *' Dear Signor Francesco, friend of 
 my friend," and who, of course, is Francesco 
 Gori ; and are written, which no other letters of 
 Mme. d' Albany's are, not in French, but in tol- 
 erably idiomatic but far from correct Italian. 
 Only one of them has any indication of place or 
 date, "Genzano, Mardi;" but this, and the ref- 
 erences to Alfieri's approaching journey north- 
 ward and to Gori's intention of escorting him as 
 far as Genoa, is sufficient to show that they 
 must have been written in the summer of 1783, 
 when Cardinal York, terrified at the liberty 
 which he had allowed to his sister-in-law, had 
 conveyed her safely to some villa in the Alban 
 
SEPARATION. 1/9 
 
 Hills. The woman who wrote these letters is a 
 strangely different being from the quiet jog- 
 trot, rather cynically philosophical Countess of 
 Albany whom we know from all her other innu- 
 merable manuscript letters, from the published 
 answers of Sismondi, of Foscolo and of Mme. 
 de Souza to letters of hers which have disap- 
 peared. The hysterical frenzy of Alfieri seems 
 to have entered into this woman ; he has worked 
 up this naturally placid but malleable soul, this 
 woman in bad health, deprived of all friends, 
 jealously guarded by enemies, weak and de- 
 pressed, until she has become another himself, 
 "weeping, raving," like himself, but unable to 
 relieve, perhaps to enjoy, all this frantic grief 
 by running about like the mad Orlando, or talk- 
 ing and weeping by the hour to a compassionate 
 Gori. 
 
 " Dear Signor Francesco," she writes, "■ how 
 grateful I am to you for your compassion. You 
 can 't have, a notion of our unhappiness. My 
 misery is not in the least less than that of our 
 friend. There are moments when I feel my 
 heart torn to pieces thinking of all that he must 
 suffer. I have no consolation except your being 
 with him, and that is something. Never let 
 him remain alone. He is worse, and I know 
 that he greatly enjoys your society, for you are 
 the only person who does not bore him and 
 
I80 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 whom he always meets with pleasure. Oh! 
 dear Signer Francesco, in what a sea of miseries 
 are we not ! You also, because our miseries are 
 certainly also yours. I no longer live ; and if it 
 were not for my friend, for whom I am keeping 
 myself, I would not drag out this miserable life. 
 What do I do in this world .'' I am a useless 
 creature in it ; and why should I suffer when it 
 is of no use to any one .? But my friend — I 
 cannot make up my mind to leave him, and he 
 must live for his own glory ; and as long as he 
 lives, even if I had to walk on my hands, I 
 would suffer and live. Who knows what will 
 happen, it is so long since the man in Florence 
 (Charles Edward) is ill, and still he lives, and it 
 seems to me that he is made of iron in order 
 that we may all die. You will say, in order to 
 console me, that he can 't last ; but I see things 
 clearly. This illness has not made him younger, 
 but he may live another couple of years. He 
 may at any moment be suffocated by the 
 humors which have risen to his chest. What a 
 cruel thing to expect one's happiness from the 
 death of another ! O God ! how it degrades 
 one's soul ! And yet I cannot refrain from 
 wishing it. What a thing, what a horrible 
 thing is life ; and for me it has been a continual 
 suffering, all except the two years that I spent 
 with my friend, and even then I lived in the 
 
SEPARATION. l8l 
 
 midst of fears. And you also are probably not 
 happy ; with a heart like yours it is not possible 
 that you should be. Whoever is born with any 
 feeling can scarcely enjoy happiness. I recom- 
 mend our friend to your care, particularly his 
 health. Mine is not so bad ; I take care of my- 
 self and stay much in bed to kill the time and 
 to rest my nerves, which are very weak. Good- 
 bye, dear Signor Francesco ; preserve your 
 friendship for me ; I deserve it, since I appreci- 
 ate you." 
 
 Later on she writes again: — 
 
 " Dear Signor Francesco, friend of ours. I 
 do all I can to take courage. I study as much 
 as I can. Music aione distracts my thoughts, 
 or rather deadens them, and I play the harp 
 many hours a day, and I do so also because I 
 know that my friend wishes me to get to play 
 it well. I work at it as hard as I can. I live 
 only for him ; without him life would be odious 
 to me, and I could not endure it, I do nothing 
 in this world ; I am useless in it ; and where is 
 the use of suffering for nothing t But there is 
 my friend, and I must remain on this earth. I 
 do not doubt of him ; I know how much he 
 loves me. But in moments of suffering I have 
 fears lest he should find some one who would 
 give him less pain than myself, with whom he 
 might live cheerful and happy. I ought to 
 
1 82 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 wish it, but I have not got the strength to do 
 so. But I believe so fully in him that I am sat- 
 isfied as soon as he tells me that such a thing 
 cannot happen. I love him more than myself ; 
 it is a union of feeling which we only can 
 understand. 1 find in him all that I can desire ; 
 he is everything for me ; and yet I must suffer 
 separation from him. Certainly if I could come 
 to a violent decision I should be the happiest 
 woman in the world ; I should never think of 
 the past ; I should live in him and for him, for 
 I care for nothing in this world. Comfort, lux- 
 ury, position, all is vanity for me ; peace by his 
 side would suffice for me. And yet I am con- 
 demned to languish far from him. What a 
 horrible life ! " 
 
 Again she writes to Gori : — 
 
 **Dear friend, I am so very, very grateful for 
 the interest you take in my unhappy situation, 
 which is really terrible. Time serves only to 
 aggravate it, and certainly it will bring no allevia- 
 tion to my misery until I shall meet our friend. 
 There is no peace, no tranquillity for me. I 
 would give whatever of life may remain to me 
 in order to live for one day with him, and I 
 should be satisfied. My feelings for him are 
 unchangeable, and I am sure that his for me are 
 the same. When shall I see the end of my 
 woes } Who knows whether I shall ever see 
 
SEPARATION. 1 83 
 
 it ? That man (Charles Edward) does not seem 
 inclined to depart .... I suffer a little from my 
 nerves .... but those are the least of my suf- 
 ferings. It is the heart which suffers. I have 
 moments of despair when I could throw myself 
 out of the window were it not for the thought 
 that I must live for my friend's sake ; that my 
 life is his. I feel a disgust for life which is so 
 reasoned out that I say to myself sometimes, 
 *Why do I live.? What good do I do.?' and 
 then I Continue to suffer patiently, remembering 
 my friend. Forgive me for unbosoming myself 
 with you, who alone can understand me ; you 
 alone, except my friend, understand what I suf- 
 fer. Do you know, you ought to come and see 
 me this winter, you would give me such a pleas- 
 ure. Good-bye, dear Signor Francesco ; pre- 
 serve your friendship for me." 
 
 Thus she runs on, repeating and re-repeating 
 the same ideas, the same words, her love for 
 Alfieri, her desperate situation, her hatred of 
 life, her uselessness, her desire to play the harp 
 well for Alfieri's sake, her hopes that Charles 
 Edward may die ; disconnected phrases run into 
 each other without so much as a comma or a 
 full stop (since I have had to punctuate my trans- 
 lation, at least partially, to make it intelligible) ; 
 the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discur- 
 sive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, 
 
1 84 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as 
 suddenly coming to a dead stop ; everything 
 rattled off as if between two sobs or two con- 
 vulsions. Did Alfieri enjoy receiving letters 
 such as these ? Doubtless ; they were echoes 
 of his own ravings — fuel for his own passion 
 and vanity. It did not strike him, for all the 
 Greek and Roman heroes and heroines whom 
 he had made to speak with stoical, unflinching 
 curtness, that there could be anything to move 
 shame, and compassion sickened by shame, in 
 the fact that this should be the expression of 
 that high and pure love imitated from Dante 
 and Petrarch. What could he do } Give up 
 Louise d'Albany, forget her, and bid her who 
 lived only in him, whom a few years must free, 
 forget him at the price of breaking her heart ? 
 Certainly not. But he, the man, the man free to 
 move about, to work, with friends and occupa- 
 tions, should surely have tried to teach resigna- 
 tion and patience to this poor, lonely, sick, 
 hysterical woman, pointing out to her that if only 
 they would wait, and wait courageously, the mo- 
 ment of liberation and happiness must come. 
 Surely more difficult and humiliating for this 
 lover to bear than the sight of his lady degraded 
 by the foul words and deeds of the drunken Pre- 
 tender, ought to have been the reading of such 
 letters as these ; the sight of this once calm and 
 
SEPARATION. 1 85 
 
 dignified woman, of this Beatrice or Laura, in her 
 disconnected hysterical ravings. And for myself, 
 the thought of all that the Countess of Albany en- 
 dured at the hands of Charles Edward awakens 
 less pity, though pity mixed with indignation at 
 the fate which humiliated her so deeply, and 
 with shame for that deep humiliation, than that 
 sudden cry with which she stops in the midst of 
 the light-headed gabble about her miseries, and 
 seems to start back ashamed as at the sight of 
 her passion and tear-defiled face in a mirror : 
 "What a cruel thing to expect one's happiness 
 from the death of another ! O God ! how it de- 
 grades one's soul ! " 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 COLMAR. 
 
 "On the 17th August, 1784, at eight in the 
 morning, at the inn of the Two Keys, Colmar, 
 I met her, and remained speechless from excess 
 of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on 
 the margin of one of his lyrics. 
 
 The hour of liberty and happiness had come 
 for Alfieri and Mme. d' Albany ; sooner by far 
 than they expected, and sooner, we may think, 
 than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, 
 however, not in the face of the law. Charles 
 Edward was still alive ; but, pressed by King 
 Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to 
 wheedle out of some most unnecessary money, 
 he had consented to a legal separation from his 
 fugitive wife ; as a result of which the Countess 
 of Albany, renouncing all money supplies from 
 the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a 
 share of the two pensions, French and Papal, 
 granted to her husband, was permitted to spend 
 a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased, 
 provided she returned for a while to show her- 
 
COLMAR 187 
 
 self in the Papal States. On hearing the un- 
 expected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the 
 Apennines of Modena with fourteen horses 
 that he had been to buy in England, was seized 
 with a violent temptation to send his caravan 
 along the main road, and gallop by cross-paths 
 to meet the Countess, who was crossing the 
 Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome 
 to the baths of Baden in Switzerland. The 
 thought of her honor and safety restrained him, 
 and he pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on 
 a previous occasion, his stern resolution not to 
 seek his lady soon gave way ; and two months 
 later followed that meeting at the Two Keys at 
 Colmar on the Rhine. 
 
 For the first time in those seven long years 
 of platonic passion, Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany 
 found themselves settled beneath the same roof. 
 To the mind of this Italian man, and this half- 
 French, half-German woman of the eighteenth 
 century, for whom marriage was one of the sac- 
 raments of a religion in which they wholly dis- 
 believed, and one of the institutions of a society 
 which alleviated it with universal adultery ; to 
 Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation 
 from Charles Edward Stuart was equivalent to 
 a divorce. The Pretender could no longer pre- 
 scribe any line of conduct to his wife ; she was 
 free to live where and with whom she chose ; 
 
l88 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and if she were not free to marry, the idea, the 
 wish for marriage, probably never crossed the 
 brains of these two platonic lovers of seven 
 years' standing. Marriage was a social contract 
 between people who wished to obtain each 
 other's money and titles and lands — who wished 
 to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all 
 his property to his sister, and the Countess, 
 who lived on a pension, had no money or titles 
 or lands to throw together ; and they certainly 
 neither of them, the man living entirely for his 
 work, the woman living entirely for the man, 
 had the smallest desire to have children, heirs 
 to nothing at all. What injury could their liv- 
 ing together now do to Charles Edward, who 
 had relinquished all his husband's rights .^ None, 
 evidently. On the other hand, what harm could 
 their living together do to their own honor or 
 happiness, now that they had had seven years' 
 experience that only death could extinguish 
 their affection } None, again evidently. And 
 as to harm to the institutions of society, what 
 were those institutions, and what was their 
 value, that they should be respected } Such, 
 could we have questioned them, would have 
 been the answers of Alfieri and the Countess. 
 That they were setting an example to others 
 less pure in mind, less exceptional in position ; 
 that they were making it more difficult for mar- 
 
COLMAR. 189 
 
 riage to be reorganized on a more rational plan, 
 by showing men and women a something that 
 might do instead of rationally organized mar- 
 riage ; that they were, in short, preventing the 
 law from being rectified, by taking the law into 
 their own hands ; such thoughts could not enter 
 into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth 
 century, people for whom the great Revolution, 
 Romanticism, and the new views of society 
 which grew out of both, were still in the future. 
 That a punishment should await them, that as 
 time went on and youthful passion diminished, 
 their lives should be barren and silent and cold 
 for want of all those things, children, legal 
 bonds, social recognition, by which their union 
 should fall short of a real marriage ; this they 
 could never anticipate. 
 
 For the moment, united in the ** excessively 
 cleon and comfortable " little chateau, rented by 
 Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Col- 
 mar ; riding and driving about in the lovely 
 Rhine country ; the Countess deep in her read- 
 ing again, Alfieri deep once more in his writ- 
 ings ; together, above all, after so many months 
 of separation, they seemed perfectly happy — 
 so happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must 
 come to restore the natural balance of things ; 
 and the misfortune came, in the sudden news of 
 the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as 
 
IQO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 of guiltiness at having half forgotten that 
 thoughtful and gentle friend, in the first flush of 
 their happiness, seems to have come over them. 
 
 " O God ! " wrote Alfieri to Gori's friend Bi- 
 anchi at Siena, "• I don't know what I shall do. 
 I always see him and speak to him, and every 
 smallest word and thought and gesture of his 
 returns to my mind and stabs my heart. I do 
 not feel very sorry for him : he cared little for 
 life for its own sake, and the life which he was 
 forced to lead was too far below his great soul, 
 and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, 
 and the nobility of his noble scornfulness. The 
 person dearest to me of any, and immediately 
 next to whom I loved Checco [Gori] most, knew 
 and appreciated him and is not to be consoled 
 for such a loss. I told him already last July, 
 so many, .many times, that he was not well, that 
 he was growing visibly thinner day by day. 
 Oh ! I ought never to have left him in this 
 state." 
 
 A letter, this one on Gori's death, which 
 may induce us to forgive the letters of Alfieri 
 of which we have seen a reflection in those of 
 Mme. d'Albany : the passionate grief for the 
 lost friend making us feel that there is some- 
 thing noble in the possibility of even the 
 morbid grief at the lost mistress. More touch- 
 ing still, bringing home what each of us, alas ! 
 
COLMAR. 191 
 
 must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one 
 who is not our kith and kin, whom the thoughts 
 of our nearest and dearest, of our work, of all 
 those things which the world recognizes as ours 
 in a sense in which the poor beloved dead was 
 not, does not permit us to mourn in such a way 
 as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for 
 whom, half suppressed, comes but the more 
 pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the present 
 and future, all where he or she is not, a blank ; 
 more touching than any letter in which Alfieri 
 gives free vent to his grief for poor Gori, is that 
 note which he wrote upon the manuscript of 
 his poem on Duke Alexander's murder, after 
 the annotation saying that this work was re- 
 sumed at Siena, the 17th July, 1784: "O God! 
 and the friend of my heart was still living 
 then;" the words which a man speaks or writes 
 only for himself, feeling that no one, not those 
 even who are the very flesh and blood of his 
 heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that 
 terrible pang at suddenly seeing the past- so 
 close within his reach, so hopelessly beyond his 
 grasp. 
 
 The death of Gori seemed the only circum- 
 stance which diminished the happiness of Al- 
 fieri and Mme. d'Albany ; nay, it is not heart- 
 less, surely, to say that, cruel as was that 
 wound, there was doubtless a quite special, sad 
 
192 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, 
 in the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling 
 in affliction, the new energy of affection which 
 comes to the survivors whenever Death calls 
 out the warning, *' Love each other while I still 
 let you." But they had still to pay, and pay 
 in many instalments, the price of happiness 
 snatched before its legitimate time. 
 
 Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the 
 Countess could not, therefore, take him back 
 with her to Italy, where, according to the stipu- 
 lations of the act of separation, she was bound 
 to spend the greater part of every year. Hence 
 the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those in the 
 succeeding years, were merely so many inter- 
 ludes of happiness in the dreary life of separa- 
 tion ; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one of 
 his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the 
 thought that every day and every hour was 
 bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. 
 
 The day came ; Alfieri had to take leave of 
 Mme. d' Albany, and, as he expresses it, had to 
 return to much worse gloom than before, being 
 separated from his lady without having the con- 
 solation of seeing Gori once more. Mechani- 
 cally he returned to Siena, to Siena which it 
 was impossible to conceive without his friend 
 Checco ; but when he realized the empty house, 
 the empty town, he found the place he had so 
 
COLMAR, 193 
 
 loved insupportable, and went to spend his long 
 solitary winter writing, reading, translating, 
 breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass 
 the weary time, at Pisa. In April, 1785, Mme. 
 d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna, 
 where she had spent the winter, and to go to 
 her sisters in France. In September she and 
 her lover met once more in the beloved country 
 house on the Rhine. But again in December 
 came another separation ; Mme. d'Albany went 
 to Paris and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar. 
 
 " Shall we then be again separated," he writes 
 in a sonnet, ** by cruel and lying opinion, which 
 blames us for errors which the whole world com- 
 mits every day } Unhappy that I am ! The 
 more I love thee with true and loyal love, the 
 more must I ever refuse myself that for which 
 I am always longing ; thy sweet sight, beyond 
 which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar can- 
 not understand this, and knows us but little, 
 and does not see that thy pure heart is the seat 
 of virtue." 
 
 Strange words, and which, coming from a man 
 cynical and truthful as Alfieri, may make us 
 pause and refuse to affirm that this strange love, 
 platonic for seven long years, ceased to be a 
 mere passionate friendship even when it resorted 
 to the secrecy and deceptions of a mere com- 
 mon intrigue ; even when it openly braved, in 
 7 
 
194 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the semblance of marriage, the opinion of the 
 world at large. During those many months of 
 solitude in the villa at Colmar, with no other 
 company than that of his Sienese servant or sec- 
 retary and of the horses, whose news he carefully 
 sent, in letters and sonnets, to the Countess, Al- 
 fieri appears for the first time to have got into a 
 habit of excessive overwork, and to have had 
 the first serious attack of the gout : overwork 
 and gout, the two things which were to kill him. 
 A six months' stay in Paris, where society, the 
 business of printing his works, and the great 
 distance of his lodgings from the house of Mme. 
 d' Albany, diminished his intellectual work, kept 
 him up for the moment. But in the following 
 summer of the year 1787, shortly after he had 
 returned to Colmar with the Countess, and had 
 welcomed as a guest Tommaso di Caluso, his 
 greatest friend since Gori's death, he suddenly 
 broke down under a terrific attack of dysentery. 
 F'or many days, reduced to a skeleton, ice-cold 
 even under burning applications, and just sufiEi- 
 ciently alive to feel in his intensely proud and 
 masculine nature the cruel degradation of an ill- 
 ness which made him an object of loathing to 
 himself, Alfieri remained at death's door, devot- 
 edly tended by his beloved and by his friend. 
 
 "It grieved me dreadfully to think that I 
 should die, leaving my lady, and my friend, and 
 
COLMAR. 195 
 
 that fame scarcely rough-hewn for which I had 
 worked and frenzied myself so terribly for more 
 than ten years," writes Alfieri; **for I felt very 
 keenly that of all the writings which I should 
 leave behind me, not one was completed and 
 finished as it should have been had time been 
 given me to complete and perfect according to 
 my ideas. On the other hand, it was a great 
 consolation to know that if I must die I should 
 die a free man, and between the two best be- 
 loved persons that I had, and whose love and 
 esteem I believed myself to possess and to de- 
 serve. 
 
 Alfieri recovered. But with that illness 
 ends, I think, the period of his youth, and of 
 his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought 
 and passionate austerity and independence of 
 character which was to him what artistic en- 
 dowment is to other writers ; and with that ill- 
 ness begins a premature old age, *mental and 
 moral, decrepitude gradually showing itself in a 
 kind of ossification of the whole personality; 
 the decrepitude which corresponds, on the other 
 side of a brief manhood of comparative strength 
 and health, to the morally inert and sickly years 
 of Alfieri's strange youth. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 
 
 Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme sim- 
 plicity of mind and gentleness of spirit, was still 
 living at Asti, cheerfully depriving herself of 
 every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as 
 she devoted her thoughts and her strength, to 
 the services of the poor and of the sick. Al- 
 fieri, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely 
 seen her except for a few hours at rare intervals, 
 looked up to her less with the affection of a 
 son than with the satisfaction of an artist who 
 sees in the woman of whom he is born the 
 peculiar type of features or character which he 
 prizes most in womankind ; if he, for all his 
 conscious weaknesses, was more like his own 
 heroes than any man of his acquaintance, if 
 Mme. d' Albany might be j udiciously got up as the 
 Laura of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri 
 was even more unmistakably the mother who 
 suited his ideas, the living model of his mother 
 of Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha. To the 
 Countess Alfieri he had, already in 1784, intro- 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE, 197 
 
 duced the Countess of Albany, whom she 
 invited to stay with her on her passage through 
 Asti as she returned from Colmar into Italy. 
 Mme. d'Albany found an excuse for not accept- 
 ing in the bad state of the roads, which ren- 
 dered another route than that of Asti preferable. 
 Frank and indifferent to the world's opinion as 
 was Mme. d'Albany, her originally cut-and-dry 
 intellectual temper hardened by many years' 
 misery, one can conceive that she should shrink 
 from accepting the hospitality of Alfieri's 
 mother. Alfieri had doubtless shown her his 
 mother's letters, and from these letters, as re- 
 flected in his answers, it is clear that the 
 Countess of Albany, returning from that first 
 stay with her lover at Colmar, would have felt 
 that she was tacitly deceiving the noble old 
 lady under whose roof she was staying. For the 
 Countess Alfieri, noble and Italian, and woman 
 of the eighteenth century though she was, 
 seems to have been one of those persons into 
 whose mind, high removed above all worldly 
 concerns, no 'experience of vice, of weakness, 
 nay, of mere equivocal situations, can enter. 
 Whatever she may have seen or heard in her 
 youth of the habits of women of her century 
 and station, of the virtual divorce which, after 
 a few years, reigned in aristocratic houses, of 
 authorized lovers and socially accepted infidelity. 
 
198 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 seems to have passed out of her memory and 
 left her mind as innocent as it may have been 
 during her convent school-days. She had taken 
 great interest in this poor young woman, mal- 
 treated by a drunken husband, and finally saved 
 from his clutches by the benevolence of the 
 Grand Duke of Tuscany and of a prince of the 
 Church, about whom her son had written to 
 her. That her son experienced more than her 
 own pity for so worthy an object, that he was 
 at all compromised in the fate of this virtuous, 
 unhappy lady, never entered her mind. So 
 little could she understand the muddy things of 
 this world, that in 1789, when Alfieri was pub- 
 licly living with Mme. d' Albany at Colmar, 
 the Countess Alfieri sent him, through his 
 friend Caluso, the suggestion of a match which 
 she had greatly at heart, between him and a 
 young lady of Asti, ''fifteen or sixteen years 
 old, without any faults, such as he would cer- 
 tainly like, cultivated, docile and clever." It is 
 one of the things which grate upon one most in 
 Alfieri's character, and which show that how- 
 ever much he might be cast and have chiselled 
 himself in antique heroic form, he was yet made 
 of the same stuff as his contemporaries, to find 
 that he and his friend Caluso merely amused 
 themselves immensely at this proposal of mar- 
 riage, and concocted a dutiful letter to the old 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 1 99 
 
 Countess explaining that matrimony was not at 
 present in his plans. What would Mme. Al- 
 fieri have thought had she known the truth ! 
 It is very sad to think how, in some cases, the 
 very noblest and purest, just because they are 
 so completely noble and pure and above all the 
 base necessities of the world of passion, must 
 be unable to see, in the doings of others less 
 fortunate than themselves, those very elements 
 of nobility and purity which redeem the baser 
 circumstances of their lives. That Mme. 
 d' Albany had loved a man not her husband, had 
 fled from her husband and united her life to 
 that of her lover, would be a horror visible to 
 the old Countess' eyes ; the platonic purity, the 
 fidelity, the loyalty of this long and illegitimate 
 love, would have escaped her. No art is so 
 cruelly contemptuous of whatever of beauty and 
 sweetness imperfect reality may contain, as the 
 art which is able to attain an ideal perfection ; 
 and thus it is also in matters of appreciation of 
 man by man and woman by woman. The 
 Countess of Albany was apparently more frank 
 than Alfieri, because frank rather from temper- 
 ament than from pre-occupation about a given 
 ideal of conduct. 
 
 That the mother of Alfieri should understand 
 so little seems to have worried her ; and when 
 the unsuspecting old lady asked her sympathiz- 
 
200 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ■>» 
 ingly for news of Charles Edward, she wrote 
 back as follows : '* As to my husband he is 
 better ; but I must confess to you, madame, 
 that I cannot take so lively an interest in him 
 as you suppose, for he made me, during nine 
 years, the most wretched woman that ever 
 lived. If I do not hate him it is a result of 
 Christian charity, and because we are desired 
 to pardon. He drags out a miserable life, aban- 
 doned by all the world, without relatives or 
 friends, given over to his servants ; but he has 
 willed it thus, since he has never been able to 
 live with any one. Forgive me, madame, for 
 having entered into such details with you ; but 
 the friendship which you have shown towards 
 me obliges me to speak sincerely." Mme. 
 d' Albany, writing some time before to condole 
 about the death of Alfieri's half-brother, had 
 tried to insinuate to the old Countess what her 
 son was for her, and what position she herself 
 might one day assume in the Alfieri family : 
 *'I hope that if circumstances change, you 
 will not see a family die out to which you are 
 so attached, and that you will receive the great- 
 est consolation from M. le Comte Alfieri." 
 Words which could only mean that when the 
 Pretender died Mme. Alfieri might hope for a 
 daughter-in-law in the writer, and for grand- 
 children through her. But Mme. Alfieri did 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 20I 
 
 not understand ; imagining, perhaps, that Mme. 
 d' Albany was alluding to some project of mar- 
 riage of her friend M. le Comte Alfieri ; and 
 the letter in which the ill-treated wife's aver- 
 sion to her husband was first openly revealed 
 appears to have acted as a thunder-clap, and to 
 have, at least momentarily, put an end to all 
 correspondence. 
 
 The Countess of Albany was mistaken in 
 supposing that Charles Edward would die in 
 the arms of mere servants. The very year 
 after her own separation from Alfieri, the Pre- 
 tender had called to Florence the natural daugh- 
 ter born to him by Miss Walkenshaw, and whom 
 he had left, apparently forgotten for twenty- 
 five years, in the convent at Meaux, where her 
 mother had taken refuge from his brutalities, 
 even as Louise d' Albany had taken refuge from 
 them in the convent of the Bianchette. Partly 
 from a paternal feeling born of the unexpected 
 solitude in which his wife's flight had left him ; 
 partly, doubtless, from a desire to spite the 
 Countess ; he had solemnly, as King of Eng- 
 land, legitimated this daughter, and created her 
 Duchess of Albany: he had made incredible 
 efforts, abandoning drink, going into the world, 
 and keeping open house, to attach this young 
 woman to him and to treat her as well as he 
 had treated his wife ill. 
 
202 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Charlotte of Albany, a strong, lively, good- 
 humored, big creature, devoted to gaiety, effect- 
 ually reformed her father in his last years, and 
 turned him from the brute he had been to a 
 tolerably well-behaved old man. But we must 
 not, therefore, conclude that Charlotte was a 
 better woman, or a woman more desirous of 
 doing her duty, than Louise d'Albany. Be- 
 tween the two there was an abyss : Charlotte 
 had been sent for by a man weary of solitude, 
 smarting under the frightful punishment brought 
 upon his pride by the flight of his wife ; ready 
 to do anything in order not to be alone and de- 
 spised by the world ; a man broken by illness 
 and age, weak, hysterical, incapable almost of 
 his former excesses ; and Charlotte was a woman 
 of thirty, she was a daughter, she was free to 
 go where she would to marry, and her father 
 could buy her presence only at the price of sub- 
 mission to her tastes and to her desires. 
 
 How different had it not been with Louise of 
 Stolberg : united to this man twelve years be- 
 fore, a mere child of nineteen, given over to him 
 as his wife, his chattel, his property, to torment 
 and lock up as he might torment and lock up 
 his dog or his horse ; losing all influence over 
 him with every day which made her less of a 
 novelty and diminished the chance of an heir ; 
 and sickened and alarmed more and more by the 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 203 
 
 obstinate jealousy and drunkenness and brutality 
 of a man still in the vigor of his odious passions. 
 Still, the fact remains that while Louise d'Al- 
 bany was secretly or openly making light of 
 all social institutions, and living as the mistress, 
 almost the wife, of Alfieri ; this insignificant 
 Charlotte, this bastard of a Miss Walkenshaw, 
 this woman who had probably never had an en- 
 thusiasm, or an ideal, or a thought, had succeed- 
 ed in reclaiming whatever there remained of 
 human in the degraded Charles Edward ; had 
 succeeded in doing the world the service of 
 laying out at least with decency and decorum 
 this living corpse which had once contained the 
 soul of a hero, so that posterity might look upon 
 it without too much contempt and loathing, nay, 
 almost, seeing it so quiet and seemingly peace- 
 ful, with compassion and reverence. 
 
 And when, at the beginning of February, 1788, 
 the Countess of Albany, in the full enjoyment 
 of her love for Alfieri, and of the pleasures of 
 the most brilliant Parisian society, received the 
 news that on the last day of January Charles Ed- 
 ward had passed away peacefully in the arms of 
 the Duchess Charlotte, and that the drink-soiled, 
 broken body, from which she must so often have 
 recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, 
 with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden 
 sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the 
 
204 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news 
 reached Paris, this woman, so confident of hav- 
 ing been in the right, and who had written so 
 frankly that if she did not hate her husband is 
 was from mere Christian charity and the duty of 
 forgiveness, felt herself smitten by an unexpect- 
 ed grief. 
 
 Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, 
 and to whose cut-and-dry nature it must have 
 seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in 
 a way overawed by this sudden emotion at the 
 death of the man who had made both lovers so 
 miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so nar- 
 row a temper, of all that may move our sympa- 
 thy in that, to him, unintelligible grief, is, I 
 think, one of the facts in his life which brings 
 this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet re- 
 pulsive character, most within reach of our affec- 
 tion ; as that same grief, so unexpected by herself, 
 at what was after all her final deliverance, is, to- 
 gether with the letter to Alfieri's mother telling 
 of her hatred to Charles Edward, and that excla- 
 mation in the hysterical love-letter at Siena — 
 " O God ! how this degrades the soul ! " — one 
 of the things which persuade us that this woman 
 whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly and 
 cynical, did really possess at bottom what her 
 lover called '^a most upright and sincere and 
 incomparable soul." 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 205 
 
 "For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sien- 
 ese friends on the occasion of Charles Edward's 
 death, ''nothing will be altered in our mode of 
 life." In other words, the Countess of Albany 
 and he*r lover, established publicly beneath the 
 same roof in Paris, did not intend getting mar- 
 ried. Whatever hopes may have filled Mme. 
 d' Albany's heart when, years before, she had 
 hinted to Alfieri's mother that when certain 
 circumstances changed, the Alfieri family should 
 be saved from extinction ; whatever ideas Alfieri 
 had had in his mind when he prayed in a sonnet 
 for the happy day when he might call his love 
 holy ; whatever intention of repairing the in- 
 jury done to social institutions, may at one time 
 have mingled with the lovers' remorse and the 
 lovers* temptations, — had now been completely 
 forgotten. 
 
 We have seen how, more than once, love, 
 however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to 
 put aside all his republican sternness and truth- 
 fulness, and to cringe before people whom 
 he thoroughly despised ; we cannot easily for- 
 get that ignominious stroking of the Brutus 
 poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now 
 see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical 
 virtue, cultivated by Alfieri in himself and in 
 his beloved as the one admirable thing in the 
 world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-cen- 
 
206 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 tury baseness, had nevertheless withered in 
 several of its branches, beaten by the wind of 
 illegitimate passion, and dried up by the cal- 
 lousness of an immoral state of society : an 
 exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, 
 come before its season, and bleached and 
 warped like a winter flower. 
 
 Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, 
 simply, I think, because they did not care to 
 get married ; because marriage would entail 
 reorganization of a mode of life which had 
 somehow organized itself ; because it would 
 give a commonplace prose solution to what 
 appeared a romantic and exceptional story ; and 
 finally because it might necessitate certain 
 losses in the way of money, of comfort and of 
 rank. 
 
 One sees throughout all his autobiography 
 and letters that Alfieri drew a sharp distinction 
 between love and marriage ; that he conceived 
 marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, 
 so to say, in his native place, goes in for having 
 children, for being master in his own house, 
 administering and increasing his estates, and 
 generally devoting himself to the advancement 
 of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essen- 
 tially a routinist, respected and approved of 
 marriage ; and anything different would have 
 struck his martinet, rule-and-compass mind as 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 20/ 
 
 ridiculous and contemptible. In giving up his 
 fortune to his sister, Alfieri had deliberately 
 cut himself off from the possibility of such a 
 marriage ; moreover, putting aside the financial 
 question, his notion of the liberty of a writer, 
 who must be able to speak freely against any 
 government, was incompatible with his notion 
 of a father of a family, settled in dignity in his 
 ancestral palace ; and finally, I feel perfectly 
 persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which 
 saw things only in sharpest black and white 
 contrasts, there existed a still more complete 
 incompatibility between a woman like the 
 Countess of Albany, and a wife such as he con- 
 ceived a wife : to marry Mme. d'AlTjany would 
 be to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domes- 
 ticity, and at the same time to frightfully depart 
 from the normal type of matrimony, which re- 
 quired that the man be absolute master, and 
 not afflicted with any sort of sentimental re- 
 spect for his better half. 
 
 According to Alfieri, there were two possi- 
 bilities for the ideal man : a handsome and 
 highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty 
 years his junior, fresh from the convent, pro- 
 vided with the right number of heraldic quar- 
 terings, acres, diamonds and domestic virtues, 
 and who would bear him, in deep awe for his 
 unapproachable superiority, five or six robust 
 
208 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 children ; and a romantic connection with a 
 married woman or a widow, a woman all pas- 
 sion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he 
 should go through a course of mutual soul im- 
 provement, who should be the sharer of all 
 his higher life, and whom he would diligently 
 deck out as a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of 
 society. 
 
 The Countess of Albany did not fit into the 
 first ideal : nor, for the matter of that, did Al- 
 fieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence, 
 engrossed in literature, fit into it himself ; and 
 both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the 
 second ideal possibility. To get married with 
 a view to turning into domestic beings, would 
 be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a dese- 
 cration and a bore ; to get married merely to 
 go on as they were at present, would, in the 
 eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the 
 poetry of their situation, a perfectly unneces- 
 sary piece of humbug. 
 
 Such were, doubtless, Alfieri' s views of the 
 case. Mme. d' Albany, on the other hand, had 
 evidently no vocation as a housewife or a 
 mother ; marriage was full of disagreeable asso- 
 ciations to her : a husband might beat one, and 
 a lover might not. She probably, also, guessed 
 instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must al- 
 ways be a mere mistress, and a wife must always 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 209 
 
 be a mere Griselda^ she knew his cut-and- 
 dry views, his frightful power of carrying 
 theory into practice ; she may have guessed 
 that the most respectful of lovers would in his 
 case make the most tyrannical of husbands. But 
 while Alfieri doubtless brought Mme. d' Albany 
 to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d' Al- 
 bany probably brought home to him her own 
 more practical ones. Alfieri, we must remem- 
 ber, had been a man of excessive social vanity ; 
 and much as he despised mankind, he certainly 
 still liked to enjoy its admiring consideration. 
 Mme. d' Albany, on the other hand, had been 
 brought up in the full worldliness of a canoness 
 of Ste. Wandru, and had grown accustomed to 
 a certain amount of state and of luxury ; and 
 these worldly tendencies, thrown into the back- 
 ground by the passion, the poetry which sprang 
 up with the irresistible force of a pressed-down 
 spring during her married misery, had re- 
 turned to her as years went on, and as passion 
 cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage 
 would probably involve a great risk of a diminu- 
 tion of income, since the Pope and the Court of 
 France might easily refuse to support Charles 
 Edward's widow once she had ceased to be a 
 Stuart ; and it must inevitably mean an end to 
 a quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow 
 of the Pretender could lay claim, but the wife of 
 
2IO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the 
 various meannesses, committed quite uncon- 
 sciously by Mme. d' Albany, and apparently 
 not censured by the people of the eighteenth 
 century, that, so far from being anxious to 
 shake off all vestiges of her hateful married life, 
 the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed 
 determined to enjoy, so to speak, her money's 
 worth; to get whatever advantages had been 
 bought at the price of her marriage with Charles 
 Edward. Mme. d' Albany enjoyed being the 
 widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather easy- 
 going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless 
 assumed towards strangers a certain queenly 
 haughtiness which frequently gave offence ; and 
 Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her 
 house in 1788, found to his surprise that all the 
 plate belonging to Mme. d' Albany was engraved 
 with the royal arms of England ; that guests were 
 conducted through an ante-room in which stood 
 a royal throne also emblazoned with the arms 
 of England ; nay, that the servants had orders 
 to address the lady of the house by the title of 
 a queen : a state of things whose institution by 
 a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and 
 who made no secret of her hatred of Charles 
 Edward, whose toleration by a man who scorned 
 the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those 
 strange anomalies which teach us the enor- 
 
RUE DE BOURGOYNE, 211 
 
 mous advance in self-respect and self-consis- 
 tency due to social and democratic progress, an 
 improvement which separates in feeling even 
 the most mediocre and worldly men and women 
 of today from the most high-minded and eccen- 
 tric men and women of a century ago. 
 
 To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Count- 
 ess of Albany, to risk part of her fortune and 
 to relinquish her royal state, as well as to sink 
 into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in 
 both parties concerned, a variety of reasons, 
 contemptible in our eyes, excellent in their own, 
 against legitimating their connection. And, on 
 the other hand, no corresponding inducement. 
 Why should they get married .'* The Countess 
 going in state every Sunday to a convent where 
 she was received with royal honors, Alfieri 
 writing to his mother that although he was not 
 regular at confession, he was yet provided with 
 a most austere and worthy spiritual director in 
 case of need, neither of them had the smallest 
 belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. 
 To please whom should they marry, pray } To 
 please religion } Why, they had none. To 
 please society } Why, society, in this Paris of 
 the year 1788, at least such aristocratic society 
 as they cared to see, consisted entirely either 
 of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each 
 with a husband or wife somewhere in the back- 
 
212 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ground, or of even more interesting triangular 
 arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, 
 husband and lover, all living together on charm- 
 ing terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, 
 each with a letti'e de cachet which should lock 
 the other up in the Bastile. A Queen of Eng- 
 land by right divine, keeping open house in 
 company with a ferociously republican Pied- 
 montese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a 
 questionable case ; but the pre-revolutionary 
 society of Paris was too philosophical to be sur- 
 prised at anything ; and, after very little hes- 
 itation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri 
 hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the 
 well-born and amusing people in Paris did not 
 insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting 
 married, why should they go out of their way 
 to do so ? We good people of the nineteenth 
 century should have liked them the better ; but 
 then, you see, it was the peculiarity of the men 
 and women of the eighteenth century to be 
 quite unable to conceive that the men and 
 women of the nineteenth century would be in 
 the least different from themselves. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 BEFORE THE STORM. 
 
 The well-born and amusing people of the end 
 of the eighteenth and beginning of the nine- 
 teenth century did not stickle at the question 
 of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel of 
 the Rue de Bourgoyne, attracted by the pecu- 
 liar cosmopolitan charm, the very undeniable 
 talent for society, the extraordinary intellectual 
 superiority of Mme. d' Albany ; attracted, also, 
 by a certain easy-going and half-motherly kind- 
 ness which seems, to all those who wanted 
 sympathy, to have been quite irresistible. It 
 was the moment of the great fermentation, when 
 even trifling things and trifling people seemed 
 to boil and seethe with importance ; when cold- 
 hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness 
 and chivalry, selfish people full of generosity, 
 prosaic people full of poetry, and mediocre peo- 
 ple full of genius : the brief carnival week of 
 the Old World, when men and women masquer- 
 aded in all manner of outlandish and antiquated 
 thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the excite- 
 
214 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ment of dressing up so much that they actually 
 believed themselves for the moment to be what 
 they pretended : it was the brief moment, gro- 
 tesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes 
 of society, who were fatally going to be exter- 
 minated for their long selfishness and indiffer- 
 ence, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and 
 shovel and tore down the bricks of the edifice 
 which was destined to fall and to crush them all 
 beneath its ruins. 
 
 All these men and women, their deep inborn 
 corruption momentarily transfigured by this 
 enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for senti- 
 ment, for austerity, which mingled oddly with 
 their childish pleasure in all new things, in 
 mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Mont- 
 golfier balloons, with their habitual pleasure in 
 all their big and small futile and wicked pleas- 
 ures of worldliness ; — all these men and women, 
 these morituid delighted at the preparations, the 
 scaffoldings, red clothes, black crape, torches 
 and drums and bugles, for their own execution, 
 all assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bour- 
 goyne. 
 
 A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomat- 
 ists, and artists and pamphleteers, and wits and 
 beautiful women ; perishable and perished things, 
 out of which we must select one or two, cither 
 as types of that which has perished, or as types 
 
BEFORE THE STORM. 215 
 
 of the imperishable; and the perished, the 
 amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and 
 brilliantly-improvising orators and philosophers 
 of the half-hour, are often that which, could we 
 have chosen, we should have preserved. Most 
 notable among the women, the young daughter 
 of Necker, the wife of the Swedish Ambassa- 
 dor, Mme. la Baronne de Stael Holstein : a 
 rather mannish, superb sort of creature, with 
 shoulders and arms compensating for thick, 
 swarthy features ; eyes like volcanoes ; the 
 laugh of the most kind-hearted of children ; the 
 stride, the attitude, with her hands forever be- 
 hind the back, of an unceremonious man ; a 
 young woman already accounted a genius and 
 felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, 
 drab-colored Livonian, with northern eyes tell- 
 ing of future mysticism, that Mme. de Krii- 
 dener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast 
 of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the sim- 
 plicity of nature, with her quarterly bills of 
 twenty thousand francs from Mile. Bertin, the 
 Queen's milliner ; but later to be famous for 
 her literary and religious vagaries, her influence 
 on Mme. de Stael, her strange influence on 
 Alexander of Russia. Near her, doubtless, that 
 fascinating Suard, in the convent of whose sis- 
 ter Mme. de Kriidener was wont to spend a 
 month in religious exercises, thanking God, at 
 
2l6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the foot of the altar, for giving her a sister like 
 Mile. Suard and a lover like Suard himself. As 
 yet but little noticed, except as the pet friend, 
 the '* younger sister" of Mme. d' Albany, a 
 Mme. de Flahault, later married to the Portu- 
 guese Souza ; a simple-natured little woman, 
 adoring her children and the roses in her gar- 
 den, and who, if I may judge by the letters 
 which, many, many years later, ^he addressed 
 to Mme. d' Albany, would be the woman of all 
 those one would rather resuscitate for a friend, 
 leaving Mmes. de Stael and de Kriidener quiet 
 in their coffins. Further on, the delicate and 
 charming Pauline de Beaumont, who was to be 
 the Egeria of Joubert and the tenderly-beloved 
 friend of Chateaubriand ; and a host of women 
 notable in those days for wit or heart or looks, 
 wherewith to make a new Ballad of Dead Ladies, 
 much sadder than the one of Villon : " But 
 where are the snows of yester-year .? " 
 
 Round about these ladies an even greater 
 number of men of what were, or passed for, em- 
 inent qualities ; political for the most part, or 
 busied with the new science of economy, like 
 the Trudaines ; and most notable among them, 
 as the typical victim of genius of the Reign of 
 Terror, j^oor Andre Chenier, his exquisite imita- 
 tions of Theocritus still waiting to be sorted and 
 annotated in prison ; and the typical blood- 
 
BEFORE THE STORM. ' 21/ 
 
 maniac of genius, the painter David, who was to 
 startle Mme. d' Albany's guests, soon after the 
 loth August, by wishing that the fishwives had 
 stuck Marie Antoinette's head without more 
 ado upon a pike. Imagine all these people as- 
 sembled in order to hear M. de Beaumarchais, 
 in the full glory of his millions and his wonder- 
 ful garden, give a first reading of his Mere 
 Coupable, after inviting them to prepare them- 
 selves to weep (which was easy in those days of 
 soft hearts) ^' a plein canals Or else listening 
 to the cold and solemn M. de Condorcet, proph- 
 esying the time when science shall have abol- 
 ished suffering and shall abolish death ; little 
 dreaming of those days of wandering without 
 food, of those nights in the. quarries of Mont- 
 rouge, of that little bottle of poison, the only 
 thing that science could give to abolish his suf- 
 fering. 
 
 To all these great and illustrious people the 
 Countess of Albany — I had almost said the 
 Queen of England — introduced her "incom- 
 parable friend" (style then in vogue). Count 
 Vittorio Alfieri ; and all of them doubtless took 
 a great interest in him as her lover, and a little 
 interest in him as the great poet of Italy ; not 
 certainly without wondering — amiable people 
 as they were, and persuaded that France and 
 Paris alone existed — that Mme. d' Albany should 
 
2l8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 find anything to love in this particularly rude 
 and disagreeable man, and that a country like 
 Italy should have the impudence to set up a poet 
 of its own. The Countess of Albany, made to 
 be a leader of intellectual society, was happy ; 
 but Alfieri was not. Ever since his childhood, 
 when a French dancing-master had vainly tried 
 to unstiffen his rigid person, he had mortally 
 hated the French nation ; ever since his first 
 boyish travels he had loathed Paris as the sewer, 
 the cloaca maxima (the expression is his own) of 
 the world; his whole life had been a struggle 
 with the French manners, the French language, 
 which had permeated Piedmont ; one of the chief 
 merits of the new drama he had conceived was 
 (in his own eyes) to sweep Corneille, Racine, 
 and particularly Voltaire, his arch-aversion Vol- 
 taire, off the stage. 
 
 Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was 
 specially constructed, if I may use the expres- 
 sion, to ignore all the good points, and to feel 
 with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, 
 of the French nation ; and more especially of the 
 French nation of the pre-revolutionary and rev- 
 olutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's 
 ideal were austerity, inflexibility, pride and con- 
 temptuousness of character, coldness, roughness, 
 decision of manner, curtness, reticence and ab- 
 solute truthfulness of speech ; above all, no con- 
 
BEFORE THE STORM. 219 
 
 sideration for other folks' likings and dislikings, 
 no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more 
 so than the ideal of other idealizing minds, was 
 the mere outcome of himself ; it contained his 
 faults as well as his virtues. Now all that fell 
 short of, or went beyond, his ideal — that is to 
 say, himself — was abomination in Alfieri's eyes. 
 Consequently France and the French, all the no- 
 bility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-hearted- 
 ness, the enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the 
 childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the dis- 
 respectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falut- 
 inism, the superficiality, the looseness of princi- 
 ple, everything that made up the greatness and lit- 
 tleness of the France of the end of last century, 
 everything which will make up the greatness 
 and littleness of France, the glories and weak- 
 nesses which the world must love to the end of 
 time; — all these things were abhorrent to Al- 
 fieri ; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a per- 
 son or a thing, justly or unjustly, could only in- 
 crease but never diminish his dislike. Let us 
 look at this matter, which is instructive to all 
 persons whose nobility of character runs to in- 
 justice, a little closer ; it will help us to under- 
 stand the Misogallo, the extraordinary apostasy 
 which, quite unconsciously, Alfieri was later to 
 commit towards the principle of freedom. Al- 
 fieri, intensely Italian, if mediaeval and peasant 
 
220 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Italy may give us the Italian type, in a certain 
 silent or rather inarticulate violence of temper 
 — violence which roars and yells and stabs and 
 strangles, but which never talks, and much less 
 argues — could not endure the particular sort of 
 excitement which surrounded him in France ; 
 excitement mainly cerebral, heroism or villainy 
 resulting, but only as the outcome of argument 
 and definition of principle and of that mixture 
 of logic and rhetoric called by the French des 
 mots. Alfieri was not a reasoning mind, he was 
 not an eloquent man ; above all, he was not a 
 witty man ; his satirical efforts are so many 
 blows upon an opponent's head ; they are almost 
 physical brutalities ; there is nothing clever or 
 funny about them. In such a society as this 
 Parisian society of the years '%J, '%^, '89, '90, he 
 must have been at a continual disadvantage ; 
 and at a disadvantage which he felt keenly, but 
 which he felt, also, that any remarkable piece of 
 Alfierism which would have moved Italy to ad- 
 miration, such as glaring, or stalking off in si- 
 lence, or punching a man's head, could only in- 
 crease. 
 
 To feel himself at a disadvantage on account 
 of his very virtues, and with people whom those 
 virtues did not impress, must have been most 
 intolerable to a man as vain and self-conscious 
 as Alfieri, and to this was added the sense that, 
 
BEFORE THE STORM, 221 
 
 from mere ignorance of the language (the lan- 
 guage whose nobility, as contrasted with the 
 "low, plebeian, nasal disgustingness " of French, 
 he so often descanted on) in which he wrote, it 
 was quite impossible for these people to be re- 
 duced to their right place and right mind by 
 the crushing superiority of his dramatic genius. 
 He, who hungered and thirsted for glory, what 
 glory could he hope among all these monkeys 
 of Frenchmen, jabbering and gesticulating 
 about their States-General, their Montgolfier, 
 their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, 
 their Necker, who had not even the decent 
 feeling to know Italian, and who bowed and 
 smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Me- 
 tastasio and Goldoni when introduced by the 
 Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as 
 an Italian poet .»* "Does monsieur write com- 
 edies or tragedies } " One fancies one can 
 hear the politely indifferent question put with a 
 charming smile by some powdered and em- 
 broidered P'rench wit to Mme. d' Albany in 
 Alfieri's hearing ; nay, to Alfieri himself. 
 
 Mixed with such meaner, though unconscious 
 motives for dissatisfaction, must have been the 
 sense, intolerable to a man like Alfieri, of the 
 horrid and grotesque jumble of good and bad, 
 of real and false, not merely in the revolution- 
 ary movement itself, but in all these men of 
 
222 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the ancien regime who initiated it. Alfieri con- 
 ceived liberty from the purely antique, or, if 
 you prefer, pseudo-antique, point of view ; it 
 was to him the final cause of the world; the 
 aim of all struggles ; to be free was the one and 
 only desideratum, to be master of one's own 
 thoughts, actions and words, merely for the 
 sake of such mastery. The practical advan- 
 tages of liberty entirely escaped him, as did the 
 practical disadvantages of tyranny ; nay, one 
 can almost imagine that had liberty involved 
 absolute misery for all men, and tryanny abso- 
 lute happiness, Alfieri would have chosen 
 liberty. To this pseudo-Roman and intensely 
 patrician stoic, who had never known privation 
 or injustice towards himself, and scarcely 
 noticed it towards others, the humanitarian, the 
 philanthropic movement, characteristic of the 
 eighteenth century, and which was the strong 
 impulse of the revolution, was absolutely incom- 
 prehensible. Alfieri was, in the sense of cer- 
 tain ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, 
 blind and deaf to suffering. That a man of 
 education and mind, a gentleman, should have 
 to sweep the ground with his hat on the pas- 
 sage of another man, because that other hap- 
 pened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he 
 should be liable to exile, to imprisonment, for a 
 truthful statement of his opinion, these were 
 
BEFORE THE STORM. 223 
 
 to Alfieri the insupportable things of tyranny. 
 But that a man in wooden shoes and a torn 
 smock frock, sleeping between the pigs and the 
 cows on the damp clay floor, eating bread main- 
 ly composed of straw, should have all the 
 profits of his hard labor taken from him in 
 taxes, while another man, a splendid gentleman 
 covered over with gold, riding over acres of his 
 land with his hounds, or a fat priest dressed in 
 silk, snoozing over his Lucullus dinner, should 
 be exempt from taxation and empowered to 
 starve, rob, beat or hang the peasant : such a 
 thing as this did not fall within the range of 
 Alfieri's feelings. To his mind, forever wrapped 
 in an intellectual toga, there was no tragedy in 
 mere misery ; there was no injustice in mere 
 cruelty, or rather misery, cruelty, nay, all their 
 allied evils, ignorance, brutality, sickness, su- 
 perstition, vice, were unknown to him. 
 
 Hence, as I have said, all the philanthropic 
 side of the revolutionary movement was lost to 
 him ; just as the defence of Labarre, the vin- 
 dication of Calas, never disturbed the current 
 of his contempt for Voltaire. So also the abo- 
 lition of privileges, the secularization of church 
 property, the equalization of legal punishment, 
 the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation 
 of slaves ; all these things, which stirred even 
 the most corrupt and apathetic minds of the 
 
224 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much 
 declamation to Alfieri. To him, who could con- 
 ceive no virtues beyond independent truthful- 
 ness, such things were mere sentimental trash, 
 mere hypocritical nonsense beneath which base 
 men hid their baseness. And the baseness, 
 unhappily, was there : baseness of absolute cor- 
 ruption, or of scandalous levity, even in the 
 noblest. To Alfieri, a man like Beaumarchais, 
 for all his quick philanthropy, his audacious out- 
 spokenness, must have seemed base, with his 
 background of money-jobbing, of dirty diplo- 
 matic work, of legal squabbles. How much 
 more such a man as Mirabeau, with his heroic 
 resolution, his heroic kindliness, his whole Titan 
 nature, carous, eaten into by a hundred mean 
 vices. That Mirabeau should have gained his 
 bread writing libels and obscene novels, meant 
 to Alfieri not that a man born in corruption and 
 tainted thereby had, by the force of his genius, 
 by the force of the great humanitarian move- 
 ment, raised himself as morally high as he had 
 hitherto grovelled morally low ; it merely meant 
 that the immaculate name of hero was degraded 
 by a foul writer. 
 
 From such figures as these Alfieri turned 
 away in indignant disgust. The great move- 
 ment of the eighteenth century seemed to him 
 a mere stirring and splashing in a noisome 
 
BEFORE THE STORM. 22$ 
 
 pool, in that cloaca maxima^ as he had called it. 
 
 Already before settling in Paris in 1787 he 
 had written to his Sienese friends that, were it not 
 for the necessity of attending to the printing of 
 his works (to print which permission would not 
 be obtainable in Italy), he would rather have es- 
 tablished himself at Prats, at Colle, at Buoncon- 
 vento, at any little town of two thousand in- 
 habitants near Florence or Siena, Surrounded 
 by, in daily contact with, some of the noblest 
 minds of the century, nay, of any century, by 
 people like Mme. de Stael, Andre Chenier, Con- 
 dorcet, Mirabeau, Alfieri could write, with a sort 
 of bitter pleasure at his own narrow-minded- 
 ness : " Now I am among a million of men, and 
 not one of them that is worth Gori's little 
 finger." 
 
 I am almost prepared to say that Alfieri really 
 felt as if living in Paris, among such people and 
 at such a moment, was a sort of saintly sacri- 
 fice, the crowning heroism of his life, which he 
 made in order to print his books ; that he en- 
 dured the contact of this plague-stricken city, 
 merely because he knew that unless he cor- 
 rected a certain number of manuscript pages, 
 and revised a certain number of proof-sheets, 
 the world would be defrauded of the great and 
 sovereign antidote to all such baseness as this 
 in the shape of his own complete works. 
 8 
 
226 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Writing to his mother towards the end of the 
 year 1788, he mentions contemptuously the ex- 
 citement and enthusiasm created by the ap- 
 proaching election of the States-General, and 
 adds calmly : " But all these sort of things in- 
 terest me very little ; and I give my attention 
 only to the correction of my proofs, a piece of 
 work with which I am pretty well half through." 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 The contradictions in complex and self-contra- 
 dictory characters like those of the Frenchmen 
 of the early revolution can be easily explained, 
 and, say what we will, must be easily pardoned : 
 rich natures, creatures of impulse, intensely 
 sensitive to external influences, we feel that it 
 is to the very richness of nature, the warmth of 
 impulse, the susceptibility to influence, that we 
 owe not merely these men's virtues but their 
 vices. But the contradictions of the self-right- 
 eous are an afflicting spectacle, over which we 
 would fain draw the veil : there is no room in a 
 narrow nature for any flagrant violation of its 
 own ideals to be stuffed away unnoticed in a 
 corner. And now we come to one of the strang- 
 est self-contradictions in the history of Mme. 
 d'Albany, that is to say, of her lord and master 
 Alfieri. 
 
 The revision and printing of Alfieri's works 
 had been brought to an end ; but neither he 
 nor the Countess seems to have contemplated 
 
228 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 a return to Italy. The fact was that they were 
 both of them retained by money matters. A 
 proportion of Mme. Albany's income consisted 
 in the pension which she received from the 
 French Court ; and the greater part of Alfieri's 
 income consisted in certain moneys made over 
 to him by his sister as the capital of his life 
 pension, and which he had invested in French 
 funds. 
 
 By the year 1791 the French Court and the 
 French funds had got to be very shaky ; and 
 those who depended upon them did not dare go 
 to any distance, lest on their return they should 
 find nothing to claim or no one to claim from. 
 Hence the necessity for Alfieri and the Count- 
 ess to remain in France, or, at least, hover about 
 near it. 
 
 Now, whether the unsettled state of French 
 affairs suggested to Mme. d' Albany, and through 
 her to Alfieri, that it would be wise to see what 
 sort of home, nay, perhaps, what sort of pecun- 
 iary assistance, might be found elsewhere, I can- 
 not tell ; but this much is certain, that on the 
 19th May, 1 79 1, Horace Walpole wrote as fol- 
 lows to Miss Barry : — 
 
 " The Countess of Albany is not only in Eng- 
 land, in London, but at this very moment, I be- 
 lieve, in the palace of St. James ; not restored 
 by as rapid a revolution as the French, but, as 
 
ENGLAND. 229 
 
 was observed at supper at Lady Mount Edge- 
 combe's, by that topsy-turvyhood that charac- 
 terizes the present age. Within these two days 
 the Pope has been burnt at Paris ; Mme. du 
 Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with 
 the Lord Mayor of London ; and the Pretender's 
 widow is presented to the Queen of Great Brit- 
 ain." 
 
 That we should have to learn so striking an 
 episode of the journey to England from the let- 
 ters of a total stranger, who noticed it as a mere 
 piece of gossip, while the memoirs of Alfieri, 
 who accompanied Mme. d' Albany to England, 
 are perfectly silent on the subject, is, to say the 
 least of it, a suspicious circumstance. 
 
 As he grew old, Alfieri seems to have lost 
 that power, nay, that irresistible desire, of speak- 
 ing the truth and the whole truth which made 
 him record with burning shame the caress of 
 Pius VL Perhaps, on the other hand, Alfieri, 
 who, after all, was but a sorry mixture of an an- 
 cient Roman and a man of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, thought that a certain amount of baseness 
 and dirt-eating, quite degrading in a man, might 
 be permitted to a woman, even to the lady of 
 his thoughts. And still I cannot help thinking 
 that Alfieri, who could certainly, with his strong 
 will, have prevented the Countess from demean- 
 ing herself, and in so far demeaning also his love 
 
230 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 for her, quietly abetted this step, and then as 
 quietly consigned it to oblivion. 
 
 But oblivion did not depend upon registration 
 or non-registration in Alfieri's memoirs. The 
 letters of Walpole, the memoirs of Hannah 
 More, the political correspondence collected by 
 Lord Stanhope, furnish abundant detail of this 
 affair. The Countess of Albany was introduced 
 by her relation, or connection, the young Count- 
 ess of Aylesbury, and announced by her maiden 
 name of Princess of Stolberg. Horace Walpole's 
 informant, who stood close by, told him that she 
 was "well dressed, and not at all embarrassed." 
 George HI. and his sons talked a good deal to 
 her about her passage, her stay in England, and 
 similar matters ; but the princesses none of them 
 said a word, and we hear that Queen Charlotte 
 ''looked at her earnestly." The strait-laced 
 wife of George HI. had probably consented to 
 receive the Pretender's widow, only because this 
 ceremony was a sort of second burial of Charles 
 Edward, a burial of all the claims, the pride of 
 the Stuarts; but she felt presumably no great 
 cordiality towards a woman who had run away 
 from her husband, who was travelling in Eng- 
 land with her lover ; and who, while affecting 
 royal state in her own house, could crave the 
 honor of being received by the family of the 
 usurper. 
 
ENGLAND. 23 1 
 
 Mme. d' Albany was not abashed ; she seems 
 to have made up her mind to get all she could 
 out of royal friendliness. She accepted a seat 
 in the King's box at the opera ; nay, she ac- 
 cepted a seat at the foot of the throne (" the 
 throne she might once have expected to mount," 
 remarks Hannah More), on the occasion of the 
 King's speech in the House of Lords. It was 
 the lOth of June, the birthday of Prince Charlie ; 
 and the woman who sat there so unconcernedly 
 kept a throne with the British arms in her 
 ante-room, and made her servants address her 
 as a queen ! 
 
 What were Alfieri's feelings when Mme. d' Al- 
 bany came home in her court toilette, and told 
 him of all these fine doings 1 The more we try 
 to conceive certain things, the more inconceiv- 
 able they become : it is like straining to see 
 what may be hidden at the bottom of a very 
 deep well. In the case of Alfieri I think we may 
 add that the well was empty. Since his illness 
 at Colmar he had aged in the most extraordi- 
 nary way : the process of desiccation and ossi- 
 fication of his moral nerves and muscles, which, 
 as I have said, was the form that premature 
 decrepitude took in this abnormal man, had 
 begun. The creative power was extinct in him, 
 both as regards his works and himself ; there 
 was no possibility of anything new, of any re- 
 
232 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 sponse of this wooden nature to new circum- 
 stances. He had attained to the age of forty-two 
 without any particular feelings such as could fit 
 into this present case, and the result was that 
 he probably had no feelings. The Countess of 
 Albany was the ideal woman ; he had enshrined 
 her as such ages ago, and an ideal woman 
 could not change, could not commit an impro- 
 priety, least of all in his eyes. If she had con- 
 descended to ridiculous meanness in order to 
 secure for herself an opening in English society, 
 a subsidy from the English Government (ap- 
 parently already suggested at that time, but 
 granted only many years later) in case of a 
 general break-up of French things ; if she had 
 done this, it was no concern of Alfieri ; Mme. 
 d' Albany had been patented as the ideal woman. 
 As to him, why should he condescend to think 
 about state receptions, galas, pensions, kings 
 and queens, and similar low things.-* He had 
 put such vanities behind him long ago. 
 
 Alfieri and the Countess made a tour through 
 England and projected a tour through Scotland. 
 Whether the climate, the manners, the aspect 
 of England and its inhabitants really disap- 
 pointed the perhaps ideal notions she had 
 formed ; or whether, perhaps, she was a little 
 bit put out of sorts by no pension being granted, 
 and by a possible coldness of British matrons 
 
ENGLAND. 233 
 
 towards a wiaow travelling about with an Italian 
 poet, it is not for me to decide. But her im- 
 pressions of England, as recorded in a note-book 
 now at the Musee Fabre at Montpellier, are 
 certainly not those of a person who has received 
 a good welcome : 
 
 '* Although I knew," she says, repeating the 
 stale platitudes (or perhaps the true impres- 
 sions ?) of all foreigners, *' that the English 
 were melancholy, I had not imagined that life 
 in their capital would be so to the point which 
 I experienced it. No sort of society, and a 
 quantity of crowds. . . As they spend nine 
 months in the country — the family alone, or 
 with only a very few friends — they like, when 
 they come to town, to throw themselves into 
 the vortex. W«:men are never at home. The 
 whole early part of the day, which begins at two 
 (for, going to bed at four in the morning, they 
 rise only at mid-day), is spent in visits and 
 exercise, for the English require, and their 
 climate absolutely necessitates, a great deal of 
 exercise. The coal smoke, the constant ab- 
 sence of sunshine, the heavy food and drink, 
 make movement a necessity to them. . . If 
 England had an oppressive Government, this 
 country and its inhabitants would be the lowest 
 in the universe : a bad climate, bad soil, hence 
 no sort of taste ; it is only the excellence of 
 
234 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the political constitution which renders it inhab- 
 itable. The nation is melancholy, without any 
 imagination, even without wit ; the dominant 
 characteristic is a desire for money." 
 
 The same note as that even of such a man as 
 Taine. The almost morbid love of beauty which 
 a civilization whose outward expression are the 
 lines and lines of black boxes, with slits for 
 doors and windows of Bloomsbury, produced in 
 men like Coleridge, Blake and Turner, naturally 
 escaped Mme. d'Albany ; but the second great 
 rebellion of imagination and love of beauty, the 
 rebellion led by Madox Brown and Morris, and 
 Rossetti and Burne Jones, escaped Taine. But 
 of all the things which most offended this quasi- 
 Queen of England in our civilization, the social 
 arrangements did so most of all. With the in- 
 stinct of a woman who has lived a by no means 
 regular life in the midst of a society far worse 
 than herself, with the instinct of one of those 
 strange pseudo-French Continental mongrels 
 with whom age always brings cynicism, she 
 tries to account for the virtue of Englishwomen 
 by accidental, and often rather nasty, necessi- 
 ties. Mme. d'Albany writes with the freedom 
 and precision of a Continental woman of the 
 world of eighty years ago ; and her remarks lose 
 too much or gain too much by translation into 
 our chaster language. '' The charm of intimate 
 
ENGLAND. 235 
 
 society," she winds up, conscious of the charms 
 of her own little salon full of clever men and 
 pretty women all well acquainted with each 
 other — "the charm of intimate society is un- 
 known in England." 
 
 In short, the sooner England be quitted, the 
 better. Political, or rather financial circumstan- 
 ces — that is to say, the frightful worthlessness 
 of French money (and Alfieri's and her money 
 came mainly from France) — made a return to 
 Paris urgent. 
 
 An incident, as curious perhaps as that of 
 Mme. d'Albany's presentation at Court, but 
 which, unlike that, Alfieri has not thought fit to 
 suppress, marked their departure from England. 
 As Alfieri, who had preceded the Countess by 
 a few minutes to see whether the luggage had 
 been properly stored on the ship at Dover, 
 turned to go and meet her, his eyes suddenly 
 fell with a start of recognition upon a woman 
 standing on the landing-place. She was not 
 young, but still very handsome, as some of us 
 may know her from Gainsborough's portrait ; 
 and she was no other than Penelope Lady Ligo- 
 nier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad twenty 
 years before, for whom he had fought his famous 
 duel in St. James' Park, and got himself disgrace- 
 fully mixed up in a peculiarly disgraceful divorce 
 suit. He had several times inquired after her, 
 
236 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and always in vain ; and now he would scarcely 
 have believed his eyes had his former mistress 
 not given him a smile of recognition. Alfieri 
 was terribly upset. The sight of this ghost from 
 out of a disgraceful past coming to haunt what 
 he considered a dignified present, seems fairly 
 to have terrified him ; he ran back into the ship 
 and dared not go to meet Mme. d'Albany, lest 
 in so doing he should meet Lady Ligonier. Pres- 
 ently Mme. d'Albany came on board. With the 
 indifference of a woman of the world, of that 
 easy-goingness which was rapidly effacing in her 
 the romantic victim of Charles Edward, she told 
 Alfieri that the friends who had escorted her to 
 the ship (and who appear to have perfectly un- 
 derstood the temper of the Countess) had pointed 
 out his former flame and entertained her with a 
 brief biography of her predecessor in Alfieri's 
 heart. Mme. d'Albany took it all as a matter 
 of course : she was probably no longer at all in 
 love with Alfieri, but she admired his genius and 
 character as much and more than ever ; and was 
 probably beginning to develop a certain good- 
 natured, half -motherly acquiescence in his eccen- 
 tricities, such as women who have suffered much, 
 and grown stout and strong, and cynically opti- 
 mistic now that suffering is over, are apt to 
 develop towards peoj^le accustomed to resort to 
 j:hem, like sick children, in all their ups and 
 downs of temper. 
 
ENGLAND. 237 
 
 "Between ns," says Alfieri, "there was never 
 any falsehood, or reticence, or coolness, or quar- 
 rel ; " and, indeed, when a woman, such as 
 Mme. d'Albany must have been at the age of 
 forty, has once determined to adore and humor 
 a particular individual in every single possible 
 thing, all such painful results of more sensitive 
 passion naturally become unnecessary. If Mme. 
 d'Albany merely smiled over bygone follies, 
 Alfieri had been put into great agitation by the 
 sight of Lady Ligonier. From Calais he sent 
 her a letter, of which no copy has been pre- 
 served, but which, according to his account, 
 "was full, not indeed of love, but of a deep and 
 sincere emotion at seeing her still leading a 
 wandering life very unsuited to her birth and 
 position ; and of pain in thinking that I, 
 although innocently (that 'although innocent- 
 ly,' on the part of a man who had been the 
 cause of her scandalous downfall, is perfectly 
 charming in its simple revelation of Continental 
 morals), might have been the cause or the pre- 
 text thereof." 
 
 Lady Ligonier's answer came to hand in 
 Brussels. Written in bad French, it answered 
 Alfieri's tragic grandiloquence with a cold civil- 
 ity, which shows how deeply his magnanimous 
 compassion had wounded a woman who felt her- 
 self to be no more really corrupt than he. 
 
238 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ''Monsieur," so runs the letter, *'you could 
 not doubt that the expression of your remem- 
 brance of me, and of the interest which you 
 kindly take in my lot, would be duly appreciated 
 and received gratefully by me ; the more espe- 
 cially as I cannot consider you as the cause of 
 my unhappiness, since I am not unhappy, 
 although the uprightness of your soul makes 
 you fear that I am. You were, on the contrary, 
 the agent of my liberation from a world for 
 which I was in no way suited, and which I have 
 not for a moment regretted. ... I am in 
 the enjoyment of perfect health, increased by 
 liberty and peace of mind. I seek the society 
 only of simple and virtuous persons without 
 pretensions either to particular genius or to 
 particular learning ; and besides such society I 
 entertain myself with books, drawing, music, 
 etc. But what constitutes the basis of real 
 happiness and satisfaction is the friendship and 
 unalterable love of a brother whom I have 
 always loved more than the whole world, and who 
 possesses the best of hearts." "I hear," goes on 
 Lady Ligonier, after a few compliments on 
 Alfieri's literary fame, ''that you are attached 
 to the Princess with whom you are travelling, 
 whose amiable arid clever physiognomy seems 
 indeed formed for the happiness of a soul as 
 sensitive and delicate as yours. I am also told 
 
ENGLAND. 239 
 
 that she is afraid of you : I recognize you there. 
 Without wishing or perhaps even knowing it, 
 you have an irresistible ascendency over all who 
 are attached to you." 
 
 Was it this disrespectful hint concerning 
 what he wished the world to consider as his 
 ideal love for Mme. d'Albany, or was it Lady 
 Ligonier's determination to let him know that 
 desertion by him had made her neither more 
 disreputable nor more unhappy than before t I 
 cannot tell ; but certain it is that something in 
 this letter appears to have put Alfieri, who had 
 not objected to Mme. d' Albany's mean behav- 
 ior towards George III., into a condition of 
 ruffled virtue and dignity. 
 
 " I copy this letter, " he writes in his mem- 
 oirs^, "in order to give an idea of this woman's 
 eccentric and obstinately evilly-inclined charac- 
 ter. " 
 
 Did it never occur to Alfieri that his own 
 character, whose faults during youth he so 
 keenly appreciated, was not improving with 
 years ? 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE MISOGALLO. 
 
 Alfieri and Madame d' Albany were scarcely 
 back in Paris, and settled in a new house, when 
 the disorders in Paris and the movements of 
 the Imperial troops on the frontier began to 
 make the situation of foreigners difficult and 
 dangerous. The storming of the Tuileries, the 
 great slaughter of the loth August, 1792, ad- 
 monished them to sacrifice everything to their 
 safety. With considerable difficulty a passport 
 for the Countess had been obtained from the 
 Swedish Minister, one for Alfieri from the 
 Venetian Resident (almost the only diplomatic 
 representatives, says Alfieri, who still remained 
 to that ghost of a king), and a passport for each 
 of them and for each of their servants from 
 their communal section. Departure was fixed 
 for the 20th August, but Alfieri's black pre- 
 sentiments hastened it to the i8th. Arrived at 
 the Barriere Blanche, on the road to Calais, 
 passports were examined by two or three sol- 
 diers of the National Guards, and the gates were 
 on the point of being opened to let the two 
 
THE MISOGALLO, 241 
 
 heavily-loaded carriages pass, when suddenly, 
 from out of a neighboring pot-house, rushed 
 some twenty-five or thirty ruffians, ragged, 
 drunken and furious. They surrounded the 
 carriages, yelling that all the rich were running 
 away and leaving them to starve without work ; 
 and a crowd rapidly formed round them and the 
 National Guards, who wanted the travellers to 
 be permitted to pass on. Alfieri jumps out of 
 the carriage, brandishing his seven passports, 
 and throws himself — a long, lean, red-haired 
 man, fiercely gesticulating and yelling at the 
 top of his voice — among the crowd, forcing 
 this man and that to read the passports, crying 
 frantically, *' Look ! listen ! Name Alfieri. Ital- 
 ian and not French! Tall, thin, pale, red- 
 haired ; that is I ; look at me. I have my pass- 
 port ! We have our passports all in order from 
 the proper authorities ! We want to pass ; and, 
 by God ! we will pass !" 
 
 After half an hour of this altercation, with 
 voices issuing from the crowd, " Burn the car- 
 riages ! " " Throw stones at them ! " " They are 
 running away ; they are noble and rich ; take 
 them to the Hotel de Ville to be judged!" at 
 last Alfieri' s vociferations and gesticulations 
 wearied even the Paris mob, the crowd became 
 quieter, the National Guards gave the sign for 
 departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the car- 
 
242 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 riage where Mme. d' Albany was sitting more 
 dead than ahve, shouted to the postilions to 
 gallop off. 
 
 At a country-house near Mons, belonging to 
 the Countess of Albany's sister, the fugitives 
 received the frightful news of the September 
 massacres ; of those men and women driven, 
 like beasts into an arena, down the prison stairs 
 into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces 
 by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Mail- 
 lard's amateur executioners, on to the blood- 
 soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, 
 morally divided on separate benches, the gen- 
 tlemen here, the ladies there, sat and looked 
 on ; of those men and women many had fre- 
 quented the salon of the Rue de Bourgoyne, 
 had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks 
 back, with Alfieri and the Countess. Amongst 
 those men and women Alfieri and the Countess 
 might themselves easily have been, had the 
 ruffians of the Barriere Blanche dragged them 
 back to their house, where an order to arrest 
 Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 
 20th August which had originally been fixed 
 for their departure. The thought of this nar- 
 row escape turned the recollection of that scene 
 at the Barriere Blanche into a perfect night- 
 mare, which focussed, so to speak, all the fren- 
 zied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French 
 Revolution, for the '* Tiger-Apes " of France. 
 
THE MISOGALLO, '243 
 
 By November Alfieri and Mme. d' Albany- 
 were in Florence, safe ; but established in a 
 miserable inn, without their furniture, their 
 horses, their books ; all left in Paris ; nay, al- 
 most without the necessary clothes, and with 
 very little money. From the dirty inn they 
 migrated into rather unseemly furnished lodg- 
 ings, and finally, after some debating about 
 Siena and inquiring whether a house might not 
 be had there on the promenade of the Lizza, 
 they settled down in the house, one of a num- 
 ber formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi 
 family, on the Lung Arno, close to the Ponte 
 Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is 
 one of the most delightful in Florence : across 
 the narrow quay the windows look almost sheer 
 down into the river, sparkling with a hundred 
 facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut 
 by the deep shadows of the old bridges, to 
 where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars 
 by the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of 
 the Cascine, closed in by the pale blue peaks of 
 the Carrara Alps ; or else, in autumn and win- 
 ter, scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and 
 browns, wonderfully veined, like some strange 
 oriental jasper, with transparent violet streak- 
 ings, and above which arise, veiled, half washed 
 out by mist, the old corbelled houses, the church 
 steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of pine 
 and ilex plumes on the hill opposite. 
 
244 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 For a moment, with the full luminousness of 
 the Tuscan sky once more in his eyes, and the 
 guttural strength of the Tuscan language once 
 more in his ears, Alfieri seems to have been 
 delighted. But his cheerfulness was not of 
 long duration. Ever since his great illness at 
 Colmar, Alfieri had, I feel persuaded, become 
 virtually an old man ; his strength and spirits 
 were impaired, and the strange morose depres- 
 sion of his half-fructified youth seemed to re- 
 turn. Coming at that moment, the disappoint- 
 ment, the terror, the horror of the French 
 Revolution became, so to speak, part of a moral 
 illness which lasted to his death. ^ Alfieri was 
 not a tender-hearted nor a humane man ; had 
 he been, he would have felt more sympathy 
 than he did with the beginning of the great 
 movement, with the strivings after reform 
 which preceded it ; he had, on the contrary, the 
 sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self- 
 righteousness and cut-and-dryness which would 
 have made him, had he been a Frenchman, a 
 terrorist of the most dreadful type, a regular 
 routinist in extermination of corrupt people. 
 Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may 
 have been shocked by the news of the Septem- 
 ber massacres, of the grandes foiirnees which 
 preceded Thermidor, and much as he may have 
 been distressed by Mme. d'Albany's anxiety 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 245 
 
 and grief for so many friends who lost their 
 property or Hfe, Alfieri was the man to be 
 driven mad by the mere thought of bloodshed. 
 But Alfieri had, ever since his earliest youth, 
 made liberty his goddess, and the worship of 
 liberty his special religion and mission. That 
 such a religion and mission, to which he 
 had devoted himself in a time and country 
 when and where no one else dreamed of any- 
 thing of the sort, should suddenly become, and 
 without the smallest agency of his, the religion 
 and mission of the very nation and people whom 
 he instinctively abhorred from the depths of 
 his soul ; that liberty, which he alone was to 
 teach men to desire, should be the fashionable 
 craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, 
 sentiment, and everything he hated most in 
 the French, this was already a pain that gnawed 
 silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty 
 was, as it were, dragged out of his own little 
 private temple, where he adored and hymned it, 
 decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and 
 Livy, and carried about, dressed in the garb of 
 a Paris fishwife, a red cotton night-cap on her 
 head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained 
 crew of sanscidottes, nay, worse, rolled along 
 on a triumphal car by an assembly of lawyers 
 and doctors and ex-priests and journalists — 
 when liberty, which had been to him antique 
 
246 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and aristocratic, became modern and demo- 
 cratic ; when the whole of France had turned 
 into a blood-reeking and streaming temple of 
 this Moloch goddess, then a sort of moral ab- 
 scess, long growing unnoticed, seemed to burst 
 within Alfieri's soul, and a process of slow 
 moral blood-poisoning to begin. 
 
 The Reign of Terror came to an end, the 
 reaction of Thermidor set in ; but this was 
 nothing to Alfieri, for, whereas the unspeakable 
 profanation of what was his own personal and 
 quasi-private property, liberty, had hitherto 
 been limited to France, it now spread, a fright- 
 ful invading abomination, with the armies of the 
 Directory all over the world ; nay, to Italy 
 itself. 
 
 It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal 
 expression, the severest conceivable retribution, 
 Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all the 
 stronger as there entered into it the petty per- 
 sonal vanity as well as the noble abstract 
 feeling of the man — it was as an expression of 
 this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous 
 but little-read Misogallo. This collection of 
 prose arguments and vituperations and versified 
 epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations 
 from all the Latin and Greek authors whom Al- 
 fieri was busy spelling out, does certainly con- 
 tain many things which, old as they are, strike 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 247 
 
 even us with the force of living contempt and 
 indignation. Nay, even including its most stu- 
 pid and dullest violent parts, we can sympathize 
 with its bitterness and violence, when we think 
 of the frightful deeds of blood which, talking 
 heroically of justice and liberty, France had 
 been committing ; of the miserable series of 
 petty rapines and extortions which, talking pat- 
 ronizingly of the Greeks and Romans, the French 
 nation was practising upon the Italians whom it 
 had come to liberate. That such feeling should 
 be elicited was natural enough. But we feel, 
 as we turn over the pages of the Misogallo, and 
 collate with its epigrams a certain passage in 
 Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet 
 it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, 
 narrow, pedantic doctrinaire, whose very mag- 
 nanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no longer 
 sympathize with the hatred of the French, which 
 in juster and more modest men, as for instance 
 Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our sympathy. 
 Much as we dislike the republican French who 
 descended into Italy, the Misogallo makes us 
 like Alfieri even less. Whether this revolution, 
 despite the oceans of blood which it shed, might 
 not be bringing a great and lasting benefit to 
 mankind by sweeping away the hundred and 
 one obstacles which impeded social progress ; 
 whether this French invasion, despite the money 
 
248 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 which it extorted, the statues and pictures which 
 it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it 
 told, might not be doing Italy a great service in 
 accustoming it to modern institutions, in train- 
 ing it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of 
 inept little tyrants ; — such questions did not 
 occur to Alfieri, for whom liberty meant every- 
 thing, progress and improvement nothing. As 
 the century drew to a close, and the futility of 
 so many vaunted reforms, the hollowness of so 
 many promises, became apparent to the Italians 
 with the shameful treaty which gave Venice, lib- 
 erated from her oligarchy, to Austria, all the 
 nobler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Fos- 
 colo, and the crowds of nameless patriotic youths 
 who filled the universities, were seized by a ter- 
 rible soul-sickness ; everything seemed to have 
 given way, each course was as bad as the other, 
 and Italy seemed destined to servitude and in- 
 dignity, whether under her new masters the 
 French, or under her old masters the Austrians 
 and Bourbons and priests. But the feelings of 
 Alfieri were not of this kind ; he was not torn 
 by patriotism ; he was simply pushed into sym- 
 pathy with the tyrannies which he had so hated 
 by the intolerable pain of finding that the liberty 
 which Ite had preached was being propagandized 
 by the nation and the class of society which he 
 detested most. 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 249 
 
 Such Alfieri appears to me, and such I think 
 he must appear to every one who conscientiously 
 studies the extraordinary manner in which this 
 apostle of liberty came to preach in favor of des- 
 potism. But in his own eyes, and in the eyes 
 of the Countess of Albany, Alfieri doubtless 
 found abundant arguments to prove himself per- 
 fectly logical and magnanimous. 
 
 This French Revolution was merely a revolt 
 of slaves ; and what tyranny could be more 
 odious than the tyranny of those whom nature 
 had fitted only for slavery .? What are the 
 French ? " The French," answers one of the 
 epigrams of the Misogalloy "have always been 
 puppets ; formerly puppets in powder, now 
 stinking and blood-stained puppets." "We 
 indeed are slaves," says another epigram, "but 
 at least indignant slaves " (a statement which 
 the whole history of Italy in the nineties goes 
 to disprove) ; " not, as you Gauls always have 
 been and always will be, slaves applauding 
 power whatever it be." The nasal and guttural 
 pronunciation of the French language, the 
 bare existence of such a word as quatraiiiy is 
 enough to prove to Alfieri that the French can 
 never know true liberty. Alfieri, who had 
 looked the ancien regime more than once in the 
 face, actually persuaded himself that, as he 
 writes, " the frightful French mob robbed and 
 
250 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 slaughtered the upper classes because those 
 upper classes had always treated it too kindly." 
 Alfieri actually got to believe these things. He 
 would, had power been put in his hands, have 
 headed a counter revolution and exterminated 
 as many people again as the Republicans had 
 exterminated. Power not being in his hands, 
 he hastened to do what seemed to him a vital 
 matter to all Europe, a sort of fatal thrust to 
 France : he solemnly recanted all his former 
 writings in favor of revolutions and republics. 
 He, who had witnessed the taking of the Bas- 
 tile and sung it in an ode, deliberately wrote as 
 follows: "The famous day of the 14th July, 
 1789, crowned the victorious iniquity (of the 
 people). Not understanding at that time the 
 nature of these slaves, I dishonored my pen by 
 writing an ode on the taking of the Bastile." 
 Surely, if we admit that to see liberty degraded 
 by its association with revolutionary horrors 
 must have been unbearably bitter to the nobler 
 portion of Alfieri's nature, we must admit that 
 to see Alfieri himself, Alfieri so proud of his 
 former ferocious love of liberty, turned into a 
 mere ranting renegade, is an unendurable spec- 
 tacle also ; we should like to wash our hands 
 of him as he tried to wash his hands of the 
 Revolution. 
 
 All this political atrabiliousness did not im- 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 25 1 
 
 prove Alfieri's temper, and could not have 
 made it easier or more agreeable to live with 
 him. The Countess of Albany naturally dis- 
 liked the Revolution and the French, after all 
 the grief and inconvenience which she owed 
 them ; she naturally, also, disliked everything 
 that Alfieri disliked. Still, I cannot help fan- 
 cying that this woman, far more intellectual 
 than passionate, and growing more indifferent, 
 more easy-going, more half-optimistically, half- 
 cynically charitable towards the world with 
 every year that saw her grow fat, and plain, and 
 dowdy, — I cannot help fancying that the 
 Countess of Albany must have got to listen to 
 Alfieri's misogallic furies much as she might 
 have listened to his groans had he been afflicted 
 with gout or the toothache, sympathizing with 
 the pain, but just a little weary of its expres- 
 sion. She must also, at times, have compared 
 the little company of select provincial notabili- 
 ties, illustrious people never known beyond 
 their town and their lifetime, which she col- 
 lected about herself and Alfieri in the house by 
 the Arno, with the brilliant society which had 
 assembled in her hotel in Paris. 
 
 To her, who was, after all, not Italian, but 
 French by education and temper, and who had 
 been steeped anew in French ideas and habits, 
 this small fry of Italian literature, professional 
 
252 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 and pedantic, able to discuss and (alas ! but too 
 able) to hold forth, but absolutely unable to 
 talk, to causer in the French sense, must have 
 become rather oppressive. She and Alfieri were 
 both growing elderly, and the hearth by which 
 they were seated alone, childless, with nothing 
 but the ghost of their former passion, the ghost 
 of their former ideal, to keep them company, 
 was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. 
 Alfieri working off his over-excitement in a 
 system of tremendous self-education, sitting for 
 the greater part of the day poring over Latin 
 and Greek and Hebrew grammars, and exer- 
 cises and annotated editions, till he was so ex- 
 hausted that he could scarcely digest his din- 
 ner ; the Countess killing the endless days 
 reading new books of philosophy, of poetry, of 
 fiction, anything and everything that came to 
 hand, writing piles and piles of letters to every 
 person of her acquaintance ; this double exist- 
 ence of bored and overworked dreariness, was 
 this the equivalent of marriage .? was this the 
 realization of ideal love } 
 
 But there were things to confirm Mme. d' Al- 
 bany in that easy-going indifferentism which 
 replaced passion and suffering in this fat, kindly, 
 intellectual woman of forty ; things which, as 
 they might have made other women weep, prob- 
 ably made this woman do what in its way was 
 just as sad — smile. 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 253 
 
 Alfieri had always had what, to us, may seem 
 very strange notions on the subject of love, but 
 which were not strange when we consider the 
 times and nation in general, and the man in 
 particular. After the various love manias which 
 preceded his meeting with Mme. d' Albany, he 
 had determined, as he tells us, to save his peace 
 of mind and dignity by refusing to fall in love 
 with women of respectable position. The Coun- 
 tess of Albany, by enchaining him in the bonds 
 of what he called *' worthy love," had saved him 
 from any chance of fresh follies with these 
 alarming *' virtuous women." But follies with 
 women of less respectable position and less 
 obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear 
 of degradation to Alfieri's mind. And now, 
 late on in the nineties, when Mme. d' Albany 
 was rapidly growing plain and stout and elderly, 
 and he was getting into the systematic habit of 
 regarding her less in her reality than in the 
 ideal image which he had arranged in his mind ; 
 now, when he was writing the autobiography 
 where the Countess figured as his Beatrice, and 
 when he was composing the Latin epitaphs 
 which were to unite his tomb with that of the 
 woman "aVictorio Alferio, ultra resomnia di- 
 lecta," just at this time Alfieri appears to have 
 returned to those flirtations with women neither 
 respectable nor virtuous which seemed to him 
 
254 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 SO morally safe to indulge in. A very strange 
 note, preserved at Siena, to a ''Nina padrona 
 mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of 
 Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were 
 not the only things which attracted him ever 
 and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection 
 of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, 
 written at Florence in a house which Mme. 
 dAlbany could not enter, and in the company 
 of women whom Mme. d' Albany could not 
 receive, and among which is a sonnet in which 
 Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in 
 these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by 
 an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows 
 that Alfieri frequented in Florence other so- 
 ciety besides that which crowded round his 
 lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi. 
 
 Mme. dAlbany was far too shrewd and far too 
 worldly not to see all this ; and Alfieri was far 
 too open and cynical to attempt to hide it. 
 Mme. d' Albany, having her praises and his love 
 read to her in innumerable sonnets, in the auto- 
 biography and in the epitaphs, probably merely 
 smiled ; she was a woman of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, a foreigner, an easy-going woman, and had 
 learned to consider such escapades as these as 
 an inevitable part of matrimony or quasi-matri- 
 mony. But, for all her worldly philosophy, did 
 she never feel a vague craving, a void, as she 
 
THE MISOGALLO. 255 
 
 sat in that big empty house reading her books 
 while Alfieri was studying his Greek, a vague 
 desire to have what consoles other women for 
 coldness or infidelity, a son or a daughter, a nor- 
 mal object of devotion, something besides Al- 
 fieri, and which she could love whether deserv- 
 ing\)r not ; something besides Alfieri's glory, in 
 which she could take an interest whether other 
 people did or did not agree ? Such a connection 
 as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction 
 of romance, of poetry, connected with its very 
 illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domes- 
 tic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were 
 young and passionately in love ; but where was 
 the romance, the poetry now, and where was the 
 humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose 
 expense that ^ romance, that poetry, had been 
 bought ? 
 
 Mme. d' Albany, if I may judge by the enor- 
 mous piles of her letters which I have myself 
 seen, and by the report of my friend Signor 
 Mario Pratesi, who has examined another huge 
 collection for my benefit, was getting to make 
 herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, 
 reading so many hours a day, writing letters so 
 many more hours ; taking the quite unenthusi- 
 astic, business-like interest in literature and pol- 
 itics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, 
 it seems to me, from the tone of her letters. 
 
256 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 growing daily more indifferent to life, more de- 
 sultor}^, more cynical, more misanthropic and tit- 
 tle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was grow- 
 ing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more 
 violent in temper, hanging a printed card stat- 
 ing that he wished no visits (one such is pre- 
 served in the library at Florence) in the hall, 
 pursuing and flogging street boys because they 
 splashe'd his stockings by playing in the pud- 
 dles ; insulting Ginguene and General Miollis 
 when they attempted to be civil ; groaning over 
 the victories of the French, rejoicing over the 
 brutal massacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan 
 populace ; going to Florence (when they were 
 spending the summer in a villa) for the pleasure 
 of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of wit- 
 nessing (as Gino Capponi records) the French 
 prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines being 
 pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary 
 mob. Besides such demonstrations of an un- 
 amiable disposition as these, working with the 
 fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a hol- 
 iday in that house where the doggrel verses were 
 written. The Countess of Albany, who had 
 been so horribly unhappy with her legitimate 
 husband, must have been rather dreary of soul 
 with her world-authorized lover. 
 
 It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, 
 desultory, neither happy nor unhajopy woman, 
 
THE MISOGALLO, 257 
 
 rapidly growing old, watching the century draw 
 to a close amid chaos and misery, — it was at 
 this moment that an eccentric English prelate, 
 Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the 
 house on the Lung Arno a friend of his, a French 
 painter, a former pupil of David, and who had 
 won the Prix de Rome, by name Frangoi^Xavier 
 Fabre. M. Fabre was French, but he was a 
 royalist ; he hated the Revolution ; he had set- 
 tled in Italy ; and in consideration of this he was 
 tolerated by Alfieri. To Mme. d' Albany, on the 
 other hand, the fact of Fabre being French 
 must secretly have been a great recommenda- 
 tion. French in language, habits, mode of 
 thought, French in heart, cut off, as it seemed, 
 forever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped 
 up among this pedantic small fry of Florentines, 
 listening all day to Alfieri's tirades against the 
 French nation, the French reforms, the French 
 philosophy, the French language, the French 
 everything, the poor woman must have heartily 
 enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a 
 real Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Al- 
 fieri might say, was really French ; she must 
 have enjoyed talking about his work, his pic- 
 tures, about everything and anything that was 
 not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's Hebrew, or Al- 
 fieri's tragedies or comedies or satires. Alfieri 
 was a great genius and a great man ; and she 
 9 
 
258 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 loved, or imagined she loved, Alfieri like her. 
 very soul. But still — still, it was somehow a 
 relief when young Fabre, with his regular south- 
 of-France face, his rather mocking and cynical 
 French expression, his easy French talk, came 
 to give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was 
 pacing up and down translating Homer and Pin- 
 dar with the help of a lexicon. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI. 
 
 Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand 
 performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened 
 the house on the Lung Arno. A room was 
 filled with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a 
 select company invited to see the poet (for by 
 this respectful title he appears always to have 
 been mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his 
 own admiration, but apparently less so to that 
 of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and 
 Mme. d'Albany would go for a few days to 
 Siena to enjoy the conversation of a little knot 
 of friends of their dead friend Gori ; a certain 
 Cavaliere Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano 
 Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani, and one 
 or two others, who met in the house of a charm- 
 ing and intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, 
 daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper, married to 
 another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who 
 was one of Mme. d' Albany's most intimate 
 friends. Occasionally, also, some of these would 
 come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and 
 
260 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the Countess moved heaven and earth (recol- 
 lecting their own aversion to husbands) that the 
 Grumbler, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly 
 called, should be left behind, and la chkre 
 Therese come accompanied (in characteristic 
 Italian eighteenth-century fashion) only by her 
 children and by her cavaliere scrvente, Mario 
 Bianchi. These were the small excitements in 
 this curious double life of more than married 
 routine. Alfieri, who, as he was getting old 
 and weak in health, was growing only the more 
 furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had 
 determined to learn Greek, to read all the great 
 Greek authors ; and worked away with terrific 
 ardor at this school-boy work, crowning his 
 efforts with a self-constituted Order of Homer, 
 of which he himself was the sole founder and 
 sole member. He was, also, having finally 
 despatched the sacramental number of trage- 
 dies, working at an equally sacramental num- 
 ber of satires and comedies, absolutely uncon- 
 scious of his complete deficiency in both these 
 styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his 
 nation to set them on the right road in comedy 
 and satire, as he had set them on the right road 
 in tragedy. 
 
 A ridiculous man } Not so. I have spoken 
 many hard words against Alfieri ; and I repeat 
 that he seems to me to have often fallen short, 
 
CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI, 261.- 
 
 betrayed by his century, his vanity, his narrow- 
 ness and hardness of temper, even of the ideal 
 which he had set up for himself. But I would 
 not have it supposed that I do not see the great- 
 ness of that ideal, and the nobleness of the real- 
 ity out of which it arose. That Alfieri, a strange 
 mixture of the passionate man of spontaneous 
 action, and of the self-manipulating, idealizing 
 posetcTy should have fallen short of his own ideals, 
 is perhaps the one pathetic circumstance of his 
 life ; the one dash of suffering and failure which 
 makes this heroic man a hero. Alfieri did not 
 probably suspect wherein he fell short of his own 
 ideal ; he did not, could not see that his faults 
 were narrowness of nature, and incompleteness, 
 meanness of conception, for, if he had, he would 
 have ceased to be narrow and ceased to be mean. 
 But Alfieri knew that there was something very 
 wrong about himself ; he felt a deficiency, a jar 
 in his own soul ; he felt, as he describes in the 
 famous sonnet at the back of Fabre's portrait 
 of him, that he did not know whether he was 
 noble or base, whether he was Achilles or Ther- 
 sites. 
 
 '* Uom, set tu grande vile ? Mori, il saprai^ 
 ("Man, art thou noble or base.'* Die and thou 
 shalt know it.") Thus wrote Alfieri, making, 
 as usual, fame the arbiter of his worth ; and 
 showing, even in the moment of seeking for 
 
262 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly 
 impossible it was for him to feel it. Mean and 
 great ; both, I think, at once. But of the mean- 
 ness, the narrowness of nature, the want of res- 
 onance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality 
 in so many things ; of Alfieri's vanity, intoler- 
 ance, injustice, indifference, hardness ; of all 
 these peculiarities which make the real man 
 repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I 
 have said more than enough, and when we have 
 said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his van- 
 ity, selfishness, meanness, narrow-mindedness, a 
 man of grander proportions, of finer materials, 
 nay, even of nobler moral shape, than the vast 
 majority of men superior to him in all these 
 points. Let us look at him in those last decay- 
 ing years, at those studies which have seemed 
 to us absurd : self-important, pedantic, almost 
 monomaniac ; or brooding over those feelings 
 which were, doubtless, selfish, morbid ; let us 
 look at him, for, despite all his faults, he is fine. 
 Fine in indomitable energy, in irrepressible pas- 
 sion. Alfieri was fifty ; he was tormented by 
 gout ; his health was rapidly sinking ; but the 
 sense of weakness only made him more resolute 
 to finish the work which (however mistakenly) 
 he thought it his duty to leave completed ; more 
 determined that, having lived for so many years 
 a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed 
 
CASA GIANFIGLIAZZL 263 
 
 of the stain of ignorance, having read and appre- 
 ciated as much of the great writers of antiquity 
 as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a 
 studious manhood. Soon after his great illness 
 (which, I believe, changed him so much for the 
 worse by hastening premature old age) at Col- 
 mar, he had written to his friends at Siena that 
 he had very nearly been made a fool of by 
 Death ; but that, having escaped, he intended, 
 by hurrying his work, to make a fool of Death 
 instead. And in 1801 he wrote in his memo- 
 randum-book : ^' Health giving way /ear by year ; 
 whence, hurrying to finish my six comedies, I 
 make it decidedly worse." 
 
 Soon after, as Mme. d' Albany later informed 
 his friend Caluso, Alfieri, finding that his 
 digestion had become so bad as to produce 
 inability to work after meals, began systemati- 
 cally to diminish his already extremely sober 
 allowance of food ; while at the same time he 
 did not diminish the exercise, walking, riding 
 and driving, which he found necessary to keep 
 himself in spirits. Knowing that death could 
 not be far ahead, and accustomed since his 
 youth to think that his life ought not to extend 
 over sixty years, Alfieri was calmly and delib- 
 erately walking to meet Death. 
 
 Calmly and deliberately, but not heartlessly. 
 Engrossed in his studies, devoted to his own 
 
264 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 glory as he was, he was still full of a kind of 
 mental passion for Mme. d' Albany. He was 
 unfaithful to her for the sake of low women ; 
 he was neglectful of her for the sake of his 
 work ; he did not, perhaps, receive much 
 pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic lady 
 (like one of Rubens' women grown old, as 
 Lamartine later described her) whom he left to 
 her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La 
 Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing ; to her 
 painting lessons and long discussions on art 
 with Monsieur Fabre ; the woman whose pres- 
 ence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a 
 matter of indifference to him. But, neverthe- 
 less, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never 
 wrote more completely from his heart than 
 when, composing the epitaph of the Countess, 
 he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been 
 loved by him more than anything on earth, and 
 held almost as a mortal divinity. "A Victorio 
 Alferio . . . ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi 
 mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et 
 observata. " For a thought begins about the 
 year 1796 to recur thoughout Alfieri's letters 
 and sonnets, and whenever he mentions the 
 Countess in his autobiography ; a thought too 
 terrible not to be genuine : he or his beloved 
 must die first ; one or the other must have the 
 horror of remaining alone, widowed of all inter- 
 
CASA GIANFTGLIAZZT. 265 
 
 est on earth. How constantly this idea haunted 
 him, and with what painful vividness, is ap- 
 jDarent from a letter which I shall translate 
 almost in extenso ; as, together with those 
 few words which I have quoted about Gori's 
 death, it shows the passionate tenderness that 
 was hidden, like some aromatic herb beneath 
 the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of 
 Alfieri. 
 
 The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at 
 Siena, and relates to the death of Mario Bianchi, 
 who had long been her devoted cavalier servcntc. 
 "Your letter," writes Alfieri, ''breaks my 
 heart. I feel the complete horror of a situation 
 which it gives me the shivers merely to think 
 may be my situation one day or other ; and oh ! 
 how much worse would it not be for me, living 
 alone, isolated from every one, closed up in 
 myself. O God ! I hope 1 may not be the sur- 
 vivor, and yet how can I wish that my better 
 self {la parte niigliore di me stesso) should endure 
 a situation which I myself could never have the 
 courage to endure } These are frightful things. 
 I think about them very often, and sometimes 
 I write some bad rhymes about them to ease 
 my mind; but I never can get accustomed 
 either to the thought of remaining alone nor to 
 that of leaving my lady. " 
 
 '' Some opinions," he goes on — and this han- 
 
266 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 kering after Christianity on the part of a man 
 who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief 
 seems to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the 
 late Gino Capponi, that had Alfieri lived much 
 longer he would have died telling his rosary, — 
 **some opinions are more useful and give more 
 satisfaction than others to a well-constituted 
 heart. Thus, it does our affection much more 
 good to believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is 
 united to Candido (another dead friend) and to 
 Gori, that they are talking and thinking about 
 us, and that we shall meet them all some day, 
 than to believe that they are all of them re- 
 duced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief 
 as the first is repugnant to physics and to math- 
 ematical evidence, it is not, therefore, to be 
 despised. The principal advantage and honor 
 of mankind is that it can feel, and science 
 teaches us how not to feel. Long live, there- 
 fore, ignorance and poetry, and let us accept 
 the imaginary as the true. Man subsists upon 
 love ; love makes him a god : for I call God an 
 intensely-felt love, and I call dogs, or French, 
 which comes to the same, the frozen philoso- 
 phizers who are moved only by the fact that 
 two and two make four." 
 
 Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive 
 his beloved was fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he 
 expected. The eccentric figure, the tall, gaunt 
 
CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI, 267 
 
 man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red 
 hair and flying scarlet cloak, driving the well- 
 known phaeton, or sauntering moodily along 
 the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, 
 was soon to be seen no more. As the year 
 1803 wore on he felt himself hard pressed by 
 the gout ; he ate less and less ; he took an 
 enormous amount of foot exercise ; he worked 
 madly at his memoirs, his comedies, his transla- 
 tions ; he felt almost constantly fatigued and de- 
 pressed. On the 3d October, 1803, after his usual 
 morning's work, he went out for a drive in his 
 phaeton ; but a strange and excessive cold, de- 
 spite the still summer weather, forced him to 
 alight and to try and warm himself by walking. 
 Walking brought on violent internal pains, and 
 he returned home with the fever on him. The 
 next day he rose and dressed, but he was unable 
 to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse ; the 
 next day after that he again tried to take a 
 walk, but returned with frightful pains. He 
 refused to go to bed except at night, and tore 
 off the mustard plasters which the doctors had 
 placed on his feet, lest the blisters should pre- 
 vent his walking ; dying, he would still not be 
 a sick man ! The night of the 8th he was 
 unable to sleep, and talked a great deal to the 
 Countess, seated by his bedside, about his work, 
 and repeated part of Hesiod in Greek to her. 
 
268 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Accustomed for months to the idea of death, he 
 does not seem to have guessed that it was near 
 at hand. But the news that he was dying 
 spread through Florence. A Piedmontese lady 
 — strangely enough a niece of that Marchesa 
 de Prie opposite to whose windows Alfieri had 
 renewed the device of Ulysses and the sirens 
 by being tied to a chair — hastened to a learned 
 and eccentric priest, a Padre Canovai," entreat- 
 ing hrm to run and offer the dying poet the 
 consolations of religion. Canovai, knowing that 
 both Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were unbe- 
 lievers, stoutly refused ; but later on, seized 
 with remorse, he hurried to the house on the 
 Lung Arno. Admitted into the sick-room, he 
 came just in time to see Alfieri, who had got up 
 during a momentary absence of Mme. d'Albany, 
 rise from his arm-chair, lean against his bed, 
 and, without agony or effort, unconscious "like 
 a bird," says the Countess, give up the ghost. 
 It was between nine and ten of the morning of 
 the 9th October, 1803. Vittorio Alfieri was in 
 his fifty-fifth year. 
 
 The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he 
 had, after Gori, was summoned from Turin to 
 console the Countess and put all papers in order. 
 Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books 
 and manuscripts, and whatever small property 
 he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany, 
 
CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI. 269 
 
 leaving her to dispose of them entirely according 
 to her good pleasure. Among these papers was 
 found a short letter, undated, addressed " To the 
 friend I have left behind, Tommaso di Caluso, 
 
 \ at Turin," and which ran as follows : — 
 
 " As I may any day give way beneath the 
 
 / very serious malady which is consuming me, I 
 have thought it wise to prepare these few lines 
 in order that they may be given to you as a 
 proof that you have always, to my last moment, 
 been present to my mind and very dear to my 
 heart. The person whom above everything in 
 the world I have most respected and loved, may 
 some day tell you all the' circumstances of my 
 illness. I supplicate and conjure you to do your 
 best to see and console her, and to concert with 
 her the various measures which I have begged 
 her to carry out with regard to my writings. 
 
 *' I will not give you more pain, at present, 
 by saying any more. I have known in you one 
 of the most rare men in every respect. I die 
 loving and esteeming you, and valuing myself 
 for your friendship if I have deserved it. Fare- 
 well, farewell." 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 FABRE. 
 
 " Happiness has disappeared out of the world 
 for me," wrote Mme. d' Albany in January, 
 1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. 
 " I take interest in nothing ; the world might 
 be completely upset without my noticing it. I 
 read a little, and reading is the only thing which 
 gives me any courage, a merely artificial cour- 
 age ; for when I return to my own thoughts 
 and think of all that I have lost, I burst into 
 tears and call Death to my assistance, but 
 Death will not come. O God ! what a misfor- 
 tune to lose.a person whom one adores and ven- 
 erates at the same time. I think that if I still 
 had Therese (Mme. Mocenni) it would be some 
 consolation ; but there is no consolation for 
 me. I have the strength to hide my feelings 
 before the world, for no one could conceive my 
 misfortune who has not felt it. A twenty-six 
 years' friendship with so perfect a being, and 
 then to see him taken away from me at the 
 very age when I required him most." 
 
FABRE, 271 
 
 Alfieri a perfect being — a being adored and 
 venerated by Mme. d' Albany ! One cannot 
 help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at 
 the strange magic by which Death metamor- 
 phoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of 
 the survivors ; at the strange potions by means 
 of which he makes love spring up in the hearts 
 where it has ceased to exist, saving us from 
 hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false 
 to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves 
 instead of lying to others. The Countess of 
 Albany's grief was certainly most sincere ; long 
 after all direct references to Alfieri have ceased 
 in her correspondence (I am speaking princi- 
 pally of that with her intimates at Siena), there 
 reigns throughout her letters a depression, an 
 indifference to everything, which shows that 
 the world had indeed become empty in her 
 eyes. But though the grief was sincere, I 
 greatly question whether the love was so. 
 Alfieri had become, in his later years, the in- 
 carnation of dreary violence ; he could not have 
 been much to any one's feelings ; and Mme. 
 d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in 
 political news and town gossip, even with her 
 most intimate correspondents, shows that 
 Alfieri played but a very small part in her 
 colorless life. So small a part, that one may 
 say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. 
 
2/2 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 d'Albany had pretty well ceased to love him at 
 all ; for had she loved him, would she have 
 been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in 
 all her letters, while the man she loved was 
 killing himself as certainly as if he were taking 
 daily doses of a slow poison ? Love is vigilant, 
 love is full of fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so 
 little vigilant, so little troubled by fears, that 
 when this visibly dying man, this man who had 
 prepared his epitaph, who had settled all his 
 literary affairs, who had written the farewell 
 letter to his friend, actually died, she would 
 seem to have been thunder-stricken not merely 
 by grief, but by amazement. 
 
 The Countess of Albany was not a selfish 
 woman ; she had apparently, without complain- 
 ing, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an 
 old woman before her time, in acquiescence to 
 Alfieri's misanthropic and routinist self-engross- 
 ment ; she had been satisfied, or thought herself 
 satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration 
 " of a man who divided his time between his 
 studies, his horses and his intrigues with other 
 women ; but unselfish nat,ures are often unselfish 
 from their very thinness and coldness. Alfieri, 
 Heaven knows, had been selfish and self-en- 
 grossed ; but, perhaps, because he was selfish 
 and self-engrossed, because he was always listen- 
 ing to his own ideas and nursing his own feelings, 
 
FAB RE. 273 
 
 Alfieri had been passionate and loving ; and, as 
 we have seen, while he seemed growing daily 
 more fossilized, while he was at once engrossed 
 with his own schemes of literary glory, and in- 
 differently amusing himself by infidelities to his 
 lady, he was then, even then, constantly haunted 
 by the thought that, unless he himself were left 
 behind in the terrors of widowerhood the Count- 
 ess of Albany would have to- suffer those pangs 
 which he felt that he himself could never en- 
 dure. 
 
 Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium 
 of his own character, and he proved mistaken. 
 Perhaps the most terrible, ironical retribution 
 which could have fallen upon his strange egoma- 
 nia, would have been, had such a thing been 
 possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had 
 been that terrible vision of Mme. d' Albany's 
 life after his death ; the revelation of how little 
 difference, after the first great grief, his loss 
 had made in her life ; the revelation that, un- 
 noticed, unconsciously, a successor had been 
 prepared for him. 
 
 In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 
 1804, in which Mme. d' Albany expatiates to her 
 friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her 
 life, and her desire to end it, I find this unob- 
 trusive little sentence : " Fabre desires his com- 
 pliments to you. He has been a great resource 
 to me in everything." 
 
274 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 This sentence, I think, explains what to the 
 enemies of Mme. d' Albany has been a delightful 
 scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mys- 
 tery ; explains, reduces to mere very simple, 
 conceivable, neither commendable nor sharheful 
 every-day prose, the fact that little by little the 
 place left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another 
 man. Italian writers, inheriting from Gordiani, 
 even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against a 
 woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became 
 once more what nature had made her, half 
 French, with a great preference for P'rench and 
 French things — Italian writers, I say, have 
 tried to turn the Fabre episode into something 
 extremely disgraceful to Mme d' Albany. Mas- 
 simo d' Azeglio, partly out of hatred to the Count- 
 ess, who was rather severe and acrimonious upon 
 his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a 
 desire to amuse his readers, has introduced into 
 his autobiography an anecdote told him by 
 Mme. de Prie (the niece of Alfieri's famous 
 Turin mistress, and the lady who took it upon 
 herself to send him a priest without consulting 
 the Countess), to the effect that she had watched 
 Fabre making eyes, kissing his fingers and gen- 
 erally exchanging signals with Mme d'Albany 
 at a party where Alfieri was present. Let those 
 who are amused by this piece of gossip believe 
 it impHcitly; it does not appear to me either 
 
FABRE. 275 
 
 amusing or credible, or creditable to the man 
 who retailed it. 
 
 The Florentine society of the early years of 
 this century was, if we may trust the keen ob- 
 servation of Stendhal, almost as naively and 
 openly profWgate as that of a South Sea Island 
 village ; and such a society, which could talk of 
 the things and in the way which it did, which 
 could permit certain poetical compositions 
 (found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be 
 publicly performed before the ladies and gentle- 
 men celebrated therein, such a society naturally 
 enjoyed and believed a story like that retailed 
 by d'Azeglio. But surely we may put it behind 
 us, we who are not Florentines of the year 1800, 
 and who can actually conceive that a woman who 
 had exchanged irreproachable submission to a 
 drunken husband, for legally unsanctioned but 
 open and faithful attachment for a man like Al- 
 fieri, might at the age of fifty take a liking to a 
 man of thirty-five without that liking requiring a 
 disgusting explanation. The clean explanation 
 seems so much simpler and more consonant. 
 Fabre had become an intimate of the house 
 during Alfieri's last years. He was French, he 
 was a painter ; two high recommendations to 
 Mme. d'Albany. He was, if we may trust Paul 
 Louis Courier, who made him the hero of a 
 famous imaginary dialogue, clever with a pecu- 
 
276 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 liarly French sort of cleverness ; he gave the 
 Countess lessons in painting while Alfieri was 
 poring over his work. The sudden death of 
 Alfieri would bring Fabre into still closer rela- 
 tions with Mme. d'Albany, as a friend of the 
 deceased, the brother of his physician, and the 
 virtual fellow-countryman of the Countess ; he 
 would naturally be called upon to help in a 
 hundred and one melancholy arrangements ; he 
 received visitors, answered letters, gave orders ; 
 he probably laid Alfieri in his coffin. When all 
 the bustle incident upon death had subsided, 
 Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most 
 constant visitor. He, who had seen Alfieri at 
 the very last, might be admitted when the 
 door was closed to all others ; he could help to 
 sort the dead man's papers ; he could, in his 
 artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's 
 monument, write to Canova, correspond with 
 the dignitaries of Santa Croce, and so forth ; 
 come in contact with the Countess in those 
 manifold pieces of business, in those long con- 
 versations, which seem, for a time, to keep the 
 dead one still in the company of the living. 
 There is nothing difficult to understand or 
 shameful to relate in all this ; and the friends of 
 the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. 
 de Souza, puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, 
 misanthropic or scoffing people like Foscolo or 
 
FABRE. 277 
 
 Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to 
 take umbrage, nothing to rage or laugh at, in 
 this long intimacy between a woman over fifty 
 and a man many years her junior; a man who 
 lived at the other end of Florence, who (if I may 
 trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to be 
 attached to a woman well known to Mme. d' Al- 
 bany ; nor have we, I think, any right to be 
 less charitable than they. 
 
 Louise d' Albany, careless, like most women 
 of her day, of social institutions, and particular- 
 ly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an 
 impure woman ; her whole life goes to prove 
 this. But Louise d'Albany was an indifferent 
 woman, and the extinction of all youthful pas- 
 sion and enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical 
 world, made her daily more indifferent. She 
 had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring 
 one of the most unendurable of companions, 
 loving and admiring him while he was still 
 alive. But once the pressure of that strong 
 personality removed, the image of Alfieri ap- 
 pears to have been obliterated little by little 
 from the soft wax of her character. She con- 
 tinued, nay, instituted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri ; 
 became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding 
 over what had once been his house and was 
 now his temple. 
 
 The house on the Lung Arno remained the 
 
2y8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Casa Alfieri ; the rooms which he had inhabited 
 were kept carefully untouched ; his books and 
 papers were elaborated and preserved as he had 
 left them ; his portraits were everywhere, and 
 visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi and the 
 young Lamartine, were expected to inquire re- 
 spectfully into the legend of the divinity, to ask 
 to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might 
 be expected to inquire into the legend, to ask to 
 see the relics, of some great saint. Mme. d'Al- 
 bany conscientiously devoted a portion of her 
 time to seeingthatAlfieri's works were properly 
 published, and that Alfieri's tomb in Santa Croce 
 was properly executed. She was, as I have said, 
 the priestess, the divinely-selected priestess, of 
 the divinity. But at the same time Mme. d'Al- 
 bany gradually settled down quite comfortably 
 and happily without Alfieri. After the first 
 great grief was over a sense of relief may have 
 arisen, a sense that, after all, "'tis an ill wind 
 that blows no good ; " that if she had lost Alfieri 
 she had gained a degree of liberty, of independ- 
 ence, that she had acquired a possibility of being 
 herself with all her tastes, the very existence of 
 which she had forgotten while living under the 
 shadow of that strange and disagreeable great 
 man. A negative sense of compensation, of 
 pleasure in the foreign society to which she 
 could now devote herself ; of satisfaction in the 
 
FABRE. 279 
 
 mirxiature copy of her former Parisian salon 
 which she could arrange in her Florentine 
 house ; of comfort in a gently-bustling, uncon- 
 cerned, cheerful old age ; negative feelings which, 
 perhaps as a result of their very existence, seem 
 little by little to have turned to a positive feel- 
 ing, a positive aversion for the past which she 
 refused to regret, a positive dislike to the mem- 
 ory of the man whom she could no longer love. 
 Horrible things to say ; yet, I fear, true. A 
 man such as Alfieri had permitted himself to be- 
 come, admirable in many respects, but intoler- 
 ant, hard, arrogant, selfish, self-engrossed, can- 
 not really be loved ; he may be endured as a re- 
 sult of long habit, he may inflict his personality 
 without effort upon another ; but in order that 
 this be the case that other must be singularly ap- 
 athetic, indifferent, malleable ; and apathetic, in- 
 different and malleable people, those who never 
 resist the living individual, rarely remember the 
 dead one. *' She was," writes one of the most 
 conscientious and respectful of men, the late 
 Gino Capponi, '' heavy in feature and form, and, 
 if I may say so, her mind, like her body, was 
 thick-set. . . Since several years she had ceased 
 to love Alfieri." 
 
 We cannot be indignant with her ; she had 
 never pretended to be what she was not. A 
 highly intellectual, literary mind, a pure tem- 
 
280 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 
 
 perament, a passive, rather characterless char- 
 acter, taking the impress of its surroundings ; 
 passionate when Alfieri was passionate, de- 
 pressed when Alfieri was depressed ; cheerful 
 when Alfieri's successors, Fabre and mankind 
 and womankind in general, were cheerful. To 
 be angry with such a woman would be ridicu- 
 lous ; but, little as we may feel attached to the 
 memory of Alfieri, we cannot help saying to our- 
 selves, "Thank Heaven he never understood 
 what she was ; thank Heaven he never foresaw 
 what she would be 1 " 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 
 
 A SHADOWY being, nay, a shadow cast in the 
 unmistakable shape of another, so long as Al- 
 fieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems 
 to gain consistency and form, to become a sub- 
 stantive person, only after Alfieri's death. 
 This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we 
 have seen consorting almost exclusively with 
 Italians, and spending the greater proportion of 
 her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, 
 Kant, Mme. de Genhs, Lessing, Milton, every- 
 thing and anything ; whose letters, exclusively 
 (as far as I know them) to Italians of the 
 middle classes, are full of fury against every- 
 thing that is French ; this woman, who has 
 hitherto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, sud- 
 denly turns into an extremely sociable, chatty 
 woman of the world, and a woman of the world 
 who is, to all intents and purposes, French. 
 
 To be the rallying point of a very cosmopoli- 
 tan, literary, but by no means unworldly 
 society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. 
 
282 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 d' Albany's mission ; and reading the letters 
 copied from the Montpellier Archives, and pub- 
 lished by M. Saint Rene Taillandier, one 
 wonders how this friend of Mme. de Stael, of 
 Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of 
 Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every 
 sort of French, English, German, Russian or 
 polyglot creature of distinction that travelled 
 through Italy in the early part of this century, 
 could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the 
 misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese 
 professors, priests and shopkeepers. 
 
 The fact was that Mme. d' Albany could now 
 become, so to speak, what she really was ; or, 
 at least, show herself to be such. Worldly wise 
 and a trifle cynical she had always been ; in the 
 midst of the pages of literary review and politi- 
 cal newspaper constituting her letters to Mme. 
 Mocenni, Canon Luti and Alessandro Cerretani 
 of Siena, there is a good deal of mere personal 
 gossip, stories of married women's lovers, 
 married men's mistresses, domestic bickerings, 
 etc., interspersed with very plain-spoken and 
 (according to our ideas) slightly demoralized 
 moralizings. It is evident that this was not a 
 woman to shrink from the reality of things, to 
 take the world in disgust, to expect too much 
 of her acquaintances. On the other hand, 
 these letters of the Alfieri period show Mme. 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 283 
 
 d' Albany to have been decidedly a good-natured 
 and friendly woman. She has the gift of 
 getting people to trust her with their little 
 annoyances and grievances ; she is constantly 
 administering sympathy to Mme. Mocenni for 
 the tiresomeness and stupidity and harshness 
 of her husband ; she keeps up a long corre- 
 spondence, recommending books, correcting 
 French exercises, exhorting to study and to 
 virtue (particularly to abstinence from gam- 
 bling), encouraging, helping Mme. Mocenni's 
 boy Vittorio. -4=-She is clearly a woman who 
 enjoys hearing about other folks' concerns, 
 enjoys taking an interest in them, sympathizing, 
 and, if possible, assisting them. 
 
 These two qualities, a dose of cynical world- 
 Jiness, sufficient to prevent all squeamishness 
 and that coldness and harshness which springs 
 from expecting people to be better than they 
 are, and a dose of kindliness, helpfulness, pleas- 
 ure in knowing the affairs and feelings and 
 troubles of others ; these two qualities are, I 
 should think, the essentials for a woman who 
 would keep a salon in the old sense of the word, 
 who would be the centre of a large but decidedly 
 select society, the friend and correspondent of 
 many and various people possessed of more 
 genius or more character than herself. Such a 
 woman, thanks to her easy-going knowledge of 
 
284 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 the world, and to her cordial curiosity and help- 
 fulness, is the friend of the most hostile people ; 
 and she is so completely satisfied with, and 
 interested in, the particular person with whom 
 she is talking or to whom she is writing, that 
 that particular person really believes himself or 
 herself to be her chief friend, and overlooks the 
 scores of other chief friends, viewed with ex- 
 actly the same degree of interest and treated 
 with the same degree of cordiality all round. 
 The world is apt to like such women, as such 
 women like it, and to say of them that there 
 must be an immense richness of character, an 
 extraordinary power of bringing out the best 
 qualities of every individual, in a woman who 
 can drive such complicated teams of friends. 
 But is it not more probable that the secret of 
 such success is poverty of personality rather 
 than richness ; and that so many people receive 
 a share of friendship, of sympathy, of compre- 
 hension, because each receives only very little ; 
 because the universal friend is too obtuse to 
 mind anybody's faults, and too obtuse, also, to 
 mind anybody's great virtues } In short, do not 
 such women pay people merely in the paper 
 money of attention, which can be multiplied at 
 pleasure, rather than in the gold coin of sym- 
 pathy, of which the supply is extremely small ^-^j? 
 Be this as it may, Mme. d' Albany, after hav- 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 285 
 
 ing been, in the earlier period of her Hfe, essen- 
 tially the woman who had one friend, who let 
 the wax of her nature be stamped in one clear 
 die, became, in the twenty years which sepa- 
 rate the death of Alfieri from her own, preemi- 
 nently the woman with many friends, a blurred 
 personality in which we recognize traces of the 
 mental eflfigy of many and various people. 
 Mme. d'Albany was, therefore, in superficial 
 sympathy with nearly every one and in deep 
 antagonism with no one : she was the ideal of 
 the woman who keeps a literary and political 
 salon. At that time especially, when Italy was 
 visited only by people of a certain social stand- 
 ing, society was carried on by a most compli- 
 cated system of letters of introduction, and 
 every one of any note brought a letter to Mme. 
 d'Albany. " La grande lajiteriie magiqti-e passe 
 tout par voire salon,' wrote Sismondi to the 
 Countess ; and the metaphor could not be truer. 
 Writers and artists, beautiful women, diploma- 
 tists, journalists, pendants, men of science, 
 women of fashion, Chateaubriand and Mme. de 
 Stael, Lamartine and Paul Louis Courier, Mme. 
 Recamier and the Duchess of Devonshire, Can- 
 ova and Foscolo, and Sismondi and Werner, the 
 whole intellectual world of the Empire and the 
 Restoration, all seem to be projected, figures 
 now flitting past like shadows, now dwelling 
 
286 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 long, clear and colored, upon the rather color- 
 less and patternless background of Mme. 
 d'Albany's house ; nay, of Mme. d' Albany her- 
 self. 
 
 Such readers as may wish to have all these 
 figures, remembered or forgotten, pointed out 
 to them, called by their right names and titles, 
 treated with the perfect impartiality of a valet 
 de place expounding monuments, or of a cham- 
 berlain announcing the guests at a levee^ may 
 refer to the two volumes of Baron Alfred von 
 Reumont ; and such readers (and I hope they 
 are more numerous) as may wish to examine 
 some of the nobler and more interesting of 
 these projected shadows of men and women, 
 may read with pleasure and profit the letters of 
 Sismondi, Bonstetten, Mme. de Souza and Mme. 
 de Stael to the Countess of Albany, and the 
 interesting pages of criticism in which they 
 have been imbedded by M. Saint Rene Taillan- 
 dier. With regard to myself, I feel that the 
 time and space which have been given me in 
 order to analyze or reconstruct the curious type 
 and curious individual called Louise d'Albany 
 are both nearly exhausted ; and I can therefore 
 select to dwell upon, of these many magic-lan- 
 tern men and women, of these friends of the 
 Countess, only two, because they seem to me' 
 to exemplify my remarks about the friendship 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 287 
 
 of a woman whose vocation it is to have many 
 friends. The two are Sismondi and Foscolo. 
 
 Two or three years after Alfieri's death, 
 somewhere about the year 1806 or 1807, there 
 was introduced to Mme. d'Albany a sort of 
 half-Itahan, half-French Swiss, a man young in 
 years and singularly young — with the peculiar 
 earnestness, gravity, purity, which belong 
 sometimes to youth — in spirit, Jean Charles 
 Leonard Simonde de Sismondi. Quietly ideal- 
 istic, with one of those northern, eminently 
 Protestant minds which imagine the principle 
 of good to be more solemnly serious, the 
 principle of evil more vainly negative, than is, 
 alas ! the case in this world — M. de Sismondi, 
 full of the heroism of mediaeval Italy which he 
 was studying with a view to his great work, 
 came to the house of Alfieri, to the woman 
 whom Alfieri had loved, as to things most rev- 
 erend and almost sacred. The Countess of 
 Albany received him very well ; and this 
 good reception, the motherly cordiality of this 
 woman with that light in her hazel eyes, that 
 welcoming graciousness in the lines of her 
 mouth, which Lamartine has charmingly de- 
 scribed, with the ^^ parole S7iave, inanieres sans 
 appret, familiarity rassurante,'' ''which made 
 one doubt whether she was descending to the 
 level of her visitor, or raising him up to her 
 
288 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 own,"— this reception by this woman, who was, 
 moreover, still surrounded by a halo of Alfieri's 
 glory, fairly conquered the heart, the pure, 
 warm, grave and truthful heart of young Sis- 
 mondi. He saw her often on his way between 
 Geneva, whither he was called by his family 
 business and his lectures, and Pescia, a little 
 town nestled among the oUves of the Lucchese 
 Apennine, where he was forever sighing to join 
 his mother, to resume his walks, his readings 
 with this noble old woman. Florence, the house 
 on the Lung Arno, had an almost romantic fas- 
 cination for Sismondi : those passing visits, at 
 intervals of months, when Mme. d'Albany would 
 devote herself entirely to the traveller, sit chat- 
 ting, or rather (we feel that) listening to the 
 young man's enthusiastic talk about liberty, 
 letters and philanthropy, about Alfieri and Mme. 
 de Stael, enabled Sismondi to make up for him- 
 self a sort of half-imaginary Countess of Al- 
 bany, to whom he poured out all his hopes and 
 fears in innumerable letters, for whom he 
 longed as (alas !) we perhaps long only for the 
 phantoms of our own creating. That Mme. 
 d'Albany was, after all, a shallow woman ; that 
 she adored a mediocre M. Fabre (to whom Sis- 
 mondi invariably sent respectful messages) and 
 half disliked the memory of Alfieri ; that she 
 had called Mme. de Stael, Sismondi's goddess. 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 289 
 
 about whom he was forever expatiating, " a mad 
 woman who always wants to inspire passions, 
 and feels nothing, and makes her readers feel 
 nothing " (I am quoting from an unpublished 
 letter at Siena) ; that she preferred despotism 
 on the whole to liberty, and had no particular 
 belief or interest in the heroic things of the 
 present and future ; that she was a lover of 
 gossip and scandal, sometimes (as Gino Capponi 
 says) hard and disagreeable ; that she inspired 
 some men, like d'Azeglio and Giordani, with a 
 positive repulsion as a vulgar-minded, spiteful, 
 meddlesome old thing ; that there should be 
 any other Mme. d'Albany than the one of his 
 noble fancy, than the woman whose image 
 (fashioned by himself) he loved to unite with 
 the image of his own sweet, serious, shy, noble- 
 minded mother : all these things M. de Sis- 
 mondi, who never guessed himself to be other- 
 wise than the most unpoetical and practical of 
 men, never dreamed oL So Sismondi went on 
 writing to Mme. d'Albany, pouring out his grief 
 at Mme. de Stael's persecutions, his schemes 
 of general improvement, all the interests which 
 filled his gentle, austere and enthusiastic mind. 
 1 8 14 came, and 181 5. Sismondi had always 
 hated, with the hatred of an Italian mediaeval 
 patriot, and the hatred of an eighteenth-century 
 philanthropist, the despotism, the bureaucratic 
 10 
 
290 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 levelling, the great military slaughters of Napo- 
 leon ; but when he saw Napoleon succeeded by 
 the inept and wicked governments of the Res- 
 toration, his heart seemed to burst. A Swiss, 
 scarcely acquainted with France, the passion for 
 the principles of liberty and good sense and 
 progress which France had represented, the 
 passion for France itself, burst out in him with 
 generous ardor. This man suffered intensely 
 at what to him, as to Byron and to Shelley (we 
 must recollect the introduction of the Revolt of 
 Islam), seemed the battle between progress and 
 retrogression ; and suffered all the more as he 
 was too pure and just-minded not to feel the 
 impossibility of complete sympathy with either 
 side. Mme. d' Albany answered his letters with 
 Olympic serenity. What was it to her which 
 got the upper hand } She was by this time one 
 of those placid mixtures of optimism and pessi- 
 mism which do not expect good to triumph, 
 simply because they do not care whether good 
 does triumph. Sismondi, in his adoration of 
 her, thought this might be the result of a supe- 
 rior magnanimity of character; yet he kept con- 
 juring her to take an interest in the tragedy 
 which was taking place before her eyes. If she 
 will take no interest, will not Fabre 1 '* Does 
 M. Fabre not feel himself turning French 
 again?" writes Sismondi, and there is a pa- 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. .291 
 
 thetic insistency in the question. Fabre thought 
 of his pictures, his collections of antiques, per- 
 haps of his dinner ; of anything save France 
 and political events. Mme. d' Albany smiled 
 serenely, and chaffed Sismondi a little for his 
 political passions. Sismondi, of all men the 
 most loyal to the idea he had formed of his 
 friends, seems never to have permitted himself 
 to see the real woman, the real abyss of indif- 
 ference, beneath his ideal Mme. d'Albany. But 
 there are few things more pathetic, I think, than 
 the letters of this enthusiastic man to this cold 
 woman; than the belief of Sismondi — writing 
 that the retrograde measures of which he reads 
 in the paper give him fits of fever, that the post 
 days on which he expects political news are days 
 of frenzied expectation — in the moral fibre, the 
 faculty for indignation, of this pleasant, indiffer- 
 ent, cynical quasi-widow of Alfieri. 
 
 The story of the Countess and Foscolo is an 
 even sadder instance of those melancholy little 
 psychological dramas which go on, unseen to 
 the world, in a man's soul ; little dramas without 
 outward events, without deaths or partings or 
 such-like similar visible catastrophes, but the 
 action of which is the slow murder of an affec- 
 tion, of an ideal, of a belief in the loyalty, sym- 
 pathy and comprehension of another. The 
 character and history of Ugo Foscolo, like Che- 
 
292 COUiVTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 nier, half a Greek in blood, and more than half 
 a Greek in passionate love of beauty and in- 
 domitable .love of liberty, are amongst the most 
 interesting in Italian literature ; and I regret 
 that I can say but little of them in this place. 
 Reviewing his brief life, his long career from 
 the moment when, scarcely more than a boy, he 
 had entered the service of liberty as a soldier, 
 a political writer, and a poet, only to taste the 
 bitterness of the betrayal of Campo Formio, he 
 wrote, in 1823, from London, where he was 
 slowly dying, to his sister Rubina : " I am now 
 nearly forty-six ; and you, although younger than 
 myself, can recollect how miserable, how un- 
 quiet ami uncertain our lives have always been 
 ever since our childhood." Poor, vain, passion- 
 ate and proud, torn between the selfish impulses 
 of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative na- 
 ture, and the rigid sense of duty of a heroic and 
 generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the ear- 
 liest and most genuine victims of that sickness 
 of disappointed hope and betrayed enthusiasm, 
 of that Weltschnierz of which personal misfor- 
 tunes seemed as but the least dreadful part, that 
 came upon the noblest minds after the Revolu- 
 tion, and which he has painted with great en- 
 ergy and truthfulness, in his early xiowoi Jacopo 
 Ortis. His career broken by his determination 
 never to come to terms with any sort of base- 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 293 
 
 ness, his happiness destroyed by political disap- 
 pointment, literary feuds, and a number of love 
 affairs into which his weaker, more passionate 
 and vainer, yet not more ungenerous temper 
 was forever embroiling him, Foscolo came to 
 Florence, ill and miserable, in the year 1812. 
 The Countess of Albany, recognizing in him a 
 something — a mixture of independence, of pas- 
 sion, of vanity, of truthfulness, of pose — which 
 resembled Alfieri in his earlier days (though, 
 as she was unable to see, a nobler Alfieri, wider- 
 minded, warmer-hearted, born in a nobler civil- 
 ization and destined to give to Italy a nobler ex- 
 ample, the pattern for her Leopardi, than Alfieri 
 had been able to give) — the Countess of Albany 
 received Foscolo well. His letters are full of 
 allusions to the hours which he spent seated at 
 the little round table in Mme. d' Albany's draw- 
 ing-room, opposite to the '' Muse " newly bought 
 of Canova, narrating to her his many and tan- 
 gled love affairs ; love affairs in which he left 
 his heart on all the briars, and in which, how- 
 ever, by an instinct which shows the very noble- 
 ness of his nature, he seems to have been im- 
 pelled rather towards women whom he must love 
 sincerely and unhappily, than towards Marchesa 
 de Pries and Lady Ligoniers, like Alfieri ; love 
 affairs in which, alas ! there was also a good dose 
 of the vanity of a poet and a notorious beau. 
 
294 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 Mme. d' Albany, as we have seen, loved gossip ; 
 and being a kind, helpful woman, she also sin- 
 cerely liked becoming the confidant of other 
 folks' woes. She took a real affection for this 
 strange Foscolo. Foscolo, in return, ill, sore of 
 heart, solitary, gradually got to love this gentle, 
 sympathizing Countess with a sort of filial de- 
 votion, but a filial devotion into which there en- 
 tered somewhat of the feeling of a wounded man 
 towards his nurse, of the feeling of a devout 
 man towards his Madonna. 
 
 His letters are full of this feeling : " My 
 friend and not the friend of my good fortune," 
 he writes to Mme. d' Albany in 1813, "I seem 
 to have left home, mother, friends, and almost 
 the person dearest to my heart in leaving Flor- 
 ence." Again, " I had in you, mia Sigiiora^ a 
 friend and a mother ; a person, in short, such 
 as no name can express, but such as sufficed to 
 console me in the miseries which are perhaps 
 incurable and interminable." Her letters are 
 a real ray of sunlight in his gloomy life, they 
 are *' so full of graciousness, and condescension 
 and benevolence and love. I venture to use 
 this last word, because I feel the sentiment 
 which it expresses in myself towards you." 
 
 His health, his work, his money matters, his 
 love affairs, were all getting into a more and 
 more lamentable condition, in which Mme. d'Al- 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 295 
 
 bany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the 
 catastrophes of 1814 and 181 5, which to Italy 
 meant the commencement of a state of degra- 
 dation and misery much more intolerable and 
 hopeless than any previous one, came and 
 drowned the various bitternesses of poor Fos- 
 colo's life in a sea of bitterness. " Italy," wrote 
 Foscolo to Mme. d' Albany in 18 14, *' is a corpse; 
 and a corpse which must not be touched if the 
 stench thereof is not to be made more horrible. 
 And yet I see certain crazy creatures fantasti- 
 cating ways of bringing her to life ; for myself, I 
 should wish her to be buried with myself, and 
 overwhelmed by the seas, or that some new 
 Phaeton should precipitate upon her the flaming 
 heavens, so that the ashes should be scattered 
 to the four winds, and that the nations coming 
 and to come should forget the infamy of our 
 times. Amen." 
 
 How strongly we feel in this outburst that, 
 despite his despair, or perhaps on account of it, 
 Foscolo is himself one of those '' crazy creatures 
 fantasticating ways of bringing Italy to life ! " 
 But the Countess did not understand ; she could 
 conceive liking Bonaparte and serving him, or 
 liking the Restoration and serving it ; but to 
 love an abstract Italy which did not yet exist, 
 to hate equally all those who deprived it of free- 
 dom, that was not within her comprehension. 
 
296 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 And as she could not comprehend this feeling, 
 the mainspring of Foscolo's soul, so she could 
 understand of Foscolo only the slighter, meaner 
 things : his troubles and intrigues, his loves and 
 quarrels. The moment came when the grief of 
 miscomprehension was revealed to poor Foscolo ; 
 when he saw how little he was understood by 
 this woman whom he loved as a mother. Fos- 
 colo had refused, latterly, to serve Napoleon ; 
 he refused, also, to serve the Austrians. Hated 
 for his independent ways both by the Bonapart- 
 ists and the reactionists, surrounded by spies, 
 he was forced to quit Italy never to return. He 
 wrote to explain his motives to Mme. d'Albany. 
 Mme. d'Albany wrote back in a way which 
 showed that she believed the assertions of Fos- 
 colo's enemies ; that she ascribed to cowardice, 
 to meanness, to a base desire to make himself 
 conspicuous, the self-inflicted exile which he had 
 taken upon him : a letter which the editor of 
 Foscolo's correspondence describes to us in one 
 word — unworthv. 
 
 This letter came upon Foscolo like a thunder- 
 clap. "So thus," he wrote to the Countess in 
 August, 1815, " generosity and justice are ban- 
 ished even from nobler souls. Your letter, 
 Signora Contessa, grieves me, and confers upon 
 me, at the same time, two advantages : it 
 diminishes suddenly the perpetual nostalgia 
 
THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 297 
 
 which I have felt for Florence, and it affords 
 me an occasion to try my strength of spirit. . . 
 My hatred for the tyranny with which Bona- 
 parte was oppressing Italy does not imply that 
 I should love the house of Austria. The differ- 
 ence for me was that I hoped that Bon^iparte's 
 ambition might bring about, if not the inde- 
 pendence of Italy, at least such magnanimous 
 deeds as might raise the Italians ; whereas the 
 regular government of Austria precludes all 
 such hopes. I should be mad and infamous if 
 I desired for Italy, which requires peace at any 
 price, new disorders and slaughterings ; but I 
 should consider myself madder still and more 
 infamous if, having despised to serve the for- 
 eigner who has fallen, I should accept to serve 
 
 the foreigner who has succeeded But if 
 
 your accusation of inconstancy is unjust, your 
 accusation that I want to ^ passer pour oi'iginaV 
 is actually offensiv^e and mocking." 
 
 Later, in his solitary wanderings, Foscolo's 
 heart seems to have melted towards his former 
 friend ; he wrote her one or two letters, con- 
 ciliating, friendly, but how different from the 
 former ones ! The Countess of Albany, whom 
 he had loved and trusted, was dead; the woman 
 who remained was dear to him as a mere relic 
 of that dead ideal. 
 
 Such is the story of Mme. d'Albany's friend- 
 
298 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 ship for two of the noblest spirits, Sismondi 
 and Foscolo, of their day ; the noblest, the one 
 in his pure austerity, the other in his magnani- 
 mous passionateness, that ever crossed the 
 path of the beloved of AJfieri. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 SANTA CROCK. 
 
 With her other friends, who gave less of 
 their own heart and asked less of hers, Mme. 
 d' Albany was more fortunate. She contrived 
 to connect herself by correspondence with the 
 most eminent men and women of the most dif- 
 ferent views and tempers ; she made her salon 
 in Florence, as M. Saint Rene Taillandier has 
 observed, a sort of adjunct to the cosmopolitan 
 salon of Mme. de Stael at Coppet. Her efforts 
 in so doing were crowned with the very highest 
 success. In 1809 Napoleon requested Mme. 
 d'Albany to leave Florence for Paris, where, he 
 added with a mixture of brutality and sarcasm, 
 she might indulge her love of art in the new 
 galleries of the Louvre, and where her social 
 talents could no longer spread dissatisfaction 
 with his government, as was the case in Italy. 
 
 The one year's residence in Paris, which 
 Napoleon's jealous meddlesomeness forced upon 
 her, was in itself a very enjoyable time, spent 
 with the friends whom she had left in '93, and 
 
300 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 with a whole host of fiew ones whom she had 
 made since. She returned to Florence with a 
 larger number of devoted correspondents than 
 ever; her salon became more and more bril- 
 liant ; and when, after Waterloo, the whole 
 English world of politics, fashion and letters 
 poured on to the Continent, her house became, 
 as Sismondi said, the wall on which all the 
 most brilliant figures of the great magic lantern 
 were projected. 
 
 Thus, seeing- crowds of the most distin- 
 guished and delightful people, receiving piles of 
 the most interesting and adoring letters, happy, 
 self-satisfied, Mme. d' Albany grew into an old 
 woman. Every evening until ten the rooms of 
 the Casa Alfieri were thrown open ; the ser- 
 vants in the Stuart liveries ushered in the 
 guests ; the tea was served in those famous 
 services emblazoned with the royal arms of 
 England. The Countess had not yet abandoned 
 her regal pretensions ; for all her condescend- 
 ing cordiality towards the elect, she could 
 assume airs of social superiority which some 
 folk scarcely brooked, and she was evidently 
 pleased when, half in earnest, Mme. de Stael 
 addressed her as "My dear sovereign," "My 
 dear Queen," and even when that vulgar woman 
 of genius. Lady Morgan, made a buffoonish 
 scene about the "dead usurper," on the death of 
 
SANTA CROCE. 3OI 
 
 George III. But Mme. d' Albany herself was get- 
 ting to look and talk less and less like a queen, 
 either the Queen of Great Britain or the Queen 
 of Hearts ; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed 
 with an eternal red shawl (now the property of 
 an intimate friend of mine), in a dress extremely 
 suggestive of an old housekeeper. She was, 
 when not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in 
 manner, loving to have children about her, to 
 spoil them with cakes and see them romp and 
 dance ; free and easy, cynical. Rabelaisian, if I 
 may use the expression, as such mongrel French- 
 women are apt to grow with years ; the nick- 
 name which she gave to a member of a family 
 where the tradition of her and her ways still 
 persists, reveals a wealth of coarse fun which is 
 rather strange in a woman who was once the 
 Beatrice or Laura of a poet. She was active, 
 mentally and bodily, never giving up her multi- 
 farious readings, her letter-writing ; never fore- 
 going her invariable morning walk, in a big 
 bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the 
 Lung Arno and into the Cascine. 
 
 Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of 
 Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, 
 widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri ; 
 and such, at the age of seventy-two, did death 
 overtake her, on the 29th January, 1824. Her 
 property she bequeathed to Fabre, whom a false 
 
302 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 
 
 rumor had called her husband ; and Fabre left 
 it jointly to his native town of Montpellier, and 
 to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, 
 who still lives and recollects Mme. d' Albany. 
 
 The famous epitaph, composed by Alfieri 
 for himself, had been mangled by Mme. 
 d' Albany and those who helped her and Canova 
 in devising his tomb ; the companion epitaph, the 
 one in which Alfieri described the Countess as 
 buried next to him, was also mangled in its 
 adaptation to a tomb erected in Santa Croce, 
 entirely separate from Alfieri's. On that mon- 
 ument of Mme. d' Albany, in the chapel where 
 moulder the frescoes of Masolino, there is not 
 a word of that sentence of Alfieri's about the 
 dead woman having been to him dearer and 
 more respected than any other human thing. 
 Mme. d' Albany had changed into quite another 
 being between 1803 and 1824: the friend of 
 Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Stael, the 
 worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have 
 no connection with the lady who had wept for 
 Alfieri in the convent at Rome, who had borne 
 with all Alfieri's misanthropic furies after the 
 Revolution, any more than with the delicate, 
 intellectual girl whom Charles Edward had 
 nearly done to death in his drunken jealousy. 
 So, on the whole, Fabre, and whosoever 
 assisted Fabre, was right in concocting a new 
 epitaph. 
 
. SANTA CROCE. 303 
 
 But to us, who have followed the career — 
 whose lesson is that of the meanness which 
 lurks in noble things, the nobility which lurks 
 in mean ones — of this woman from her inau- 
 spicious wedding day to the placid day of her 
 death, to us Louise of Stolberg, Countess of 
 Albany, Queen of Great Britain, France and 
 Ireland, will remain, for all blame we may give 
 her and her times, a figure to remember and 
 reflect upon, principally because of those 
 suppressed words of her epitaph : " A Victoria 
 Alferio ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale 
 numert ab ipso cons tauter habita et observata. " 
 
Messrs. ROBERTS BROTHERS' 
 
 LIST OF 
 
 Bio^papMcal PublicationB. 
 
 LATE BIOGRAPHIES. 
 
 THE LIFE OF RICHARD COBDEN. By John Mor- 
 
 ley. I vol. 8vo. Cloth. With Steel Portrait. Price. . $3.00 
 
 " This life has been compared to Trevelyan's * Life of Macaulay.' This is rather, 
 we assume, as an illustration of its expected popularity with readers than on any other 
 ground. It is hardly a compliment to place it on a par with the ' Life of Macaulay' in 
 other respects. It is an abler work than the latter; a more important work ; a more 
 artistic work. Mr. Trevelyan writes in a certain florid style of composition which 
 Mr. Morely does not attempt to follow ; but his manner is more terse and vigorous 
 than that of Mr. Trevelyan, and his picture of the life and times of Cobden is more 
 effective than that made of Macaulay. This book does not aim to be picturesque ; 
 there is no attempt at fine writing- in its pages; but it is essentially a graphic presenta- 
 tion of its subject. It is always interestmg. There are marks m it of a mind fully 
 conscious of the dignity and importance of its subject; and there is a firm grasp 
 of all the matenal, and a masterly weaving of it into a lucid and thoroughly life-like 
 narrative, that it would be difficult to overpraise. * * * • It is a picture of the 
 most important era of English politics of the present century, and it is a record of 
 one of the most interesting of lives in its personal relations. It records English legisla- 
 tion for a third of a century; it pictures the inner life of the man who was the finest 
 figure in it. The diaries, the letters, the speeches, the correspondence of Cobden are 
 all drawn upon to give the narrative clearness, and make the presentation complete. 
 Twice Mr. Cobden visited America, and once he made the tour of Europe. He was 
 in constant correspondence with the more liberal men both in our own country and 
 abroad. Several of his letters to Charles Sumner are used, either in whole or in part, 
 in this department of the biography." — Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH : A Biographical Sketch, 
 
 with Selections from his Writings in Poetry and Prose. , 
 
 By A. J. Symington. With Portrait of Wordsworth 
 
 and View of Rydal Mount. 2 vols. i6mo. Cloth.* Price, $2.00 
 
 " Mr. S>Tnington quotes iii full no less than forty-seven of the almost matchlesr 
 fionnets, which are, in our opinion, the portion of Wordsworth's work which ensure; 
 him an undying fame, and which must command admiration even from those who havt 
 but little sympathy with the poet's general teaching, and who even dislike the great 
 mass of his work. Mr. Symington's book will be found an excellent popular guide to 
 the study of Wordsworth, and a true picture of one who never * blazed,_the comet of 
 a season,' but lived in obscurity, and sowed seed to bear fruit in increasing measure; 
 and Mr. Symington, while deroted to his subject, allows his enthusiasm to be guided 
 by common sense, and does not rush into extremes." — Manchester Exatniner, 
 
 GASPARA STAMPA. By Eugene Benson. With a 
 selection from her Sonnets translated by George Fleming, 
 author of " Kismet." i8mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00 
 
 ** Gaspara Stampa is a name that has lived only in the keeping of choice and well 
 furnished minds. Her brief story is told in these pages in a style well fitted to the 
 subject, with no superfluity and no poverty of words. She is depicted in the beauty 
 of her person and the brilliancy of her mind, as possessed of genius to give her rank 
 with Sappho, and endowed, like her, wth the perilous gift of love. The fatal grief that 
 fell on her heart, though it sent her to the grave, drew from her the sonnets which 
 keep her name alive in literature. 'George Fleming's' selections are done by her 
 into English in a style which preserves the tenderness and the passion of the origi* 
 nals," says the Independent. 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 ANDREW (JOHN A.) A Memoir of Governor An- 
 drew, with Reminiscences. By Peleg \V. Chandler. 
 With Illustrations and Portrait. i6mo $1-2^ 
 
 ARNDT (ERNST MORITZ), Life and Adventures of. 
 
 With Preface by J. R. Seeley, M. A. With Portrait. 
 
 Crown 8vo 2.25 
 
 BRASSEY (THOMAS), Life and Labors of. 1805-1870. 
 
 By Arthur Helps. With Portrait. 8vo 2.50 
 
 CHANNING (WILLIAM ELLERY, D. D.). A Cen- 
 tennial Memory. By Charles T. Brooks. With nine 
 Illustrations, including Portrait after Gambadella. i6mo. 1.50 
 
 CHANNING (WILLIAM ELLERY, D. D.), Remi- 
 niscences of. By Elizabeth P. Peabody. i6mo. . . . 2.00 
 
 COBDEN (RICHARD). The Life of. By John Morley. 
 
 With Portrait. Svo 3.00 
 
 D'ARBLAY (MADAME). The Diary and Letters of 
 Madame D'Arblay. Revised and Edited by Sarah 
 Chauncey Woolsey. With Portraits. 2 vols. i2mo. . 4.00 
 
 DELANEY (MRS.)- The Autobiography and Corres- 
 pondence of Mrs. Delaney. Revised from Lady Llan- 
 over's Edition, and Edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. 
 With Portraits. 2 vols. i2mo, , . 4.00 
 
 DE MUSSET (ALFRED), The Biography of. From 
 the French of Paul de Musset. By Harriet W. Preston. 
 Squa^p i2mo. Gilt top 2.00 
 
 DESBORDES-VALMORE (MADAME), Memoirs of. 
 
 By C. A. Sainte-Beuve. i6mo 1.50 
 
 DE SEVIGNE (MADAME). Letters. Edited by Mrs. 
 
 Sarah J. Hale. With Portrait. i2mo 1.50 
 
 FLETCHER (MRS.), Autobiography of. With Letters 
 and other Family Memorials. Edited by the Survivor of 
 her Family. Two superb steel-engraved likenesses of Mrs. 
 Fletcher at the ages of fifteen and eighty. Svo. . . . 1.50 
 
 FULLER (MARGARET), Memoirs of. By Ralph Waldo 
 
 Emerson, and others. With Portrait. 2 vols. i2mo. . 3.00 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 GANNETT (EZRA STILES). A Memoir. By his 
 
 son, W. C. Gannett. With Portrait. 8vo 3.00 
 
 GODWIN (WILLIAM); His Friends and Contem- 
 poraries. By C. Kegan Paul. With Portraits and Illus- 
 trations. 2 vols. 8vo 6.00 
 
 JAMESON (ANNA), Memoirs of the Life of. Author 
 of "Characteristics of Women," etc. By her Niece, 
 Gerardine Macpherson. With Portrait. 8vo 2.50 
 
 LAMB (CHARLES). A Memoir. By Barry Cornwall. 
 
 i6mo 1.50 
 
 MAY (REV. SAMUEL J.), Memoirs of. With a steel- 
 engraved Likeness. i6mo 75 
 
 MODERN FRENCHMEN. Five Biographies. By 
 
 P. G. Hamerton. Square i2ino 2.00 
 
 MONTAGU (MARY WORTLEY). Letters. Edited, 
 
 with a Memoir, by Mrs. Sarah J, Hale. i2mo 1. 50 
 
 PELLICO (SILVIO). My Prisons. Memoirs of Silvio 
 Pellico. With an Introduction by Epes Sargent. i2mo., 
 $2.25; i6mo 1.50 
 
 PORTRAITS OF CELEBRATED WOMEN. By 
 C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Translated by H. W. Preston. 
 i6mo 1.50 
 
 PROCTER (BRYAN WALLER). [Barry Cornwall.] 
 An Autobiographical Fragment, and Biographical Notes, 
 with Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished * 
 Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends. Edited by Mrs. 
 Procter and Coventry Patmore. With Portrait. Square 
 i2mo 2.00 
 
 .-lECAMIER (MADAME). Memoirs and Correspon- 
 dence. Translated from the French of Mme. Lenormant, 
 by I. M. Luyster. With Portrait. i6mo 1.5c 
 
 VIECAMIER (MADAME) and her Friends. By Mme. 
 
 Lenormant. Translated by I. M. Luyster. i6mo. . . . 1. 50 
 
 RUSSELL (JOHN, EARL). Recollections and Sug- 
 gestions of Public Life, 1813-1873. Svo 3.00 
 
BIOGRAPHICAL PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 SISTER DORA : A Biography. By Margaret Lonsdale. . 
 
 With Portrait. i6mo 1.25 
 
 SOMERVILLE (MARY). Personal Recollections from 
 Early Life to Old Age. With a selection from her Cor- 
 respondence. By her daughter, Martha Somerville. With 
 Portrait. 8vo 2.5c 
 
 STEIN, LIFE AND TIMES OF; or, Germany and 
 Prussia in the Napoleonic Age. By J. R. Seeley, M. A. 
 With Portrait and Maps. 2 vols. 8vo 7.50 
 
 SUMNER (CHARLES), Memoir and Letters of. By 
 Edward L. Pierce. With two newly engraved Likenesses 
 of Sumner. 2 vols. 8vo 6.00 
 
 SWETCHINE (MADAME), Life and Letters. Edited 
 by Count de Falloux. Translated by H. W. Preston. 
 i6mo 1.50 
 
 SWETCHINE (MADAME), Writings. Edited by 
 
 Count de Falloux. Translated by H. W. Preston. i6mo. 1.25 
 
 THOREAU: The Poet Naturalist. By William Ellery 
 
 Channing. i6mo 1.5° 
 
 THORVALDSEN : His Life and Works. By Eugene 
 
 Plon. Svo. Fully Illustrated. Bevelled boards, gilt top. 4.00 
 
 TURNER (J. M. W.), The Life of. By P. G. Hamer- 
 
 ton. Square i2mo 2.00 
 
 WORDSWORTH ( WILLIAM ). A Biographical 
 Sketch, with Selections from his Writings in Poetry and 
 Prose. By A. J. Symington. With Portrait of Words- 
 worth and view of Rydal Mount. 2 vols. i6mo. . . . 2.00 
 
 WOLLSTONECRAFT (MARY), Letters to Imlay, 
 with Prefatory Memoir by C. Kegan Paul. Two Portraits 
 after Opie. i2mo 2.00 
 
 These books are all neatly bound in cloth, and are especially 
 adapted for Libraries. Mailed post-paid, on recevpt of price, by 
 the publishers, lioberts Brothers, Boston. 
 
MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' 
 
 A collection of world-renowned works selected from the 
 /iteratures of all nations, printed from new type in the best 
 manner, and neatly and durably bound. Handy books, con- 
 venient to hold, and an ornament to the library shelves. 
 
 READY AND IN PREPARATION. 
 Sir Walter Scott's "Lay of the Last Minstrel," 
 "Marmion," and "The Lady of the Lake." The 
 three poems in one volume. 
 
 " There are no books for boys like these poems by Sir Walter 
 Scott. Every boy likes them, if they are not put into his hands 
 too late. T/iey surpass everything for boy reading,^'' — Ralph 
 Vi^a/do Emerson. 
 
 Oliver Goldsmith's "The Vicar of Wakefield." 
 With Illustrations by Mulready. 
 
 Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe." With Illustrations by 
 Stothard. 
 
 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's "Paul and Virginia." 
 With Illustrations by Lalauze. 
 
 Southey's "Life of Nelson." With Illustrations by 
 Birket Foster. 
 
 Voltaire's " Life of Charles the Twelfth." With 
 Maps and Portraits. 
 
 Maria Edgeworth's "Classic Tales." With a bio- 
 graphical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 
 
 Lord Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome." With 
 a Biographical Sketch and Illustrations. 
 
 Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress." With all of the origi- 
 nal Illustrations in fac-simile. 
 
 Classic Heroic Ballads. Edited by the. Editor of 
 " Quiet Hours." 
 
 Classic Tales. By Anna Letitia Barbauld. With a 
 Biographical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 
 
 Classic Tales. By Ann and Jane Taylor. With a 
 Biographical Sketch by Grace A. Oliver. 
 
 AND OTHERS. 
 
MESSRS. ROBERTS BROTHERS' HANDBOOKS. 
 
 MODERN SOCIETY and Changes in American Society. 
 
 By Julia Ward Howe. i6mo, cloth. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 " P'uU of thought, of wit, of high purpose and clear expression." — Spring- 
 field Republican. 
 
 STUDYING ART ABROAD, and how to do it cheaply. 
 
 By May Alcott Nieriker. i6mo, cloth. Price 50 cents. 
 
 Practical advice for lady students desirous of studying Art in England, France, 
 or Italy; points out the best and cheapest route to take, the cheapest and most 
 advantageous way to live, to shop, to study, S:c. 
 
 READING AS A FINE ART. By Ernest Legouve, 
 
 of the Academie Frangaise. Translated from the Ninth Edition by 
 Abby Langdon Alger. i6mo, cloth. 50 cents. 
 
 It treats of the " First Steps" in reading, " Learning to Read," " Should we 
 Read as we Talk," "The Use and Management of the Voice," "The Art of 
 Breathing," "Pronunciation," "Stuttering," " Punctuaticm," " Readers and 
 Speakers," " Reading as a Means of Criticism," " On Reading Poetry," &c. 
 
 HOW TO TAKE CARE OF OUR EYES. With 
 
 advice to Parents and Teachers in regard to the management of the 
 
 Pyes of Children. By Henry C. Angell, M.D. Third Edition. 
 
 i6mo. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 " If any one thing in the human organism demands special and intelligent 
 care, almost every one will agree that the eye holds that important place." — 
 Providence Journal. 
 
 ON THE RIGHT USE OF BOOKS. A Lecture. By 
 
 William P. Atkinson, Professor of English and History in the 
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. i6nio, cloth. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 " Full of good sense, sound taste, and quiet humor. ... It is the function of a 
 good book not only to fructify, but to inspire." — N. Y. Tributte. 
 
 THE ACTOR AND HIS ART. By C. Coqueltn, of 
 
 the Comedie Frangaise. Translated from the French by Abby Lang- 
 don Alger. i6mo, cloth. Price, 50 cents. 
 / shall fiow try to prove that tJie actor is an artist. 
 
 WHIST; OR, BUMBLEPUPPY? By Pembridge. From 
 
 the second London Edition. i6mo. Cloth. Price, 50 cents. 
 
 "We have been rather lengthy in our remarks on tliis book, as it is the best 
 attempt we have ever seen to shame very bad players into trying to improve, and 
 also because it abounds with most sensible maxims, dressed up in a very amusing 
 and palatable form." — London Field, Jan. 17, x88o. 
 
 Sold by all booksellers., or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of price, by the publishers., 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
 LIVES OF EXEMPLARY WOMEN 
 
 flleesrs. Roberts' Bros, are publishing a series of Lives of Exemplary 
 Women, uniform in size and price. The first volume is 
 
 niEMOIBS AND CORRESPONDENCE OP MADAMH 
 BECAMTEB. Translated from the French and edited by Miaa 
 LuYSTER. With a fine portrait of Madame Recamier. Seventh edition. 
 One handsome 12mo volume. Price $ 1.50. 
 
 " Her own contributions to it are exceedingly brief, but her individuality permeatCB tKf 
 (Thole work and gives it unitv. She was undoubtedly a woman of genius; but it was in ha 
 life alone, in her noble friendships, in her unselfish devotion to all bound to her by any ties, 
 that gave her genius expression, and it is only fair, tlierefore, that she should attain immor- 
 tility not through the labor of her own spirit, but rather through the praise of those by 
 whom she was so weU beloved." — Virginia Vaughan in " 27ie Leader." 
 
 The second volume is 
 IiIFIi AND LETTERS OP MADAME SWETCHINE. By 
 Count de Falloux. Translated by Miss Preston. Seventh edition 
 In one voiame. 12mo. Price $ 1.50. 
 
 *• The Life and Letters of Madame Swetchine, is a companion volume to Mme. Recamier, 
 and both works give us two phases of contemporary Paris life, aud two characters that 
 with some accidental resemblances, present strong points of contrast 
 
 " The social influence both women exercised was good, but when we compare the two, 
 Madame Recamier's sinks to a much lower level. She (Madame R.) was gentle and kind, 
 ready to sacrifice herself to any extent to advance the materia) influence or her friends, but 
 she was essentiaLy a worldly woman ; whereas Madame Swetchine was ' in the world bul 
 not of it.' She exerted an immense spiritual as well as intellectual influence on all who 
 approached her, and raised her friends to her own level. Madame Recamier made her asso- 
 ciates ptea*ed with themselves, whilst Madame Swetchine taught hers to forget themselvea. 
 
 " As a biography, the life of Madame Swetchine is more satisfactory and much better 
 written; that of Madame Recamier is Mler of personal anecdote respecting distinguiehed 
 persons, and as a book of reference is more valuable. We frequently meet the same people 
 in each, and in this respect they serve to illustrate and explain eacn other." — Pro»«de»Jc» 
 Joumat. 
 
 The third volume is 
 
 THE FRIENDSHIPS OP "WOMEN. By Rev. W. R. Algbb. 
 
 Seventh edition. One voliune, 12mo. Price $ 1.50. 
 "Mr. Alger is among our most diligent students and earnest thinkers; and this volume 
 will add to the reputation he has fairly earned as the occupant of quite a prominent place in 
 American literature. He deserves all the popularity he has won ; for, always thoughtful, 
 sincere, and excellent of purpose with his pen, he allows no success to seduce him into any 
 content with what he has already accomplished. His ' Friendships of Women,' for many 
 reasons, will have a wide circle of readers, and cannot fail to increase our sense of the 
 worth of human nature, as it enthusiastically delineates some of its most elevated manifos- 
 thtions. By telling what woman has been, he tells what woman may be; intellectually as 
 well as morally, in the beauty of her mind as weU as in the affections of her heart, and (hfl 
 loveliness of her person." — Salem Gazette. 
 
 The fourth volume is 
 
 SAINT BETTVE'S PORTRAITS OP CELEBRATBD 
 "WOMEN. 
 BLIDAMB DE SEVIONB. MADAME DE DURAS. 
 
 MADAME DE LA FATETTB. MADAME DE REMUS AT. 
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. MADAME DE KRUDENBB. 
 
 MADAME ROLAND. MADAME QUIZOT. 
 
 MADAME DB STAEL. 
 
 To match " Madame Recamier," " Madame Swetchine," and " The 
 Friendships of Women." In one volume, l2mo. Price $ 1.50, 
 
 49" Mailed, post-paid, to any addrdss, on receipt of the price, bg (ta 
 TvbUslvers. 
 
Messrs, Roberts Brothers^ Publications, 
 
 THE LETTERS 
 
 OF 
 
 ^ MADAME DE SEVIGNE 
 
 TO HER DAUGHTER AND FRIENDS, 
 
 EDITED BY MRS. HALE. 
 
 i2mo. Price $1.50. 
 
 " The charm of Madame de S^vigne's letters has so long been acknowledged 
 that criticism is uncalled for in referring to them, nor would it be easy to find a 
 word of admiration or praise that has not already been pronounced in their 
 favor. For spontaneity, tenderness, playfulness, sweetness, they are unequalled. 
 The style is all that is most simple and natural and graceful. Madame 
 de Sevigne has no variety of inspiration, and but little profundity of thought. 
 She is inspired by only one sentiment, her love for her daughter; but thia 
 single note is so sweet, and is sung in so many keys, and with such a pleasing 
 accompaniment of spicy gossip and pensive meditation, that its monotony is 
 never unpleasing. The influence which these letters have exerted upon the 
 development of the French language and French literature has again given 
 them a classical reputation, which works of far greater pretension and power 
 have never attained. They will ever be classed with the works of a few great 
 authors, who founded in France the distinctive literary school that at a later 
 period obtained a development so varied and so brilliant. By the simplicity 
 and sincerity of her genius, Madame de Sevign^ corrected the false taste and 
 feeble sentimentality of her day, while the purity of her style exerted an im- 
 mense influence in forming the language in which she wrote." — Miss 
 Vaughan^ in The Leader, 
 
 •^* Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed^ postpaidy by the pub» 
 Ushers^ 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Bro theirs' Publications. 
 
 jFamousi SEomen &txm. 
 
 margaretF fuller. 
 
 By JULIA WARD HOWE. 
 
 " A memoir of the woman who first in New England took a position of moral 
 and intellectual leadership, by the woman who wrote the Battle Hymn of the 
 Republic, is a literary event of no common or transient interest. The Famous 
 Women Series will have no worthier subject and no more illustrious biographer. 
 Nor will the reader be disappointed, — for the narrative is deeply interesting and 
 full of inspiration." — IVotnati^s yournal. 
 
 "Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's biography of Margaret Fuller, in the Famous 
 Women Series of Messrs. Roberts Brothers, is a work which has been looked for 
 with curiosity. It will not disappoint expectation. She has made a brilliant and 
 an interesting book. Her study of Margaret Fuller's character is thoroughly 
 sympathetic ; her relation of her life is done in a graphic and at times a fascinating 
 manner. It is the case of one woman of strong individuality depicting the points 
 which made another one of the most marked characters of her day. It is always 
 agreeable to follow Mrs. Howe in this ; for while we see marks of her own mind 
 constantly, there is no inartistic protrusion of her personality. The book is always 
 readable, and the relation of the death-scene is thrillingly impressive." —Satur- 
 day Gazette. 
 
 " Mrs. Julia Ward Howe has retold the story of Margaret Fuller's lite and 
 career in a very interesting manner. This remarkable woman was happy in 
 having James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Henry 
 Channing, all of whom had been intimate with her and had felt the spell of her 
 extraordinary personal influence, for her biographers. It is needless to say, of 
 course, that nothing could be better than these reminiscences in their way." — 
 New York World. 
 
 •'The selection of Mrs. Howe as the writer of this biography was a happy 
 thought on the part of the editor of the series; for, aside from the natural appre- 
 ciation she would have for Margaret Fuller, comes her knowledge of all the 
 influences that had their effect on Margaret Fuller's life. She tells the story of 
 Margaret Fuller's interesting life from all sources and from her own knowledge, 
 not hesitating to use plenty of quotations when she felt that others, or even 
 Margaret Fuller herself, had done the work better." — .^/m* Gilder., in Philadel- 
 phia Press. 
 
 ♦ 
 
 Sold by all booksellers. Mailed., post-paid^ on receipt of 
 the price, by the publishers., 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, 
 
 Boston, Mass. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers Pablicatiojis. 
 
 JFamous SHomen Series. 
 
 MARIA EDGEWORTH 
 
 By HELEN ZIMMERN. 
 
 ** This little volume shows good literary workmanship. It does not weary the 
 reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthu- 
 siasm — not to say baseless encomium — for which too many female biographers 
 have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of 
 the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling 
 women.' . . • Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too 
 much in praise. That home life, so loving, so wise, and so helpful, was beautiful 
 lo its end. Miss Zimmern has treated it with delicate appreciation. Her book 
 is refined in conception and tasteful in execution,— all, in short, the cynic might 
 say, that we expect a woman's book to be." — Neiv York Tribune. 
 
 " It was high time that we should possess an adequate biography of this orna- 
 ment and general benefactor of her time. And so we bail with uncommon pleas- 
 ure the volume just published in the Roberts Brothers' series of Famous Women, 
 of which it is the sixth. We have only words of praise for the manner in which 
 Miss Zimmern has written her life of Maria Edgeworth. It exhibits sound 
 judgment, critical analysis, and clear characterization. . . . The style of the 
 volume is pure, limpid, and strong, as we might expect from a well-trained Eng- 
 lish writer." — Margaret J. Presto7i, in the Hovie Jourftal. 
 
 " We can h^rtily recommend this life of Maria Edgeworth, not only because it 
 is singularly readable in itself, but because it makes familiar to readers of the 
 present age a notable figure in English literary history, with whose lineaments 
 we suspect most readers, especially of the present generation, are less familiar 
 tiian they ought to be." — Eclectic. 
 
 " This biography contains several letters and papers by Miss Edgeworth th.it 
 have not before been made public, notably some charming letters written during 
 the latter part of her life to Dr. Holland and Mr. and Mrs. Ticknor. The author 
 had access to a life of Miss Edgeworth written by her step-mother, as well as to a 
 large collection of her private letters, and has therefore been able to bring forward 
 many facts in her life which have not been noted by other writers. The book is 
 written in a pleasant vein, and is altogether a delightful one to read." — Utica 
 Herald. 
 
 Sold by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, by the pub- 
 lishers^ 
 
 RORERTS BROTHERS, 
 
 Boston, Mass, 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications, 
 
 FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES. 
 
 GEORGE SAND. 
 
 By bertha THOMAS. 
 One volume. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 
 
 ** Miss Thomas has accomplished a difficult task with as much good sense as 
 good feeling. She presents the main facts of George Sand's life, extenuating 
 nothing, and setting naught down in malice, but wisely leaving her readers to 
 form their own conclusions. Everybody knows that it was not such a life as the 
 women of England and America are accustomed to live, and as the worst of men 
 are glad to have them Hve. ... Whatever may be said against it, its result on 
 George Sand was not what it would have been upon an English or American 
 woman of genius." — New York Mail and Express. 
 
 " This is a volume of the ' Famous Women Series,' which was begun so well 
 with George Eliot and Emily Fironte. The book is a review and critical analysis 
 of George Sand's life and work, by no means a detailed biography. Amantine 
 Lucile Aurore Dupin, the maiden, or Mme. Dudevant, the married woman, is 
 forgotten in the renown of the pseudonym George Sand. 
 
 " Altogether, George Sand, with all her excesses and defects, is a representative 
 woman, one of the names of the nineteenth century. She was great among the 
 greatest, the friend and compeer of the finest intellects, and Miss Thomas's essay 
 will be a useful and agreeable introduction to a more extended study of her life 
 and works." — Knickerbocker. 
 
 " The biography of this famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in 
 existence. I'hose who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with 
 some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot 
 fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on 
 George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a 
 sketch, which it undoubtedly is, but a sketch that gives a just and discriminating 
 analysis of George Sand's life, tastes, occupations, and of the motives and impulses 
 which prompted her unconventional actions, that were misunderstood by a narrow 
 public. The difficulties encountered by the writer in describing this remarkable 
 character are shown in the first Hue of the opening chapter, which says, ' In nam- 
 ing George Sand we name something more exceptional than even a great genius.' 
 Tliat tells the whole story. Misconstruction, condemnation, and isolation are the 
 penalties enforced upon the great leaders in the realm of advanced thought, by 
 the bigoted people of their time. The thinkers soar beyond the common herd, 
 whose soul-wings are not strong enough to fly aloft to clearer atmospheres, and 
 consequently they censure or ridicule what they are powerless to reach. George 
 Sand, even lo a greater extent than her contemporary', George Eliot, was a victim 
 to ignorant social prejudices, but even the conservative world was forced to recog- 
 nize the matchless genius of these two extraordinary women, each widely different 
 in her character and method of thought and writing. . . . She has told much that 
 is good which has been untold, and just what will interest the reader, and no more, 
 'n the same easy, entertaining style that characterizes all of these unpretentious 
 jiographies." — Hartford Times. 
 
 Sold everywhere. Mailed, Post-paid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 FAMOUS WOMEN SEEIES. 
 
 MARY LAMB. 
 
 By ANNE GILCHRIST. 
 One volume. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 
 
 " The story of Mary Lamb has long been familiar to the readers of Ella, but 
 never in its entirety as in the monograph which Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has just 
 contributed to the Famous Women Series. Darkly hinted at by Talfourd in his 
 Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, it became better known as the years went on 
 and that imperfect work was followed by fuller and franker biographies, — became 
 so well known, in fact, that no one could recall the memory of Lamb without 
 recalling at the same time the memory of his sister." — New York Mail and Ex- 
 press. 
 
 " A biography of Mary Lamb must inevitably be also, almost more, a biogra- 
 phy of Charles Lamb, so completely was the life of the sister encompassed by 
 that of her brother ; and it must be allowed that Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has per- 
 formed a difficult biographical task with taste and ability. . . . The reader is at 
 least likely to lay down the book with the feeling that if Mary Lamb is not famous 
 she certainly deserves to be, and that a debt of gratitude is due Mrs. Gilchrist for 
 this well-considered record of her life." — Boston Courier. 
 
 *' Mary Lamb, who was the embodiment of everything ,that is tenderest in 
 woman, combined with this a heroism which bore her on for a while through the 
 terrors of insanity. Think of a highly intellectual woman struggling year after 
 year with madness, triumphant over it for a season, and then at last succumbing to 
 it. The saddest lines that ever were written are those descriptive of this brother and 
 sister just before Mary, on some return of insanity, was to leave Charles Lamb. 
 ' On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little 
 foot-path in Hoxton F'ields, both weeping bitterly, and found, on joining them, 
 that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum.' What pathos 
 is there not here ? " — New York Times. 
 
 " This life was worth writing, for all records of weakness conquered, of pain 
 patiently borne, of success won from difficulty, of cheerfulness in sorrow and 
 affliction, make the world better. Mrs. Gilchrist's biography is unaffected and 
 simple. She has told the sweet and melancholy story with judicious sympathy, 
 showing always the light shining through darkness." — Philadelphia Press. 
 
 Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
 the price, by the Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
MESSES. EOBEETS BEOTHEES' PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 JTamous fKHamen ^txit^. 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 By MATHILDE BLIND. 
 One vol. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 
 
 " Messrs. Roberts Brothers begin a series of Biographies of Famous 
 Women with a Hfe of George Eliot, by Mathilde Blind. The idea of th4 
 series is an excellent one, and the reputation of its publishers is a guarantee 
 for its adequate execution. This book contains about three hundred pages in 
 open type, and not only collects and condenses the main facts that are known 
 in regard to the history of George Eliot, but supplies other material from 
 j)ersonal research. It is agreeably written, and with a good idea of propo»- 
 tion in a memoir of its size. The critical study of its subject's works, whicl 
 is made in the order of their appearance, is particularly well done. In fact, 
 good taste and good judgment pervade the memoir throughout." — Saturday 
 Evening Gazette. 
 
 " Miss Blind's little book is written with admirable good taste and judg- 
 ment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with 
 critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings 
 and recondite oracles in tlie plain 'yea' and ' nay ' of life. It is a graceful 
 and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning 
 one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not 
 fascinating woman whom Miss Blind presents," says the New York 
 Tribune. 
 
 " Miss Blind's little biographical study of George Eliot is writteii with 
 sympathy and good taste, and is very welcome. It gives us a graphic if not 
 elaborate sketch of the personality and development of the great novelist, is 
 particularly full and authentic concerning her earlier years, tells enough of 
 the leading motives in her work to give the general reader a lucid idea of the 
 true drift and purpose of her art, and analyzes carefully her various writings, 
 with no attempt at profound criticism or fine writing, but with ajipreciation, 
 insight, and a clear grasp of those underlying psychological principles which 
 are so closely interwoven in every productiou that came from her pen." — 
 Traveler. 
 
 •' The lives of few great writers have attracted more curiosity and specula- 
 tion than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century 
 she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the 
 anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, 
 therefcre, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to 
 the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the 
 present volume." —Philadelphia Press. 
 
 Sold by all booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
 price, by the publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES. 
 
 EMILY BRONTE. 
 
 By a. MARY F. ROBINSON. 
 One vol. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 
 
 " Miss Robinson has written a fascinating biography. . . . Emily Bronte is 
 Interesting, not because she wrote ' Wuthering Heights,' but because of her 
 brave, baffled, human Hfe, so lonely, so full of pain, but with a great hope shining 
 beyond all the darkness, and a passionate defiance in bearing more than the 
 burdens that were laid upon her. Tlie story of the three sisters is infinitely sad, 
 but it is the ennobling sadness that belongs to large natures cramped and striving" 
 for freedom to heroic, almost desperate, work, with little or no result. The author 
 of this intensely interesting, sympathetic, and eloquent biography, is a young lady 
 and a poet, to whom a place is given in a recent anthology of living English poets, 
 which is supposed to contain only the best poems of the best writers." — Boston 
 Daily A dvertiser. 
 
 " Miss Robinson had many excellent qualifications for the task she has per- 
 formed in this little volume, among which may be named, an enthusiastic interest 
 in her subject and a real sympathy with Emily Bronte's sad and heroic life. 'To 
 represent her as she was,' says Miss Robinson, ' would be her noblest and most 
 fititmg monument.' . . . Emily Bronte here becomes well known to us and, in one 
 sense, this should be praise enough for any biography." — New York Times. 
 
 "The biographer who finds such material before him as the lives and characters 
 of the Bronte family need have no anxiety as to the interest of his work. Char- 
 acters not only stroiig but so uniquely strong, genius so supreme, misfortunes so 
 overwhelming, set in its scenery so forlornly picturesque, could not fail to attract 
 all readers, if told even in the most prosaic language. When we add to this, that 
 Miss Robinson has told their 9Xox\ not in prosaic language, but with a literary* 
 style exhibiting all the qualities essential to good biography, our readers will 
 understand that this life of Emi!y Bronte is not only as interesting as a novel, but 
 a great deal more interesting than most novels. As it presents most vividly a 
 general picture of the family, there seems hardly a reason for giving it Emily's name 
 alone, except perhaps for the masterly chajiters on • Wuihering Hei.i;hts,' which 
 the reader will find a grateful condensation of the best in that powerful but some- 
 what forbidding story. We know of no point in the Bronte history — their genius, 
 their surrounding's, their faults, their happiness, their misery, their love and friend- 
 ships, their peculiarities, their power, their gentleness, their patience, their pride, 
 — wh.ch Miss Robinson has not touched upon with conscientiousness and sym- 
 pathy." — The Critic. 
 
 *" Emily Bronte ' is the seeond of the ' Famous Women Series,' which Roberts 
 Brothers, Boston, propose to j^ublish, and of which ' George Eliot ' was the initial 
 volume. Not the least remarkable of a very remarkable family, the personage 
 whose life is here written, possesses a peculiar interest to all who are at all familiar 
 with the sad and singular history of herself and her sister Charlotte. That the 
 author, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, has done her work with minute fidelity to 
 facts as well as affectionate devotion to the subject of her sketch, is plainly to be 
 seen all through the book." — Washington Post. 
 ♦ 
 
 Sold by all Booksellers, or mailed, post-paid, on receipt of 
 price, by the Publishers, 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 
 
 ^\,^h^' 
 
 -rvV 
 
\^^^. 
 
 ^^ "''c^. 
 
 
 
 
 
 V" v^ s^"'u''- 
 
 
 
 •■',%''"''\f .^'•<^-u''"'-\^ «-■■,%-"'"-' - 
 
 
'^^ " ' ,\^ -^^- w, ^^*o SC 
 
 o 
 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 021 359 142 3 
 
 mi 
 
 
 
 iiliP