These resources, with the exception of receiving 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 Cyprus 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 acquaintances. The Count and Countess of Albany appear to have inhabited the Casino Corsini until 1777, when they sent for the greater part of the furniture of their Roman house, and established 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, the vigilant 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 become so public that spying had grown unnecessary. 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 drinking; 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 originated, 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 pretender; but there can be no doubt that jealousy was an essential feature of his character, in which it amounted almost to 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) barricaded 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 infidelity was a social organisation supplemented by every kind of individual caprice of gallantry; where women were none the worse thought of if they added to the official cavaliere servente 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 presence 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, disgustingly-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 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 common 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 person; 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 precocious 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 rebelling against the frightful negativeness of existence, the want of love, of youth, of brightness, of all that a young girl can want in the early part of her married life; not rebelling against the positive miseries, the constant presence of everything that was mentally and physically loathsome in the second period of this wedded slavery; a woman of cold temperament, and even, you might say, of cold heart, and safe, safe in the routine of duty and suffering, 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, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless 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 domesticated 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, dozing or snoring, his bottle of Cyprus wine by his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read through the lines of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tittle-tattle, that Florence, frivolous and unintellectual and corrupt though it was, and, perhaps, almost in proportion to its frivolity, 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, perhaps not less young, but more serious and solemn for her five years of wasted youth and endured misery, with her reputation for coldness, 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 frivolous and immoral people like those powdered Florentines of a hundred years ago, whose brocaded 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 foreigners; pity and awe the more natural when, as in the case of Louise d'Albany, it is evident to every man and woman, however heartless and stupid, that the creature in question is a victim, and an innocent one. People were led, perhaps to some extent by impertinent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have some opinion to give upon that now legendary household 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 distinguished visitors from other parts. And thus, one day in the autumn of 1777, 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 Sardinian uniform, but with something strange, untamed, morose about his whole aspect which contrasted singularly with the effete gracefulness and amiability of young Florentine dandies. 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 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 tragedies. 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 circumstance 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, perhaps, no man had ever prepared for him an easier existence; no man had ever less misfortune sent to him by Providence, or less unkindness shown towards him by mankind, than this constantly struggling, this pessimistic and misanthropic man. The only son of Count Alfieri of Cortemiglia, of one of the richest and noblest families 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, 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 punishments, as long as he remained at home. He was sent, under the care of an uncle, the eminent architect, Benedetto Alfieri, who appears to have been the ideally amiable uncle as Giacinto Alfieri had 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. Petersburg to Cadiz, in search of experience or amusement. Nor during those years of youthful wanderings, does he ever seem, except upon one memorable occasion, to have been made to suffer from the unconscientiousness, the harshness, 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 brutality of his tutor-servants, 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 character, 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 circumstances 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 excessive 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 taking exhausting walks, eating next to no dinner, and filling the lives of others with their excitable cantankerousness and gloomy forebodings. 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 connexion 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 curious passion which he experienced for the little choristers, boys of twelve or thirteen, whom he saw serving mass, or heard singing the responses, in the Carmine Church at Asti. Silently, painfully, he seems to have yearned 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 little life of seven or eight. Some physical 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 poisonous 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 himself 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 became cultured and even learned men. He learned nothing because he felt interest, emulation, 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, colourless, featureless part of his autobiography. He would seem to have made neither friends nor enemies. The tricks practised by or upon other school-boys are never mentioned by him; never a practical joke, a lark, a scrape. Of his intellectual tendencies, which were but little developed, we learn only that he exchanged a copy of Ariosto, finally confiscated by the authorities, for a certain 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 reveals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that vis inertiae 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 misdemeanour, 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 evening, 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 instead of his dinner, which he regularly sent down; receiving the visits of his school-fellows without speaking or even moving; deaf and dumb, as he describes himself, by the hour together, 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 and giddiness, and no one was ever less frivolous or giddy than the young Alfieri. With no particular purity of nature 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 furious passion which he had for horses, and the hysterical, one might almost say epileptic passions which he experienced for women, he remained 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 distinctions and national prejudices. He remained joyless and ignorant, and, what was worse, without 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 recognise certain negative qualities rare in the eighteenth century—an intense and cruel truthfulness, an absolute disinterestedness, a constitutional contempt 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 Spain, 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 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 fearful 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 dishonourable, 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 gossip, 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 negative character, a mere mass of rough material, out of which a man might be made. But who should mould that matter? It is extremely 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 unorganised 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 without), and organised 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 indifferent by turns, he had yet felt acutely the ignominy of certain excesses, whether of avarice, or brutality, or love (if love it may be called), which had ever and anon broken the monotony of his aimless life. Of these ignominies 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 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's 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 Ligonier, 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 mistress 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 struggles between his sense of weariness and degradation 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 return to it as soon as he could stand on his feet. The beautiful social customs of eighteenth-century Italy authorised and even imposed upon a man who had accepted the position of cavaliere servente (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 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 of 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, dissipation, and unworthy love, before he could step forth and walk steadily along the new road which had appeared to him. His ignorance was appalling. He could no longer construe 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 serfdom to a woman whom he knew he neither 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 obstinacy, 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 ordinary young man under five-and-twenty. He had, moreover, at this moment, when all the energies 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 operations 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 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 attitudinising, 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 recognised 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 frankness to himself and others, the despicable vanity, 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 agonised 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 insincere 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 understand this contradiction, I discover a thousand ridiculous dirtinesses in my character (mille ridicole porcherie)." 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, &c. I thought I was giving him a perfectly 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 working 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 continually ruminating over the glory for which he intended 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 obtained, 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 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 efficacious. 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 invariably 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 solemn written promise to the effect that he would not merely never go to the lady, nor take any notice of her messages, but that, until he felt himself absolutely indifferent and beyond her reach, he would go out only in solitary places and at 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 anywhere. And then he had himself tied to his chair with ropes hidden under his cloak, and spent day after day looking at his mistress' windows, 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 permission to travel from the King of Sardinia, and set out for Tuscany in order to learn the language in which he was to achieve that great literary 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 independence; he who even in his dullest and most inane years had hated the thought of any sort of military 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 tyrannised and those who were tyrannised over, this Alfieri had always, as he tells us, fled, though unsuccessfully, from the presence 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 defend his liberty now that he saw before him the direct road to glory, and felt within himself the power to journey along it.

Thus it was, as he explains in his autobiography, that on his first arrival in Florence, hearing everyone praising the character and talents of the wife of Charles Edward Stuart, and seeing the beautiful young woman at theatres and in the public 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's, were in reality of that hazel colour 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 literary 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 armour of poetic interests, Alfieri decided, on his return to Florence, that he was quite sufficiently of a new man to expose himself without any danger to such a lady as the Countess of Albany. He was, after all, a different 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, virtuous, extremely intellectual woman, trying to find consolation for her quietly and bravely supported 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 usefulness and uniqueness sufficiently to see that it did not turn to a mere useless and demoralising love affair? There may also have been something very reassuring to Alfieri's apprehensions in the knowledge that he would be dealing, not 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, unbroken by shop-fronts and unfrequented by vehicles, lead up to that quarter; streets of low white-washed convent walls overtopped by trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, 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 harpsichord-strummed minuet, the turns and sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song by Cimarosa or Paisiello. 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 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 various epochs, with a pretty late sixteenth-century belvedere tower on one side; a lot of shuttered and heavily-grated seventeenth-century windows, 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 coloured 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 after his introduction to the Countess of Albany, Alfieri, terrified lest he might be forfeiting 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 Florence, 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, therefore, 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 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 intellectual redemption.

Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri's question, and the meaning of Gori's answer; let us try and realise the ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year 1777. Here was Alfieri, passionately desirous to redeem 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 worldly vanities, the hatred of political and religious servitude, 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 scruples? Merely that a new love might distract Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a 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 before exposing to temptation the woman whom he loved, and the honour which he loved more than her; whether he had a right to return to the palace of Charles Edward and, while receiving his hospitality, while enjoying his confidence, 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 husband, and add to these sufferings the sufferings of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty conscience?

But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, even to the man who most thoroughly despised and loathed his country's and century's corruption, no such scruple ever came. What consideration need any man or any woman waste upon a husband? 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 perpetual spying, most effectually remove any further consideration there might be for him?

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 neighbours, 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 rearrangements, 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 married 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 seeking, and obtaining, the love of a married woman of twenty-five. The immoral law had produced the immoral lawlessness. So, to the scruples of Alfieri, Francesco Gori had answered: "Return 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, contrived 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 previously experienced, quiet, pure, and solemn—was destined not to interfere with that austere process of detaching his soul from the base passions of the world, and devoting it to the creation 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 personality 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 he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in which he had previously lived had been the reverse. 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 improbable whether he would have obtained them otherwise. Irritable and vain and moody, at once excessively 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 sympathy 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 humour, his very dissatisfaction with himself, must have quickly exhausted of the small amount of brotherly tenderness 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 other men of letters; which 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-tempered man like Alfieri could receive only lukewarmness. Now what he required was sympathy, 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 interest 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 actually 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 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, canary 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 education 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 educated 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 Pretender, had the advantage of open doors upon several fields of culture. She could read the books of four different nations—a very rare accomplishment in her day; and she was, moreover, one of those women, rarer even in the eighteenth century than now-a-days, whose nature, while unproductive in any particular line, is intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, and in the intellectual domain even more intensely 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 devouring Kant long before he had been heard of out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful than a symphony. And this woman, thus educated, 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 reality 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 encouragement 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 dissatisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is the price too often paid for the consolation of mere abstract and literary interests. The pressure of constant disgust and terror at her husband'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 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 bestial 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 whatever he thought mean and slothful in himself.

Some eighteen months after their first acquaintance, 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 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 himself from comparative wealth to comparative poverty; he had cut himself off from ever making 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 abhorrence 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 Petrarch 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 required, every time they wished to travel or live abroad, to beg civilly for leave of absence, which was usually most uncivilly granted; and one of whose laws threatened any person who should print books in foreign countries, and without the permission of the Sardinian censor, 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 become 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 bitterness, to the Countess, as he confided it to the readers of his autobiography, it was to resign 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 humiliation, exposed to the Countess all the little, mean motives which had deterred him or which had encouraged him in his liberation from political 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 imagine 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, spending 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 neutralised. Of all the various persons who speak of the extraordinary friendship between Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany which existed at this time, not one even ventures to hint that the relations between them exceeded in the slightest degree the limits of mere passionate friendship; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom truthfulness was not merely an essential part of his natural character, but an even more essential part of his self-idealised personality, merely confirm the words of all contemporary writers. Now, if there was a country where an intrigue between a woman noted for 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-demoralised 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, paralyses 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 second; 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 interference 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 remember, 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 apartment, 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 platonic 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 and restraint had been removed, except the obstacles and restraints which, from the very ideality 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 intellectual and ideal cravings which in a nature like hers, and in a situation like hers, must have been the strongest and most durable necessities. 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 passion 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, a poseur whose pose 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 Petrarch: Alfieri must have found in this love, which fate in the Pretender's person ordained to be platonic, the crowning characteristic of his present personality, 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-shuttered prison—nay, rather bedlam-like existence; 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.



CHAPTER 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 for ever 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 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 lacqueys to assist him in a fit of drunken sickness, 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 husband'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 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 profoundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon the "cruel and indecent behaviour" 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 husband who was daily becoming more and more of a wild beast, and a lover who was fearful of giving any advice which might compromise her reputation or separate them for ever, 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 bacchanal 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 recriminations; 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's screams and dragged Charles Edward away.[1]

Alfieri, partly from an honourable 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 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 favour, there had mingled a sense also that by breaking all connections with Piedmont, 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's flight from her husband, they both well knew, would in all probability put an end to these relations; the Catholic Church could grant no divorce, and Charles Edward would probably refuse a separation; so that the honour, nay, the life of the fugitive wife would be safe only in a convent, whence Alfieri would be excluded together 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 absolutely 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 misery 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 interested 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 condemned to a life of much worse agony, had not provision been made against the Pretender's certain 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 convent whither she had escaped, and had been restored to her husband the Pretender James; she was probably aware, also, how Charles Edward 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 different with a wife; and both Alfieri and the Countess 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 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 this 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 miserable woman, of the woman whom he loved more than the whole world; by the bitter knowledge that the success of his efforts, the liberation 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.

[2]In the first days of December 1780 a certain Mme. Orlandini, a half Irish lady connected with the Jacobite Ormonds, was invited to breakfast at the palace in the Via San Sebastiano. She skilfully led the conversation into a discussion on needle-work, and suggested that the Countess of Albany should go and see the last embroidery produced at the convent of Bianchette, a now long-suppressed establishment in the adjoining Via del Mandorlo. The Countess of Albany ordered her carriage for immediately 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 cavaliere servente 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 rapidly ran up the flight of steps leading to the convent 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 person than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously informed the Count that she was unable to let 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 narrative of Dutens, was hanging about the convent, in order to prevent the Pretender, who always carried pistols in his pockets, from committing any violence. This seems extremely unlikely, as the first use to which Charles Edward 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 discomfited 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-condemnatory 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 MacDonald, there is something very frightful in this tragi-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 Forty-five there 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 conception 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 position, 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 reproach 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 behaviour, 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 misfortunes, 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 an unrighteous contract; the evil practice of the world which condemned the Countess of Albany to be for so much of her life an unhappy 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 circumstances permit to live blameless and comfortable, were splashed with the mud of unrighteousness, 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 Government to put him again in possession of the woman whom he had victimised; but as the French Government had refused to recognise 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 presently sent a maid to the palace in Via San Sebastiano to fetch such things as she might require. But Charles Edward would not permit a single one of her effects to be touched; if 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 suspend the pension was probably expressed or implied, for Charles Edward immediately obeyed.

Meanwhile, the Countess of Albany was anxiously 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 Cardinal 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 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 household, 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 anyone 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 carriage 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 memory hung about the place: it had been the asylum 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 inmates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great store, the Countess, with her heart full of the 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 Florence 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 crying, I tried to console myself with the thought 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 honourable and tender heart, are the most terrible and mortal pain that a man can suffer. I delayed throughout April, and I determined to drag on through May; but on the 12th May I found myself, I scarcely know how, back in Rome."

Alfieri found the Countess of Albany established 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 indomitable power of resistance to himself, the passion for realising 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 connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, 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 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 impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all contemporaries, 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, including 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. Permitting 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 comparatively 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 usurping 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 constructing 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 of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful inevitableness; but Alfieri did not merely submit 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 surrounded him, a life reduced to absolute monotony of grinding work was almost an object of aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual delight: he enjoyed a dead level, an endless white-washed wall, as much as other men, and especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, the irregularities and mottled colours 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 Maggiore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, and St. John Lateran: miles of former villa 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 plaster, 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—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 interest, 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 upper 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 people gathered round the lemonade-booth near the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortuous black streets filled with the noise of the anvils and hammers of the locksmiths and nailors behind the Pantheon, made his way towards the palace, grand and prim in its architecture of Bramants, of the Cancelleria, perhaps not without thinking that in the big square before its windows, where the vegetable carts were unloaded every morning, and the quacks and dentists and pedlars 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 predecessor 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 hazel 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-attitudinising 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 11 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 whom consideration for gossip prevented his staying much after ten at night, must not be taken as the invariable rule; for Alfieri, 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 tormented with that same desire to display his work to others, to hear their praises even if false, to understand their opinion even if unfavourable, which came, by gusts, as one of the passions of his life. Rome was at that time, like every Italian town, full of literary academies, conventicles of very small intellectual fry meeting 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 conversation and music to be enjoyed there, was the house of a Signora Maria Pizzelli, of all women 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 quiescence of his listeners on their chairs, how his work might affect the mixed audience of a theatre; but admitting 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 Florence.

But something better soon offered itself. The Duke Grimaldi had had a small theatre constructed in the Spanish palace, his residence as Ambassador from the Catholic King, and a small company of high-born amateurs had been playing in it translations of French comedies and tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Alfieri offered his Antigone, which was accepted with fervour. The beautiful and majestic Duchess 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 Haemon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, the villain of the piece, was reserved for Alfieri himself. The performance of Antigone was a great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the Spanish Embassy were crowded with the fashionable 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 Santacroce and the Princess Altieri, vying 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 honour of being her orthodox cavaliere 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 bouquetiere. In the front row sat the wife of the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being the niece of the late Pope Clement XIII., 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 hall was nearly full when the stir in the crowd, and the general looking in one direction, announced the arrival of a guest who excited unwonted 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 entertainment, solemnly installed by the side of the Princess 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.