The Countess of Albany Part 6

For a moment, with the full luminousness of the Tuscan sky once more in his eyes, and the guttural strength of the Tuscan language once more in his ears, Alfieri seems to have been delighted. But his cheerfulness was not of long duration. Ever since his great illness at Colmar, Alfieri had, I feel persuaded, become virtually an old man; his strength and spirits were impaired, and the strange morose depression of his half-fructified youth seemed to return. Coming at that moment, the disappointment, the terror, the horror of the French Revolution became, so to speak, part of a moral illness which lasted to his death. Alfieri was not a tender-hearted nor a humane man; had he been, he would have felt more sympathy than he did with the beginning of the great movement, with the strivings after reform which preceded it; he had, on the contrary, the sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self-righteousness and cut-and-dryness which would have made him, had he been a Frenchman, a terrorist of the most dreadful type; a regular routinist in extermination of corrupt people. Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may have been shocked by the news of the September ma.s.sacres, of the _grandes fournees_ which preceded Thermidor, and much as he may have been distressed by Mme. d'Albany's anxiety and grief for so many friends who lost their property or life, Alfieri was the man to be driven mad by the mere thought of bloodshed. But Alfieri had, ever since his earliest youth, made liberty his G.o.ddess, and the wors.h.i.+p of liberty his special religion and mission. That such a religion and mission, to which he had devoted himself in a time and country when and where no one else dreamed of anything of the sort, should suddenly become, and without the smallest agency of his, the religion and mission of the very nation and people whom he instinctively abhorred from the depths of his soul; that liberty, which he alone was to teach men to desire, should be the fas.h.i.+onable craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, sentiment, and everything he hated most in the French, this was already a pain that gnawed silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty was, as it were, dragged out of his own little private temple, where he adored and hymned it, decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and Livy, and carried about, dressed in the garb of a Paris fish-wife, a red cotton night-cap on her head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained crew of _sansculottes_, nay, worse, rolled along on a triumphal car by an a.s.sembly of lawyers and doctors and ex-priests and journalists--when liberty, which had been to him antique and aristocratic, became modern and democratic; when the whole of France had turned into a blood-reeking and streaming temple of this Moloch G.o.ddess, then a sort of moral abscess, long growing unnoticed, seemed to burst within Alfieri's soul, and a process of slow moral blood-poisoning to begin.

The Reign of Terror came to an end, the reaction of Thermidor set in; but this was nothing to Alfieri, for, whereas the unspeakable profanation of what was his own personal and quasi-private property, liberty, had hitherto been limited to France, it now spread, a frightful invading abomination, with the armies of the Directory all over the world; nay, to Italy itself.

It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal expression, the severest conceivable retribution, Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all the stronger as there entered into it the petty personal vanity as well as the n.o.ble abstract feeling of the man--it was as an expression of this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous but little-read _Misogallo_. This collection of prose arguments and vituperations and versified epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations from all the Latin and Greek authors whom Alfieri was busy spelling out, does certainly contain many things which, old as they are, strike even us with the force of living contempt and indignation. Nay, even including its most stupid and dullest violent parts, we can sympathise with its bitterness and violence, when we think of the frightful deeds of blood which, talking heroically of justice and liberty, France had been committing; of the miserable series of petty rapines and extortions which, talking patronisingly of the Greeks and Romans, the French nation was practising upon the Italians whom it had come to liberate. That such feeling should be elicited was natural enough. But we feel, as we turn over the pages of the _Misogallo_, and collate with its epigrams a certain pa.s.sage in Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, narrow, pedantic doctrinaire, whose very magnanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no longer sympathise with the hatred of the French, which in juster and more modest men, as for instance Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our sympathy. Much as we dislike the republican French who descended into Italy, the _Misogallo_ makes us like Alfieri even less. Whether this revolution, despite the oceans of blood which it shed, might not be bringing a great and lasting benefit to mankind by sweeping away the hundred and one obstacles which impeded social progress; whether this French invasion, despite the money which it extorted, the statues and pictures which it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it told, might not be doing Italy a great service in accustoming it to modern inst.i.tutions, in training it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of inept little tyrants: such questions did not occur to Alfieri, for whom liberty meant everything, progress and improvement nothing. As the century drew to a close, and the futility of so many vaunted reforms, the hollowness of so many promises, became apparent to the Italians with the shameful treaty which gave Venice, liberated of her oligarchy, to Austria, all the n.o.bler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Foscolo, and the crowds of nameless patriotic youths who filled the universities, were seized by a terrible soul-sickness; everything seemed to have given way, each course was as bad as the other, and Italy seemed destined to servitude and indignity, whether under her new masters the French, or under her old masters the Austrians and Bourbons and priests. But the feelings of Alfieri were not of this kind; he was not torn by patriotism; he was simply pushed into sympathy with the tyrannies which he had so hated by the intolerable pain of finding that the liberty which he had preached was being propagandised by the nation and the cla.s.s of society which he detested most.

Such Alfieri appears to me, and such I think he must appear to everyone who conscientiously studies the extraordinary manner in which this apostle of liberty came to preach in favour of despotism. But in his own eyes, and in the eyes of the Countess of Albany, Alfieri doubtless found abundant arguments to prove himself perfectly logical and magnanimous.

This French Revolution was merely a revolt of slaves; and what tyranny could be more odious than the tyranny of those whom nature had fitted only for slavery? What are the French? "The French," answers one of the epigrams of the _Misogallo_, "have always been puppets; formerly puppets in powder, now stinking and blood-stained puppets." "We indeed are slaves," says another epigram, "but at least indignant slaves" (a statement which the whole history of Italy in the nineties goes to disprove); "not, as you Gauls always have been and always will be, slaves applauding power whatever it be." The nasal and guttural p.r.o.nunciation of the French language, the bare existence of such a word as _quatrain_, is enough to prove to Alfieri that the French can never know true liberty. Alfieri, who had looked the _ancien regime_ more than once in the face, actually persuaded himself that, as he writes, "the frightful French mob robbed and slaughtered the upper cla.s.ses because those upper cla.s.ses had always treated it too kindly." Alfieri actually got to believe these things. He would, had power been put in his hands, have headed a counter revolution and exterminated as many people again as the republicans had exterminated. Power not being in his hands, he hastened to do what seemed to him a vital matter to all Europe, a sort of fatal thrust to France; he solemnly recanted all his former writings in favour of revolutions and republics. He, who had witnessed the taking of the Bastille and sung it in an ode, deliberately wrote as follows: "The famous day of the 14th July 1789 crowned the victorious iniquity (of the people). Not understanding at that time the nature of these slaves, I dishonoured my pen by writing an ode on the taking of the Bastille." Surely, if we admit that to see liberty degraded by its a.s.sociation with revolutionary horrors must have been unbearably bitter to the n.o.bler portion of Alfieri's nature, we must admit that to see Alfieri himself, Alfieri so proud of his former ferocious love of liberty, turned into a mere ranting renegade, is an unendurable spectacle also; we should like to wash our hands of him as he tried to wash his hands of the Revolution.

All this political atrabiliousness did not improve Alfieri's temper; and could not have made it easier or more agreeable to live with him.

The Countess of Albany naturally disliked the Revolution and the French, after all the grief and inconvenience which she owed them; she naturally, also, disliked everything that Alfieri disliked. Still, I cannot help fancying that this woman, far more intellectual than pa.s.sionate, and growing more indifferent, more easy-going, more half-optimistically, half-cynically charitable towards the world with every year that saw her grow fat, and plain, and dowdy,--I cannot help fancying that the Countess of Albany must have got to listen to Alfieri's misogallic furies much as she might have listened to his groans had he been afflicted with gout or the toothache, sympathising with the pain, but just a little weary of its expression. She must also, at times, have compared the little company of select provincial notabilities, ill.u.s.trious people never known beyond their town and their lifetime, which she collected about herself and Alfieri in the house by the Arno, with the brilliant society which had a.s.sembled in her hotel in Paris. To her, who was, after all, not Italian, but French by education and temper, and who had been steeped anew in French ideas and habits, this small fry of Italian literature, professional and pedantic, able to discuss and (alas! but too able) to hold forth, but absolutely unable to talk, to _causer_ in the French sense, must have become rather oppressive. She and Alfieri were both growing elderly, and the hearth by which they were seated, alone, childless, with nothing but the ghost of their former pa.s.sion, the ghost of their former ideal, to keep them company, was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. Alfieri, working off his over-excitement in a system of tremendous self-education, sitting for the greater part of the day poring over Latin and Greek and Hebrew grammars, and exercises and annotated editions, till he was so exhausted that he could scarcely digest his dinner; the Countess killing the endless days reading new books of philosophy, of poetry, of fiction, anything and everything that came to hand, writing piles and piles of letters to every person of her acquaintance; this double existence of bored and overworked dreariness, was this the equivalent of marriage?

was this the realisation of ideal love?

But there were things to confirm Mme. d'Albany in that easy-going indifferentism which replaced pa.s.sion and suffering in this fat, kindly, intellectual woman of forty; things which, as they might have made other women weep, probably made this woman do what in its way was just as sad--smile.

Alfieri had always had what, to us, may seem very strange notions on the subject of love, but which were not strange when we consider the times and nation in general, and the man in particular. After the various love manias which preceded his meeting with Mme. d'Albany, he had determined, as he tells us, to save his peace of mind and dignity by refusing to fall in love with women of respectable position. The Countess of Albany, by enchaining him in the bonds of what he called "worthy love," had saved him from any chance of fresh follies with these alarming "virtuous women." But follies with women of less respectable position and less obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear of degradation to Alfieri's mind. And now, late on in the nineties, when Mme. d'Albany was rapidly growing plain and stout and elderly, and he was getting into the systematic habit of regarding her less in her reality than in the ideal image which he had arranged in his mind; now, when he was writing the autobiography where the Countess figured as his Beatrice, and when he was composing the Latin epitaphs which were to unite his tomb with that of the woman "a Victorio Alferio, ultra resomnia dilecta," just at this time Alfieri appears to have returned to those flirtations with women neither respectable nor virtuous which seemed to him so morally safe to indulge in. A very strange note, preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friends.h.i.+p of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, written at Florence in a house which Mme. d'Albany could not enter, and in the company of women whom Mme. d'Albany could not receive, and among which is a sonnet in which Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows that Alfieri frequented in Florence other society besides that which crowded round his lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi.

Mme. d'Albany was far too shrewd and far too worldly not to see all this; and Alfieri was far too open and cynical to attempt to hide it. Mme. d'Albany, having her praises and his love read to her in innumerable sonnets, in the autobiography and in the epitaphs, probably merely smiled; she was a woman of the eighteenth century, a foreigner, an easy-going woman, and had learned to consider such escapades as these as an inevitable part of matrimony or quasi-matrimony. But, for all her worldly philosophy, did she never feel a vague craving, a void, as she sat in that big empty house reading her books while Alfieri was studying his Greek, a vague desire to have what consoles other women for coldness or infidelity, a son or a daughter, a normal object of devotion, something besides Alfieri, and which she could love whether deserving or not; something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were young and pa.s.sionately in love; but where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose expense that romance, that poetry, had been bought?

Mme. d'Albany, if I may judge by the enormous piles of her letters which I have myself seen, and by the report of my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, who has examined another huge collection for my benefit, was getting to make herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, reading so many hours a day, writing letters so many more hours; taking the quite unenthusiastic, business-like interest in literature and politics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory, more cynical, more misanthropic and t.i.ttle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one such is preserved in the library at Florence) in the hall, pursuing and flogging street-boys because they splashed his stockings by playing in the puddles; insulting Ginguene and General Miollis when they attempted to be civil; groaning over the victories of the French, rejoicing over the brutal ma.s.sacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan populace; going to Florence (when they were spending the summer in a villa) for the pleasure of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of witnessing (as Gino Capponi records) the French prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines being pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary mob. Besides such demonstrations of an unamiable disposition as these, working with the fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a holiday at that house where the doggrel verses were written. The Countess of Albany, who had been so horribly unhappy with her legitimate husband, must have been rather dreary of soul with her world-authorised lover.

It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, desultory, neither happy nor unhappy woman, rapidly growing old, watching the century draw to a close amid chaos and misery,--it was at this moment that an eccentric English prelate, Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the house on the Lung Arno a friend of his, a French painter, a former pupil of David, and who had won the _Prix de Rome_, by name Francois Xavier Fabre. M.

Fabre was French, but he was a royalist; he hated the Revolution; he had settled in Italy; and, in consideration of this, he was tolerated by Alfieri. To Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, the fact of Fabre being French must secretly have been a great recommendation. French in language, habits, mode of thought, French in heart, cut off, as it seemed, for ever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped up among this pedantic small fry of Florentines, listening all day to Alfieri's tirades against the French nation, the French reforms, the French philosophy, the French language, the French everything, the poor woman must have heartily enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a real Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Alfieri might say, was really French; she must have enjoyed talking about his work, his pictures, about everything and anything that was not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's Hebrew, or Alfieri's tragedies, or comedies or satires. Alfieri was a great genius and a great man; and she loved, or imagined she loved, Alfieri like her very soul. But still--still, it was somehow a relief when young Fabre, with his regular south-of-France face, his rather mocking and cynical French expression, his easy French talk, came to give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was pacing up and down translating Homer and Pindar with the help of a lexicon.

CHAPTER XVII.

CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI.

Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno. A room was filled with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a select company invited to see the poet (for by this respectful t.i.tle he appears always to have been mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his own admiration, but apparently less so to that of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and Mme.

d'Albany would go for a few days to Siena to enjoy the conversation of a little knot of friends of their dead friend Gori; a certain Cavaliere Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani, and one or two others, who met in the house of a charming and intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper, married to another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who was one of Mme.

d'Albany's most intimate friends. Occasionally, also, some of these would come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and the Countess moved heaven and earth (recollecting their own aversion to husbands) that the _Grumbler_, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly called, should be left behind, and _la chere_ Therese come accompanied (in characteristic Italian eighteenth-century fas.h.i.+on) only by her children and by her _cavaliere servente_, Mario Bianchi. These were the small excitements in this curious double life of more than married routine. Alfieri, who, as he was getting old and weak in health, was growing only the more furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had determined to learn Greek, to read all the great Greek authors; and worked away with terrific ardour at this school-boy work, crowning his efforts with a self-const.i.tuted Order of Homer, of which he himself was the sole founder and sole member. He was, also, having finally despatched the sacramental number of tragedies, working at an equally sacramental number of satires and comedies, absolutely unconscious of his complete deficiency in both these styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his nation to set them on the right road in comedy and satire, as he had set them on the right road in tragedy.

A ridiculous man! Not so. I have spoken many hard words against Alfieri; and I repeat that he seems to me to have often fallen short, betrayed by his century, his vanity, his narrowness and hardness of temper, even of the ideal which he had set up for himself. But I would not have it supposed that I do not see the greatness of that ideal, and the n.o.bleness of the reality out of which it arose. That Alfieri, a strange mixture of the pa.s.sionate man of spontaneous action, and of the self-manipulating, idealising _poseur_, should have fallen short of his own ideals, is perhaps the one pathetic circ.u.mstance of his life; the one dash of suffering and failure which makes this heroic man a hero. Alfieri did not probably suspect wherein he fell short of his own ideal; he did not, could not see that his faults were narrowness of nature, and incompleteness, meanness of conception, for, if he had, he would have ceased to be narrow and ceased to be mean. But Alfieri knew that there was something very wrong about himself, he felt a deficiency, a jar in his own soul; he felt, as he describes in the famous sonnet at the back of Fabre's portrait of him, that he did not know whether he was n.o.ble or base, whether he was Achilles or Thersites.

"_Uom, sei tu grande o vile? Mori, il saprai._" ("Man, art thou n.o.ble or base? Die, and thou shalt know it.") Thus wrote Alfieri, making, as usual, fame the arbiter of his worth; and showing, even in the moment of seeking for truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly impossible it was for him to feel it. Mean and great; both, I think, at once. But of the meanness, the narrowness of nature, the want of resonance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality in so many things; of Alfieri's vanity, intolerance, injustice, indifference, hardness; of all these peculiarities which make the real man repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I have said more than enough, and when we have said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his vanity, selfishness, meanness, narrow-mindedness, a man of grander proportions, of finer materials, nay, even of n.o.bler moral shape, than the vast majority of men superior to him in all these points. Let us look at him in those last decaying years, at those studies which have seemed to us absurd: self-important, pedantic, almost monomaniac; or brooding over those feelings which were, doubtless, selfish, morbid; let us look at him, for, despite all his faults, he is fine. Fine in indomitable energy, in irrepressible pa.s.sion. Alfieri was fifty; he was tormented by gout; his health was rapidly sinking; but the sense of weakness only made him more resolute to finish the work which (however mistakenly) he thought it his duty to leave completed; more determined that, having lived for so many years a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed of the stain of ignorance, having read and appreciated as much of the great writers of antiquity as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a studious manhood. Soon after his great illness (which, I believe, changed him so much for the worse by hastening premature old age) at Colmar, he had written to his friends at Siena that he had very nearly been made a fool of by Death; but that, having escaped, he intended, by hurrying his work, to make a fool of Death instead. And in 1801 he wrote in his memorandum-book: "Health giving way year by year; whence, hurrying to finish my six comedies, I make it decidedly worse."

Soon after, as Mme. d'Albany later informed his friend Caluso, Alfieri, finding that his digestion had become so bad as to produce inability to work after meals, began systematically to diminish his already extremely sober allowance of food; while, at the same time, he did not diminish the exercise, walking, riding, and driving, which he found necessary to keep himself in spirits. Knowing that death could not be far ahead, and accustomed since his youth to think that his life ought not to extend over sixty years, Alfieri was calmly and deliberately walking to meet Death.

Calmly and deliberately; but not heartlessly. Engrossed in his studies, devoted to his own glory as he was, he was still full of a kind of mental pa.s.sion for Mme. d'Albany. He was unfaithful to her for the sake of low women, he was neglectful of her for the sake of his work; he did not, perhaps, receive much pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic lady (like one of Rubens's women grown old, as Lamartine later described her) whom he left to her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing; to her painting lessons, and long discussions on art with Monsieur Fabre. The woman whose presence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a matter of indifference to him. But, nevertheless, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never wrote more completely from his heart than when, composing the epitaph of the Countess, he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been loved by him more than anything on earth, and held almost as a mortal divinity. "A Victorio Alferio ... ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et observata." For a thought begins about the year 1796 to recur throughout Alfieri's letters and sonnets, and whenever he mentions the Countess in his autobiography; a thought too terrible not to be genuine: he or his beloved must die first; one or the other must have the horror of remaining alone, widowed of all interest on earth. How constantly this idea haunted him, and with what painful vividness, is apparent from a letter which I shall translate almost _in extenso_; as, together with those few words which I have quoted about Gori's death, it shows the pa.s.sionate tenderness that was hidden, like some aromatic herb beneath the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of Alfieri.

The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at Siena, and relates to the death of Mario Bianchi, who had long been her devoted _cavaliere servente_.

"Your letter," writes Alfieri, "breaks my heart. I feel the complete horror of a situation which it gives me the s.h.i.+vers merely to think may be my situation one day or other; and oh! how much worse would it not be for me, living alone, isolated from everyone, closed up in myself. O G.o.d! I hope I may not be the survivor, and yet how can I wish that my better self (_la parte migliore di me stesso_) should endure a situation which I myself could never have the courage to endure? These are frightful things. I think about them very often, and sometimes I write some bad rhymes about them to ease my mind; but I never can get accustomed either to the thought of remaining alone, nor to that of leaving my lady."

"Some opinions," he goes on--and this hankering after Christianity on the part of a man who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief seems to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the late Gino Capponi, that had Alfieri lived much longer he would have died telling his rosary,--"some opinions are more useful and give more satisfaction than others to a well-const.i.tuted heart. Thus, it does our affection much more good to believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is united to Candido (another dead friend) and to Gori, that they are talking and thinking about us, and that we shall meet them all some day, than to believe that they are all of them reduced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief as the first is repugnant to physics and to mathematical evidence, it is not, therefore, to be despised. The princ.i.p.al advantage and honour of mankind is that it can feel, and science teaches us how not to feel. Long live, therefore, ignorance and poetry, and let us accept the imaginary as the true. Man subsists upon love; love makes him a G.o.d: for I call _G.o.d_ an intensely felt love, and I call dogs, or French, which comes to the same, the frozen philosophisers who are moved only by the fact that two and two make four."

Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive his beloved was fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he expected. The eccentric figure, the tall, gaunt man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red hair and flying scarlet cloak, driving the well-known phaeton, or sauntering moodily along the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, was soon to be seen no more. As the year 1803 wore on he felt himself hard pressed by the gout; he ate less and less, he took an enormous amount of foot exercise; he worked madly at his memoirs, his comedies, his translations, he felt almost constantly fatigued and depressed. On the 3rd October 1803, after his usual morning's work, he went out for a drive in his phaeton; but a strange and excessive cold, despite the still summer weather, forced him to alight and to try and warm himself by walking. Walking brought on violent internal pains, and he returned home with the fever on him. The next day he rose and dressed, but he was unable to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse; the next day after that he again tried to take a walk, but returned with frightful pains.

He refused to go to bed except at night, and tore off the mustard plaisters which the doctors had placed on his feet, lest the blisters should prevent his walking; dying, he would still not be a sick man. The night of the 8th he was unable to sleep, and talked a great deal to the Countess, seated by his bedside, about his work, and repeated part of Hesiod in Greek to her. Accustomed for months to the idea of death, he does not seem to have guessed that it was near at hand. But the news that he was dying spread through Florence. A Piedmontese lady--strangely enough a niece of that Marchesa de Prie opposite to whose windows Alfieri had renewed the device of Ulysses and the sirens by being tied to a chair--hastened to a learned and eccentric priest, a Padre Canovai, entreating him to run and offer the dying poet the consolations of religion. Canovai, knowing that both Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were unbelievers, stoutly refused; but later on, seized with remorse, he hurried to the house on the Lung Arno. Admitted into the sick room, he came just in time to see Alfieri, who had got up during a momentary absence of Mme. d'Albany, rise from his arm-chair, lean against his bed, and, without agony or effort, unconscious "like a bird," says the Countess, give up the ghost. It was between nine and ten of the morning of the 9th October 1803. Vittorio Alfieri was in his fifty-fifth year.

The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he had, after Gori, was summoned from Turin to console the Countess and put all papers in order.

Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books and MSS., and whatever small property he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany, leaving her to dispose of them entirely according to her good pleasure.

Among these papers was found a short letter, undated, addressed "To the friend I have left behind, Tommaso di Caluso, at Turin," and which ran as follows:--

"As I may any day give way beneath the very serious malady which is consuming me, I have thought it wise to prepare these few lines in order that they may be given to you as a proof that you have always, to my last moment, been present to my mind and very dear to my heart. The person whom above everything in the world I have most respected and loved, may some day tell you all the circ.u.mstances of my illness. I supplicate and conjure you to do your best to see and console her, and to concert with her the various measures which I have begged her to carry out with regard to my writings.

"I will not give you more pain, at present, by saying any more. I have known in you one of the most rare men in every respect. I die loving and esteeming you, and valuing myself for your friends.h.i.+p if I have deserved it. Farewell, farewell."

CHAPTER XVIII.

FABRE.

"Happiness has disappeared out of the world for me," wrote Mme. d'Albany, in January 1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. "I take interest in nothing; the world might be completely upset without my noticing it. I read a little, and reading is the only thing which gives me any courage, a merely artificial courage; for when I return to my own thoughts and think of all that I have lost, I burst into tears and call Death to my a.s.sistance, but Death will not come. O G.o.d! what a misfortune to lose a person whom one adores and venerates at the same time. I think that if I still had Therese (Mme. Mocenni) it would be some consolation; but there is no consolation for me. I have the strength to hide my feelings before the world, for no one could conceive my misfortune who has not felt it. A twenty-six years' friends.h.i.+p with so perfect a being, and then to see him taken away from me at the very age when I required him most."

Alfieri a perfect being--a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany!

One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere; long after all direct references to Alfieri have ceased in her correspondence (I am speaking princ.i.p.ally of that with her intimates at Siena), there reigns throughout her letters a depression, an indifference to everything, which shows that the world had indeed become empty in her eyes. But though the grief was sincere, I greatly question whether the love was so. Alfieri had become, in his later years, the incarnation of dreary violence; he could not have been much to anyone's feelings; and Mme.

d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in political news and town gossip, even with her most intimate correspondents, shows that Alfieri played but a very small part in her colourless life. So small a part, that one may say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. d'Albany had pretty well ceased to love him at all; for had she loved him, would she have been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in all her letters, while the man she loved was killing himself as certainly as if he were taking daily doses of a slow poison? Love is vigilant, love is full of fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so little vigilant, so little troubled by fears, that when this visibly dying man, this man who had prepared his epitaph, who had settled all his literary affairs, who had written the farewell letter to his friend, actually died, she would seem to have been thunder-stricken not merely by grief, but by amazement.

The Countess of Albany was not a selfish woman; she had, apparently without complaining, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an old woman before her time, in acquiescence to Alfieri's misanthropic and routinist self-engrossment; she had been satisfied, or thought herself satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration of a man who divided his time between his studies, his horses, and his intrigues with other women; but unselfish natures are often unselfish from their very thinness and coldness. Alfieri, heaven knows, had been selfish and self-engrossed; but, perhaps because he was selfish and self-engrossed, because he was always listening to his own ideas, and nursing his own feelings, Alfieri had been pa.s.sionate and loving; and, as we have seen, while he seemed growing daily more fossilised, while he was at once engrossed with his own schemes of literary glory, and indifferently amusing himself by infidelities to his lady, he was then, even then, constantly haunted by the thought that, unless he himself were left behind in the terrors of widowhood, the Countess of Albany would have to suffer those pangs which he felt that he himself could never endure.

Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium of his own character, and he proved mistaken. Perhaps the most terrible ironical retribution which could have fallen upon his strange egomania, would have been, had such a thing been possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had been that terrible vision of Mme. d'Albany's life after his death; the revelation of how little difference, after the first great grief, his loss had made in her life; the revelation that, unnoticed, unconsciously, a successor had been prepared for him.

In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 1804, in which Mme. d'Albany expatiates to her friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her life, and her desire to end it, I find this un.o.btrusive little sentence: "Fabre desires his compliments to you. He has been a great resource to me in everything."

This sentence, I think, explains what to the enemies of Mme. d'Albany has been a delightful scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mystery; explains, reduces to mere very simple, conceivable, neither commendable nor shameful every-day prose, the fact that little by little the place left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another man. Italian writers, inheriting from Giordani, even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against a woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became once more what nature had made her, half French, with a great preference for French and French things--Italian writers, I say, have tried to turn the Fabre episode into something extremely disgraceful to Mme. d'Albany. Ma.s.simo d'Azeglio, partly out of hatred to the Countess, who was rather severe and acrimonious upon his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a desire to amuse his readers, has introduced into his autobiography an anecdote told him by Mme. de Prie (the niece of Alfieri's famous Turin mistress, and the lady who took it upon herself to send him a priest without consulting the Countess), to the effect that she had watched Fabre making eyes, kissing his fingers, and generally exchanging signals with Mme. d'Albany at a party where Alfieri was present. Let those who are amused by this piece of gossip believe it implicitly; it does not appear to me either amusing, or credible, or creditable to the man who retailed it. The Florentine society of the early years of this century was, if we may trust the keen observation of Stendhal, almost as navely and openly profligate as that of a South Sea Island village; and such a society, which could talk of the things and in the way which it did, which could permit certain poetical compositions (found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be publicly performed before the ladies and gentlemen celebrated therein, such a society naturally enjoyed and believed a story like that retailed by d'Azeglio. But surely we may put it behind us, we who are not Florentines of the year 1800, and who can actually conceive that a woman who had exchanged irreproachable submission to a drunken husband, for legally unsanctioned, but open and faithful attachment for a man like Alfieri, might at the age of fifty take a liking to a man of thirty-five without that liking requiring a disgusting explanation. The clean explanation seems so much simpler and more consonant. Fabre had become an intimate of the house during Alfieri's last years. He was French, he was a painter; two high recommendations to Mme. d'Albany. He was, if we may trust Paul Louis Courier, who made him the hero of a famous imaginary dialogue, clever with a peculiarly French sort of cleverness; he gave the Countess lessons in painting while Alfieri was poring over his work. The sudden death of Alfieri would bring Fabre into still closer relations with Mme.

d'Albany, as a friend of the deceased, the brother of his physician, and the virtual fellow-countryman of the Countess; he would naturally be called upon to help in a hundred and one melancholy arrangements: he received visitors, answered letters, gave orders; he probably laid Alfieri in his coffin. When all the bustle incident upon death had subsided, Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most constant visitor. He, who had seen Alfieri at the very last, might be admitted when the door was closed to all others; he could help to sort the dead man's papers; he could, in his artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's monument, write to Canova, correspond with the dignitaries of Santa Croce, and so forth; come in contact with the Countess in those manifold pieces of business, in those long conversations, which seem, for a time, to keep the dead one still in the company of the living. There is nothing difficult to understand or shameful to relate in all this; and the friends of the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. de Souza, puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, misanthropic or scoffing people like Foscolo or Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to take umbrage, nothing to rage or laugh at, in this long intimacy between a woman over fifty and a man many years her junior; a man who lived at the other end of Florence, who (if I may trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to be attached to a woman well known to Mme. d'Albany; nor have we, I think, any right to be less charitable than they.

Louise d'Albany, careless, like most women of her day, of social inst.i.tutions, and particularly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an impure woman; her whole life goes to prove this. But Louise d'Albany was an indifferent woman, and the extinction of all youthful pa.s.sion and enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical world, made her daily more indifferent. She had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring one of the most unendurable of companions, loving and admiring him while he was still alive. But once the pressure of that strong personality removed, the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay inst.i.tuted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers were elaborated and preserved as he had left them; his portraits were everywhere, and visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi, and the young Lamartine, were expected to inquire respectfully into the legend of the divinity, to ask to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might be expected to enquire into the legend, to ask to see the relics, of some great saint. Mme. d'Albany conscientiously devoted a portion of her time to seeing that Alfieri's works were properly published, and that Alfieri's tomb in Santa Croce was properly executed. She was, as I have said, the priestess, the divinely selected priestess, of the divinity. But at the same time Mme. d'Albany gradually settled down quite comfortably and happily without Alfieri. After the first great grief was over a sense of relief may have arisen, a sense that after all "'tis an ill wind that blows no good"; that if she had lost Alfieri she had gained a degree of liberty, of independence, that she had acquired a possibility of being herself with all her tastes, the very existence of which she had forgotten while living under the shadow of that strange and disagreeable great man. A negative sense of compensation, of pleasure in the foreign society to which she could now devote herself; of satisfaction in the miniature copy of her former Parisian salon which she could arrange in her Florentine house; of comfort in a gently bustling, unconcerned, cheerful old age; negative feelings which, perhaps as a result of their very repression, seem little by little to have turned to a positive feeling, a positive aversion for the past which she refused to regret, a positive dislike to the memory of the man whom she could no longer love. Horrible things to say; yet, I fear, true. A man such as Alfieri had permitted himself to become, admirable in many respects, but intolerant, hard, arrogant, selfish, self-engrossed, cannot really be loved; he may be endured as a result of long habit, he may inflict his personality without effort upon another; but in order that this be the case that other must be singularly apathetic, indifferent, malleable; and apathetic, indifferent, and malleable people, those who never resist the living individual, rarely remember the dead one. "She was," writes one of the most conscientious and respectful of men, the late Gino Capponi, "heavy in feature and form, and, if I may say so, her mind, like her body, was thick-set....

Since several years she had ceased to love Alfieri."

We cannot be indignant with her; she had never pretended to be what she was not. A highly intellectual, literary mind, a pure temperament, a pa.s.sive, rather characterless character, taking the impress of its surroundings; pa.s.sionate when Alfieri was pa.s.sionate, depressed when Alfieri was depressed; cheerful when Alfieri's successors, Fabre and mankind and womankind in general, were cheerful. To be angry with such a woman would be ridiculous; but, little as we may feel attached to the memory of Alfieri, we cannot help saying to ourselves, "Thank Heaven he never understood what she was; thank Heaven he never foresaw what she would be!"

CHAPTER XIX.

SALON OF THE COUNTESS.

A shadowy being, nay, a shadow cast in the unmistakable shape of another, so long as Alfieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems to gain consistency and form, to become a substantive person, only after Alfieri's death. This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we have seen consorting almost exclusively with Italians, and spending the greater proportion of her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, Kant, Mme. de Genlis, Lessing, Milton, everything and anything; whose letters, exclusively (as far as I know them) to Italians of the middle cla.s.ses, are full of fury against everything that is French; this woman, who has. .h.i.therto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, suddenly turns into an extremely sociable, chatty woman of the world, and a woman of the world who is, to all intents and purposes, French.

To be the rallying point of a very cosmopolitan, literary, but by no means unworldly society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. d'Albany's mission; and reading the letters copied from the Montpellier Archives, and published by M. Saint Rene Taillandier, one wonders how this friend of Mme. de Stael, of Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every sort of French, English, German, Russian, or polyglot creature of distinction that travelled through Italy in the early part of this century, could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese professors, priests, and shop-keepers.