"On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of theTwo Keys, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his lyrics.
The hour of liberty and happiness had come for Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; sooner by far than they expected, and sooner, we may think, than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, however, not in the face of the law. Charles Edward was still alive; but, pressed by King Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to wheedle out of some most unnecessary money, he had consented to a legal separation from his fugitive wife; as a result of which the Countess of Albany, renouncing all money supplies from the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a share of the two pensions, French and Papal, granted to her husband, was permitted to spend a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased, provided she returned for awhile to show herself in the Papal States. On hearing the unexpected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the Apennines of Modena with fourteen horses that he had been to buy in England, was seized with a violent temptation to send his caravan along the main road, and gallop by cross-paths to meet the Countess, who was crossing the Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome to the baths of Baden in Switzerland. The thought of her honour and safety restrained him, and he pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on a previous occasion, his stern resolution not to seek his lady soon gave way; and two months later followed that meeting at theTwo Keysat Colmar on the Rhine.
For the first time in those seven long years of platonic passion, Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany found themselves settled beneath the same roof. To the mind of this Italian man, and this half-French, half-German woman of the eighteenth century, for whom marriage was one of the sacraments of a religion in which they wholly disbelieved, and one of the institutions of a society which alleviated it with universal adultery; to Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation from Charles Edward Stuart was equivalent to a divorce. The Pretender could no longer prescribe any line of conduct to his wife; she was free to live where and with whom she chose; and if she were not free to marry, the idea, the wish for marriage, probably never crossed the brains of these two platonic lovers of seven years' standing. Marriage was a social contract between people who wished to obtain each other's money and titles and lands—who wished to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all his property to his sister, and the Countess, who lived on a pension, had no money or titles or lands to throw together; and they certainly neither of them, the man living entirely for his work, the woman living entirely for the man, had the smallest desire to have children, heirs to nothing at all. What injury could their living together now do to Charles Edward, who had relinquished all his husband's rights? None, evidently. On the other hand, what harm could their living together do to their own honour or happiness, now that they had had seven years' experience that only death could extinguish their affection? None, again evidently. And as to harm to the institutions of society, what were those institutions, and what was their value, that they should be respected? Such, could we have questioned them, would have been the answers of Alfieri and the Countess. That they were setting an example to others less pure in mind, less exceptional in position; that they were making it more difficult for marriage to be reorganised on a more rational plan, by showing men and women a something that might do instead of rationally organised marriage; that they were, in short, preventing the law from being rectified, by taking the law into their own hands: such thoughts could not enter into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth century, people for whom the great Revolution, Romanticism, and the new views of society which grew out of both, were still in the future. That a punishment should await them, that as time went on and youthful passion diminished, their lives should be barren and silent and cold for want of all those things: children, legal bonds, social recognition, by which their union should fall short of a real marriage; this they could never anticipate.
For the moment, united in the "excessively clean and comfortable" little château, rented by Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Colmar; riding and driving about in the lovely Rhine country; the Countess deep in her reading again, Alfieri deep once more in his writings; together, above all, after so many months of separation: they seemed perfectly happy. So happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must come to restore the natural balance of things; and the misfortune came, in the sudden news of the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as of guiltiness at having half forgotten that thoughtful and gentle friend in the first flush of their happiness, seems to have come over them.
"O God," wrote Alfieri to Gori's friend Bianchi at Siena, "I don't know what I shall do. I always see him and speak to him, and every smallest word and thought and gesture of his returns to my mind, and stabs my heart. I do not feel very sorry for him: he cared little for life for its own sake, and the life which he was forced to lead was too far below his great soul, and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, and the nobility of his noble scornfulness. The person dearest to me of any, and immediately next to whom I loved Checco [Gori] most, knew and appreciated him and is not to be consoled for such a loss. I told him already last July, so many, many times, that he was not well, that he was growing visibly thinner day by day. Oh! I ought never to have left him in this state."
A letter, this one on Gori's death, which may induce us to forgive the letters of Alfieri of which we have seen a reflection in those of Mme. d'Albany: the passionate grief for the lost friend making us feel that there is something noble in the possibility of even the morbid grief at the lost mistress. More touching still, bringing home what each of us, alas! must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one who is not our kith and kin, whom the thoughts of our nearest and dearest, of our work, of all those things which the world recognises as ours in a sense in which the poor beloved dead was not, does not permit us to mourn in such a way as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for whom, half suppressed, comes but the more pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the present and future, all where he or she is not, a blank; more touching than any letter in which Alfieri gives free vent to his grief for poor Gori, is that note which he wrote upon the manuscript of his poem on Duke Alexander's murder, after the annotation saying that this work was resumed at Siena, the 17th July 1784—"O God! and the friend of my heart was still living then"; the words which a man speaks, or writes only for himself, feeling that no one, not those even who are the very flesh and blood of his heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that terrible pang at suddenly seeing the past so close within his reach, so hopelessly beyond his grasp.
The death of Gori seemed the only circumstance which diminished the happiness of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; nay, it is not heartless, surely, to say that, cruel as was that wound, there was doubtless a quite special sad sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, in the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling in affliction, the new energy of affection which comes to the survivors whenever Death calls out the warning, "Love each other while I still let you." But they had still to pay, and pay in many instalments, the price of happiness snatched before its legitimate time.
Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the Countess could not, therefore, take him back with her to Italy, where, according to the stipulations of the act of separation, she was bound to spend the greater part of every year. Hence the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those in the succeeding years, were merely so many interludes of happiness in the dreary life of separation; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one of his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the thought that every day and every hour was bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. The day came: Alfieri had to take leave of Mme. d'Albany; and, as he expresses it, had to return to much worse gloom than before, being separated from his lady without having the consolation of seeing Gori once more. Mechanically he returned to Siena, to Siena which it was impossible to conceive without his friend Checco; but when he realised the empty house, the empty town, he found the place he had so loved insupportable, and went to spend his long solitary winter writing, reading, translating, breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass the weary time, at Pisa. In April 1785 Mme. d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna, where she had spent the winter, and to go to her sisters in France. In September she and her lover met once more in the beloved country-house on the Rhine. But again, in December, came another separation; Mme. d'Albany went to Paris, and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar.
"Shall we then be again separated," he writes in a sonnet, "by cruel and lying opinion, which blames us for errors which the whole world commits every day? Unhappy that I am! The more I love thee with true and loyal love, the more must I ever refuse myself that for which I am always longing: thy sweet sight, beyond which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar cannot understand this, and knows us but little, and does not see that thy pure heart is the seat of virtue."
Strange words, and which, coming from a man cynical and truthful as Alfieri, may make us pause and refuse to affirm that this strange love, platonic for seven long years, ceased to be a mere passionate friendship even when it resorted to the secrecy and deceptions of a mere common intrigue; even when it openly braved, in the semblance of marriage, the opinion of the world at large. During those many months of solitude in the villa at Colmar, with no other company than that of his Sienese servant or secretary and of the horses, whose news he carefully sent, in letters and sonnets, to the Countess, Alfieri appears for the first time to have got into a habit of excessive overwork, and to have had the first serious attack of the gout; overwork and gout, the two things which were to kill him. A six months' stay in Paris, where society, the business of printing his works, and the great distance of his lodgings from the house of Mme. d'Albany, diminished his intellectual work, kept him up for the moment. But in the following summer of the year 1787, shortly after he had returned to Colmar with the Countess, and had welcomed as a guest Tommaso di Caluso, his greatest friend since Gori's death, he suddenly broke down under a terrific attack of dysentery. For many days, reduced to a skeleton, ice cold even under burning applications, and just sufficiently alive to feel in his intensely proud and masculine nature the cruel degradation of an illness which made him an object of loathing to himself, Alfieri remained at death's door, devotedly tended by his beloved and by his friend.
"It grieved me dreadfully to think that I should die, leaving my lady, and my friend, and that fame scarcely rough hewn for which I had worked and frenzied myself so terribly for more than ten years," writes Alfieri; "for I felt very keenly that of all the writings which I should leave behind me, not one was completed and finished as it should have been had time been given me to complete and to perfect according to my ideas. On the other hand, it was a great consolation to know that, if I must die, I should die a free man, and between the two best beloved persons that I had, and whose love and esteem I believed myself to possess and to deserve."
Alfieri recovered. But with that illness ends, I think, the period of his youth, and of his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought and passionate austerity and independence of character which was to him what artistic endowment is to other writers; and with that illness begins a premature old age, mental and moral, decrepitude gradually showing itself in a kind of ossification of the whole personality; the decrepitude which corresponds, on the other side of a brief manhood of comparative strength and health, to the morally inert and sickly years of Alfieri's strange youth.
Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme simplicity of mind and gentleness of spirit, was still living at Asti, cheerfully depriving herself of every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as she devoted her thoughts and her strength, to the services of the poor and of the sick. Alfieri, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely seen her except for a few hours at rare intervals, looked up to her less with the affection of a son than with the satisfaction of an artist who sees in the woman of whom he is born the peculiar type of features or character which he prizes most in womankind; if he, for all his conscious weaknesses, was more like his own heroes than any man of his acquaintance, if Mme. d'Albany might be judiciously got up as the Laura of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri was even more unmistakably the mother who suited his ideas, the living model of his mother of Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha. To the Countess Alfieri he had, already in 1784, introduced the Countess of Albany, whom she invited to stay with her on her passage through Asti as she returned from Colmar into Italy. Mme. d'Albany found an excuse for not accepting in the bad state of the roads, which rendered another route than that of Asti preferable. Frank and indifferent to the world's opinion as was Mme. d'Albany, her originally cut and dry intellectual temper hardened by many years' misery, one can conceive that she should shrink from accepting the hospitality of Alfieri's mother. Alfieri had doubtless shown her his mother's letters, and from these letters, as reflected in his answers, it is clear that the Countess of Albany, returning from that first stay with her lover at Colmar, would have felt that she was tacitly deceiving the noble old lady under whose roof she was staying. For the Countess Alfieri, noble, and Italian, and woman of the eighteenth century though she was, seems to have been one of those persons into whose mind, high removed above all worldly concerns, no experience of vice, of weakness, nay, of mere equivocal situations, can enter. Whatever she may have seen or heard in her youth of the habits of women of her century and station, of the virtual divorce which, after a few years, reigned in aristocratic houses, of authorised lovers and socially accepted infidelity, seems to have passed out of her memory and left her mind as innocent as it may have been during her convent school-days. She had taken great interest in this poor young woman, maltreated by a drunken husband, and finally saved from his clutches by the benevolence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and of a prince of the church, about whom her son had written to her. That her son experienced more than her own pity for so worthy an object, that he was at all compromised in the fate of this virtuous, unhappy lady, never entered her mind. So little could she understand the muddy things of this world, that in 1789, when Alfieri was publicly living with Mme. d'Albany at Colmar, the Countess Alfieri sent him, through his friend Caluso, the suggestion of a match which she had greatly at heart, between him and a young lady of Asti, "fifteen or sixteen years old, without any faults, such as he would certainly like, cultivated, docile, and clever." It is one of the things which grate upon one most in Alfieri's character, and which show that however much he might be cast and have chiselled himself in antique heroic form he was yet made of the same stuff as his contemporaries, to find that he and his friend Caluso merely amused themselves immensely at this proposal of marriage, and concocted a dutiful letter to the old Countess explaining that matrimony was not at present in his plans. What would Madame Alfieri have thought had she known the truth! It is very sad to think how, in some cases, the very noblest and purest, just because they are so completely noble and pure and above all the base necessities of the world of passion, must be unable to see, in the doings of others less fortunate than themselves, those very elements of nobility and purity which redeem the baser circumstances of their lives. That Mme. d'Albany had loved a man not her husband, had fled from her husband and united her life to that of her lover, would be a horror visible to the old Countess' eyes; the platonic purity, the fidelity, the loyalty of this long and illegitimate love, would have escaped her. No art is so cruelly contemptuous of whatever of beauty and sweetness imperfect reality may contain, as the art which is able to attain an ideal perfection; and thus it is also in matters of appreciation of man by man and woman by woman. The Countess of Albany was apparently more frank than Alfieri, because frank rather from temperament than from pre-occupation about a given ideal of conduct. That the mother of Alfieri should understand so little seems to have worried her; and when the unsuspecting old lady asked her sympathisingly for news of Charles Edward, she wrote back as follows: "As to my husband, he is better; but I must confess to you, Madame, that I cannot take so lively an interest in him as you suppose, for he made me, during nine years, the most wretched woman that ever lived. If I do not hate him it is a result of Christian charity, and because we are desired to pardon. He drags out a miserable life, abandoned by all the world, without relatives or friends, given over to his servants; but he has willed it thus, since he has never been able to live with anyone. Forgive me, Madame, for having entered into such details with you; but the friendship which you have shown towards me obliges me to speak sincerely." Mme. d'Albany, writing some time before to condole about the death of Alfieri's half-brother, had tried to insinuate to the old Countess what her son was for her, and what position she herself might one day assume in the Alfieri family: "I hope that if circumstances change, you will not see a family die out to which you are so attached, and that you will receive the greatest consolation from M. le Comte Alfieri." Words which could only mean that when the Pretender died Mme. Alfieri might hope for a daughter-in-law in the writer, and for grand-children through her. But Madame Alfieri did not understand; imagining, perhaps, that Mme. d'Albany was alluding to some project of marriage of her friend M. le Comte Alfieri; and the letter in which the ill-treated wife's aversion to her husband was first openly revealed appears to have acted as a thunder-clap, and to have, at least momentarily, put an end to all correspondence.
The Countess of Albany was mistaken in supposing that Charles Edward would die in the arms of mere servants. The very year after her own separation from Alfieri, the Pretender had called to Florence the natural daughter born to him by Miss Walkenshaw, and whom he had left, apparently forgotten for twenty-five years, in the convent at Meaux, where her mother had taken refuge from his brutalities, even as Louise d'Albany had taken refuge from them in the convent of the Bianchette. Partly from a paternal feeling born of the unexpected solitude in which his wife's flight had left him; partly, doubtless, from a desire to spite the Countess; he had solemnly, as King of England, legitimated this daughter, and created her Duchess of Albany: he had made incredible efforts, abandoning drink, going into the world and keeping open house, to attach this young woman to him, and to treat her as well as he had treated his wife ill.
Charlotte of Albany, a strong, lively, good-humoured, big creature, devoted to gaiety, effectually reformed her father in his last years, and turned him, from the brute he had been, to a tolerably well-behaved old man. But we must not therefore conclude that Charlotte was a better woman, or a woman more desirous of doing her duty, than Louise d'Albany. Between the two there was an abyss: Charlotte had been sent for by a man weary of solitude, smarting under the frightful punishment brought upon his pride by the flight of his wife; ready to do anything in order not to be alone and despised by the world; a man broken by illness and age, weak, hysterical, incapable almost of his former excesses; and Charlotte was a woman of thirty, she was a daughter, she was free to go where she would to marry, and her father could buy her presence only at the price of submission to her tastes and to her desires. How different had it not been with Louise of Stolberg: united to this man twelve years before, a mere child of nineteen, given over to him as his wife, his chattel, his property, to torment and lock up as he might torment and lock up his dog or his horse; losing all influence over him with every day which made her less of a novelty and diminished the chance of an heir; and sickened and alarmed more and more by the obstinate jealousy and drunkenness and brutality of a man still in the vigour of his odious passions. Still, the fact remains that while Louise d'Albany was secretly or openly making light of all social institutions, and living as the mistress, almost the wife, of Alfieri; this insignificant Charlotte, this bastard of a Miss Walkenshaw, this woman who had probably never had an enthusiasm, or an ideal, or a thought, had succeeded in reclaiming whatever there remained of human in the degraded Charles Edward; had succeeded in doing the world the service of laying out at least with decency and decorum this living corpse which had once contained the soul of a hero, so that posterity might look upon it without too much contempt and loathing, nay, almost, seeing it so quiet and seemingly peaceful, with compassion and reverence.
And when, at the beginning of February 1788, the Countess of Albany, in the full enjoyment of her love for Alfieri, and of the pleasures of the most brilliant Parisian society, received the news that on the last day of January Charles Edward had passed away peacefully in the arms of the Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere Christian charity and the duty of forgiveness, felt herself smitten by an unexpected grief.
Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, and to whose cut-and-dry nature it must have seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in a way overawed by this sudden emotion at the death of the man who had made both lovers so miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so narrow a temper, of all that may move our sympathy in that, to him, unintelligible grief, is, I think, one of the facts in his life which brings this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet repulsive character, most within reach of our affection; as that same grief, so unexpected by herself, at what was after all her final deliverance, is, together with the letter to Alfieri's mother, telling of her hatred to Charles Edward, and that exclamation in the hysterical love-letter at Siena—"O God! how this degrades the soul!"—one of the things which persuade us that this woman, whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly, and cynical, did really possess at bottom what her lover called "a most upright and sincere and incomparable soul."
"For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sienese friends on the occasion of Charles Edward's death, "nothing will be altered in our mode of life." In other words, the Countess of Albany and her lover, established publicly beneath the same roof in Paris, did not intend getting married. Whatever hopes may have filled Mme. d'Albany's heart when, years before, she had hinted to Alfieri's mother that when certain circumstances changed, the Alfieri family should be saved from extinction; whatever ideas Alfieri had had in his mind when he prayed in a sonnet for the happy day when he might call his love holy; whatever intention of repairing the injury done to social institutions, may at one time have mingled with the lovers' remorse and the lovers' temptations,—had now been completely forgotten. We have seen how, more than once, love, however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated by Alfieri in himself and in his beloved as the one admirable thing in the world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-century baseness, had nevertheless withered in several of its branches, beaten by the wind of illegitimate passion, and dried up by the callousness of an immoral state of society: an exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, come before its season, and bleached and warped like a winter flower.
Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, simply, I think, because they did not care to get married; because marriage would entail reorganisation of a mode of life which had somehow organised itself; because it would give a common-place prose solution to what appeared a romantic and exceptional story; and finally because it might necessitate certain losses in the way of money, of comfort, and of rank.
One sees throughout all his autobiography and letters that Alfieri drew a sharp distinction between love and marriage; that he conceived marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, so to say, in his native place, goes in for having children, for being master in his own house, administering and increasing his estates, and generally devoting himself to the advancement of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essentially a routinist, respected and approved of marriage; and anything different would have struck his martinet, rule and compass, mind, as ridiculous and contemptible. In giving up his fortune to his sister, Alfieri had deliberately cut himself off from the possibility of such a marriage; moreover, putting aside the financial question, his notion of the liberty of a writer, who must be able to speak freely against any government, was incompatible with his notion of a father of a family, settled in dignity in his ancestral palace; and finally, I feel perfectly persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which saw things only in sharpest black and white contrasts, there existed a still more complete incompatibility between a woman like the Countess of Albany, and a wife such as he conceived a wife: to marry Mme. d'Albany would be to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domesticity, and at the same time to frightfully depart from the normal type of matrimony, which required that the man be absolute master, and not afflicted with any sort of sentimental respect for his better half.
According to Alfieri, there were two possibilities for the ideal man: a handsome and highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty years his junior, fresh from the convent, provided with the right number of heraldic quarterings, acres, diamonds, and domestic virtues, and who would bear him, in deep awe for his unapproachable superiority, five or six robust children; and a romantic connexion with a married woman or a widow, a woman all passion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he should go through a course of mutual soul improvement, who should be the sharer of all his higher life, and whom he would diligently deck out as a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of society.
The Countess of Albany did not fit into the first ideal; nor, for the matter of that, did Alfieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence, engrossed in literature, fit into it himself; and both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly unnecessary piece of humbug.
Such were, doubtless, Alfieri's views of the case. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had evidently no vocation as a housewife or a mother; marriage was full of disagreeable associations to her: a husband might beat one, and a lover might not. She, probably, also, guessed instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must always be a mere mistress, and a wife must always be a mere Griselda; she knew his cut-and-dry views, his frightful power of carrying theory into practice; she may have guessed that the most respectful of lovers would in his case make the most tyrannical of husbands. But while Alfieri doubtless brought Mme. d'Albany to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d'Albany probably brought home to him her own more practical ones. Alfieri, we must remember, had been a man of excessive social vanity; and much as he despised mankind, he certainly still liked to enjoy its admiring consideration. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had been brought up in the full worldliness of a canoness of Ste. Wandru, and had grown accustomed to a certain amount of state and of luxury; and these worldly tendencies, thrown into the background by the passion, the poetry which sprang up with the irresistible force of a pressed down spring during her married misery, had returned to her as years went on, and as passion cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage would probably involve a great risk of a diminution of income, since the Pope and the Court of France might easily refuse to support Charles Edward's widow once she had ceased to be a Stuart; and it must inevitably mean an end to a quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow of the Pretender could lay claim, but the wife of a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the various meannesses, committed quite unconsciously by Mme. d'Albany, and apparently not censured by the people of the eighteenth century, that, so far from being anxious to shake off all vestiges of her hateful married life, the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed determined to enjoy, so to speak, her money's worth; to get whatever advantages had been bought at the price of her marriage with Charles Edward. Mme. d'Albany enjoyed being the widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather easy-going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless assumed towards strangers a certain queenly haughtiness which frequently gave offence; and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her house in 1788, found, to his surprise, that all the plate belonging to Mme. d'Albany was engraved with the royal arms of England; that guests were conducted through an ante-room in which stood a royal throne also emblazoned with the arms of England; nay, that the servants had orders to address the lady of the house by the title of a queen: a state of things whose institution by a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and who made no secret of her hatred of Charles Edward, whose toleration by a man who scorned the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those strange anomalies which teach us the enormous advance in self-respect and self-consistency due to social and democratic progress, an improvement which separates in feeling even the most mediocre and worldly men and women of to-day from the most high-minded and eccentric men and women of a century ago. To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Countess of Albany, to risk part of her fortune and to relinquish her royal state, as well as to sink into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in both parties concerned, a variety of reasons, contemptible in our eyes, excellent in their own, against legitimating their connection. And, on the other hand, no corresponding inducement. Why should they get married? The Countess, going in state every Sunday to a convent where she was received with royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom should they marry, pray? To please religion? Why, they had none. To please society? Why, society, in this Paris of the year 1788, at least such aristocratic society as they cared to see, consisted entirely either of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each with a husband or wife somewhere in the background, or of even more interesting triangular arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover, all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, each with alettre de cachetwhich should lock the other up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and, after very little hesitation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the well-born and amusing people in Paris did not insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting married, why should they go out of their way to do so? We good people of the nineteenth century should have liked them the better; but then, you see, it was the peculiarity of the men and women of the eighteenth century to be quite unable to conceive that the men and women of the nineteenth century would be in the least different from themselves.
The well-born and amusing people of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century did not stickle at the question of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne, attracted by the peculiar cosmopolitan charm, the very undeniable talent for society, the extraordinary intellectual superiority of Mme. d'Albany; attracted, also, by a certain easy-going and half-motherly kindliness which seems, to all those who wanted sympathy, to have been quite irresistible. It was the moment of the great fermentation, when even trifling things and trifling people seemed to boil and seethe with importance; when cold-hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness and chivalry, selfish people full of generosity, prosaic people full of poetry, and mediocre people full of genius: the brief carnival-week of the old world, when men and women masqueraded in all manner of outlandish and antiquated thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the excitement of dressing-up so much that they actually believed themselves for the moment to be what they pretended: it was the brief moment, grotesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes of society, who were fatally going to be exterminated for their long selfishness and indifference, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and shovel and tore down the bricks of the edifice which was destined to fall and to crush them all beneath its ruins.
All these men and women, their deep in-born corruption momentarily transfigured by this enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for sentiment, for austerity, which mingled oddly with their childish pleasure in all new things, in mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Montgolfier balloons, with their habitual pleasure in all their big and small futile and wicked pleasures of worldliness;—all these men and women, thesemorituridelighted at the preparations, the scaffoldings, red clothes, black crape, torches and drums and bugles, for their own execution, all assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne.
A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomatists, and artists and pamphleteers, and wits and beautiful women; perishable and perished things, out of which we must select one or two, either as types of that which has perished, or as types of the imperishable; and the perished, the amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and brilliantly-improvising orators and philosophers of the half-hour, are often that which, could we have chosen, we should have preserved. Most notable among the women, the young daughter of Necker, the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Mme. la Baronne de Staël Holstein: a rather mannish superb sort of creature, with shoulders and arms compensating for thick swarthy features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Krüdener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand francs from Mdlle. Bertin, the Queen's milliner; but later to be famous for her literary and religious vagaries, her influence on Mme. de Staël, her strange influence on Alexander of Russia. Near her, doubtless, that fascinating Suard, in the convent of whose sister Mme. de Krüdener was wont to spend a month in religious exercises, thanking God, at the foot of the altar, for giving her a sister like Mdlle. Suard, and a lover like Suard himself. As yet but little noticed, except as the pet friend, the "younger sister" of Mme. d'Albany, a Mme. de Flahault, later married to the Portuguese Souza; a simple-natured little woman, adoring her children and the roses in her garden, and who, if I may judge by the letters which, many, many years later, she addressed to Mme. d'Albany, would be the woman of all those one would rather resuscitate for a friend, leaving Mmes. de Staël and de Krüdener quiet in their coffins. Further on, the delicate and charming Pauline de Beaumont, who was to be the Egeria of Joubert and the tenderly-beloved friend of Châteaubriand; and a host of women notable in those days for wit or heart or looks, wherewith to make a new Ballade of Dead Ladies, much sadder than the one of Villon: "But where are the snows of yester-year?"
Round about these ladies an even greater number of men of what were, or passed for, eminent qualities; political for the most part, or busied with the new science of economy, like the Trudaines; and most notable among them, as the typical victim of genius of the Reign of Terror, poor André Chénier, his exquisite imitations of Theocritus still waiting to be sorted and annotated in prison; and the typical blood-maniac of genius, the painter David, who was to startle Mme. d'Albany's guests, soon after the 10th August, by wishing that the Fishwives had stuck Marie Antoinette's head without more ado upon a pike. Imagine all these people assembled in order to hear M. de Beaumarchais, in the full glory of his millions and his wonderful garden, give a first reading of hisMère Coupable, after inviting them to prepare themselves to weep (which was easy in those days of soft hearts) "à plein canal." Or else listening to the cold and solemn M. de Condorcet, prophesying the time when science shall have abolished suffering and shall abolish death; little dreaming of those days of wandering without food, of those nights in the quarries of Montrouge, of that little bottle of poison, the only thing that science could give to abolish his suffering.
To all these great and illustrious people the Countess of Albany—I had almost said the Queen of England—introduced her "incomparable friend" (style then in vogue) Count Vittorio Alfieri; and all of them doubtless took a great interest in him as her lover, and a little interest in him asthegreat poet of Italy; not certainly without wondering—amiable people as they were, and persuaded that France and Paris alone existed—that Mme. d'Albany should find anything to love in this particularly rude and disagreeable man, and that a country like Italy should have the impudence to set up a poet of its own. The Countess of Albany, made to be a leader of intellectual society, was happy; but Alfieri was not. Ever since his childhood, when a French dancing-master had vainly tried to unstiffen his rigid person, he had mortally hated the French nation; ever since his first boyish travels he had loathed Paris as the sewer, thecloaca maxima(the expression is his own) of the world; his whole life had been a struggle with the French manners, the French language, which had permeated Piedmont; one of the chief merits of the new drama he had conceived was (in his own eyes) to sweep Corneille, Racine, and particularly Voltaire, his arch-aversion Voltaire, off the stage.
Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was specially constructed, if I may use the expression, to ignore all the good points, and to feel with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, of the French nation; and more especially of the French nation of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's ideal were austerity, inflexibility, pride and contemptuousness of character, coldness, roughness, decision of manner, curtness, reticence, and absolute truthfulness of speech; above all, no consideration for other folks' likings and dislikings, no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more so than the ideal of other idealising minds, was the mere outcome of himself; it contained his faults as well as his virtues. Now all that fell short of, or went beyond, his ideal—that is to say, himself—was abomination in Alfieri's eyes. Consequently France and the French, all the nobility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-heartedness, the enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the disrespectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falutinism, the superficiality, the looseness of principle, everything that made up the greatness and littleness of the France of the end of last century, everything which will make up the greatness and littleness of France, the glories and weaknesses which the world must love, to the end of time; all these things were abhorrent to Alfieri; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a person or a thing, justly or unjustly, could only increase but never diminish his dislike. Let us look at this matter, which is instructive to all persons whose nobility of character runs to injustice, a little closer; it will help us to understand theMisogallo, the extraordinary apostasy which, quite unconsciously, Alfieri was later to commit towards the principle of freedom. Alfieri, intensely Italian, if mediæval and peasant Italy may give us the Italian type, in a certain silent or rather inarticulate violence of temper—violence which roars and yells and stabs and strangles, but which never talks, and much less argues—could not endure the particular sort of excitement which surrounded him in France; excitement mainly cerebral, heroism or villainy resulting, but only as the outcome of argument and definition of principle and of that mixture of logic and rhetoric called by the Frenchdes mots. Alfieri was not a reasoning mind, he was not an eloquent man; above all, he was not a witty man; his satirical efforts are so many blows upon an opponent's head; they are almost physical brutalities; there is nothing clever or funny about them. In such a society as this Parisian society of the years '87, '88, '89, '90, he must have been at a continual disadvantage; and at a disadvantage which he felt keenly, but which he felt, also, that any remarkable piece of Alfierism which would have moved Italy to admiration, such as glaring, or stalking off in silence, or punching a man's head, could only increase. To feel himself at a disadvantage on account of his very virtues, and with people whom those virtues did not impress, must have been most intolerable to a man as vain and self-conscious as Alfieri, and to this was added the sense that, from mere ignorance of the language (the language whose nobility, as contrasted with the "low, plebeian, nasal disgustingness" of French, he so often descanted on) in which he wrote, it was quite impossible for these people to be reduced to their right place and right mind by the crushing superiority of his dramatic genius. He, who hungered and thirsted for glory, what glory could he hopeforamong all these monkeys of Frenchmen, jabbering and gesticulating about their States-General, their Montgolfier, their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, their Necker, who had not even the decent feeling to know Italian, and who bowed and smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Metastasio and Goldoni when introduced by the Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as an Italian poet. "Does Monsieur write comedies or tragedies?" One fancies one can hear the politely indifferent question put with a charming smile by some powdered and embroidered French wit to Mme. d'Albany in Alfieri's hearing; nay, to Alfieri himself.
Mixed with such meaner, though unconscious motives for dissatisfaction, must have been the sense, intolerable to a man like Alfieri, of the horrid and grotesque jumble of good and bad, of real and false, not merely in the revolutionary movement itself, but in all these men of theancien régimewho initiated it. Alfieri conceived liberty from the purely antique, or, if you prefer, pseudo-antique, point of view; it was to him the final cause of the world; the aim of all struggles; to be free was the one and only desideratum, to be master of one's own thoughts, actions, and words, merely for the sake of such mastery. The practical advantages of liberty entirely escaped him, as did the practical disadvantages of tyranny; nay, one can almost imagine that had liberty involved absolute misery for all men, and tyranny absolute happiness, Alfieri would have chosen liberty. To this pseudo-Roman and intensely patrician stoic, who had never known privation or injustice towards himself, and scarcely noticed it towards others, the humanitarian, the philanthropic movement, characteristic of the eighteenth century, and which was the strong impulse of the revolution, was absolutely incomprehensible. Alfieri was, in the sense of certain ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, blind and deaf to suffering. That a man of education and mind, a gentleman, should have to sweep the ground with his hat on the passage of another man, because that other happened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he should be liable to exile, to imprisonment, for a truthful statement of his opinion: these were to Alfieri the insupportable things of tyranny. But that a man in wooden shoes and a torn smock frock, sleeping between the pigs and the cows on the damp clay floor, eating bread mainly composed of straw, should have all the profits of his hard labour taken from him in taxes, while another man, a splendid gentleman covered over with gold, riding over acres of his land with his hounds, or a fat priest dressed in silk, snoozing over his Lucullus dinner, should be exempt from taxation and empowered to starve, rob, beat, or hang the peasant: such a thing as this did not fall within the range of Alfieri's feelings. To his mind, for ever wrapped in an intellectual toga, there was no tragedy in mere misery; there was no injustice in mere cruelty, or rather misery, cruelty, nay, all their allied evils, ignorance, brutality, sickness, superstition, vice, were unknown to him. Hence, as I have said, all the philanthropic side of the revolutionary movement was lost to him; just as the defence of Labarre, the vindication of Calas, never disturbed the current of his contempt for Voltaire. So also the abolition of privileges, the secularisation of church property, the equalisation of legal punishment, the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation of slaves; all these things, which stirred even the most corrupt and apathetic minds of the late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much declamation to Alfieri. To him, who could conceive no virtues beyond independent truthfulness, such things were mere sentimental trash, mere hypocritical nonsense beneath which base men hid their baseness. And the baseness, unhappily, was there: baseness of absolute corruption, or of scandalous levity, even in the noblest. To Alfieri, a man like Beaumarchais, for all his quick philanthropy, his audacious outspokenness, must have seemed base, with his background of money-jobbing, of dirty diplomatic work, of legal squabbles. How much more such a man as Mirabeau, with his heroic resolution, his heroic kindliness, his whole Titan nature, carous, eaten into by a hundred mean vices. That Mirabeau should have gained his bread writing libels and obscene novels, meant to Alfieri not that a man born in corruption and tainted thereby had, by the force of his genius, by the force of the great humanitarian movement, raised himself as morally high as he had hitherto grovelled morally low; it merely meant that the immaculate name of hero was degraded by a foul writer.
From such figures as these Alfieri turned away in indignant disgust. The great movement of the eighteenth century seemed to him a mere stirring and splashing in a noisome pool, in thatcloaca maxima, as he had called it.
Already before settling in Paris in 1787, he had written to his Sienese friends that, were it not for the necessity of attending to the printing of his works (to print which permission would not be obtainable in Italy), he would rather have established himself at Prats, at Colle, at Buonconvento, at any little town of two thousand inhabitants near Florence or Siena. Surrounded by, in daily contact with, some of the noblest minds of the century, nay, of any century, by people like Mme. de Staël, André Chénier, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Alfieri could write, with a sort of bitter pleasure at his own narrow-mindedness: "Now I am among a million of men, and not one of them that is worth Gori's little finger."
I am almost prepared to say that Alfieri really felt as if living in Paris, among such people and at such a moment, was a sort of saintly sacrifice, the crowning heroism of his life, which he made in order to print his books; that he endured the contact of this plague-stricken city, merely because he knew that unless he corrected a certain number of manuscript pages, and revised a certain number of proof-sheets, the world would be defrauded of the great and sovereign antidote to all such baseness as this in the shape of his own complete works.
Writing to his mother towards the end of the year 1788, he mentions contemptuously the excitement and enthusiasm created by the approaching election of the States-General, and adds calmly: "But all these sort of things interest me very little; and I give my attention only to the correction of my proofs, a piece of work with which I am pretty well half through."
The contradictions in complex and self-contradictory characters like those of the Frenchmen of the early revolution can be easily explained, and, say what we will, must be easily pardoned: rich natures, creatures of impulse, intensely sensitive to external influences, we feel that it is to the very richness of nature, the warmth of impulse, the susceptibility to influence, that we owe not merely these men's virtues but their vices. But the contradictions of the self-righteous are an afflicting spectacle, over which we would fain draw the veil: there is no room in a narrow nature for any flagrant violation of its own ideals to be stuffed away unnoticed in a corner. And now we come to one of the strangest self-contradictions in the history of Mme. d'Albany, that is to say, of her lord and master Alfieri.
The revision and printing of Alfieri's works had been brought to an end; but neither he nor the Countess seems to have contemplated a return to Italy. The fact was that they were both of them retained by money matters. A proportion of Mme. d'Albany's income consisted in the pension which she received from the French Court; and the greater part of Alfieri's income consisted in certain moneys made over to him by his sister as the capital of his life pension, and which he had invested in French funds.
By the year 1791, the French Court and the French funds had got to be very shaky; and those who depended upon them did not dare go to any distance, lest on their return they should find nothing to claim, or no one to claim from. Hence the necessity for Alfieri and the Countess to remain in France, or, at least, hover about near it.
Now, whether the unsettled state of French affairs suggested to Mme. d'Albany, and through her to Alfieri, that it would be wise to see what sort of home, nay, perhaps, what sort of pecuniary assistance, might be found elsewhere, I cannot tell; but this much is certain, that on the 19th May, 1791, Horace Walpole wrote as follows to Miss Barry:—
"The Countess of Albany is not only in England, in London, but at this very moment, I believe, in the palace of St. James; not restored by as rapid a revolution as the French, but, as was observed at supper at Lady Mount Edgecumbe's, by that topsy-turvihood that characterises the present age. Within these two days the Pope has been burnt at Paris; Mme. du Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with the Lord Mayor of London; and the Pretender's widow is presented to the Queen of Great Britain."
That we should have to learn so striking an episode of the journey to England from the letters of a total stranger, who noticed it as a mere piece of gossip, while the memoirs of Alfieri, who accompanied Mme. d'Albany to England, are perfectly silent on the subject, is, to say the least of it, a suspicious circumstance.
As he grew old, Alfieri seems to have lost that power, nay that irresistible desire, of speaking the truth and the whole truth which made him record with burning shame the caress of Pius VI. Perhaps, on the other hand, Alfieri, who, after all, was but a sorry mixture of an ancient Roman and a man of the eighteenth century, thought that a certain amount of baseness and dirt-eating, quite degrading in a man, might be permitted to a woman, even to the lady of his thoughts. And still I cannot help thinking that Alfieri, who could certainly, with his strong will, have prevented the Countess from demeaning herself, and in so far demeaning also his love for her, quietly abetted this step, and then as quietly consigned it to oblivion.
But oblivion did not depend upon registration, or non-registration, in Alfieri's memoirs. The letters of Walpole, the memoirs of Hannah More, the political correspondence collected by Lord Stanhope, furnish abundant detail of this affair. The Countess of Albany was introduced by her relation, or connexion, the young Countess of Aylesbury, and announced by her maiden name of Princess of Stolberg. Horace Walpole's informant, who stood close by, told him that she was "well-dressed, and not at all embarrassed." George III. and his sons talked a good deal to her, about her passage, her stay in England, and similar matters; but the princesses none of them said a word; and we hear that Queen Charlotte "looked at her earnestly." The strait-laced wife of George III. had probably consented to receive the Pretender's widow, only because this ceremony was a sort of second burial of Charles Edward, a burial of all the claims, the pride of the Stuarts; but she felt presumably no great cordiality towards a woman who had run away from her husband, who was travelling in England with her lover; and who, while affecting royal state in her own house, could crave the honour of being received by the family of the usurper.
Mme. d'Albany was not abashed: she seems to have made up her mind to get all she could out of royal friendliness. She accepted a seat in the King's box at the opera; nay, she accepted a seat at the foot of the throne ("the throne she might once have expected to mount," remarks Hannah More), on the occasion of the King's speech in the House of Lords. It was the 10th of June, the birthday of Prince Charlie; and the woman who sat there so unconcernedly, kept a throne with the British arms in her ante-room, and made her servants address her as a Queen!
What were Alfieri's feelings when Mme. d'Albany came home in her Court toilette, and told him of all these fine doings? The more we try to conceive certain things, the more inconceivable they become: it is like straining to see what may be hidden at the bottom of a very deep well. In the case of Alfieri, I think we may add that the well was empty. Since his illness at Colmar, he had aged in the most extraordinary way: the process of dessication and ossification of his moral nerves and muscles, which, as I have said, was the form that premature decrepitude took in this abnormal man, had begun. The creative power was extinct in him, both as regards his works and himself: there was no possibility of anything new, of any response of this wooden nature to new circumstances. He had attained to the age of forty-two without any particular feelings such as could fit into this present case, and the result was that he probably had no feelings. The Countess of Albany was the ideal woman he had enshrined her as such ages ago, and an ideal woman could not change, could not commit an impropriety, least of all in his eyes. If she had condescended to ridiculous meanness in order to secure for herself an opening in English society, a subsidy from the English Government (apparently already suggested at that time, but granted only many years later) in case of a general break-up of French things; if she had done this, it was no concern of Alfieri: Mme. d'Albany had been patented as the ideal woman. As to him, why should he condescend to think about state receptions, galas, pensions, kings and queens, and similar low things? He had put such vanities behind him long ago.
Alfieri and the Countess made a tour through England, and projected a tour through Scotland. Whether the climate, the manners, the aspect of England and its inhabitants really disappointed the perhaps ideal notions she had formed; or whether, perhaps, she was a little bit put out of sorts by no pension being granted, and by a possible coldness of British matrons towards a widow travelling about with an Italian poet, it is not for me to decide. But her impressions of England, as recorded in a note-book now at the Musée Fabre at Montpellier, are certainly not those of a person who has received a good welcome:
"Although I knew," she says, repeating the stale platitudes (or perhaps the true impressions?) of all foreigners, "that the English were melancholy, I had not imagined that life in their capital would be so to the point which I experienced it. No sort of society, and a quantity of crowds … As they spend nine months in the country—the family alone, or with only a very few friends—they like, when they come to town, to throw themselves into the vortex. Women are never at home. The whole early part of the day, which begins at two (for, going to bed at four in the morning, they rise only at mid-day), is spent in visits and exercise, for the English require, and their climate absolutely necessitates, a great deal of exercise. The coal smoke, the constant absence of sunshine, the heavy food and drink, make movement a necessity to them…. If England had an oppressive Government, this country and its inhabitants would be the lowest in the universe: a bad climate, bad soil, hence no sort of taste; it is only the excellence of the political constitution which renders it inhabitable. The nation is melancholy, without any imagination, even without wit; the dominant characteristic is a desire for money."
The same note as that even of such a man as Taine. The almost morbid love of beauty which a civilisation, whose outward expression are the lines and lines of black boxes, with slits for doors and windows of Bloomsbury, produced in men like Coleridge, Blake, and Turner, naturally escaped Mme. d'Albany; but the second great rebellion of imagination and love of beauty, the rebellion led by Madox Brown and Morris, and Rossetti and Burne Jones, escaped Taine. But of all the things which most offended this quasi-Queen of England in our civilisation, the social arrangements did so most of all. With the instinct of a woman who has lived a by no means regular life in the midst of a society far worse than herself, with the instinct of one of those strange pseudo-French Continental mongrels with whom age always brings cynicism, she tries to account for the virtue of Englishwomen by accidental, and often rather nasty, necessities. Mme. d'Albany writes with the freedom and precision of a Continental woman of the world of eighty years ago; and her remarks lose too much or gain too much by translation into our chaster language. "The charm of intimate society," she winds up, conscious of the charms of her own little salon full of clever men and pretty women all well-acquainted with each other—"the charm of intimate society is unknown in England."
In short, the sooner England be quitted, the better. Political, or rather financial circumstances—that is to say, the frightful worthlessness of French money (and Alfieri's and her money came mainly from France), made a return to Paris urgent.
An incident, as curious perhaps as that of Mme. d'Albany's presentation at Court, but which, unlike that, Alfieri has not thought fit to suppress, marked their departure from England. As Alfieri, who had preceded the Countess by a few minutes to see whether the luggage had been properly stored on the ship at Dover, turned to go and meet her, his eyes suddenly fell with a start of recognition upon a woman standing on the landing-place. She was not young, but still very handsome, as some of us may know her from Gainsborough's portrait; and she was no other than Penelope Lady Ligonier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad twenty years before, for whom he had fought his famous duel in St. James' Park, and got himself disgracefully mixed up in a peculiarly disgraceful divorce suit. He had several times inquired after her, and always in vain; and now he would scarcely have believed his eyes had his former mistress not given him a smile of recognition. Alfieri was terribly upset. The sight of this ghost from out of a disgraceful past, coming to haunt what he considered a dignified present, seems fairly to have terrified him; he ran back into the ship and dared not go to meet Mme. d'Albany, lest in so doing he should meet Lady Ligonier. Presently, Mme. d'Albany came on board. With the indifference of a woman of the world, of that easy-goingness which was rapidly effacing in her the romantic victim of Charles Edward, she told Alfieri that the friends who had escorted her to the ship (and who appear to have perfectly understood the temper of the Countess) had pointed out his former flame and entertained her with a brief biography of her predecessor in Alfieri's heart. Mme. d'Albany took it all as a matter of course: she was probably no longer at all in love with Alfieri, but she admired his genius and character as much and more than ever; and was probably beginning to develop a certain good-natured, half-motherly acquiescence in his eccentricities, such as women who have suffered much, and grown stout and strong, and cynically optimistic now that suffering is over, are apt to develop towards people accustomed to resort to them, like sick children, in all their ups and downs of temper.
"Between us," says Alfieri, "there was never any falsehood, or reticence, or coolness, or quarrel";—and, indeed, when a woman, such as Mme. d'Albany must have been at the age of forty, has once determined to adore and humour a particular individual in every single possible thing, all such painful results of more sensitive passion naturally become unnecessary. If Mme. d'Albany merely smiled over bygone follies, Alfieri had been put into great agitation by the sight of Lady Ligonier. From Calais he sent her a letter, of which no copy has been preserved, but which, according to his account, "was full, not indeed of love, but of a deep and sincere emotion at seeing her still leading a wandering life very unsuited to her birth and position; and of pain in thinking that I, although innocently (that "although innocently," on the part of a man who had been the cause of her scandalous downfall, is perfectly charming in its simple revelation of Continental morals), might have been the cause or the pretext thereof."
Lady Ligonier's answer came to hand in Brussels. Written in bad French, it answered Alfieri's tragic grandiloquence with a cold civility, which shows how deeply his magnanimous compassion had wounded a woman who felt herself to be no more really corrupt than he.
"Monsieur," so runs the letter, "you could not doubt that the expression of your remembrance of me, and of the interest which you kindly take in my lot, would be duly appreciated and received gratefully by me; the more especially as I cannot consider you as the cause of my unhappiness, since I am not unhappy, although the uprightness of your soul makes you fear that I am. You were, on the contrary, the agent of my liberation from a world for which I was in no way suited, and which I have not for a moment regretted…. I am in the enjoyment of perfect health, increased by liberty and peace of mind. I seek the society only of simple and virtuous persons without pretensions either to particular genius or to particular learning; and besides such society I entertain myself with books, drawing, music, &c. But what constitutes the basis of real happiness and satisfaction is the friendship and unalterable love of a brother whom I have always loved more than the whole world, and who possesses the best of hearts." "I hear," goes on Lady Ligonier, after a few compliments on Alfieri's literary fame, "that you are attached to the Princess with whom you are travelling, whose amiable and clever physiognomy seems indeed formed for the happiness of a soul as sensitive and delicate as yours. I am also told that she is afraid of you: I recognise you there. Without wishing, or perhaps even knowing it, you have an irresistible ascendancy over all who are attached to you."
Was it this disrespectful hint concerning what he wished the world to consider as his ideal love for Mme. d'Albany, or was it Lady Ligonier's determination to let him know that desertion by him had made her neither more disreputable nor more unhappy than before, I cannot tell; but certain it is that something in this letter appears to have put Alfieri, who had not objected to Mme. d'Albany's mean behaviour towards George III., into a condition of ruffled virtue and dignity.
"I copy this letter," he writes in his memoirs, "in order to give an idea of this woman's eccentric and obstinately evilly-inclined character."
Did it never occur to Alfieri that his own character, whose faults during youth he so keenly appreciated, was not improving with years?
Alfieri and Madame d'Albany were scarcely back in Paris, and settled in a new house, when the disorders in Paris and the movements of the Imperial troops on the frontier began to make the situation of foreigners difficult and dangerous. The storming of the Tuileries, the great slaughter of the 10th August 1792, admonished them to sacrifice everything to their safety. With considerable difficulty a passport for the Countess had been obtained from the Swedish Minister, one for Alfieri from the Venetian Resident (almost the only diplomatic representatives, says Alfieri, who still remained to that ghost of a king), and a passport for each of them and for each of their servants from their communal section. Departure was fixed for the 20th August, but Alfieri's black presentiments hastened it to the 18th. Arrived at the Barrière Blanche, on the road to Calais, passports were examined by two or three soldiers of the National Guard, and the gates were on the point of being opened to let the two heavily-loaded carriages pass, when suddenly, from out of a neighbouring pot-house, rushed some twenty-five or thirty ruffians, ragged, drunken, and furious. They surrounded the carriages, yelling that all the rich were running away and leaving them to starve without work; and a crowd rapidly formed round them and the National Guards, who wanted the travellers to be permitted to pass on. Alfieri jumps out of the carriage, brandishing his seven passports, and throws himself, a long, lean, red-haired man, fiercely gesticulating and yelling at the top of his voice, among the crowd, forcing this man and that to read the passports, crying frantically, "Look! Listen! Name Alfieri. Italian and not French! Tall, thin, pale, red-haired; that is I; look at me. I have my passport! We have our passports all in order from the proper authorities! We want to pass; and, by God! we will pass!"
After half an hour of this altercation, with voices issuing from the crowd, "Burn the carriages!" "Throw stones at them!" "They are running away, they are noble and rich; take them to the Hotel de Ville to be judged!" at last Alfieri's vociferations and gesticulations wearied even the Paris mob, the crowd became quieter, the National Guards gave the sign for departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the carriage where Mme. d'Albany was sitting more dead than alive, shouted to the postillions to gallop off.
At a country house near Mons, belonging to the Countess of Albany's sister, the fugitives received the frightful news of the September massacres; of those men and women driven, like beasts into an arena, down the prison-stairs into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Maillard's amateur executioners, on to the blood-soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, morally divided on separate benches, the gentlemen here, the ladies there, sat and looked on; of those men and women many had frequented the salon of the Rue de Bourgoyne, had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks back, with Alfieri and the Countess; amongst those men and women Alfieri and the Countess might themselves easily have been, had the ruffians of the Barrière Blanche dragged them back to their house, where an order to arrest Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 20th August which had originally been fixed for their departure. The thought of this narrow escape turned the recollection of that scene at the Barrière Blanche into a perfect nightmare, which focussed, so to speak, all the frenzied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French Revolution, for the "Tiger-Apes" of France.
By November Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were in Florence, safe; but established in a miserable inn, without their furniture, their horses, their books; all left in Paris; nay, almost without the necessary clothes, and with very little money. From the dirty inn they migrated into rather unseemly furnished lodgings, and finally, after some debating about Siena and inquiring whether a house might not be had there on the promenade of the Lizza, they settled down in the house, one of a number formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi family, on the Lung Arno, close to the Ponte Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is one of the most delightful in Florence: across the narrow quay the windows look almost sheer down into the river, sparkling with a hundred facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut by the deep shadows of the old bridges, to where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars by the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of the Cascine, closed in by the pale blue peaks of the Carrara Alps; or else, in autumn and winter, scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and browns, wonderfully veined, like some strange oriental jasper, with transparent violet streakings, and above which arise, veiled, half washed out by mist, the old corbelled houses, the church-steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of pine and ilex plumes on the hill opposite.
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 massacres, of thegrandes fournéeswhich 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 goddess, and the worship of liberty his special religion and mission. That such a religion and mission, to which he had devoted himself in a time and country when and where no one else dreamed of 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 fashionable craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, sentiment, and everything he hated most in the French, this was already a pain that gnawed silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty was, as it were, dragged out of his own little private temple, where he adored and hymned it, decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and Livy, and carried about, dressed in the garb of a Paris fish-wife, a red cotton night-cap on her head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained crew ofsansculottes, nay, worse, rolled along on a triumphal car by an assembly of lawyers and doctors and ex-priests and journalists—when liberty, which had been to him antique and aristocratic, became modern and democratic; when the whole of France had turned into a blood-reeking and streaming temple of this Moloch goddess, 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 noble abstract feeling of the man—it was as an expression of this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous but little-readMisogallo. 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 theMisogallo, and collate with its epigrams a certain passage in Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, narrow, pedantic doctrinaire, whose very 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, theMisogallomakes 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 institutions, 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 nobler 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 class of society which he detested most.