United States or Maldives ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The lady occupied a house in the great rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one which he rented; she could not go in or out of her door without being seen by Alfieri, and the sight of her was too much for him: he invariably broke all his resolves and went across the square to his Armida.
She read on a signboard: Via Alfieri. After they had taken fifty steps, he stopped before a sombre alley: "It is in there," he said. She looked at him with infinite sadness. "You wish me to go in?" She saw he was resolute, and followed him without saying a word, into the humid shadow of the alley. He traversed a courtyard where the grass grew among the stones.
The Countess of Albany left her property to Fabre; and I suppose some of the pieces in the museum of his native town used to hang in the sunny saloons of that fine old palace on the Arno which is still pointed out to the stranger in Florence as the residence of Alfieri.
The attitude and the gesture, which are the things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri.
That her hero should have stooped so low, so low that he scarcely dared to tell even her, surely this must have been as galling to the Countess of Albany as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself; this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dantesque passion, had been dragged down, by the impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating punishment which awaited all the basest love intrigues in this base Rome of the base eighteenth century.
His conspiracy of the Pazzi, his Virginia, and his Philip II., are to be admired for elevation and strength of thought; but it is always the character of Alfieri, and not that of peculiar nations and peculiar times, which are to be discovered in them.
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.
"Here is my father," said she; and her companion of the previous day stepped into the room with several folios under his arm. Alfieri turned to Odo. "This, my dear Odo," said he, "is my distinguished friend, Professor Vivaldi, who has done us the honour of inviting us to his house." He took the Professor's hand.
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."
One of the examples usually given to our children, to teach them to admire strength of will, is that of Vittorio Alfieri, who began to educate himself late in life, overcoming the drudgery of the rudiments by a great effort.
Word Of The Day