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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.
Such is the story of Mme. d'Albany's friendship for two of the noblest spirits, Sismondi and Foscolo, of their day; the noblest, the one in his pure austerity, the other in his magnanimous passionateness, that ever crossed the path of the beloved of Alfieri. With her other friends, who gave less of their own heart and asked less of hers, Mme. d'Albany was more fortunate.
When all the bustle incident upon death had subsided, Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most constant visitor.
His health, his work, his money-matters, his love-affairs, were all getting into a more and more lamentable condition, in which Mme. d'Albany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the catastrophes of 1814 and 1815, which to Italy meant the commencement of a state of degradation and misery much more intolerable and hopeless than any previous one, came and drowned the various bitternesses of poor Foscolo's life in a sea of bitterness.
These visitors were lodged by the Duke's kindness in the Palazzo Cerveno, near the ducal residence; and though the ladies of Pianura were inclined to look askance on the Marquise's genealogy, yet his Highness's condescension, and her own edifying piety, had soon allayed these scruples, and the salon of Madame de Coeur-Volant became the rival of Madame d'Albany's.
His letters are full of allusions to the hours which he spent seated at the little round table in Mme. d'Albany's drawing-room, opposite to the "Muse" newly bought of Canova, narrating to her his many and tangled love affairs; love affairs in which he left his heart on all the briars, and in which, however, by an instinct which shows the very nobleness of his nature, he seems to have been impelled rather towards women whom he must love sincerely and unhappily, than towards Marchesa di Prié and Lady Ligonier, like Alfieri; love affairs in which, alas, there was also a good dose of the vanity of a poet and a notorious beau.
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.
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 René Taillandier, one wonders how this friend of Mme. de Staël, 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.
Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may have been shocked by the news of the September massacres, of the grandes fournées 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.
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.
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