United States or São Tomé and Príncipe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then I went round to Half Moon Street, but found that Rayne was at the Automobile Club. I found him there just as he was going in to lunch with two ladies whom I had never before seen. My presence seemed to alarm him, for with excuse he left the ladies and took me out into the big hall. There I told him of Gori's visit and of his threats. He laughed.
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.
His Florentine housekeeper, Gori, remembers Hortense and her two sons very distinctly; for Louis once met him in the Boboli Gardens and insisted on his smoking a cigar, in order to laugh at him when it had made him sick, as it was Gori's first experience with tobacco.
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.
"When?" she gasped. "He called on Monday night." Madame Duperré held her breath for a few moments. She seemed to be calculating. "I recognize certain grave probabilities in Gori's visit," she said, and then lapsed again into silence.
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."
"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.
Let us pause, and consider for a moment the meaning of Alfieri's question, and the meaning of Gori's answer; let us try and realise the ideas and feelings of two honourable men, seeking a higher life, in a country so near our own as Italy, and so short a while ago as the year 1777.
A very strange note, preserved at Siena, to a "Nina padrona mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were not the only things which attracted him ever and anon from Florence to Siena.
Only one of them has any indication of place or date, "Genzano, Mardi"; but this, and the references to Alfieri's approaching journey northward and to Gori's intention of escorting him as far as Genoa, is sufficient to show that they must have been written in the summer of 1783, when Cardinal York, terrified at the liberty which he had allowed to his sister-in-law, had conveyed her safely to some villa in the Alban Hills.
Word Of The Day