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Updated: May 16, 2025
"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.
And about a year earlier he had been urging upon her a translation of Alfieri's Myrrha. Thomas Medwin, indeed, thought that the story which she was writing in 1819 was specifically based on Myrrha. That she was thinking of that tragedy while writing Mathilda is evident from her effective use of it at one of the crises in the tale.
To Odo, to whom the years had brought an increasing detachment, this self-absorption seemed an arrest in growth; for Alfieri's early worship of liberty had not yet found its destined channel of expression, and for the moment his enthusiasms had shrunk to the compass of a romantic adventure.
Odo knew that he would probably be followed and his movements reported to the authorities; but he was almost equally certain that there would be no active interference in his affairs. What chiefly puzzled him was Alfieri's insistence that Cantapresto should not be privy to the adventure.
There may also have been something very reassuring to Alfieri's apprehensions in the knowledge that he would be dealing, not with an Italian woman, accustomed and almost socially obliged to hold a man in the degrading bonds of cicisbeism, but with a foreigner, the jealously-guarded wife of a sort of legendary ogre, with whom, however much the old fury of love might awaken in him, there could by no possibility be anything beyond the most strictly watched friendship.
That, notwithstanding they belong not to the highest poetic sphere, his comedies continue to live and to be enjoyed, this testifies of the breadth and truthfulness of his humanity, the piercing insight of his rich mind, and his superlative comic genius. Of Alfieri's twenty-two tragedies, three only are modern, and of these three the scene of one is in Spain.
On this occasion I chanced to say that I thought Myrrha the best of Alfieri's tragedies; as I said this I chanced to cast my eyes on my father and met his: for the first time the expression of those beloved eyes displeased me, and I saw with affright that his whole frame shook with some concealed emotion that in spite of his efforts half conquered him: as this tempest faded from his soul he became melancholy and silent.
The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune, which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if Alfieri's amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for what escapes them.
A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri's lyrics, written about this time, and complaining of having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged through ignoble filth, shows that Alfieri, like most poetical minds, resented the vulgar and the disgusting much more than he would have resented what one may call clean tragedy. But things got worse and worse, and the real tragedy threatened.
The royal pretensions of the Countess of Albany pretentions affirmed rather than abated as the tide of revolution rose made it impossible that she should be received at the court of Pianura; but the Duke found a mild entertainment in Alfieri's company. The poet's revulsion of feeling seemed to Odo like the ironic laughter of the fates.
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