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Over and above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of "Pétrarque" when young. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
These incongruities revived his former wonder; nor was this dispelled by Alfieri's approach. The poet, masked and unattended, rejoined his friend without a word; and Odo guessed in him an eye and ear alert for pursuit. Guided by the pressure of his arm, Odo was hurried round the bend of the lane, up a transverse alley and across a little square lost between high shuttered buildings.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing can be more serious, as I have already remarked, than this diary of Alfieri's struggles, where he notes, day by day, the laziness, the meanness, the want of frankness to himself and others, the despicable vanity, the attempt to appear what he is not, the indulged unfounded suspiciousness towards his friends, all the little base defects which must have pained a nature like his more than any real sinfulness, as the prodding of a surgeon's instruments would have agonised such a man more than an actual amputation.
When morning came, with Alfieri's assistance, the plan of escape was arranged. In the company of a lady friend and also of her husband, now scared and penitent, but fearing to let her out of his sight she drove to a neighbouring convent, ostensibly to inspect the nuns' needlework.
He had been curious to hear what impression Alfieri's drama had produced upon the hunchback; but now any interruption seemed unwelcome, and he turned to Gamba with a gesture of dismissal. The latter however remained on the threshold. "Your Highness," he said, "the bookseller Andreoni craves the privilege of an audience." "Andreoni? At this hour?"
Alfieri's melancholy and passionate qualities, fostered in solitude, and aggravated by a tyranny he could not bear, led him irresistibly to tragic composition. Though a noble, his nobility only added to his pride, and insensibly his intellect had been imbued with the democratic sentiments which were destined to shake Europe in his lifetime.
The eyes of the Italian reformers were fixed with passionate eagerness on the course of events in England and France. The conclusion of peace between England and America, recently celebrated in Alfieri's fifth Ode, seemed to the most sceptical convincing proof that the rights of man were destined to a speedy triumph throughout the civilised world.
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