Charles Edward did what he had done once before in his life: he applied to the Government to put him again in possession of the woman whom he had victimised; but as the French Government had refused to recognise his claims over his fugitive mistress, so the Government of the Grand Duke of Tuscany now refused to give him back his fugitive wife. The Countess of Albany had naturally taken no clothes with her in her flight; and she presently sent a maid to the palace in Via San Sebastiano to fetch such things as she might require. But Charles Edward would not permit a single one of her effects to be touched; if she wanted her clothes and trinkets, she might come and fetch them herself. However, after a few days, a message came from the Pope, ordering the Pretender to supply his wife with whatever she might require; a threat to suspend the pension was probably expressed or implied, for Charles Edward immediately obeyed.
Meanwhile, the Countess of Albany was anxiously awaiting at the convent of the Bianchette a decision from her brother-in-law, to whom she had written immediately after her flight. Those first days must have been painfully unquiet. What if the Tuscan Court should listen to the Count of Albany's entreaties? What if Cardinal York should take part with his brother? Return to the house of her husband would be death or worse than death. Cardinal York answered immediately: a long, kind, rather weak-minded letter, the ideal letter of a well-intentioned, rather silly priest, in curious Anglo-Roman French. He informed her that for some time past he had expected to hear of her flight from her husband; he protested that he had had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and begged her to believe that it had been out of his power to protect her. He had informed the Pope of the whole affair, and with His Holiness' approval had prepared for his sister-in-law a temporary asylum in the Ursuline convent in Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon as possible. In January 1781 the Countess of Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan, who appears to have formed part of her household, and two maids, started for Rome; but such had been the threats of Charles Edward, and his ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri and Gahagan, armed and dressed as servants, accompanied the carriage a considerable part of its way. The Pretender, we must remember, had offered a thousand sequins to anyone who would kill Alfieri; and even in that humdrum late eighteenth century a man of position might easily hire a couple of ruffians to waylay a carriage and kidnap a woman.
The Countess of Albany was installed in the Ursuline convent in Via Vittoria, a street near the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family memory hung about the place: it had been the asylum of Clementina Sobieska when she had fled from the elder Pretender as Louise d'Albany had fled from the younger. But the wife of Charles Edward was in a very different mood from the wife of James III.; and it is probable that, despite the many charms of the convent, and the excellent manners of its aristocratic inmates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great store, the Countess, with her heart full of the thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined to give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, which he apparently expected, of developing a sudden vocation for Heaven.
She had left Florence at the end of the year; in the spring she saw Alfieri again. The quiet work which had seemed so natural and easy while he was sure of seeing his lady every day, had become quite impossible to him. He felt that he ought to remain in Florence, that he ought not to follow her to Rome. But Florence had become insufferable to him; and he determined to remove to Naples, because to get to Naples it was necessary to pass through Rome. The melancholy barren approach to the Eternal City, which, three years before, had inspired Alfieri with nothing but melancholy and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly paradise; and Rome, which he hated, as the most delightful of places. He hurried to the Ursuline convent, and was admitted to speak to the Countess of Albany. "I saw her," he wrote many years later, "but (O God! my heart seems to break at the mere recollection) I saw her a prisoner behind a grating; less tormented than in Florence, but yet not less unhappy. We were separated, and who could tell how long our separation might not last? But, while crying, I tried to console myself with the thought that she might at least recover her health, that she would breathe freely, and sleep peacefully, no longer trembling at every moment before the indivisible shadow of her drunken husband; that she might, in short, live."
CHAPTER X.
ANTIGONE.
About three months after the Countess of Albany's flight from her husband, the Pope granted her permission to leave the Ursuline convent; and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, offered her hospitality in his magnificent palace of the Cancelleria. Alfieri was at Naples when he received this news, riding gloomily along the sea-shore, weeping profusely (for we must remember that to an Italian, especially of the eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a would-be ancient Roman shedding love-sick tears), unable to give his attention to work, living, as he expresses it, on the coming in and going out of the post. "I wished to return to Rome," he writes, "and at the same time I felt very keenly that I ought not to do it yet. The struggles between love and duty which take place in an honourable and tender heart, are the most terrible and mortal pain that a man can suffer. I delayed throughout April, and I determined to drag on through May; but on the 12th May I found myself, I scarcely know how, back in Rome."
Alfieri found the Countess of Albany established in the palace of the Cancelleria, the mistress of the establishment, for her brother-in-law was living in his episcopal town of Frascati. They were free to see each other as much as they chose, to love each other as much as they would; for the Cardinal and the priestly circles seem to have gone completely to sleep in the presence of this critical situation; and the habits of Roman society, which were even a shade worse than those of Florence, were not such as to give umbrage to the lovers. But those years during which they had loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles Edward, had apparently fostered a love which was accustomed and satisfied with being only a more passionate kind of friendship; the indomitable power of resistance to himself, the passion for realising in himself some heroic attitude which he admired, and the almost furious desire to reverse completely his former habits of life, kept Alfieri up to the point of a platonic connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, cold, passive, easily moulded by a more vehement nature, loved Alfieri much more with the head than with the heart, and loved in him just that which made him prefer that they should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the Countess of Albany had much more mind than personality, and that she was therefore mere wax in the hands of a man who had become so exclusively and violently intellectual as Alfieri: she had seen too much of the coarse realities of life, of the brutal giving way to sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all contemporaries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the same footing as in Florence.
And these months in Rome seem to have been the happiest months of Alfieri's life, the happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess of Albany. Alfieri hired the villa Strozzi, on the Esquiline, a small palace built by one of Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, including the use of furniture, stables, and garden, he paid the now incredibly small sum of ten scudi a month, about two pounds of our money. Permitting himself only two coats, the black one for the evening, and the famous blue one for ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to one dish of meat and vegetables, without wine or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make the comparatively small pension paid to him by his sister, go almost as far as had the fine fortune of which he had despoiled himself. He spent lavishly on books, and more lavishly on horses, on horses which, according to his own account, were his third passion, coming only after his love for Mme. d'Albany, and sometimes usurping the place of his love of literary glory.