The Countess of Albany

by Vernon Lee

COLMAR.

"On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of the Two Keys, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his lyrics.

The hour of liberty and happiness had come for Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; sooner by far than they expected, and sooner, we may think, than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, however, not in the face of the law. Charles Edward was still alive; but, pressed by King Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to wheedle out of some most unnecessary money, he had consented to a legal separation from his fugitive wife; as a result of which the Countess of Albany, renouncing all money supplies from the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a share of the two pensions, French and Papal, granted to her husband, was permitted to spend a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased, provided she returned for awhile to show herself in the Papal States. On hearing the unexpected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the Apennines of Modena with fourteen horses that he had been to buy in England, was seized with a violent temptation to send his caravan along the main road, and gallop by cross-paths to meet the Countess, who was crossing the Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome to the baths of Baden in Switzerland. The thought of her honour and safety restrained him, and he pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on a previous occasion, his stern resolution not to seek his lady soon gave way; and two months later followed that meeting at the Two Keys at Colmar on the Rhine.

For the first time in those seven long years of platonic passion, Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany found themselves settled beneath the same roof. To the mind of this Italian man, and this half-French, half-German woman of the eighteenth century, for whom marriage was one of the sacraments of a religion in which they wholly disbelieved, and one of the institutions of a society which alleviated it with universal adultery; to Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation from Charles Edward Stuart was equivalent to a divorce. The Pretender could no longer prescribe any line of conduct to his wife; she was free to live where and with whom she chose; and if she were not free to marry, the idea, the wish for marriage, probably never crossed the brains of these two platonic lovers of seven years' standing. Marriage was a social contract between people who wished to obtain each other's money and titles and lands—who wished to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all his property to his sister, and the Countess, who lived on a pension, had no money or titles or lands to throw together; and they certainly neither of them, the man living entirely for his work, the woman living entirely for the man, had the smallest desire to have children, heirs to nothing at all. What injury could their living together now do to Charles Edward, who had relinquished all his husband's rights? None, evidently. On the other hand, what harm could their living together do to their own honour or happiness, now that they had had seven years' experience that only death could extinguish their affection? None, again evidently. And as to harm to the institutions of society, what were those institutions, and what was their value, that they should be respected? Such, could we have questioned them, would have been the answers of Alfieri and the Countess. That they were setting an example to others less pure in mind, less exceptional in position; that they were making it more difficult for marriage to be reorganised on a more rational plan, by showing men and women a something that might do instead of rationally organised marriage; that they were, in short, preventing the law from being rectified, by taking the law into their own hands: such thoughts could not enter into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth century, people for whom the great Revolution, Romanticism, and the new views of society which grew out of both, were still in the future. That a punishment should await them, that as time went on and youthful passion diminished, their lives should be barren and silent and cold for want of all those things: children, legal bonds, social recognition, by which their union should fall short of a real marriage; this they could never anticipate.

For the moment, united in the "excessively clean and comfortable" little château, rented by Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Colmar; riding and driving about in the lovely Rhine country; the Countess deep in her reading again, Alfieri deep once more in his writings; together, above all, after so many months of separation: they seemed perfectly happy. So happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must come to restore the natural balance of things; and the misfortune came, in the sudden news of the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as of guiltiness at having half forgotten that thoughtful and gentle friend in the first flush of their happiness, seems to have come over them.

"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. I do not feel very sorry for him: he cared little for life for its own sake, and the life which he was forced to lead was too far below his great soul, and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, and the nobility of his noble scornfulness. The person dearest to me of any, and immediately next to whom I loved Checco [Gori] most, knew and appreciated him and is not to be consoled for such a loss. I told him already last July, so many, many times, that he was not well, that he was growing visibly thinner day by day. Oh! 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. More touching still, bringing home what each of us, alas! must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one who is not our kith and kin, whom the thoughts of our nearest and dearest, of our work, of all those things which the world recognises as ours in a sense in which the poor beloved dead was not, does not permit us to mourn in such a way as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for whom, half suppressed, comes but the more pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the present and future, all where he or she is not, a blank; more touching than any letter in which Alfieri gives free vent to his grief for poor Gori, is that note which he wrote upon the manuscript of his poem on Duke Alexander's murder, after the annotation saying that this work was resumed at Siena, the 17th July 1784—"O God! and the friend of my heart was still living then"; the words which a man speaks, or writes only for himself, feeling that no one, not those even who are the very flesh and blood of his heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that terrible pang at suddenly seeing the past so close within his reach, so hopelessly beyond his grasp.

The death of Gori seemed the only circumstance which diminished the happiness of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; nay, it is not heartless, surely, to say that, cruel as was that wound, there was doubtless a quite special sad sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, in the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling in affliction, the new energy of affection which comes to the survivors whenever Death calls out the warning, "Love each other while I still let you." But they had still to pay, and pay in many instalments, the price of happiness snatched before its legitimate time.

Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the Countess could not, therefore, take him back with her to Italy, where, according to the stipulations of the act of separation, she was bound to spend the greater part of every year. Hence the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those in the succeeding years, were merely so many interludes of happiness in the dreary life of separation; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one of his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the thought that every day and every hour was bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. The day came: Alfieri had to take leave of Mme. d'Albany; and, as he expresses it, had to return to much worse gloom than before, being separated from his lady without having the consolation of seeing Gori once more. Mechanically he returned to Siena, to Siena which it was impossible to conceive without his friend Checco; but when he realised the empty house, the empty town, he found the place he had so loved insupportable, and went to spend his long solitary winter writing, reading, translating, breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass the weary time, at Pisa. In April 1785 Mme. d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna, where she had spent the winter, and to go to her sisters in France. In September she and her lover met once more in the beloved country-house on the Rhine. But again, in December, came another separation; Mme. d'Albany went to Paris, and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar.

"Shall we then be again separated," he writes in a sonnet, "by cruel and lying opinion, which blames us for errors which the whole world commits every day? Unhappy that I am! The more I love thee with true and loyal love, the more must I ever refuse myself that for which I am always longing: thy sweet sight, beyond which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar cannot understand this, and knows us but little, and does not see that thy pure heart is the seat of virtue."