Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, and to whose cut-and-dry nature it must have seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in a way overawed by this sudden emotion at the death of the man who had made both lovers so miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so narrow a temper, of all that may move our sympathy in that, to him, unintelligible grief, is, I think, one of the facts in his life which brings this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet repulsive character, most within reach of our affection; as that same grief, so unexpected by herself, at what was after all her final deliverance, is, together with the letter to Alfieri's mother, telling of her hatred to Charles Edward, and that exclamation in the hysterical love-letter at Siena—"O God! how this degrades the soul!"—one of the things which persuade us that this woman, whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly, and cynical, did really possess at bottom what her lover called "a most upright and sincere and incomparable soul."
"For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sienese friends on the occasion of Charles Edward's death, "nothing will be altered in our mode of life." In other words, the Countess of Albany and her lover, established publicly beneath the same roof in Paris, did not intend getting married. 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. We have seen how, more than once, love, however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated by Alfieri in himself and in his beloved as the one admirable thing in the world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-century baseness, had nevertheless withered in several of its branches, beaten by the wind of illegitimate passion, and dried up by the callousness of an immoral state of society: an exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, come before its season, and bleached and warped like a winter flower.
Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, simply, I think, because they did not care to get married; because marriage would entail reorganisation of a mode of life which had somehow organised itself; because it would give a common-place prose solution to what appeared a romantic and exceptional story; and finally because it might necessitate certain losses in the way of money, of comfort, and of rank.
One sees throughout all his autobiography and letters that Alfieri drew a sharp distinction between love and marriage; that he conceived marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, so to say, in his native place, goes in for having children, for being master in his own house, administering and increasing his estates, and generally devoting himself to the advancement of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essentially a routinist, respected and approved of marriage; and anything different would have struck his martinet, rule and compass, mind, as ridiculous and contemptible. In giving up his fortune to his sister, Alfieri had deliberately cut himself off from the possibility of such a marriage; moreover, putting aside the financial question, his notion of the liberty of a writer, who must be able to speak freely against any government, was incompatible with his notion of a father of a family, settled in dignity in his ancestral palace; and finally, I feel perfectly persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which saw things only in sharpest black and white contrasts, there existed a still more complete incompatibility between a woman like the Countess of Albany, and a wife such as he conceived a wife: to marry Mme. d'Albany would be to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domesticity, and at the same time to frightfully depart from the normal type of matrimony, which required that the man be absolute master, and not afflicted with any sort of sentimental respect for his better half.
According to Alfieri, there were two possibilities for the ideal man: a handsome and highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty years his junior, fresh from the convent, provided with the right number of heraldic quarterings, acres, diamonds, and domestic virtues, and who would bear him, in deep awe for his unapproachable superiority, five or six robust children; and a romantic connexion with a married woman or a widow, a woman all passion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he should go through a course of mutual soul improvement, who should be the sharer of all his higher life, and whom he would diligently deck out as a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of society.
The Countess of Albany did not fit into the first ideal; nor, for the matter of that, did Alfieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence, engrossed in literature, fit into it himself; and both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly unnecessary piece of humbug.
Such were, doubtless, Alfieri's views of the case. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had evidently no vocation as a housewife or a mother; marriage was full of disagreeable associations to her: a husband might beat one, and a lover might not. She, probably, also, guessed instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must always be a mere mistress, and a wife must always be a mere Griselda; she knew his cut-and-dry views, his frightful power of carrying theory into practice; she may have guessed that the most respectful of lovers would in his case make the most tyrannical of husbands. But while Alfieri doubtless brought Mme. d'Albany to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d'Albany probably brought home to him her own more practical ones. Alfieri, we must remember, had been a man of excessive social vanity; and much as he despised mankind, he certainly still liked to enjoy its admiring consideration. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had been brought up in the full worldliness of a canoness of Ste. Wandru, and had grown accustomed to a certain amount of state and of luxury; and these worldly tendencies, thrown into the background by the passion, the poetry which sprang up with the irresistible force of a pressed down spring during her married misery, had returned to her as years went on, and as passion cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage would probably involve a great risk of a diminution of income, since the Pope and the Court of France might easily refuse to support Charles Edward's widow once she had ceased to be a Stuart; and it must inevitably mean an end to a quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow of the Pretender could lay claim, but the wife of a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the various meannesses, committed quite unconsciously by Mme. d'Albany, and apparently not censured by the people of the eighteenth century, that, so far from being anxious to shake off all vestiges of her hateful married life, the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed determined to enjoy, so to speak, her money's worth; to get whatever advantages had been bought at the price of her marriage with Charles Edward. Mme. d'Albany enjoyed being the widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather easy-going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless assumed towards strangers a certain queenly haughtiness which frequently gave offence; and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her house in 1788, found, to his surprise, that all the plate belonging to Mme. d'Albany was engraved with the royal arms of England; that guests were conducted through an ante-room in which stood a royal throne also emblazoned with the arms of England; nay, that the servants had orders to address the lady of the house by the title of a queen: a state of things whose institution by a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and who made no secret of her hatred of Charles Edward, whose toleration by a man who scorned the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those strange anomalies which teach us the enormous advance in self-respect and self-consistency due to social and democratic progress, an improvement which separates in feeling even the most mediocre and worldly men and women of to-day from the most high-minded and eccentric men and women of a century ago. To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Countess of Albany, to risk part of her fortune and to relinquish her royal state, as well as to sink into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in both parties concerned, a variety of reasons, contemptible in our eyes, excellent in their own, against legitimating their connection. And, on the other hand, no corresponding inducement. Why should they get married? The Countess, going in state every Sunday to a convent where she was received with royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom should they marry, pray? To please religion? Why, they had none. To please society? Why, society, in this Paris of the year 1788, at least such aristocratic society as they cared to see, consisted entirely either of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each with a husband or wife somewhere in the background, or of even more interesting triangular arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover, all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, each with a lettre de cachet which should lock the other up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and, after very little hesitation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the well-born and amusing people in Paris did not insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting married, why should they go out of their way to do so? We good people of the nineteenth century should have liked them the better; but then, you see, it was the peculiarity of the men and women of the eighteenth century to be quite unable to conceive that the men and women of the nineteenth century would be in the least different from themselves.