Writing to his mother towards the end of the year 1788, he mentions contemptuously the excitement and enthusiasm created by the approaching election of the States-General, and adds calmly: "But all these sort of things interest me very little; and I give my attention only to the correction of my proofs, a piece of work with which I am pretty well half through."
CHAPTER XV.
ENGLAND.
The contradictions in complex and self-contradictory characters like those of the Frenchmen of the early revolution can be easily explained, and, say what we will, must be easily pardoned: rich natures, creatures of impulse, intensely sensitive to external influences, we feel that it is to the very richness of nature, the warmth of impulse, the susceptibility to influence, that we owe not merely these men's virtues but their vices. But the contradictions of the self-righteous are an afflicting spectacle, over which we would fain draw the veil: there is no room in a narrow nature for any flagrant violation of its own ideals to be stuffed away unnoticed in a corner. And now we come to one of the strangest self-contradictions in the history of Mme. d'Albany, that is to say, of her lord and master Alfieri.
The revision and printing of Alfieri's works had been brought to an end; but neither he nor the Countess seems to have contemplated a return to Italy. The fact was that they were both of them retained by money matters. A proportion of Mme. d'Albany's income consisted in the pension which she received from the French Court; and the greater part of Alfieri's income consisted in certain moneys made over to him by his sister as the capital of his life pension, and which he had invested in French funds.
By the year 1791, the French Court and the French funds had got to be very shaky; and those who depended upon them did not dare go to any distance, lest on their return they should find nothing to claim, or no one to claim from. Hence the necessity for Alfieri and the Countess to remain in France, or, at least, hover about near it.
Now, whether the unsettled state of French affairs suggested to Mme. d'Albany, and through her to Alfieri, that it would be wise to see what sort of home, nay, perhaps, what sort of pecuniary assistance, might be found elsewhere, I cannot tell; but this much is certain, that on the 19th May, 1791, Horace Walpole wrote as follows to Miss Barry:—
"The Countess of Albany is not only in England, in London, but at this very moment, I believe, in the palace of St. James; not restored by as rapid a revolution as the French, but, as was observed at supper at Lady Mount Edgecumbe's, by that topsy-turvihood that characterises the present age. Within these two days the Pope has been burnt at Paris; Mme. du Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with the Lord Mayor of London; and the Pretender's widow is presented to the Queen of Great Britain."
That we should have to learn so striking an episode of the journey to England from the letters of a total stranger, who noticed it as a mere piece of gossip, while the memoirs of Alfieri, who accompanied Mme. d'Albany to England, are perfectly silent on the subject, is, to say the least of it, a suspicious circumstance.