The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at Siena, and relates to the death of Mario Bianchi, who had long been her devoted cavaliere servente. "Your letter," writes Alfieri, "breaks my heart. I feel the complete horror of a situation which it gives me the shivers merely to think may be my situation one day or other; and oh! how much worse would it not be for me, living alone, isolated from everyone, closed up in myself. O God! I hope I may not be the survivor, and yet how can I wish that my better self (la parte migliore di me stesso) should endure a situation which I myself could never have the courage to endure? These are frightful things. I think about them very often, and sometimes I write some bad rhymes about them to ease my mind; but I never can get accustomed either to the thought of remaining alone, nor to that of leaving my lady." "Some opinions," he goes on—and this hankering after Christianity on the part of a man who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief seems to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the late Gino Capponi, that had Alfieri lived much longer he would have died telling his rosary,—"some opinions are more useful and give more satisfaction than others to a well-constituted heart. Thus, it does our affection much more good to believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is united to Candido (another dead friend) and to Gori, that they are talking and thinking about us, and that we shall meet them all some day, than to believe that they are all of them reduced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief as the first is repugnant to physics and to mathematical evidence, it is not, therefore, to be despised. The principal advantage and honour of mankind is that it can feel, and science teaches us how not to feel. Long live, therefore, ignorance and poetry, and let us accept the imaginary as the true. Man subsists upon love; love makes him a god: for I call God an intensely felt love, and I call dogs, or French, which comes to the same, the frozen philosophisers who are moved only by the fact that two and two make four."
Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive his beloved was fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he expected. The eccentric figure, the tall, gaunt man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red hair and flying scarlet cloak, driving the well-known phaeton, or sauntering moodily along the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, was soon to be seen no more. As the year 1803 wore on he felt himself hard pressed by the gout; he ate less and less, he took an enormous amount of foot exercise; he worked madly at his memoirs, his comedies, his translations, he felt almost constantly fatigued and depressed. On the 3rd October 1803, after his usual morning's work, he went out for a drive in his phaeton; but a strange and excessive cold, despite the still summer weather, forced him to alight and to try and warm himself by walking. Walking brought on violent internal pains, and he returned home with the fever on him. The next day he rose and dressed, but he was unable to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse; the next day after that he again tried to take a walk, but returned with frightful pains. He refused to go to bed except at night, and tore off the mustard plaisters which the doctors had placed on his feet, lest the blisters should prevent his walking; dying, he would still not be a sick man. The night of the 8th he was unable to sleep, and talked a great deal to the Countess, seated by his bedside, about his work, and repeated part of Hesiod in Greek to her. Accustomed for months to the idea of death, he does not seem to have guessed that it was near at hand. But the news that he was dying spread through Florence. A Piedmontese lady—strangely enough a niece of that Marchesa de Prié opposite to whose windows Alfieri had renewed the device of Ulysses and the sirens by being tied to a chair—hastened to a learned and eccentric priest, a Padre Canovai, entreating him to run and offer the dying poet the consolations of religion. Canovai, knowing that both Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were unbelievers, stoutly refused; but later on, seized with remorse, he hurried to the house on the Lung Arno. Admitted into the sick room, he came just in time to see Alfieri, who had got up during a momentary absence of Mme. d'Albany, rise from his arm-chair, lean against his bed, and, without agony or effort, unconscious "like a bird," says the Countess, give up the ghost. It was between nine and ten of the morning of the 9th October 1803. Vittorio Alfieri was in his fifty-fifth year.
The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he had, after Gori, was summoned from Turin to console the Countess and put all papers in order. Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books and MSS., and whatever small property he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany, leaving her to dispose of them entirely according to her good pleasure. Among these papers was found a short letter, undated, addressed "To the friend I have left behind, Tommaso di Caluso, at Turin," and which ran as follows:—
"As I may any day give way beneath the very serious malady which is consuming me, I have thought it wise to prepare these few lines in order that they may be given to you as a proof that you have always, to my last moment, been present to my mind and very dear to my heart. The person whom above everything in the world I have most respected and loved, may some day tell you all the circumstances of my illness. I supplicate and conjure you to do your best to see and console her, and to concert with her the various measures which I have begged her to carry out with regard to my writings.
"I will not give you more pain, at present, by saying any more. I have known in you one of the most rare men in every respect. I die loving and esteeming you, and valuing myself for your friendship if I have deserved it. Farewell, farewell."
CHAPTER XVIII.
FABRE.
"Happiness has disappeared out of the world for me," wrote Mme. d'Albany, in January 1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. "I take interest in nothing; the world might be completely upset without my noticing it. I read a little, and reading is the only thing which gives me any courage, a merely artificial courage; for when I return to my own thoughts and think of all that I have lost, I burst into tears and call Death to my assistance, but Death will not come. O God! what a misfortune to lose a person whom one adores and venerates at the same time. I think that if I still had Thérèse (Mme. Mocenni) it would be some consolation; but there is no consolation for me. I have the strength to hide my feelings before the world, for no one could conceive my misfortune who has not felt it. A twenty-six years' friendship with so perfect a being, and then to see him taken away from me at the very age when I required him most."
Alfieri a perfect being—a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany! One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere; long after all direct references to Alfieri have ceased in her correspondence (I am speaking principally of that with her intimates at Siena), there reigns throughout her letters a depression, an indifference to everything, which shows that the world had indeed become empty in her eyes. But though the grief was sincere, I greatly question whether the love was so. Alfieri had become, in his later years, the incarnation of dreary violence; he could not have been much to anyone's feelings; and Mme. d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in political news and town gossip, even with her most intimate correspondents, shows that Alfieri played but a very small part in her colourless life. So small a part, that one may say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. d'Albany had pretty well ceased to love him at all; for had she loved him, would she have been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in all her letters, while the man she loved was killing himself as certainly as if he were taking daily doses of a slow poison? Love is vigilant, love is full of fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so little vigilant, so little troubled by fears, that when this visibly dying man, this man who had prepared his epitaph, who had settled all his literary affairs, who had written the farewell letter to his friend, actually died, she would seem to have been thunder-stricken not merely by grief, but by amazement.