The Countess of Albany was not a selfish woman; she had, apparently without complaining, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an old woman before her time, in acquiescence to Alfieri's misanthropic and routinist self-engrossment; she had been satisfied, or thought herself satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration of a man who divided his time between his studies, his horses, and his intrigues with other women; but unselfish natures are often unselfish from their very thinness and coldness. Alfieri, heaven knows, had been selfish and self-engrossed; but, perhaps because he was selfish and self-engrossed, because he was always listening to his own ideas, and nursing his own feelings, Alfieri had been passionate and loving; and, as we have seen, while he seemed growing daily more fossilised, while he was at once engrossed with his own schemes of literary glory, and indifferently amusing himself by infidelities to his lady, he was then, even then, constantly haunted by the thought that, unless he himself were left behind in the terrors of widowhood, the Countess of Albany would have to suffer those pangs which he felt that he himself could never endure.
Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium of his own character, and he proved mistaken. Perhaps the most terrible ironical retribution which could have fallen upon his strange egomania, would have been, had such a thing been possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had been that terrible vision of Mme. d'Albany's life after his death; the revelation of how little difference, after the first great grief, his loss had made in her life; the revelation that, unnoticed, unconsciously, a successor had been prepared for him.
In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 1804, in which Mme. d'Albany expatiates to her friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her life, and her desire to end it, I find this unobtrusive little sentence: "Fabre desires his compliments to you. He has been a great resource to me in everything."
This sentence, I think, explains what to the enemies of Mme. d'Albany has been a delightful scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mystery; explains, reduces to mere very simple, conceivable, neither commendable nor shameful every-day prose, the fact that little by little the place left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another man. Italian writers, inheriting from Giordani, even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against a woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became once more what nature had made her, half French, with a great preference for French and French things—Italian writers, I say, have tried to turn the Fabre episode into something extremely disgraceful to Mme. d'Albany. Massimo d'Azeglio, partly out of hatred to the Countess, who was rather severe and acrimonious upon his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a desire to amuse his readers, has introduced into his autobiography an anecdote told him by Mme. de Prié (the niece of Alfieri's famous Turin mistress, and the lady who took it upon herself to send him a priest without consulting the Countess), to the effect that she had watched Fabre making eyes, kissing his fingers, and generally exchanging signals with Mme. d'Albany at a party where Alfieri was present. Let those who are amused by this piece of gossip believe it implicitly; it does not appear to me either amusing, or credible, or creditable to the man who retailed it. The Florentine society of the early years of this century was, if we may trust the keen observation of Stendhal, almost as naïvely and openly profligate as that of a South Sea Island village; and such a society, which could talk of the things and in the way which it did, which could permit certain poetical compositions (found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be publicly performed before the ladies and gentlemen celebrated therein, such a society naturally enjoyed and believed a story like that retailed by d'Azeglio. But surely we may put it behind us, we who are not Florentines of the year 1800, and who can actually conceive that a woman who had exchanged irreproachable submission to a drunken husband, for legally unsanctioned, but open and faithful attachment for a man like Alfieri, might at the age of fifty take a liking to a man of thirty-five without that liking requiring a disgusting explanation. The clean explanation seems so much simpler and more consonant. Fabre had become an intimate of the house during Alfieri's last years. He was French, he was a painter; two high recommendations to Mme. d'Albany. He was, if we may trust Paul Louis Courier, who made him the hero of a famous imaginary dialogue, clever with a peculiarly French sort of cleverness; he gave the Countess lessons in painting while Alfieri was poring over his work. The sudden death of Alfieri would bring Fabre into still closer relations with Mme. d'Albany, as a friend of the deceased, the brother of his physician, and the virtual fellow-countryman of the Countess; he would naturally be called upon to help in a hundred and one melancholy arrangements: he received visitors, answered letters, gave orders; he probably laid Alfieri in his coffin. When all the bustle incident upon death had subsided, Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most constant visitor. He, who had seen Alfieri at the very last, might be admitted when the door was closed to all others; he could help to sort the dead man's papers; he could, in his artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's monument, write to Canova, correspond with the dignitaries of Santa Croce, and so forth; come in contact with the Countess in those manifold pieces of business, in those long conversations, which seem, for a time, to keep the dead one still in the company of the living. There is nothing difficult to understand or shameful to relate in all this; and the friends of the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. de Souza, puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, misanthropic or scoffing people like Foscolo or Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to take umbrage, nothing to rage or laugh at, in this long intimacy between a woman over fifty and a man many years her junior; a man who lived at the other end of Florence, who (if I may trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to be attached to a woman well known to Mme. d'Albany; nor have we, I think, any right to be less charitable than they.
Louise d'Albany, careless, like most women of her day, of social institutions, and particularly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an impure woman; her whole life goes to prove this. But Louise d'Albany was an indifferent woman, and the extinction of all youthful passion and enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical world, made her daily more indifferent. She had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring one of the most unendurable of companions, loving and admiring him while he was still alive. But once the pressure of that strong personality removed, the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay instituted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers were elaborated and preserved as he had left them; his portraits were everywhere, and visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi, and the young Lamartine, were expected to inquire respectfully into the legend of the divinity, to ask to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might be expected to enquire into the legend, to ask to see the relics, of some great saint. Mme. d'Albany conscientiously devoted a portion of her time to seeing that Alfieri's works were properly published, and that Alfieri's tomb in Santa Croce was properly executed. She was, as I have said, the priestess, the divinely selected priestess, of the divinity. But at the same time Mme. d'Albany gradually settled down quite comfortably and happily without Alfieri. After the first great grief was over a sense of relief may have arisen, a sense that after all "'tis an ill wind that blows no good"; that if she had lost Alfieri she had gained a degree of liberty, of independence, that she had acquired a possibility of being herself with all her tastes, the very existence of which she had forgotten while living under the shadow of that strange and disagreeable great man. A negative sense of compensation, of pleasure in the foreign society to which she could now devote herself; of satisfaction in the miniature copy of her former Parisian salon which she could arrange in her Florentine house; of comfort in a gently bustling, unconcerned, cheerful old age; negative feelings which, perhaps as a result of their very repression, seem little by little to have turned to a positive feeling, a positive aversion for the past which she refused to regret, a positive dislike to the memory of the man whom she could no longer love. Horrible things to say; yet, I fear, true. A man such as Alfieri had permitted himself to become, admirable in many respects, but intolerant, hard, arrogant, selfish, self-engrossed, cannot really be loved; he may be endured as a result of long habit, he may inflict his personality without effort upon another; but in order that this be the case that other must be singularly apathetic, indifferent, malleable; and apathetic, indifferent, and malleable people, those who never resist the living individual, rarely remember the dead one. "She was," writes one of the most conscientious and respectful of men, the late Gino Capponi, "heavy in feature and form, and, if I may say so, her mind, like her body, was thick-set…. Since several years she had ceased to love Alfieri."
We cannot be indignant with her; she had never pretended to be what she was not. A highly intellectual, literary mind, a pure temperament, a passive, rather characterless character, taking the impress of its surroundings; passionate when Alfieri was passionate, depressed when Alfieri was depressed; cheerful when Alfieri's successors, Fabre and mankind and womankind in general, were cheerful. To be angry with such a woman would be ridiculous; but, little as we may feel attached to the memory of Alfieri, we cannot help saying to ourselves, "Thank Heaven he never understood what she was; thank Heaven he never foresaw what she would be!"
CHAPTER XIX.
SALON OF THE COUNTESS.
A shadowy being, nay, a shadow cast in the unmistakable shape of another, so long as Alfieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems to gain consistency and form, to become a substantive person, only after Alfieri's death. This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we have seen consorting almost exclusively with Italians, and spending the greater proportion of her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, Kant, Mme. de Genlis, Lessing, Milton, everything and anything; whose letters, exclusively (as far as I know them) to Italians of the middle classes, are full of fury against everything that is French; this woman, who has hitherto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, suddenly turns into an extremely sociable, chatty woman of the world, and a woman of the world who is, to all intents and purposes, French.