mense fund of intellectual energy, was living, not a normal life with
the normal distracting influences of an endurable husband, of children
and society, but a life of frightful mental and moral isolation, by the
side, or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, sordid, violent,
and jealous brute, from the reality of whose beastly excesses and
bestial fury, of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and blows, she
could take refuge only in the unreal world of books.

With such a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an intimate by the husband, who
doubtless thought one hare-brained poet more easy to manage than two or
three fashionable gallants--with such a woman as this, Alfieri might
talk over plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his essays on
liberty and literature, and all the things by which he intended to
redeem Italy and make himself immortal, without any fear of his listener
ever growing weary; from her he could receive that passionate sympathy
and encouragement without which life and work were impossible to him.
For we must bear in mind what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his
youth, his beauty, and that genius which was the indomitable energy and
independence of his nature, must have been in the eyes of the Countess
of Albany. She had been married at nineteen--she was now twenty-six: in
those seven years of suffering there had been ample time to obliterate
all traces of the frivolous, worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen
light-heartedly laughing at her old husband's jokes; there had been
plenty of time to produce in this excessively intellectual nature that
vague dissatisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is the price too
often paid for the consolation of mere abstract and literary interests.
The pressure of constant disgust and terror at her husband's doings, the
terrible mental and moral solitude of living by such a husband's side,
had probably wrought up Louise d'Albany to the very highest and almost
morbid refinement of nature--a refinement far surpassing the normal
condition of her character, even as the extra fining off of already
delicate features by illness will make them surpass by far their healthy
degree of beauty. In such a mental condition the sense of what her
husband was must have exasperated her imagination quite as much as his
actual loathsomeness must have repelled her feelings; the knowledge of
the frightful moral and intellectual fall of Charles Edward must have
been as bad as