sted that he had had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and begged
her to believe that it had been out of his power to protect her. He had
informed the Pope of the whole affair, and with His Holiness' approval
had prepared for his sister-in-law a temporary asylum in the Ursuline
convent in Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon as possible.
In January 1781 the Countess of Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan,
who appears to have formed part of her household, and two maids, started
for Rome; but such had been the threats of Charles Edward, and his
ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri and Gahagan, armed and
dressed as servants, accompanied the carriage a considerable part of its
way. The Pretender, we must remember, had offered a thousand sequins to
anyone who would kill Alfieri; and even in that humdrum late eighteenth
century a man of position might easily hire a couple of ruffians to
waylay a carriage and kidnap a woman.

The Countess of Albany was installed in the Ursuline convent in Via
Vittoria, a street near the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family memory
hung about the place: it had been the asylum of Clementina Sobieska when
she had fled from the elder Pretender as Louise d'Albany had fled from
the younger. But the wife of Charles Edward was in a very different mood
from the wife of James III.; and it is probable that, despite the many
charms of the convent, and the excellent manners of its aristocratic
inmates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great store, the Countess,
with her heart full of the thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined
to give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, which he apparently
expected, of developing a sudden vocation for Heaven.

She had left Florence at the end of the year; in the spring she saw
Alfieri again. The quiet work which had seemed so natural and easy while
he was sure of seeing his lady every day, had become quite impossible to
him. He felt that he ought to remain in Florence, that he ought not to
follow her to Rome. But Florence had become insufferable to him; and
he determined to remove to Naples, because to get to Naples it was
necessary to pass through Rome. The melancholy barren approach to the
Eternal City, which, three years before, had inspired Alfieri with
nothing but melancholy and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly
paradise; and Rome, which he hated, as the most delightful of places.
He hurried to the Ursuline convent, and was admitt