ubtless: they were echoes of his own
ravings; fuel for his own passion and vanity. It did not strike him, for
all the Greek and Roman heroes and heroines whom he had made to speak
with stoical, unflinching curtness, that there could be anything to move
shame, and compassion sickened by shame, in the fact that this should be
the expression of that high and pure love imitated from Dante and
Petrarch. What could he do? Give up Louise d'Albany, forget her; and bid
her, who lived only in him, whom a few years must free, forget him at
the price of breaking her heart? Certainly not. But he, the man, the man
free to move about, to work, with friends and occupations, should surely
have tried to teach resignation and patience to this poor lonely, sick,
hysterical woman, pointing out to her that if only they would wait, and
wait courageously, the moment of liberation and happiness must come.
Surely more difficult and humiliating for this lover to bear than the
sight of his lady degraded by the foul words and deeds of the drunken
Pretender, ought to have been the reading of such letters as these; the
sight of this once calm and dignified woman, of this Beatrice or Laura,
in her disconnected hysterical ravings. And for myself, the thought of
all that the Countess of Albany endured at the hands of Charles Edward
awakens less pity, though pity mixed with indignation at the fate which
humiliated her so deeply, and with shame for that deep humiliation, than
that sudden cry with which she stops in the midst of the light-headed
gabble about her miseries, and seems to start back ashamed as at the
sight of her passion and tear-defiled face in a mirror: "What a cruel
thing to expect one's happiness from the death of another! O God! how it
degrades one's soul!"

CHAPTER XII.

COLMAR.

"On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of the
_Two Keys_, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of
joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his
lyrics.

The hour of liberty and happiness had come for Alfieri and Mme.
d'Albany; sooner by far than they expected, and sooner, we may think,
than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, however, not in the face
of the law. Charles Edward was still alive; but, pressed by King
Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to wheedle out of some most
unnecessary money, he had consented to a legal separation from his
fugitive wife; as a result of which t