rst serious attack of the gout; overwork and gout, the two things
which were to kill him. A six months' stay in Paris, where society, the
business of printing his works, and the great distance of his lodgings
from the house of Mme. d'Albany, diminished his intellectual work, kept
him up for the moment. But in the following summer of the year 1787,
shortly after he had returned to Colmar with the Countess, and had
welcomed as a guest Tommaso di Caluso, his greatest friend since Gori's
death, he suddenly broke down under a terrific attack of dysentery.
For many days, reduced to a skeleton, ice cold even under burning
applications, and just sufficiently alive to feel in his intensely proud
and masculine nature the cruel degradation of an illness which made him
an object of loathing to himself, Alfieri remained at death's door,
devotedly tended by his beloved and by his friend.

"It grieved me dreadfully to think that I should die, leaving my lady,
and my friend, and that fame scarcely rough hewn for which I had worked
and frenzied myself so terribly for more than ten years," writes
Alfieri; "for I felt very keenly that of all the writings which I should
leave behind me, not one was completed and finished as it should have
been had time been given me to complete and to perfect according to my
ideas. On the other hand, it was a great consolation to know that, if I
must die, I should die a free man, and between the two best beloved
persons that I had, and whose love and esteem I believed myself to
possess and to deserve."

Alfieri recovered. But with that illness ends, I think, the period of
his youth, and of his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought and
passionate austerity and independence of character which was to him
what artistic endowment is to other writers; and with that illness
begins a premature old age, mental and moral, decrepitude gradually
showing itself in a kind of ossification of the whole personality; the
decrepitude which corresponds, on the other side of a brief manhood of
comparative strength and health, to the morally inert and sickly years
of Alfieri's strange youth.

CHAPTER XIII.

RUE DE BOURGOYNE.

Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme simplicity of mind and
gentleness of spirit, was still living at Asti, cheerfully depriving
herself of every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as she devoted
her thoughts and her strength, to the services of the poor and of the
sick. Alfier