y, had returned to her as years went on, and as passion
cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage would probably involve a
great risk of a diminution of income, since the Pope and the Court of
France might easily refuse to support Charles Edward's widow once she
had ceased to be a Stuart; and it must inevitably mean an end to a
quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow of the Pretender could lay
claim, but the wife of a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the
various meannesses, committed quite unconsciously by Mme. d'Albany, and
apparently not censured by the people of the eighteenth century, that,
so far from being anxious to shake off all vestiges of her hateful
married life, the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed determined
to enjoy, so to speak, her money's worth; to get whatever advantages had
been bought at the price of her marriage with Charles Edward. Mme.
d'Albany enjoyed being the widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather
easy-going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless assumed towards
strangers a certain queenly haughtiness which frequently gave offence;
and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her house in 1788,
found, to his surprise, that all the plate belonging to Mme. d'Albany
was engraved with the royal arms of England; that guests were conducted
through an ante-room in which stood a royal throne also emblazoned with
the arms of England; nay, that the servants had orders to address the
lady of the house by the title of a queen: a state of things whose
institution by a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and who made
no secret of her hatred of Charles Edward, whose toleration by a man
who scorned the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those strange
anomalies which teach us the enormous advance in self-respect and
self-consistency due to social and democratic progress, an improvement
which separates in feeling even the most mediocre and worldly men and
women of to-day from the most high-minded and eccentric men and women of
a century ago. To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Countess of Albany,
to risk part of her fortune and to relinquish her royal state, as well
as to sink into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in both parties
concerned, a variety of reasons, contemptible in our eyes, excellent in
their own, against legitimating their connection. And, on the other hand,
no corresponding inducement. Why should they get married? The Countess,
going in state every Sunday to a