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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
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