convent where she was received with
royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not
regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and
worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the
smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom
should they marry, pray? To please religion? Why, they had none. To
please society? Why, society, in this Paris of the year 1788, at least
such aristocratic society as they cared to see, consisted entirely
either of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each with a husband or
wife somewhere in the background, or of even more interesting triangular
arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover,
all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of
disagreement, each with a _lettre de cachet_ which should lock the other
up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open
house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was
indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary
society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and,
after very little hesitation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri
hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the well-born and amusing people
in Paris did not insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting married,
why should they go out of their way to do so? We good people of the
nineteenth century should have liked them the better; but then, you see,
it was the peculiarity of the men and women of the eighteenth century to
be quite unable to conceive that the men and women of the nineteenth
century would be in the least different from themselves.

CHAPTER XIV

BEFORE THE STORM.

The well-born and amusing people of the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century did not stickle at the question
of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne,
attracted by the peculiar cosmopolitan charm, the very undeniable
talent for society, the extraordinary intellectual superiority of Mme.
d'Albany; attracted, also, by a certain easy-going and half-motherly
kindliness which seems, to all those who wanted sympathy, to have been
quite irresistible. It was the moment of the great fermentation, when
even trifling things and trifling people seemed to boil and seethe with
importance; when cold-hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness
and chivalry, selfish people