not French! Tall, thin, pale, red-haired; that is
I; look at me. I have my passport! We have our passports all in order
from the proper authorities! We want to pass; and, by God! we will
pass!"

After half an hour of this altercation, with voices issuing from the
crowd, "Burn the carriages!" "Throw stones at them!" "They are running
away, they are noble and rich; take them to the Hotel de Ville to be
judged!" at last Alfieri's vociferations and gesticulations wearied even
the Paris mob, the crowd became quieter, the National Guards gave the
sign for departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the carriage where Mme.
d'Albany was sitting more dead than alive, shouted to the postillions to
gallop off.

At a country house near Mons, belonging to the Countess of Albany's
sister, the fugitives received the frightful news of the September
massacres; of those men and women driven, like beasts into an arena,
down the prison-stairs into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces
by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Maillard's amateur executioners,
on to the blood-soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, morally
divided on separate benches, the gentlemen here, the ladies there, sat
and looked on; of those men and women many had frequented the salon of
the Rue de Bourgoyne, had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks back,
with Alfieri and the Countess; amongst those men and women Alfieri and
the Countess might themselves easily have been, had the ruffians of the
Barriere Blanche dragged them back to their house, where an order to
arrest Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 20th August which
had originally been fixed for their departure. The thought of this
narrow escape turned the recollection of that scene at the Barriere
Blanche into a perfect nightmare, which focussed, so to speak, all the
frenzied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French Revolution, for the
"Tiger-Apes" of France.

By November Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were in Florence, safe; but
established in a miserable inn, without their furniture, their horses,
their books; all left in Paris; nay, almost without the necessary
clothes, and with very little money. From the dirty inn they migrated
into rather unseemly furnished lodgings, and finally, after some
debating about Siena and inquiring whether a house might not be had
there on the promenade of the Lizza, they settled down in the house, one
of a number formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi family,