can populace; going to
Florence (when they were spending the summer in a villa) for the
pleasure of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of witnessing (as Gino
Capponi records) the French prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines
being pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary mob. Besides such
demonstrations of an unamiable disposition as these, working with the
fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a holiday at that house where
the doggrel verses were written. The Countess of Albany, who had been so
horribly unhappy with her legitimate husband, must have been rather
dreary of soul with her world-authorised lover.

It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, desultory, neither happy nor
unhappy woman, rapidly growing old, watching the century draw to a close
amid chaos and misery,--it was at this moment that an eccentric English
prelate, Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the house on the
Lung Arno a friend of his, a French painter, a former pupil of David,
and who had won the _Prix de Rome_, by name Francois Xavier Fabre. M.
Fabre was French, but he was a royalist; he hated the Revolution; he had
settled in Italy; and, in consideration of this, he was tolerated by
Alfieri. To Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, the fact of Fabre being
French must secretly have been a great recommendation. French in
language, habits, mode of thought, French in heart, cut off, as it
seemed, for ever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped up among this
pedantic small fry of Florentines, listening all day to Alfieri's
tirades against the French nation, the French reforms, the French
philosophy, the French language, the French everything, the poor woman
must have heartily enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a real
Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Alfieri might say, was really
French; she must have enjoyed talking about his work, his pictures,
about everything and anything that was not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's
Hebrew, or Alfieri's tragedies, or comedies or satires. Alfieri was a
great genius and a great man; and she loved, or imagined she loved,
Alfieri like her very soul. But still--still, it was somehow a relief
when young Fabre, with his regular south-of-France face, his rather
mocking and cynical French expression, his easy French talk, came to
give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was pacing up and down
translating Homer and Pindar with the help of a lexicon.

CHAPTER XVII.

CASA GIANFI