their very
thinness and coldness. Alfieri, heaven knows, had been selfish and
self-engrossed; but, perhaps because he was selfish and self-engrossed,
because he was always listening to his own ideas, and nursing his own
feelings, Alfieri had been passionate and loving; and, as we have seen,
while he seemed growing daily more fossilised, while he was at once
engrossed with his own schemes of literary glory, and indifferently
amusing himself by infidelities to his lady, he was then, even then,
constantly haunted by the thought that, unless he himself were left
behind in the terrors of widowhood, the Countess of Albany would have to
suffer those pangs which he felt that he himself could never endure.

Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium of his own character, and he
proved mistaken. Perhaps the most terrible ironical retribution which
could have fallen upon his strange egomania, would have been, had such a
thing been possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had been that
terrible vision of Mme. d'Albany's life after his death; the revelation
of how little difference, after the first great grief, his loss had made
in her life; the revelation that, unnoticed, unconsciously, a successor
had been prepared for him.

In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 1804, in which Mme. d'Albany
expatiates to her friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her life,
and her desire to end it, I find this unobtrusive little sentence:
"Fabre desires his compliments to you. He has been a great resource to
me in everything."

This sentence, I think, explains what to the enemies of Mme. d'Albany
has been a delightful scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mystery;
explains, reduces to mere very simple, conceivable, neither commendable
nor shameful every-day prose, the fact that little by little the place
left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another man. Italian writers,
inheriting from Giordani, even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against
a woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became once more what nature
had made her, half French, with a great preference for French and French
things--Italian writers, I say, have tried to turn the Fabre episode
into something extremely disgraceful to Mme. d'Albany. Massimo d'Azeglio,
partly out of hatred to the Countess, who was rather severe and
acrimonious upon his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a desire
to amuse his readers, has introduced into his autobiography an anecdote
t