e letters of the Alfieri period show Mme. d'Albany
to have been decidedly a good-natured and friendly woman. She has the
gift of getting people to trust her with their little annoyances and
grievances; she is constantly administering sympathy to Mme. Mocenni
for the tiresomeness and stupidity and harshness of her husband; she
keeps up a long correspondence, recommending books, correcting French
exercises, exhorting to study and to virtue (particularly to abstinence
from gambling), encouraging, helping Mme. Mocenni's boy Vittorio. She is
clearly a woman who enjoys hearing about other folk's concerns, enjoys
taking an interest in them, sympathising and, if possible, assisting
them.

These two qualities, a dose of cynical worldliness, sufficient to
prevent all squeamishness and that coldness and harshness which springs
from expecting people to be better than they are, and a dose of
kindliness, helpfulness, pleasure in knowing the affairs and feelings
and troubles of others; these two qualities are, I should think, the
essentials for a woman who would keep a salon in the old sense of the
word, who would be the centre of a large but decidedly select society,
the friend and correspondent of many and various people possessed of
more genius or more character than herself. Such a woman, thanks to her
easy-going knowledge of the world, and to her cordial curiosity and
helpfulness, is the friend of the most hostile people; and she is so
completely satisfied with, and interested in, the particular person with
whom she is talking or to whom she is writing, that that particular
person really believes himself or herself to be her chief friend, and
overlooks the scores of other chief friends, viewed with exactly the
same degree of interest, and treated with the same degree of cordiality
all round. The world is apt to like such women, as such women like it,
and to say of them that there must be an immense richness of character,
an extraordinary power of bringing out the best qualities of every
individual, in a woman who can drive such complicated teams of friends.
But is it not more probable that the secret of such success is poverty
of personality rather than richness; and that so many people receive a
share of friendship, of sympathy, of comprehension, because each
receives only very little; because the universal friend is too obtuse to
mind anybody's faults, and too obtuse, also, to mind anybody's great
virtues? In short, do not such