Mme. de Stael, enabled
Sismondi to make up for himself a sort of half-imaginary Countess of
Albany, to whom he poured out all his hopes and fears in innumerable
letters, for whom he longed as (alas!) we perhaps long only for the
phantoms of our own creating. That Mme. d'Albany was, after all, a
shallow woman; that she adored a mediocre M. Fabre (to whom Sismondi
invariably sent respectful messages) and half disliked the memory of
Alfieri; that she had called Mme. de Stael, Sismondi's goddess, about
whom he was for ever expatiating, "a mad woman who always wants to
inspire passions, and feels nothing, and makes her readers feel nothing"
(I am quoting from an unpublished letter at Siena); that she preferred
despotism on the whole to liberty, and had no particular belief or
interest in the heroic things of the present and future; that she was a
lover of gossip and scandal, sometimes (as Gino Capponi says) hard and
disagreeable; that she inspired some men, like d'Azeglio and Giordani,
with a positive repulsion as a vulgar-minded, spiteful, meddlesome old
thing; that there should be any other Mme. d'Albany than the one of his
noble fancy, than the woman whose image (fashioned by himself) he loved
to unite with the image of his own sweet, serious, shy, noble-minded
mother: all these things M. de Sismondi, who never guessed himself to be
otherwise than the most unpoetical and practical of men, never dreamed
of. So Sismondi went on writing to Mme. d'Albany, pouring out his grief
at Mme. de Stael's persecutions, his schemes of general improvement, all
the interests which filled his gentle, austere, and enthusiastic mind.
1814 came, and 1815. Sismondi had always hated, with the hatred of an
Italian mediaeval patriot, and the hatred of an eighteenth-century
philanthropist, the despotism, the bureaucratic levelling, the great
military slaughters of Napoleon; but when he saw Napoleon succeeded by
the inept and wicked governments of the Restoration, his heart seemed to
burst. A Swiss, scarcely acquainted with France, the passion for the
principles of liberty and good sense and progress which France had
represented, the passion for France itself, burst out in him with
generous ardour. This man suffered intensely at what to him, as to Byron
and to Shelley (we must recollect the introduction of the _Revolt of
Islam_), seemed the battle between progress and retrogression; and
suffered all the more as he was too pure and just-minded not to