r this strange
Foscolo. Foscolo, in return, ill, sore of heart, solitary, gradually
got to love this gentle, sympathising Countess with a sort of filial
devotion, but a filial devotion into which there entered also somewhat
of the feeling of a wounded man towards his nurse, of the feeling of a
devout man towards his Madonna.

His letters are full of this feeling: "My friend and not the friend of
my good fortune," he writes to Mme. d'Albany in 1813, "I seem to have
left home, mother, friends, and almost the person dearest to my heart in
leaving Florence." Again, "I had in you, _mia Signora_, a friend and a
mother; a person, in short, such as no name can express, but such as
sufficed to console me in the miseries which are perhaps incurable
and interminable." Her letters are a real ray of sunlight in his
gloomy life, they are "so full of graciousness, and condescension and
benevolence and love. I venture to use this last word, because I feel
the sentiment which it expresses in myself towards you."

His health, his work, his money-matters, his love-affairs, were all
getting into a more and more lamentable condition, in which Mme.
d'Albany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the catastrophes of
1814 and 1815, which to Italy meant the commencement of a state of
degradation and misery much more intolerable and hopeless than any
previous one, came and drowned the various bitternesses of poor
Foscolo's life in a sea of bitterness. "Italy," wrote Foscolo to Mme.
d'Albany in 1814, "is a corpse; and a corpse which must not be touched
if the stench thereof is not to be made more horrible. And yet I see
certain crazy creatures fantasticating ways of bringing her to life; for
myself, I should wish her to be buried with myself, and overwhelmed by
the seas, or that some new Phaeton should precipitate upon her the
flaming heavens, so that the ashes should be scattered to the four
winds, and that the nations coming and to come should forget the infamy
of our times. Amen."

How strongly we feel in this outburst that, despite his despair, or
perhaps on account of it, Foscolo is himself one of those "crazy
creatures fantasticating ways of bringing Italy to life!" But the
Countess did not understand; she could conceive liking Bonaparte and
serving him, or liking the Restoration and serving it; but to love an
abstract Italy which did not yet exist, to hate equally all those who
deprived it of freedom, that was not within her comprehension.