found
their way into the cupboards of curiosity shops, and been cut up into
quaint room decoration by aesthetically-minded foreigners; pity and awe
the more natural when, as in the case of Louise d'Albany, it is evident
to every man and woman, however heartless and stupid, that the creature
in question is a victim, and an innocent one. People were led, perhaps
to some extent by impertinent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have
some opinion to give upon that now legendary household of the besotten,
sleepy, nauseous old King of England and his terribly virtuous and
intellectual young Queen, to the palace in Via San Sebastiano; and men
and women of fashion led thither, as to one of the curious sights of
Florence, their country cousins and their distinguished visitors from
other parts. And thus, one day in the autumn of 1777, there was brought,
we know not by whom, half-curious and half-indifferent, to the _salon_
of the Countess of Albany a certain very tall, thin, pale young man of
twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, rather hard aquiline features,
choleric, flashing blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair; a
man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardinian uniform, but with
something strange, untamed, morose about his whole aspect which
contrasted singularly with the effete gracefulness and amiability of
young Florentine dandies. He had heard of the Countess of Albany's
eccentricities long before; she had doubtless heard of his.

One can imagine the curiosity with which the wild, moody young officer
fixed those bright, hard, steel, flashing blue eyes upon the beautiful
young woman of whom he had heard that she was, what no woman of
his acquaintance (and his acquaintance was but too large) had
been--intellectual and virtuous. One can imagine the curiosity, much
vaguer and more indifferent, with which the woefully cold and woefully
weary young woman met the scrutiny of those hard, flashing blue eyes,
and took the moral measure of this eccentric creature, come from Turin
to Florence with some ten or twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn
Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing tragedies. The common friend,
whose name has been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced to the
Countess of Albany Count Vittorio Alfieri.

CHAPTER VI.

ALFIERI.

The childhood and early youth of Vittorio Alfieri had been strangely
vacant, dreary, one might almost say intellectually and morally sordid;
and the strangest, th