ng painter of only moderate gifts, whose handsome face,
plausible tongue, and sunny disposition soon made a captive of her
middle-aged heart. At the time when Fabre came thus into her life Madame
la Comtesse had passed her fiftieth birthday--youth and beauty had taken
wings; and passion (if ever she had any--for her relations with Alfieri
seem to have been quite platonic) had died down to its embers.

But a man's companionship and homage were always necessary to her, and
in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier. Her _salon_ now became more
popular even than in the days of her young wifehood. It drew to it all
the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship,
letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture
and with such rare gifts of conversation.

That she was now middle-aged, stout and dowdy--"like a cook with pretty
hands," as Stendhal said of her--mattered nothing to her admirers, many
of whom remembered her in the days of her lovely youth. She was, in
their eyes, as much a Queen as if she wore a crown; and, moreover, she
was a woman of magnetic charm and clever brain.

And thus, with her books and her _salon_ and her cavalier, she spent the
rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her
last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her
beloved Alfieri. In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway
between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers
sleep together their last sleep, beneath a beautiful monument fashioned
by Canova's hands--Louise, wife of the "Bonnie Prince" (as we still
choose to remember him) and Vittorio Alfieri, to whom, to quote his own
words, "she was beyond all things beloved."

CHAPTER III

THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS

Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for
convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the "playthings of an
hour"; and at least three of them have carried this contempt to the
altar itself.

Peter, the first, as we have seen, offered a crown to Martha Skovronski,
a Livonian scullery-maid, who succeeded him on the throne; the second
Catherine gave her hand as well as her heart to Patiomkin, the gigantic,
ill-favoured ex-sergeant of cavalry; and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter
and his kitchen-Queen, proved herself worthy of her parentage when she
made Alexis Razoum, a peasant's son, husband of the Empress of Russia.
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