ROME.
This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, as it were, of two
long-repressed, long solitary intellectual lives, austerely satisfied
with itself and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have sufficed for
the happiness of two such over-wrought natures as were at that moment
Vittorio Alfieri and Louise d'Albany.
But there could be no happiness for the wife of the Pretender, and no
happiness, therefore, for the man who saw her the daily victim of the
cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence of her drunken husband.
To an imaginative mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the
reality, striving for ever after some poetical or heroic model of love
and of life, trying to be at once a patriot out of Plutarch and a
lover after the fashion of the _Vita Nuova_, there are few trials more
exasperating than to have to see the real creature who for the moment
embodies one's ideal, the creature whom one carefully garlands with
flowers and hangs round with lamps, raised above all vulgar things in
the niche in one's imagination, elbowed by brutish reality, bespattered
with ignoble miseries. And this Alfieri had constantly to bear.
Perhaps the very knowledge of the actual suffering, of the unjust
recriminations, the cruel violence, the absolute fear of death, among
which Louise d'Albany spent her life, was not so difficult for her lover
to bear as to see her, the beautiful and high-minded lady of his heart,
seated in her opera box near the sofa where the red and tumid-faced
Pretender lay snoring, waking up, as Mann describes him, only to summon
his lacqueys to assist him in a fit of drunken sickness, or to be
carried, like a dead swine, with hanging bloated head and powerless
arms, down-stairs to his carriage; not so difficult to bear as to hear
her, his Beatrice, his Laura, made the continual victim of her bullying
husband's childish bad-temper, of his foul-mouthed abuse, to hear it and
have to sit by in silence, dependent upon the good graces of a besotted
ruffian against whom Alfieri's hands must have continually itched.
A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri's lyrics, written about this time,
and complaining of having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged through
ignoble filth, shows that Alfieri, like most poetical minds, resented
the vulgar and the disgusting much more than he would have resented what
one may call clean tragedy. But things got worse and worse, and the real
tragedy threatened. Charles Edward had outraged and beaten his mistress;
older and much more profoundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his
wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon the "cruel and indecent
behaviour" of which Mme. d'Albany was the victim. Ill-treatment and
terror were beginning to undermine her health, and there can be no
doubt, I think, that the symptoms of a nervous disorder, of which she
complained a couple of years later to Alfieri's bosom friend Gori, must
originally have been produced in this unusually robust young woman by
the horrible treatment to which she was at this time subjected. Mme.
d'Albany, who had astonished the world by her resignation, appears to
have fairly taken fright; she wrote to her brother-in-law Cardinal
York, entreating him to protect her from her husband. The weak-minded,
conscientious cardinal was not the man to take any bold step; he promised
his sister-in-law all possible assistance if she were driven to
extremities, but begged her to endure a little longer and save him the
pain of a scandal. So the Countess of Albany, long since abandoned by
her own kith and kin, abandoned also by her brother-in-law, alone in the
world between a husband who was daily becoming more and more of a wild
beast, and a lover who was fearful of giving any advice which might
compromise her reputation or separate them for ever, went on suffering.
But the moment came when she could suffer no more. At the beginning of
the winter of 1780, the celebration of St. Andrew's day by Charles
Edward and his drinking companions, was followed by a scene over which
Alfieri drops a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent bacchanal
which endangered the life of his lady. From the biographers of Charles
Edward we learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the middle of
the night with a torrent of insulting language which provoked her to
vehement recriminations; that he beat her, committed foul acts upon her,
and finished off with attempting to choke her in her bed, in which he
would probably have succeeded had the servants not been waked by the
Countess's screams and dragged Charles Edward away.[1]
Alfieri, partly from an honourable reluctance to see his lady made the
heroine of a public scandal, and partly, no doubt, from the more selfish
fear lest a separation from her husband might imply a separation also
from her lover, had long persisted in advising the Countess against any
extreme measure. Alfieri tells us that with the desire for freedom of
speech and writing at the bottom of his act of self-spoliation in his
sister's favour, there had mingled a sense also that by breaking all
connections with Piedmont, and liberating himself from all temptation of
marrying for the sake of his family, he was, in a manner, securing the
continuation of his relations with Mme. d'Albany. The Countess's flight
from her husband, they both well knew, would in all probability put an
end to these relations; the Catholic Church could grant no divorce, and
Charles Edward would probably refuse a separation; so that the honour,
nay, the life of the fugitive wife would be safe only in a convent,
whence Alfieri would be excluded together with Charles Edward. The
choice was a hard one to make; the choice between a life of peace and
safety, but separated from all that made life dear to her, and a life
consoled by the presence of Alfieri, but made wretched and absolutely
endangered by the violence of a drunken maniac. But after that frightful
night of St. Andrew no choice remained; to remain under the Pretender's
roof was equivalent for his wife either to a violent death in another
such fit of madness, or to a lingering death from sheer misery and daily
terror. The Countess of Albany must leave her husband.
To effectuate this was the work of Alfieri--of Alfieri, who, of all
men, was most interested to keep Mme. d'Albany in her husband's house;
of Alfieri, who, of all men, was the least fitted for any kind of
underhand practices. The actual plot for escape was the least part of
the business; the conspiracy would have utterly miscarried, and Mme.
d'Albany have been condemned to a life of much worse agony, had not
provision been made against the Pretender's certain efforts to get his
wife back. Mme. d'Albany may have remembered how her mother-in-law
Clementina Sobieska, although protected by the Pope, had been eventually
got out of the convent whither she had escaped, and had been restored
to her husband the Pretender James; she was probably aware, also,
how Charles Edward had stormed at the French Government to have Miss
Walkenshaw sent back to him from the convent at Meaux. No Government
could give a man back his mistress, but it was different with a wife;
and both Alfieri and the Countess must have known full well that
however lax the Grand Ducal Court might be on the subject of conjugal
infidelity, when quietly carried on under the domestic roof and
dignified by the name of _serventismo_, no court, no society, could do
otherwise than virtuously resent so great a turpitude as a wife publicly
running away by herself from her husband's house. It became necessary to
win over the sympathies of those in power, to secure their connivance,
or at all events their neutrality; and this task of talking, flattering,
wheedling, imploring, fell to Alfieri, whose sense of self-debasement
appears to have been mitigated only by the knowledge that he was working
for the good of a guiltless and miserable woman, of the woman whom he
loved more than the whole world; by the bitter knowledge that the
success of his efforts, the liberation of his beloved, meant also the
sacrifice of that intercourse which made the happiness of his life.
Alfieri succeeded; the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess were won over.
The actual flight alone remained to be accomplished.
[2]In the first days of December 1780 a certain Mme. Orlandini, a
half Irish lady connected with the Jacobite Ormonds, was invited to
breakfast at the palace in the Via San Sebastiano. She skilfully led
the conversation into a discussion on needle-work, and suggested that
the Countess of Albany should go and see the last embroidery produced
at the convent of Bianchette, a now long-suppressed establishment in
the adjoining Via del Mandorlo. The Countess of Albany ordered her
carriage for immediately after breakfast, and the two ladies drove off,
accompanied, of course, by Charles Edward, who never permitted his wife
to go out without him. Near the convent-gate they met a Mr. Gahagan, an
Irish Jacobite and the official _cavaliere servente_ of Mme. Orlandini,
who, hearing that they were going to pay a visit to the nuns, offered to
accompany them. Gahagan helped out the Countess and Mme. Orlandini, who
rapidly ran up the flight of steps leading to the convent door; he then
offered his arm to Charles Edward, whose legs were disabled by dropsy.
Leaning on Gahagan's arm, the Pretender was slowly making his way up the
steps when his companion, looking up, suddenly exclaimed that the two
ladies had already entered the convent and that the nuns had stupidly
and rudely shut the door in his and the Count of Albany's face. "They
will soon have to open," answered Charles Edward, and began to knock
violently. Mr. Gahagan doubtless knocked also. But no answer came. At
length the door opened, and there appeared behind a grating no less a
person than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously informed the Count that
she was unable to let him in, as his wife had sought an asylum in her
convent under the protection of Her Highness the Grand Duchess of
Tuscany.
Sir Horace Mann says that Alfieri, who is not mentioned in the very
circumstantial narrative of Dutens, was hanging about the convent,
in order to prevent the Pretender, who always carried pistols in his
pockets, from committing any violence. This seems extremely unlikely,
as the first use to which Charles Edward would naturally have put
his pistols would have been shooting Alfieri, for whose murder he
immediately offered a thousand sequins. At any rate, raging like a
maniac, the discomfited husband went back to his empty house.
It would be pretty and pathetic to insert in this part of my narrative a
page of half-condemnatory condolence with Charles Edward. But this I
find it perfectly impossible to do. Of course, if we call to mind
Falkirk and Skye, if we conjure up in our fancy the Prince Charlie who
still lived in the thoughts of Flora MacDonald, there is something very
frightful in this tragi-comic flight of the Countess of Albany: the
slamming of that convent door in his face is the worst injury, the worst
injustice, the worst ignominy reserved by fate for the last of the
unhappy Stuarts.
But of the Charles Edward of the Forty-five there remained so little in
this Count of Albany that we have no right to consider them any longer
as one individual, to condone the brutishness of the Count of Albany for
the sake of the chivalry of Prince Charles, to degrade our conception of
the young man by tacking on to it the just ignominy inflicted upon the
old man, the man who had inherited his name and position, but scarcely
his personality. Above all, we have no right to add to whatever reproaches
we may think fit to shower upon the Countess of Albany and on Alfieri,
the imaginary reproach that the husband whose rights they were violating
was the victor of Gladsmuir and Falkirk.
There must always be something which shocks us in the behaviour,
however otherwise innocent and decorous, of a woman who runs away
from her husband with the assistance of her lover; but this quality of
offensiveness is not, in such a case as the present one, a fault of
the woman: it is one of her undeserved misfortunes, as much as is the
bad treatment, the solitude, the temptation, to which she has been
subjected. The evil practice of the world, its folly and wickedness in
permitting that a girl like Louise of Stolberg should be married to a
man like Charles Edward, its injustice and cruelty in forbidding the
legal breaking of such an unrighteous contract; the evil practice of the
world which condemned the Countess of Albany to be for so much of her
life an unhappy woman, also condemned her to be in some of her actions a
woman deserving of blame. We shall see further on how, in the attempt to
work out their happiness in despite of the evil world in which they
lived, the Countess and Alfieri, infinitely intellectually and morally
superior to many of us whom circumstances permit to live blameless and
comfortable, were splashed with the mud of unrighteousness, which was
foreign to their nature, and remained spotted in the eyes of posterity.
Charles Edward did what he had done once before in his life: he applied
to the Government to put him again in possession of the woman whom he
had victimised; but as the French Government had refused to recognise
his claims over his fugitive mistress, so the Government of the Grand
Duke of Tuscany now refused to give him back his fugitive wife. The
Countess of Albany had naturally taken no clothes with her in her
flight; and she presently sent a maid to the palace in Via San Sebastiano
to fetch such things as she might require. But Charles Edward would not
permit a single one of her effects to be touched; if she wanted her
clothes and trinkets, she might come and fetch them herself. However,
after a few days, a message came from the Pope, ordering the Pretender
to supply his wife with whatever she might require; a threat to suspend
the pension was probably expressed or implied, for Charles Edward
immediately obeyed.
Meanwhile, the Countess of Albany was anxiously awaiting at the convent
of the Bianchette a decision from her brother-in-law, to whom she had
written immediately after her flight. Those first days must have been
painfully unquiet. What if the Tuscan Court should listen to the Count
of Albany's entreaties? What if Cardinal York should take part with his
brother? Return to the house of her husband would be death or worse
than death. Cardinal York answered immediately: a long, kind, rather
weak-minded letter, the ideal letter of a well-intentioned, rather
silly priest, in curious Anglo-Roman French. He informed her that for
some time past he had expected to hear of her flight from her husband;
he protested that he had had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and begged
her to believe that it had been out of his power to protect her. He had
informed the Pope of the whole affair, and with His Holiness' approval
had prepared for his sister-in-law a temporary asylum in the Ursuline
convent in Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon as possible.
In January 1781 the Countess of Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan,
who appears to have formed part of her household, and two maids, started
for Rome; but such had been the threats of Charles Edward, and his
ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri and Gahagan, armed and
dressed as servants, accompanied the carriage a considerable part of its
way. The Pretender, we must remember, had offered a thousand sequins to
anyone who would kill Alfieri; and even in that humdrum late eighteenth
century a man of position might easily hire a couple of ruffians to
waylay a carriage and kidnap a woman.
The Countess of Albany was installed in the Ursuline convent in Via
Vittoria, a street near the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family memory
hung about the place: it had been the asylum of Clementina Sobieska when
she had fled from the elder Pretender as Louise d'Albany had fled from
the younger. But the wife of Charles Edward was in a very different mood
from the wife of James III.; and it is probable that, despite the many
charms of the convent, and the excellent manners of its aristocratic
inmates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great store, the Countess,
with her heart full of the thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined
to give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, which he apparently
expected, of developing a sudden vocation for Heaven.
She had left Florence at the end of the year; in the spring she saw
Alfieri again. The quiet work which had seemed so natural and easy while
he was sure of seeing his lady every day, had become quite impossible to
him. He felt that he ought to remain in Florence, that he ought not to
follow her to Rome. But Florence had become insufferable to him; and
he determined to remove to Naples, because to get to Naples it was
necessary to pass through Rome. The melancholy barren approach to the
Eternal City, which, three years before, had inspired Alfieri with
nothing but melancholy and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly
paradise; and Rome, which he hated, as the most delightful of places.
He hurried to the Ursuline convent, and was admitted to speak to the
Countess of Albany. "I saw her," he wrote many years later, "but (O God!
my heart seems to break at the mere recollection) I saw her a prisoner
behind a grating; less tormented than in Florence, but yet not less
unhappy. We were separated, and who could tell how long our separation
might not last? But, while crying, I tried to console myself with the
thought that she might at least recover her health, that she would
breathe freely, and sleep peacefully, no longer trembling at every
moment before the indivisible shadow of her drunken husband; that she
might, in short, live."