COLMAR.
"On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of the
_Two Keys_, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of
joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his
lyrics.
The hour of liberty and happiness had come for Alfieri and Mme.
d'Albany; sooner by far than they expected, and sooner, we may think,
than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, however, not in the face
of the law. Charles Edward was still alive; but, pressed by King
Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to wheedle out of some most
unnecessary money, he had consented to a legal separation from his
fugitive wife; as a result of which the Countess of Albany, renouncing
all money supplies from the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a
share of the two pensions, French and Papal, granted to her husband,
was permitted to spend a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased,
provided she returned for awhile to show herself in the Papal States.
On hearing the unexpected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the Apennines
of Modena with fourteen horses that he had been to buy in England, was
seized with a violent temptation to send his caravan along the main
road, and gallop by cross-paths to meet the Countess, who was crossing
the Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome to the baths of Baden in
Switzerland. The thought of her honour and safety restrained him, and he
pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on a previous occasion, his stern
resolution not to seek his lady soon gave way; and two months later
followed that meeting at the _Two Keys_ at Colmar on the Rhine.
For the first time in those seven long years of platonic passion,
Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany found themselves settled beneath the same
roof. To the mind of this Italian man, and this half-French, half-German
woman of the eighteenth century, for whom marriage was one of the
sacraments of a religion in which they wholly disbelieved, and one
of the institutions of a society which alleviated it with universal
adultery; to Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation from Charles
Edward Stuart was equivalent to a divorce. The Pretender could no longer
prescribe any line of conduct to his wife; she was free to live where
and with whom she chose; and if she were not free to marry, the idea,
the wish for marriage, probably never crossed the brains of these two
platonic lovers of seven years' standing. Marriage was a social contract
between people who wished to obtain each other's money and titles and
lands--who wished to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all his
property to his sister, and the Countess, who lived on a pension, had no
money or titles or lands to throw together; and they certainly neither
of them, the man living entirely for his work, the woman living entirely
for the man, had the smallest desire to have children, heirs to nothing
at all. What injury could their living together now do to Charles Edward,
who had relinquished all his husband's rights? None, evidently. On the
other hand, what harm could their living together do to their own honour
or happiness, now that they had had seven years' experience that only
death could extinguish their affection? None, again evidently. And as to
harm to the institutions of society, what were those institutions, and
what was their value, that they should be respected? Such, could we
have questioned them, would have been the answers of Alfieri and the
Countess. That they were setting an example to others less pure in mind,
less exceptional in position; that they were making it more difficult
for marriage to be reorganised on a more rational plan, by showing men
and women a something that might do instead of rationally organised
marriage; that they were, in short, preventing the law from being
rectified, by taking the law into their own hands: such thoughts could
not enter into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth century,
people for whom the great Revolution, Romanticism, and the new views
of society which grew out of both, were still in the future. That a
punishment should await them, that as time went on and youthful passion
diminished, their lives should be barren and silent and cold for want of
all those things: children, legal bonds, social recognition, by which
their union should fall short of a real marriage; this they could never
anticipate.
For the moment, united in the "excessively clean and comfortable" little
château, rented by Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Colmar;
riding and driving about in the lovely Rhine country; the Countess deep
in her reading again, Alfieri deep once more in his writings; together,
above all, after so many months of separation: they seemed perfectly
happy. So happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must come to restore
the natural balance of things; and the misfortune came, in the sudden
news of the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as of guiltiness at
having half forgotten that thoughtful and gentle friend in the first
flush of their happiness, seems to have come over them.
"O God," wrote Alfieri to Gori's friend Bianchi at Siena, "I don't know
what I shall do. I always see him and speak to him, and every smallest
word and thought and gesture of his returns to my mind, and stabs my
heart. I do not feel very sorry for him: he cared little for life for
its own sake, and the life which he was forced to lead was too far below
his great soul, and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, and the
nobility of his noble scornfulness. The person dearest to me of any,
and immediately next to whom I loved Checco [Gori] most, knew and
appreciated him and is not to be consoled for such a loss. I told him
already last July, so many, many times, that he was not well, that he
was growing visibly thinner day by day. Oh! I ought never to have left
him in this state."
A letter, this one on Gori's death, which may induce us to forgive the
letters of Alfieri of which we have seen a reflection in those of Mme.
d'Albany: the passionate grief for the lost friend making us feel that
there is something noble in the possibility of even the morbid grief at
the lost mistress. More touching still, bringing home what each of us,
alas! must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one who is not
our kith and kin, whom the thoughts of our nearest and dearest, of our
work, of all those things which the world recognises as ours in a sense
in which the poor beloved dead was not, does not permit us to mourn in
such a way as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for whom, half
suppressed, comes but the more pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the
present and future, all where he or she is not, a blank; more touching
than any letter in which Alfieri gives free vent to his grief for poor
Gori, is that note which he wrote upon the manuscript of his poem on
Duke Alexander's murder, after the annotation saying that this work was
resumed at Siena, the 17th July 1784--"O God! and the friend of my heart
was still living then"; the words which a man speaks, or writes only for
himself, feeling that no one, not those even who are the very flesh and
blood of his heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that terrible
pang at suddenly seeing the past so close within his reach, so
hopelessly beyond his grasp.
The death of Gori seemed the only circumstance which diminished the
happiness of Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany; nay, it is not heartless,
surely, to say that, cruel as was that wound, there was doubtless a
quite special sad sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, in
the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling in affliction, the new
energy of affection which comes to the survivors whenever Death calls
out the warning, "Love each other while I still let you." But they had
still to pay, and pay in many instalments, the price of happiness
snatched before its legitimate time.
Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the Countess could not,
therefore, take him back with her to Italy, where, according to the
stipulations of the act of separation, she was bound to spend the
greater part of every year. Hence the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those
in the succeeding years, were merely so many interludes of happiness in
the dreary life of separation; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one
of his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the thought that every day
and every hour was bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. The day
came: Alfieri had to take leave of Mme. d'Albany; and, as he expresses
it, had to return to much worse gloom than before, being separated from
his lady without having the consolation of seeing Gori once more.
Mechanically he returned to Siena, to Siena which it was impossible
to conceive without his friend Checco; but when he realised the empty
house, the empty town, he found the place he had so loved insupportable,
and went to spend his long solitary winter writing, reading, translating,
breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass the weary time, at
Pisa. In April 1785 Mme. d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna,
where she had spent the winter, and to go to her sisters in France. In
September she and her lover met once more in the beloved country-house
on the Rhine. But again, in December, came another separation; Mme.
d'Albany went to Paris, and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar.
"Shall we then be again separated," he writes in a sonnet, "by cruel and
lying opinion, which blames us for errors which the whole world commits
every day? Unhappy that I am! The more I love thee with true and loyal
love, the more must I ever refuse myself that for which I am always
longing: thy sweet sight, beyond which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar
cannot understand this, and knows us but little, and does not see that
thy pure heart is the seat of virtue."
Strange words, and which, coming from a man cynical and truthful as
Alfieri, may make us pause and refuse to affirm that this strange love,
platonic for seven long years, ceased to be a mere passionate friendship
even when it resorted to the secrecy and deceptions of a mere common
intrigue; even when it openly braved, in the semblance of marriage, the
opinion of the world at large. During those many months of solitude in
the villa at Colmar, with no other company than that of his Sienese
servant or secretary and of the horses, whose news he carefully sent, in
letters and sonnets, to the Countess, Alfieri appears for the first time
to have got into a habit of excessive overwork, and to have had the
first serious attack of the gout; overwork and gout, the two things
which were to kill him. A six months' stay in Paris, where society, the
business of printing his works, and the great distance of his lodgings
from the house of Mme. d'Albany, diminished his intellectual work, kept
him up for the moment. But in the following summer of the year 1787,
shortly after he had returned to Colmar with the Countess, and had
welcomed as a guest Tommaso di Caluso, his greatest friend since Gori's
death, he suddenly broke down under a terrific attack of dysentery.
For many days, reduced to a skeleton, ice cold even under burning
applications, and just sufficiently alive to feel in his intensely proud
and masculine nature the cruel degradation of an illness which made him
an object of loathing to himself, Alfieri remained at death's door,
devotedly tended by his beloved and by his friend.
"It grieved me dreadfully to think that I should die, leaving my lady,
and my friend, and that fame scarcely rough hewn for which I had worked
and frenzied myself so terribly for more than ten years," writes
Alfieri; "for I felt very keenly that of all the writings which I should
leave behind me, not one was completed and finished as it should have
been had time been given me to complete and to perfect according to my
ideas. On the other hand, it was a great consolation to know that, if I
must die, I should die a free man, and between the two best beloved
persons that I had, and whose love and esteem I believed myself to
possess and to deserve."
Alfieri recovered. But with that illness ends, I think, the period of
his youth, and of his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought and
passionate austerity and independence of character which was to him
what artistic endowment is to other writers; and with that illness
begins a premature old age, mental and moral, decrepitude gradually
showing itself in a kind of ossification of the whole personality; the
decrepitude which corresponds, on the other side of a brief manhood of
comparative strength and health, to the morally inert and sickly years
of Alfieri's strange youth.