RUE DE BOURGOYNE.
Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme simplicity of mind and
gentleness of spirit, was still living at Asti, cheerfully depriving
herself of every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as she devoted
her thoughts and her strength, to the services of the poor and of the
sick. Alfieri, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely seen her except
for a few hours at rare intervals, looked up to her less with the
affection of a son than with the satisfaction of an artist who sees
in the woman of whom he is born the peculiar type of features or
character which he prizes most in womankind; if he, for all his
conscious weaknesses, was more like his own heroes than any man of his
acquaintance, if Mme. d'Albany might be judiciously got up as the Laura
of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri was even more unmistakably
the mother who suited his ideas, the living model of his mother of
Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha. To the Countess Alfieri he had,
already in 1784, introduced the Countess of Albany, whom she invited to
stay with her on her passage through Asti as she returned from Colmar
into Italy. Mme. d'Albany found an excuse for not accepting in the bad
state of the roads, which rendered another route than that of Asti
preferable. Frank and indifferent to the world's opinion as was Mme.
d'Albany, her originally cut and dry intellectual temper hardened by
many years' misery, one can conceive that she should shrink from
accepting the hospitality of Alfieri's mother. Alfieri had doubtless
shown her his mother's letters, and from these letters, as reflected in
his answers, it is clear that the Countess of Albany, returning from
that first stay with her lover at Colmar, would have felt that she was
tacitly deceiving the noble old lady under whose roof she was staying.
For the Countess Alfieri, noble, and Italian, and woman of the
eighteenth century though she was, seems to have been one of those
persons into whose mind, high removed above all worldly concerns, no
experience of vice, of weakness, nay, of mere equivocal situations, can
enter. Whatever she may have seen or heard in her youth of the habits of
women of her century and station, of the virtual divorce which, after a
few years, reigned in aristocratic houses, of authorised lovers and
socially accepted infidelity, seems to have passed out of her memory
and left her mind as innocent as it may have been during her convent
school-days. She had taken great interest in this poor young woman,
maltreated by a drunken husband, and finally saved from his clutches by
the benevolence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and of a prince of the
church, about whom her son had written to her. That her son experienced
more than her own pity for so worthy an object, that he was at all
compromised in the fate of this virtuous, unhappy lady, never entered
her mind. So little could she understand the muddy things of this
world, that in 1789, when Alfieri was publicly living with Mme. d'Albany
at Colmar, the Countess Alfieri sent him, through his friend Caluso, the
suggestion of a match which she had greatly at heart, between him and a
young lady of Asti, "fifteen or sixteen years old, without any faults,
such as he would certainly like, cultivated, docile, and clever." It is
one of the things which grate upon one most in Alfieri's character,
and which show that however much he might be cast and have chiselled
himself in antique heroic form he was yet made of the same stuff as his
contemporaries, to find that he and his friend Caluso merely amused
themselves immensely at this proposal of marriage, and concocted a
dutiful letter to the old Countess explaining that matrimony was not at
present in his plans. What would Madame Alfieri have thought had she
known the truth! It is very sad to think how, in some cases, the very
noblest and purest, just because they are so completely noble and pure
and above all the base necessities of the world of passion, must be
unable to see, in the doings of others less fortunate than themselves,
those very elements of nobility and purity which redeem the baser
circumstances of their lives. That Mme. d'Albany had loved a man not her
husband, had fled from her husband and united her life to that of her
lover, would be a horror visible to the old Countess' eyes; the platonic
purity, the fidelity, the loyalty of this long and illegitimate love,
would have escaped her. No art is so cruelly contemptuous of whatever of
beauty and sweetness imperfect reality may contain, as the art which is
able to attain an ideal perfection; and thus it is also in matters of
appreciation of man by man and woman by woman. The Countess of Albany
was apparently more frank than Alfieri, because frank rather from
temperament than from pre-occupation about a given ideal of conduct.
That the mother of Alfieri should understand so little seems to have
worried her; and when the unsuspecting old lady asked her sympathisingly
for news of Charles Edward, she wrote back as follows: "As to my husband,
he is better; but I must confess to you, Madame, that I cannot take so
lively an interest in him as you suppose, for he made me, during nine
years, the most wretched woman that ever lived. If I do not hate him it
is a result of Christian charity, and because we are desired to pardon.
He drags out a miserable life, abandoned by all the world, without
relatives or friends, given over to his servants; but he has willed
it thus, since he has never been able to live with anyone. Forgive
me, Madame, for having entered into such details with you; but the
friendship which you have shown towards me obliges me to speak
sincerely." Mme. d'Albany, writing some time before to condole about the
death of Alfieri's half-brother, had tried to insinuate to the old
Countess what her son was for her, and what position she herself might
one day assume in the Alfieri family: "I hope that if circumstances
change, you will not see a family die out to which you are so attached,
and that you will receive the greatest consolation from M. le Comte
Alfieri." Words which could only mean that when the Pretender died Mme.
Alfieri might hope for a daughter-in-law in the writer, and for
grand-children through her. But Madame Alfieri did not understand;
imagining, perhaps, that Mme. d'Albany was alluding to some project of
marriage of her friend M. le Comte Alfieri; and the letter in which the
ill-treated wife's aversion to her husband was first openly revealed
appears to have acted as a thunder-clap, and to have, at least
momentarily, put an end to all correspondence.
The Countess of Albany was mistaken in supposing that Charles Edward
would die in the arms of mere servants. The very year after her own
separation from Alfieri, the Pretender had called to Florence the
natural daughter born to him by Miss Walkenshaw, and whom he had left,
apparently forgotten for twenty-five years, in the convent at Meaux,
where her mother had taken refuge from his brutalities, even as Louise
d'Albany had taken refuge from them in the convent of the Bianchette.
Partly from a paternal feeling born of the unexpected solitude in which
his wife's flight had left him; partly, doubtless, from a desire to
spite the Countess; he had solemnly, as King of England, legitimated
this daughter, and created her Duchess of Albany: he had made incredible
efforts, abandoning drink, going into the world and keeping open house,
to attach this young woman to him, and to treat her as well as he had
treated his wife ill.
Charlotte of Albany, a strong, lively, good-humoured, big creature,
devoted to gaiety, effectually reformed her father in his last years,
and turned him, from the brute he had been, to a tolerably well-behaved
old man. But we must not therefore conclude that Charlotte was a better
woman, or a woman more desirous of doing her duty, than Louise d'Albany.
Between the two there was an abyss: Charlotte had been sent for by a man
weary of solitude, smarting under the frightful punishment brought upon
his pride by the flight of his wife; ready to do anything in order not
to be alone and despised by the world; a man broken by illness and age,
weak, hysterical, incapable almost of his former excesses; and Charlotte
was a woman of thirty, she was a daughter, she was free to go where she
would to marry, and her father could buy her presence only at the price
of submission to her tastes and to her desires. How different had it not
been with Louise of Stolberg: united to this man twelve years before, a
mere child of nineteen, given over to him as his wife, his chattel, his
property, to torment and lock up as he might torment and lock up his dog
or his horse; losing all influence over him with every day which made
her less of a novelty and diminished the chance of an heir; and sickened
and alarmed more and more by the obstinate jealousy and drunkenness and
brutality of a man still in the vigour of his odious passions. Still,
the fact remains that while Louise d'Albany was secretly or openly
making light of all social institutions, and living as the mistress,
almost the wife, of Alfieri; this insignificant Charlotte, this
bastard of a Miss Walkenshaw, this woman who had probably never had an
enthusiasm, or an ideal, or a thought, had succeeded in reclaiming
whatever there remained of human in the degraded Charles Edward; had
succeeded in doing the world the service of laying out at least with
decency and decorum this living corpse which had once contained the soul
of a hero, so that posterity might look upon it without too much
contempt and loathing, nay, almost, seeing it so quiet and seemingly
peaceful, with compassion and reverence.
And when, at the beginning of February 1788, the Countess of Albany, in
the full enjoyment of her love for Alfieri, and of the pleasures of the
most brilliant Parisian society, received the news that on the last day
of January Charles Edward had passed away peacefully in the arms of the
Duchess Charlotte; and that the drink-soiled broken body, from which she
must so often have recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out,
with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden sceptre and pinchbeck crown,
in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached
Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had
written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere
Christian charity and the duty of forgiveness, felt herself smitten by
an unexpected grief.
Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, and to whose cut-and-dry
nature it must have seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in a
way overawed by this sudden emotion at the death of the man who had
made both lovers so miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so
narrow a temper, of all that may move our sympathy in that, to him,
unintelligible grief, is, I think, one of the facts in his life which
brings this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet repulsive
character, most within reach of our affection; as that same grief, so
unexpected by herself, at what was after all her final deliverance, is,
together with the letter to Alfieri's mother, telling of her hatred to
Charles Edward, and that exclamation in the hysterical love-letter at
Siena--"O God! how this degrades the soul!"--one of the things which
persuade us that this woman, whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly,
and cynical, did really possess at bottom what her lover called "a most
upright and sincere and incomparable soul."
"For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sienese friends on the occasion
of Charles Edward's death, "nothing will be altered in our mode of
life." In other words, the Countess of Albany and her lover, established
publicly beneath the same roof in Paris, did not intend getting married.
Whatever hopes may have filled Mme. d'Albany's heart when, years before,
she had hinted to Alfieri's mother that when certain circumstances
changed, the Alfieri family should be saved from extinction; whatever
ideas Alfieri had had in his mind when he prayed in a sonnet for the
happy day when he might call his love holy; whatever intention of
repairing the injury done to social institutions, may at one time have
mingled with the lovers' remorse and the lovers' temptations,--had now
been completely forgotten. We have seen how, more than once, love,
however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his
Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people
whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious
stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see
how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated by
Alfieri in himself and in his beloved as the one admirable thing in
the world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-century baseness, had
nevertheless withered in several of its branches, beaten by the wind
of illegitimate passion, and dried up by the callousness of an immoral
state of society: an exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, come
before its season, and bleached and warped like a winter flower.
Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, simply, I think, because
they did not care to get married; because marriage would entail
reorganisation of a mode of life which had somehow organised itself;
because it would give a common-place prose solution to what appeared a
romantic and exceptional story; and finally because it might necessitate
certain losses in the way of money, of comfort, and of rank.
One sees throughout all his autobiography and letters that Alfieri drew
a sharp distinction between love and marriage; that he conceived
marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, so to say, in his native
place, goes in for having children, for being master in his own house,
administering and increasing his estates, and generally devoting himself
to the advancement of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essentially a
routinist, respected and approved of marriage; and anything different
would have struck his martinet, rule and compass, mind, as ridiculous
and contemptible. In giving up his fortune to his sister, Alfieri had
deliberately cut himself off from the possibility of such a marriage;
moreover, putting aside the financial question, his notion of the
liberty of a writer, who must be able to speak freely against any
government, was incompatible with his notion of a father of a family,
settled in dignity in his ancestral palace; and finally, I feel
perfectly persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which saw things only
in sharpest black and white contrasts, there existed a still more
complete incompatibility between a woman like the Countess of Albany,
and a wife such as he conceived a wife: to marry Mme. d'Albany would be
to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domesticity, and at the same
time to frightfully depart from the normal type of matrimony, which
required that the man be absolute master, and not afflicted with any
sort of sentimental respect for his better half.
According to Alfieri, there were two possibilities for the ideal man: a
handsome and highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty years his
junior, fresh from the convent, provided with the right number of
heraldic quarterings, acres, diamonds, and domestic virtues, and who
would bear him, in deep awe for his unapproachable superiority, five or
six robust children; and a romantic connexion with a married woman or a
widow, a woman all passion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he
should go through a course of mutual soul improvement, who should be the
sharer of all his higher life, and whom he would diligently deck out as
a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of society.
The Countess of Albany did not fit into the first ideal; nor, for the
matter of that, did Alfieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence,
engrossed in literature, fit into it himself; and both, as it happened,
fitted in perfectly to the second ideal possibility. To get married with
a view to turning into domestic beings, would be a failure, a trouble,
an interruption, a desecration, and a bore; to get married merely to go
on as they were at present, would, in the eyes of Alfieri, have been a
profanation of the poetry of their situation, a perfectly unnecessary
piece of humbug.
Such were, doubtless, Alfieri's views of the case. Mme. d'Albany, on
the other hand, had evidently no vocation as a housewife or a mother;
marriage was full of disagreeable associations to her: a husband
might beat one, and a lover might not. She, probably, also, guessed
instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must always be a mere mistress,
and a wife must always be a mere Griselda; she knew his cut-and-dry
views, his frightful power of carrying theory into practice; she may
have guessed that the most respectful of lovers would in his case make
the most tyrannical of husbands. But while Alfieri doubtless brought
Mme. d'Albany to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d'Albany probably
brought home to him her own more practical ones. Alfieri, we must
remember, had been a man of excessive social vanity; and much as he
despised mankind, he certainly still liked to enjoy its admiring
consideration. Mme. d'Albany, on the other hand, had been brought up in
the full worldliness of a canoness of Ste. Wandru, and had grown
accustomed to a certain amount of state and of luxury; and these worldly
tendencies, thrown into the background by the passion, the poetry which
sprang up with the irresistible force of a pressed down spring during
her married misery, had returned to her as years went on, and as passion
cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage would probably involve a
great risk of a diminution of income, since the Pope and the Court of
France might easily refuse to support Charles Edward's widow once she
had ceased to be a Stuart; and it must inevitably mean an end to a
quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow of the Pretender could lay
claim, but the wife of a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the
various meannesses, committed quite unconsciously by Mme. d'Albany, and
apparently not censured by the people of the eighteenth century, that,
so far from being anxious to shake off all vestiges of her hateful
married life, the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed determined
to enjoy, so to speak, her money's worth; to get whatever advantages had
been bought at the price of her marriage with Charles Edward. Mme.
d'Albany enjoyed being the widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather
easy-going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless assumed towards
strangers a certain queenly haughtiness which frequently gave offence;
and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her house in 1788,
found, to his surprise, that all the plate belonging to Mme. d'Albany
was engraved with the royal arms of England; that guests were conducted
through an ante-room in which stood a royal throne also emblazoned with
the arms of England; nay, that the servants had orders to address the
lady of the house by the title of a queen: a state of things whose
institution by a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and who made
no secret of her hatred of Charles Edward, whose toleration by a man
who scorned the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those strange
anomalies which teach us the enormous advance in self-respect and
self-consistency due to social and democratic progress, an improvement
which separates in feeling even the most mediocre and worldly men and
women of to-day from the most high-minded and eccentric men and women of
a century ago. To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Countess of Albany,
to risk part of her fortune and to relinquish her royal state, as well
as to sink into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in both parties
concerned, a variety of reasons, contemptible in our eyes, excellent in
their own, against legitimating their connection. And, on the other hand,
no corresponding inducement. Why should they get married? The Countess,
going in state every Sunday to a convent where she was received with
royal honours, Alfieri writing to his mother that although he was not
regular at confession, he was yet provided with a most austere and
worthy spiritual director in case of need, neither of them had the
smallest belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. To please whom
should they marry, pray? To please religion? Why, they had none. To
please society? Why, society, in this Paris of the year 1788, at least
such aristocratic society as they cared to see, consisted entirely
either of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each with a husband or
wife somewhere in the background, or of even more interesting triangular
arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover,
all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of
disagreement, each with a _lettre de cachet_ which should lock the other
up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open
house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was
indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary
society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and,
after very little hesitation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri
hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the well-born and amusing people
in Paris did not insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting married,
why should they go out of their way to do so? We good people of the
nineteenth century should have liked them the better; but then, you see,
it was the peculiarity of the men and women of the eighteenth century to
be quite unable to conceive that the men and women of the nineteenth
century would be in the least different from themselves.