FABRE.
"Happiness has disappeared out of the world for me," wrote Mme. d'Albany,
in January 1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. "I take
interest in nothing; the world might be completely upset without my
noticing it. I read a little, and reading is the only thing which gives
me any courage, a merely artificial courage; for when I return to my
own thoughts and think of all that I have lost, I burst into tears and
call Death to my assistance, but Death will not come. O God! what a
misfortune to lose a person whom one adores and venerates at the same
time. I think that if I still had Thérèse (Mme. Mocenni) it would
be some consolation; but there is no consolation for me. I have the
strength to hide my feelings before the world, for no one could conceive
my misfortune who has not felt it. A twenty-six years' friendship with
so perfect a being, and then to see him taken away from me at the very
age when I required him most."
Alfieri a perfect being--a being adored and venerated by Mme. d'Albany!
One cannot help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at the strange
magic by which Death metamorphoses those whom he has taken in the eyes
of the survivors; at the strange potions by means of which he makes love
spring up in the hearts where it has ceased to exist, saving us from
hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false to our nature,
enabling us to lie to ourselves instead of lying to others. The Countess
of Albany's grief was certainly most sincere; long after all direct
references to Alfieri have ceased in her correspondence (I am speaking
principally of that with her intimates at Siena), there reigns
throughout her letters a depression, an indifference to everything,
which shows that the world had indeed become empty in her eyes. But
though the grief was sincere, I greatly question whether the love was
so. Alfieri had become, in his later years, the incarnation of dreary
violence; he could not have been much to anyone's feelings; and Mme.
d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in political news and town
gossip, even with her most intimate correspondents, shows that Alfieri
played but a very small part in her colourless life. So small a part,
that one may say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. d'Albany had
pretty well ceased to love him at all; for had she loved him, would she
have been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in all her letters,
while the man she loved was killing himself as certainly as if he were
taking daily doses of a slow poison? Love is vigilant, love is full of
fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so little vigilant, so little troubled by
fears, that when this visibly dying man, this man who had prepared his
epitaph, who had settled all his literary affairs, who had written the
farewell letter to his friend, actually died, she would seem to have
been thunder-stricken not merely by grief, but by amazement.
The Countess of Albany was not a selfish woman; she had, apparently
without complaining, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an old
woman before her time, in acquiescence to Alfieri's misanthropic and
routinist self-engrossment; she had been satisfied, or thought herself
satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration of a man who divided his
time between his studies, his horses, and his intrigues with other
women; but unselfish natures are often unselfish from their very
thinness and coldness. Alfieri, heaven knows, had been selfish and
self-engrossed; but, perhaps because he was selfish and self-engrossed,
because he was always listening to his own ideas, and nursing his own
feelings, Alfieri had been passionate and loving; and, as we have seen,
while he seemed growing daily more fossilised, while he was at once
engrossed with his own schemes of literary glory, and indifferently
amusing himself by infidelities to his lady, he was then, even then,
constantly haunted by the thought that, unless he himself were left
behind in the terrors of widowhood, the Countess of Albany would have to
suffer those pangs which he felt that he himself could never endure.
Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium of his own character, and he
proved mistaken. Perhaps the most terrible ironical retribution which
could have fallen upon his strange egomania, would have been, had such a
thing been possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had been that
terrible vision of Mme. d'Albany's life after his death; the revelation
of how little difference, after the first great grief, his loss had made
in her life; the revelation that, unnoticed, unconsciously, a successor
had been prepared for him.
In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 1804, in which Mme. d'Albany
expatiates to her friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her life,
and her desire to end it, I find this unobtrusive little sentence:
"Fabre desires his compliments to you. He has been a great resource to
me in everything."
This sentence, I think, explains what to the enemies of Mme. d'Albany
has been a delightful scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mystery;
explains, reduces to mere very simple, conceivable, neither commendable
nor shameful every-day prose, the fact that little by little the place
left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another man. Italian writers,
inheriting from Giordani, even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against
a woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became once more what nature
had made her, half French, with a great preference for French and French
things--Italian writers, I say, have tried to turn the Fabre episode
into something extremely disgraceful to Mme. d'Albany. Massimo d'Azeglio,
partly out of hatred to the Countess, who was rather severe and
acrimonious upon his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a desire
to amuse his readers, has introduced into his autobiography an anecdote
told him by Mme. de Prié (the niece of Alfieri's famous Turin mistress,
and the lady who took it upon herself to send him a priest without
consulting the Countess), to the effect that she had watched Fabre
making eyes, kissing his fingers, and generally exchanging signals with
Mme. d'Albany at a party where Alfieri was present. Let those who are
amused by this piece of gossip believe it implicitly; it does not appear
to me either amusing, or credible, or creditable to the man who retailed
it. The Florentine society of the early years of this century was, if we
may trust the keen observation of Stendhal, almost as naïvely and
openly profligate as that of a South Sea Island village; and such a
society, which could talk of the things and in the way which it did,
which could permit certain poetical compositions (found highly
characteristic by Stendhal) to be publicly performed before the ladies
and gentlemen celebrated therein, such a society naturally enjoyed and
believed a story like that retailed by d'Azeglio. But surely we may put
it behind us, we who are not Florentines of the year 1800, and who can
actually conceive that a woman who had exchanged irreproachable
submission to a drunken husband, for legally unsanctioned, but open and
faithful attachment for a man like Alfieri, might at the age of fifty
take a liking to a man of thirty-five without that liking requiring a
disgusting explanation. The clean explanation seems so much simpler and
more consonant. Fabre had become an intimate of the house during
Alfieri's last years. He was French, he was a painter; two high
recommendations to Mme. d'Albany. He was, if we may trust Paul Louis
Courier, who made him the hero of a famous imaginary dialogue, clever
with a peculiarly French sort of cleverness; he gave the Countess
lessons in painting while Alfieri was poring over his work. The sudden
death of Alfieri would bring Fabre into still closer relations with Mme.
d'Albany, as a friend of the deceased, the brother of his physician, and
the virtual fellow-countryman of the Countess; he would naturally be
called upon to help in a hundred and one melancholy arrangements: he
received visitors, answered letters, gave orders; he probably laid
Alfieri in his coffin. When all the bustle incident upon death had
subsided, Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most constant visitor. He,
who had seen Alfieri at the very last, might be admitted when the door
was closed to all others; he could help to sort the dead man's papers;
he could, in his artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's
monument, write to Canova, correspond with the dignitaries of Santa
Croce, and so forth; come in contact with the Countess in those manifold
pieces of business, in those long conversations, which seem, for a time,
to keep the dead one still in the company of the living. There is
nothing difficult to understand or shameful to relate in all this; and
the friends of the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. de Souza,
puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, misanthropic or scoffing people like
Foscolo or Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to take umbrage,
nothing to rage or laugh at, in this long intimacy between a woman over
fifty and a man many years her junior; a man who lived at the other end
of Florence, who (if I may trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to
be attached to a woman well known to Mme. d'Albany; nor have we, I
think, any right to be less charitable than they.
Louise d'Albany, careless, like most women of her day, of social
institutions, and particularly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an
impure woman; her whole life goes to prove this. But Louise d'Albany was
an indifferent woman, and the extinction of all youthful passion and
enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical world, made her daily more
indifferent. She had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring one of
the most unendurable of companions, loving and admiring him while he was
still alive. But once the pressure of that strong personality removed,
the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little
from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay instituted,
a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess
presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The
house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he
had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers were
elaborated and preserved as he had left them; his portraits were
everywhere, and visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi, and the young
Lamartine, were expected to inquire respectfully into the legend of the
divinity, to ask to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might be
expected to enquire into the legend, to ask to see the relics, of some
great saint. Mme. d'Albany conscientiously devoted a portion of her time
to seeing that Alfieri's works were properly published, and that
Alfieri's tomb in Santa Croce was properly executed. She was, as I have
said, the priestess, the divinely selected priestess, of the divinity. But
at the same time Mme. d'Albany gradually settled down quite comfortably
and happily without Alfieri. After the first great grief was over a
sense of relief may have arisen, a sense that after all "'tis an ill
wind that blows no good"; that if she had lost Alfieri she had gained a
degree of liberty, of independence, that she had acquired a possibility
of being herself with all her tastes, the very existence of which she
had forgotten while living under the shadow of that strange and
disagreeable great man. A negative sense of compensation, of pleasure
in the foreign society to which she could now devote herself; of
satisfaction in the miniature copy of her former Parisian salon which
she could arrange in her Florentine house; of comfort in a gently
bustling, unconcerned, cheerful old age; negative feelings which,
perhaps as a result of their very repression, seem little by little to
have turned to a positive feeling, a positive aversion for the past
which she refused to regret, a positive dislike to the memory of the
man whom she could no longer love. Horrible things to say; yet, I
fear, true. A man such as Alfieri had permitted himself to become,
admirable in many respects, but intolerant, hard, arrogant, selfish,
self-engrossed, cannot really be loved; he may be endured as a result of
long habit, he may inflict his personality without effort upon another;
but in order that this be the case that other must be singularly
apathetic, indifferent, malleable; and apathetic, indifferent, and
malleable people, those who never resist the living individual, rarely
remember the dead one. "She was," writes one of the most conscientious
and respectful of men, the late Gino Capponi, "heavy in feature and
form, and, if I may say so, her mind, like her body, was thick-set....
Since several years she had ceased to love Alfieri."
We cannot be indignant with her; she had never pretended to be what she
was not. A highly intellectual, literary mind, a pure temperament, a
passive, rather characterless character, taking the impress of its
surroundings; passionate when Alfieri was passionate, depressed when
Alfieri was depressed; cheerful when Alfieri's successors, Fabre and
mankind and womankind in general, were cheerful. To be angry with such a
woman would be ridiculous; but, little as we may feel attached to the
memory of Alfieri, we cannot help saying to ourselves, "Thank Heaven he
never understood what she was; thank Heaven he never foresaw what she
would be!"