SALON OF THE COUNTESS.
A shadowy being, nay, a shadow cast in the unmistakable shape of
another, so long as Alfieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems to
gain consistency and form, to become a substantive person, only after
Alfieri's death. This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we have seen
consorting almost exclusively with Italians, and spending the greater
proportion of her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, Kant,
Mme. de Genlis, Lessing, Milton, everything and anything; whose letters,
exclusively (as far as I know them) to Italians of the middle classes,
are full of fury against everything that is French; this woman, who has
hitherto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, suddenly turns into an
extremely sociable, chatty woman of the world, and a woman of the world
who is, to all intents and purposes, French.
To be the rallying point of a very cosmopolitan, literary, but by no
means unworldly society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. d'Albany's
mission; and reading the letters copied from the Montpellier Archives,
and published by M. Saint René Taillandier, one wonders how this friend
of Mme. de Staël, of Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of Moore,
of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every sort of French, English, German,
Russian, or polyglot creature of distinction that travelled through
Italy in the early part of this century, could ever have been the
beloved of Alfieri, the misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese
professors, priests, and shop-keepers.
The fact was that Mme. d'Albany could now become, so to speak, what she
really was; or, at least, show herself to be such. Worldly wise and a
trifle cynical she had always been; in the midst of the pages of literary
review and political newspaper constituting her letters to Mme. Mocenni,
Canon Luti and Alessandro Cerretani of Siena, there is a good deal of
mere personal gossip, stories of married women's lovers, married men's
mistresses, domestic bickerings, &c., interspersed with very plain-spoken
and (according to our ideas) slightly demoralised moralisings. It is
evident that this was not a woman to shrink from the reality of things,
to take the world in disgust, to expect too much of her acquaintances.
On the other hand these letters of the Alfieri period show Mme. d'Albany
to have been decidedly a good-natured and friendly woman. She has the
gift of getting people to trust her with their little annoyances and
grievances; she is constantly administering sympathy to Mme. Mocenni
for the tiresomeness and stupidity and harshness of her husband; she
keeps up a long correspondence, recommending books, correcting French
exercises, exhorting to study and to virtue (particularly to abstinence
from gambling), encouraging, helping Mme. Mocenni's boy Vittorio. She is
clearly a woman who enjoys hearing about other folk's concerns, enjoys
taking an interest in them, sympathising and, if possible, assisting
them.
These two qualities, a dose of cynical worldliness, sufficient to
prevent all squeamishness and that coldness and harshness which springs
from expecting people to be better than they are, and a dose of
kindliness, helpfulness, pleasure in knowing the affairs and feelings
and troubles of others; these two qualities are, I should think, the
essentials for a woman who would keep a salon in the old sense of the
word, who would be the centre of a large but decidedly select society,
the friend and correspondent of many and various people possessed of
more genius or more character than herself. Such a woman, thanks to her
easy-going knowledge of the world, and to her cordial curiosity and
helpfulness, is the friend of the most hostile people; and she is so
completely satisfied with, and interested in, the particular person with
whom she is talking or to whom she is writing, that that particular
person really believes himself or herself to be her chief friend, and
overlooks the scores of other chief friends, viewed with exactly the
same degree of interest, and treated with the same degree of cordiality
all round. The world is apt to like such women, as such women like it,
and to say of them that there must be an immense richness of character,
an extraordinary power of bringing out the best qualities of every
individual, in a woman who can drive such complicated teams of friends.
But is it not more probable that the secret of such success is poverty
of personality rather than richness; and that so many people receive a
share of friendship, of sympathy, of comprehension, because each
receives only very little; because the universal friend is too obtuse to
mind anybody's faults, and too obtuse, also, to mind anybody's great
virtues? In short, do not such women pay people merely in the paper
money of attention, which can be multiplied at pleasure, rather than in
the gold coin of sympathy, of which the supply is extremely small?
Be this as it may, Mme. d'Albany, after having been, in the earlier
period of her life, essentially the woman who had one friend, who let
the wax of her nature be stamped in one clear die, became, in the twenty
years which separate the death of Alfieri from her own, pre-eminently
the woman with many friends, a blurred personality in which we recognise
traces of the mental effigy of many and various people. Mme. d'Albany
was, therefore, in superficial sympathy with nearly everyone, and in
deep antagonism with no one: she was the ideal of the woman who keeps a
literary and political salon. At that time especially, when Italy was
visited only by people of a certain social standing, society was carried
on by a most complicated system of letters of introduction, and everyone
of any note brought a letter to Mme. d'Albany. "_La grande lanterne
magique passe tout par votre salon_," wrote Sismondi to the Countess;
and the metaphor could not be truer. Writers and artists, beautiful
women, diplomatists, journalists, pedants, men of science, women of
fashion, Châteaubriand and Mme. de Staël, Lamartine and Paul Louis
Courier, Mme. Récamier and the Duchess of Devonshire, Canova and
Foscolo, and Sismondi and Werner, the whole intellectual world of the
Empire and the Restoration, all seem to be projected, figures now
flitting past like shadows, now dwelling long, clear and coloured, upon
the rather colourless and patternless background of Mme. d'Albany's
house; nay, of Mme. d'Albany herself. Such readers as may wish to have
all these figures, remembered or forgotten, pointed out to them, called
by their right names and titles, treated with the perfect impartiality
of a _valet de place_ expounding monuments, or of a chamberlain
announcing the guests at a _levée_, may refer to the two volumes of
Baron Alfred von Reumont; and such readers (and I hope they are more
numerous) as may wish to examine some of the nobler and more interesting
of these projected shadows of men and women, may read with pleasure and
profit the letters of Sismondi, Bonstetten, Mme. de Souza and Mme. de
Staël to the Countess of Albany, and the interesting pages of criticism
in which they have been imbedded by M. St.-René Taillandier. With regard
to myself, I feel that the time and space which have been given me in
order to analyse or reconstruct the curious type and curious individual
called Louise d'Albany are both nearly exhausted; and I can therefore
select to dwell upon, of these many magic-lantern men and women, of
these friends of the Countess, only two, because they seem to me to
exemplify my remarks about the friendship of a woman whose vocation it
is to have many friends. The two are Sismondi and Foscolo.
Two or three years after Alfieri's death, somewhere about the year 1806
or 1807, there was introduced to Mme. d'Albany a sort of half-Italian,
half-French Swiss, a man young in years and singularly young--with the
peculiar earnestness, gravity, purity which belongs sometimes to
youth--in spirit, Jean Charles Léonard Simonde de Sismondi. Quietly
idealistic, with one of those northern, eminently Protestant minds which
imagine the principle of good to be more solemnly serious, the principle
of evil more vainly negative, than is, alas, the case in this world--M.
de Sismondi, full of the heroism of mediæval Italy which he was studying
with a view to his great work, came to the house of Alfieri, to the
woman whom Alfieri had loved, as to things most reverend and almost
sacred. The Countess of Albany received him very well; and this good
reception, the motherly cordiality of this woman with that light in her
hazel eyes, that welcoming graciousness in the lines of her mouth, which
Lamartine has charmingly described, with the "_parole suave, manières
sans apprêt, familiarité rassurante_," "which made one doubt whether she
was descending to the level of her visitor, or raising him up to her
own,"--this reception by this woman, who was, moreover, still surrounded
by a halo of Alfieri's glory, fairly conquered the heart, the pure,
warm, grave and truthful heart of young Sismondi. He saw her often, on
his way between Geneva, whither he was called by his family business and
his lectures, and Pescia, a little town nestled among the olives of the
Lucchese Apennine, where he was for ever sighing to join his mother, to
resume his walks, his readings with this noble old woman. Florence, the
house on the Lung Arno, had an almost romantic fascination for Sismondi;
those passing visits, at intervals of months, when Mme. d'Albany would
devote herself entirely to the traveller, sit chatting, or rather (we
feel that) listening to the young man's enthusiastic talk about liberty,
letters, and philanthropy, about Alfieri and Mme. de Staël, enabled
Sismondi to make up for himself a sort of half-imaginary Countess of
Albany, to whom he poured out all his hopes and fears in innumerable
letters, for whom he longed as (alas!) we perhaps long only for the
phantoms of our own creating. That Mme. d'Albany was, after all, a
shallow woman; that she adored a mediocre M. Fabre (to whom Sismondi
invariably sent respectful messages) and half disliked the memory of
Alfieri; that she had called Mme. de Staël, Sismondi's goddess, about
whom he was for ever expatiating, "a mad woman who always wants to
inspire passions, and feels nothing, and makes her readers feel nothing"
(I am quoting from an unpublished letter at Siena); that she preferred
despotism on the whole to liberty, and had no particular belief or
interest in the heroic things of the present and future; that she was a
lover of gossip and scandal, sometimes (as Gino Capponi says) hard and
disagreeable; that she inspired some men, like d'Azeglio and Giordani,
with a positive repulsion as a vulgar-minded, spiteful, meddlesome old
thing; that there should be any other Mme. d'Albany than the one of his
noble fancy, than the woman whose image (fashioned by himself) he loved
to unite with the image of his own sweet, serious, shy, noble-minded
mother: all these things M. de Sismondi, who never guessed himself to be
otherwise than the most unpoetical and practical of men, never dreamed
of. So Sismondi went on writing to Mme. d'Albany, pouring out his grief
at Mme. de Staël's persecutions, his schemes of general improvement, all
the interests which filled his gentle, austere, and enthusiastic mind.
1814 came, and 1815. Sismondi had always hated, with the hatred of an
Italian mediæval patriot, and the hatred of an eighteenth-century
philanthropist, the despotism, the bureaucratic levelling, the great
military slaughters of Napoleon; but when he saw Napoleon succeeded by
the inept and wicked governments of the Restoration, his heart seemed to
burst. A Swiss, scarcely acquainted with France, the passion for the
principles of liberty and good sense and progress which France had
represented, the passion for France itself, burst out in him with
generous ardour. This man suffered intensely at what to him, as to Byron
and to Shelley (we must recollect the introduction of the _Revolt of
Islam_), seemed the battle between progress and retrogression; and
suffered all the more as he was too pure and just-minded not to feel the
impossibility of complete sympathy with either side. Mme. d'Albany
answered his letters with Olympic serenity. What was it to her which got
the upper hand? She was by this time one of those placid mixtures of
optimism and pessimism which do not expect good to triumph, simply
because they do not care whether good does triumph. Sismondi, in his
adoration of her, thought this might be the result of a superior
magnanimity of character; yet he kept conjuring her to take an interest
in the tragedy which was taking place before her eyes. If she will take
no interest, will not Fabre? "Does M. Fabre not feel himself turning
French again?" writes Sismondi, and there is a pathetic insistency
in the question. Fabre thought of his pictures, his collections of
antiques, perhaps of his dinner; of anything save France and political
events. Mme. d'Albany smiled serenely, and chaffed Sismondi a little for
his political passions. Sismondi, of all men the most loyal to the idea
he had formed of his friends, seems never to have permitted himself to
see the real woman, the real abyss of indifference, beneath his ideal
Mme. d'Albany. But there are few things more pathetic, I think, than the
letters of this enthusiastic man to this cold woman; than the belief of
Sismondi--writing that the retrograde measures of which he reads in the
papers give him fits of fever, that the post days on which he expects
political news are days of frenzied expectation--in the moral fibre,
the faculty for indignation, of this pleasant, indifferent, cynical
quasi-widow of Alfieri.
The story of the Countess and Foscolo is an even sadder instance of
those melancholy little psychological dramas which go on, unseen to the
world, in a man's soul; little dramas without outward events, without
deaths or partings or such-like similar visible catastrophes, but the
action of which is the slow murder of an affection, of an ideal, of a
belief in the loyalty, sympathy, and comprehension of another. The
character and history of Ugo Foscolo, like Chénier, half a Greek in
blood, and more than half a Greek in passionate love of beauty and
indomitable love of liberty, are amongst the most interesting in Italian
literature; and I regret that I can say but little of them in this
place. Reviewing his brief life, his long career from the moment when,
scarcely more than a boy, he had entered the service of liberty as a
soldier, a political writer, and a poet, only to taste the bitterness of
the betrayal of Campo Formio, he wrote, in 1823, from London, where he
was slowly dying, to his sister Rubina: "I am now nearly forty-six;
and you, although younger than myself, can recollect how miserable,
how unquiet and uncertain our lives have always been ever since our
childhood." Poor, vain, passionate and proud, torn between the selfish
impulses of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative nature, and the rigid
sense of duty of a heroic and generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the
earliest and most genuine victims of that sickness of disappointed hope
and betrayed enthusiasm, of that _Weltschmerz_ of which personal
misfortunes seemed as but the least dreadful part, that came upon the
noblest minds after the Revolution, and which he has painted, with
great energy and truthfulness, in his early novel _Jacopo Ortis_. His
career broken by his determination never to come to terms with any
sort of baseness, his happiness destroyed by political disappointment,
literary feuds, and a number of love affairs into which his weaker, more
passionate and vainer, yet not more ungenerous temper was for ever
embroiling him, Foscolo came to Florence, ill and miserable, in the year
1812. The Countess of Albany, recognising in him a something--a mixture
of independence, of passion, of vanity, of truthfulness, of pose--which
resembled Alfieri in his earlier days (though, as she was unable to
see, a nobler Alfieri, wider-minded, warmer-hearted, born in a nobler
civilization and destined to give to Italy a nobler example, the pattern
for her Leopardi, than Alfieri had been able to give)--the Countess of
Albany received Foscolo well. His letters are full of allusions to the
hours which he spent seated at the little round table in Mme. d'Albany's
drawing-room, opposite to the "Muse" newly bought of Canova, narrating
to her his many and tangled love affairs; love affairs in which he left
his heart on all the briars, and in which, however, by an instinct which
shows the very nobleness of his nature, he seems to have been impelled
rather towards women whom he must love sincerely and unhappily, than
towards Marchesa di Prié and Lady Ligonier, like Alfieri; love affairs
in which, alas, there was also a good dose of the vanity of a poet and a
notorious beau. Mme. d'Albany, as we have seen, loved gossip; and, being
a kind, helpful woman, she also sincerely liked becoming the confidant
of other folk's woes. She took a real affection for this strange
Foscolo. Foscolo, in return, ill, sore of heart, solitary, gradually
got to love this gentle, sympathising Countess with a sort of filial
devotion, but a filial devotion into which there entered also somewhat
of the feeling of a wounded man towards his nurse, of the feeling of a
devout man towards his Madonna.
His letters are full of this feeling: "My friend and not the friend of
my good fortune," he writes to Mme. d'Albany in 1813, "I seem to have
left home, mother, friends, and almost the person dearest to my heart in
leaving Florence." Again, "I had in you, _mia Signora_, a friend and a
mother; a person, in short, such as no name can express, but such as
sufficed to console me in the miseries which are perhaps incurable
and interminable." Her letters are a real ray of sunlight in his
gloomy life, they are "so full of graciousness, and condescension and
benevolence and love. I venture to use this last word, because I feel
the sentiment which it expresses in myself towards you."
His health, his work, his money-matters, his love-affairs, were all
getting into a more and more lamentable condition, in which Mme.
d'Albany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the catastrophes of
1814 and 1815, which to Italy meant the commencement of a state of
degradation and misery much more intolerable and hopeless than any
previous one, came and drowned the various bitternesses of poor
Foscolo's life in a sea of bitterness. "Italy," wrote Foscolo to Mme.
d'Albany in 1814, "is a corpse; and a corpse which must not be touched
if the stench thereof is not to be made more horrible. And yet I see
certain crazy creatures fantasticating ways of bringing her to life; for
myself, I should wish her to be buried with myself, and overwhelmed by
the seas, or that some new Phaeton should precipitate upon her the
flaming heavens, so that the ashes should be scattered to the four
winds, and that the nations coming and to come should forget the infamy
of our times. Amen."
How strongly we feel in this outburst that, despite his despair, or
perhaps on account of it, Foscolo is himself one of those "crazy
creatures fantasticating ways of bringing Italy to life!" But the
Countess did not understand; she could conceive liking Bonaparte and
serving him, or liking the Restoration and serving it; but to love an
abstract Italy which did not yet exist, to hate equally all those who
deprived it of freedom, that was not within her comprehension. And as
she could not comprehend this feeling, the mainspring of Foscolo's soul,
so she could understand of Foscolo only the slighter, meaner things: his
troubles and intrigues, his loves and quarrels. The moment came when the
grief of miscomprehension was revealed to poor Foscolo; when he saw
how little he was understood by this woman whom he loved as a mother.
Foscolo had refused, latterly, to serve Napoleon; he refused, also,
to serve the Austrians. Hated for his independent ways both by the
Bonapartists and the reactionists, surrounded by spies, he was forced
to quit Italy never to return. He wrote to explain his motives to Mme.
d'Albany. Mme. d'Albany wrote back in a way which showed that she
believed the assertions of Foscolo's enemies; that she ascribed to
cowardice, to meanness, to a base desire to make himself conspicuous,
the self-inflicted exile which he had taken upon him: a letter which the
editor of Foscolo's correspondence describes to us in one
word--unworthy.
This letter came upon Foscolo like a thunder-clap. "So thus," he wrote
to the Countess in August 1815, "generosity and justice are banished
even from nobler souls. Your letter, Signora Contessa, grieves me, and
confers upon me, at the same time, two advantages: it diminishes
suddenly the perpetual nostalgia which I have felt for Florence, and it
affords me an occasion to try my strength of spirit.... My hatred for
the tyranny with which Bonaparte was oppressing Italy does not imply
that I should love the house of Austria. The difference for me was
that I hoped that Bonaparte's ambition might bring about, if not the
independence of Italy, at least such magnanimous deeds as might raise
the Italians; whereas the regular government of Austria precludes all
such hopes. I should be mad and infamous if I desired for Italy, which
requires peace at any price, new disorders and slaughterings; but I
should consider myself madder still and more infamous if, having despised
to serve the foreigner who has fallen, I should accept to serve the
foreigner who has succeeded.... But if your accusation of inconstancy is
unjust, your accusation that I want to '_passer pour original_' is
actually offensive and mocking."
Later, in his solitary wanderings, Foscolo's heart seems to have melted
towards his former friend; he wrote her one or two letters, conciliating,
friendly, but how different from the former ones! The Countess of
Albany, whom he had loved and trusted, was dead; the woman who remained
was dear to him as a mere relic of that dead ideal.
Such is the story of Mme. d'Albany's friendship for two of the noblest
spirits, Sismondi and Foscolo, of their day; the noblest, the one in his
pure austerity, the other in his magnanimous passionateness, that ever
crossed the path of the beloved of Alfieri.