SANTA CROCE.
With her other friends, who gave less of their own heart and asked less
of hers, Mme. d'Albany was more fortunate. She contrived to connect
herself by correspondence with the most eminent men and women of the
most different views and tempers; she made her salon in Florence, as M.
St. René Taillandier has observed, a sort of adjunct to the cosmopolitan
salon of Mme. de Staël at Coppet. Her efforts in so doing were crowned
with the very highest success. In 1809 Napoleon requested Mme. d'Albany
to leave Florence for Paris, where, he added with a mixture of brutality
and sarcasm, she might indulge her love of art in the new galleries of
the Louvre, and where her social talents could no longer spread
dissatisfaction with his government, as was the case in Italy.
The one year's residence in Paris, which Napoleon's jealous meddlesomeness
forced upon her, was, in itself, a very enjoyable time, spent with the
friends whom she had left in '93, and with a whole host of new ones whom
she had made since. She returned to Florence with a larger number of
devoted correspondents than ever; her salon became more and more brilliant;
and when, after Waterloo, the whole English world of politics, fashion,
and letters poured on to the Continent, her house became, as Sismondi
said, the wall on which all the most brilliant figures of the great
magic lantern were projected.
Thus, seeing crowds of the most distinguished and delightful people,
receiving piles of the most interesting and adoring letters, happy,
self-satisfied, Mme. d'Albany grew into an old woman. Every evening
until ten, the rooms of the Casa Alfieri were thrown open; the servants
in the Stuart liveries ushered in the guests, the tea was served in
those famous services emblazoned with the royal arms of England. The
Countess had not yet abandoned her regal pretensions; for all her
condescending cordiality towards the elect, she could assume airs of
social superiority which some folk scarcely brooked, and she was
evidently pleased when, half in earnest, Mme. de Staël addressed her as
"My dear Sovereign," "My dear Queen," and even when that vulgar woman of
genius, Lady Morgan, made a buffoonish scene about the "dead usurper,"
on the death of George III. But Mme. d'Albany herself was getting to
look and talk less and less like a queen, either the Queen of Great
Britain or the Queen of Hearts; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed with
an eternal red shawl (now the property of an intimate friend of mine),
in a dress extremely suggestive of an old house-keeper. She was, when
not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in manner, loving to have
children about her, to spoil them with cakes and see them romp and
dance; free and easy, cynical, Rabelaisian, if I may use the expression,
as such mongrel Frenchwomen are apt to grow with years; the nick-name
which she gave to a member of a family where the tradition of her and
her ways still persists, reveals a wealth of coarse fun which is rather
strange in a woman who was once the Beatrice or Laura of a poet. She was
active, mentally and bodily, never giving up her multifarious reading,
her letter-writing; never foregoing her invariable morning walk, in a
big bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the Lung Arno and into the
Cascine.
Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles
Edward, widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri; and such, at
the age of seventy-two, did death overtake her, on the 29th January
1824. Her property she bequeathed to Fabre whom a false rumour had
called her husband; and Fabre left it jointly to his native town of
Montpellier, and to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, who
still lives and recollects Mme. d'Albany.
The famous epitaph, composed by Alfieri for himself, had been mangled by
Mme. d'Albany and those who helped her and Canova in devising his tomb;
the companion epitaph, the one in which Alfieri described the Countess
as buried next to him, was also mangled in its adaptation to a tomb
erected in Santa Croce, entirely separate from Alfieri's. On that
monument of Mme. d'Albany, in the chapel where moulder the frescoes of
Masolino, there is not a word of that sentence of Alfieri's about the
dead woman having been to him dearer and more respected than any other
human thing. Mme. d'Albany had changed into quite another being between
1803 and 1824; the friend of Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Staël, the
worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have no connection with the
lady who had wept for Alfieri in the convent at Rome, who had borne
with all Alfieri's misanthropic furies after the Revolution, any more
than with the delicate intellectual girl whom Charles Edward had nearly
done to death in his drunken jealousy. So, on the whole, Fabre, and
whosoever assisted Fabre, was right in concocting a new epitaph.
But to us, who have followed the career--whose lesson is that of the
meanness which lurks in noble things, the nobility which lurks in mean
ones--of this woman from her inauspicious wedding-day to the placid day
of her death, to us Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, Queen of
Great Britain, France, and Ireland, will remain, for all blame we
may give her and her times, a figure to remember and reflect upon,
principally because of those suppressed words of her epitaph: "_A
Victorio Alferio ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab
ipso constanter habita et observata._"
FOOTNOTES
1: I have purposely quoted, almost textually, the account given by
Ewald, lest I should be accused of following Alfieri's vague version.
2: The chief sources for this account are Mann's despatches and the
_Mémoires_ of Louis Dutens. Alfieri gives no details.
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_
THE ENCHANTED WOODS
and other Essays on the Genius of Place
HORTUS VITÆ, or the Hanging Gardens.
Moralising Essays
THE SPIRIT OF ROME.
Leaves from a Diary
HAUNTINGS: Fantastic Tales
Second Edition
THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER.
Notes on Places
GENIUS LOCI. Second Edition
POPE JACYNTH. Second Edition
LIMBO; and Other Essays;
to which is now added
ARIADNE IN MANTUA.
Second Edition
RENAISSANCE FANCIES AND STUDIES.
Second Edition
ALTHEA.
Second Edition
VANITAS: Polite stories.
Second Edition
LAURUS NOBILIS:
Chapters on Art and Life
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Contemporary spellings have generally been retained even where
inconsistent. Missing Punctuation has been silently added, and a few
obvious spelling errors have been corrected. The information about
further volumes by the author has been moved to the end.
The following additional changes have been made to the text:
Tales of a Century (1 instance) Tales of the Century
No sadder way (...) can No sadder way (...) can
well be imagined that landing well be imagined than landing
has not mad him younger has not made him younger
probably sown in the swaddling probably sewn in the swaddling
clothes clothes
cavaliere servante cavaliere servente
behaving in the way in which behaving in the way of which
he approved he approved
what glory could he hope what glory could he hope for
among all these monkeys among all these monkeys