Part 5 (2/2)
What were Alfieri's feelings when Mme. d'Albany came home in her Court toilette, and told him of all these fine doings? The more we try to conceive certain things, the more inconceivable they become: it is like straining to see what may be hidden at the bottom of a very deep well.
In the case of Alfieri, I think we may add that the well was empty.
Since his illness at Colmar, he had aged in the most extraordinary way: the process of dessication and ossification of his moral nerves and muscles, which, as I have said, was the form that premature decrepitude took in this abnormal man, had begun. The creative power was extinct in him, both as regards his works and himself: there was no possibility of anything new, of any response of this wooden nature to new circ.u.mstances.
He had attained to the age of forty-two without any particular feelings such as could fit into this present case, and the result was that he probably had no feelings. The Countess of Albany was the ideal woman he had enshrined her as such ages ago, and an ideal woman could not change, could not commit an impropriety, least of all in his eyes. If she had condescended to ridiculous meanness in order to secure for herself an opening in English society, a subsidy from the English Government (apparently already suggested at that time, but granted only many years later) in case of a general break-up of French things; if she had done this, it was no concern of Alfieri: Mme. d'Albany had been patented as the ideal woman. As to him, why should he condescend to think about state receptions, galas, pensions, kings and queens, and similar low things? He had put such vanities behind him long ago.
Alfieri and the Countess made a tour through England, and projected a tour through Scotland. Whether the climate, the manners, the aspect of England and its inhabitants really disappointed the perhaps ideal notions she had formed; or whether, perhaps, she was a little bit put out of sorts by no pension being granted, and by a possible coldness of British matrons towards a widow travelling about with an Italian poet, it is not for me to decide. But her impressions of England, as recorded in a note-book now at the Musee Fabre at Montpellier, are certainly not those of a person who has received a good welcome:
”Although I knew,” she says, repeating the stale plat.i.tudes (or perhaps the true impressions?) of all foreigners, ”that the English were melancholy, I had not imagined that life in their capital would be so to the point which I experienced it. No sort of society, and a quant.i.ty of crowds ... As they spend nine months in the country--the family alone, or with only a very few friends--they like, when they come to town, to throw themselves into the vortex. Women are never at home. The whole early part of the day, which begins at two (for, going to bed at four in the morning, they rise only at mid-day), is spent in visits and exercise, for the English require, and their climate absolutely necessitates, a great deal of exercise. The coal smoke, the constant absence of suns.h.i.+ne, the heavy food and drink, make movement a necessity to them.... If England had an oppressive Government, this country and its inhabitants would be the lowest in the universe: a bad climate, bad soil, hence no sort of taste; it is only the excellence of the political const.i.tution which renders it inhabitable. The nation is melancholy, without any imagination, even without wit; the dominant characteristic is a desire for money.”
The same note as that even of such a man as Taine. The almost morbid love of beauty which a civilisation, whose outward expression are the lines and lines of black boxes, with slits for doors and windows of Bloomsbury, produced in men like Coleridge, Blake, and Turner, naturally escaped Mme. d'Albany; but the second great rebellion of imagination and love of beauty, the rebellion led by Madox Brown and Morris, and Rossetti and Burne Jones, escaped Taine. But of all the things which most offended this quasi-Queen of England in our civilisation, the social arrangements did so most of all. With the instinct of a woman who has lived a by no means regular life in the midst of a society far worse than herself, with the instinct of one of those strange pseudo-French Continental mongrels with whom age always brings cynicism, she tries to account for the virtue of Englishwomen by accidental, and often rather nasty, necessities. Mme. d'Albany writes with the freedom and precision of a Continental woman of the world of eighty years ago; and her remarks lose too much or gain too much by translation into our chaster language.
”The charm of intimate society,” she winds up, conscious of the charms of her own little salon full of clever men and pretty women all well-acquainted with each other--”the charm of intimate society is unknown in England.”
In short, the sooner England be quitted, the better. Political, or rather financial circ.u.mstances--that is to say, the frightful worthlessness of French money (and Alfieri's and her money came mainly from France), made a return to Paris urgent.
An incident, as curious perhaps as that of Mme. d'Albany's presentation at Court, but which, unlike that, Alfieri has not thought fit to suppress, marked their departure from England. As Alfieri, who had preceded the Countess by a few minutes to see whether the luggage had been properly stored on the s.h.i.+p at Dover, turned to go and meet her, his eyes suddenly fell with a start of recognition upon a woman standing on the landing-place. She was not young, but still very handsome, as some of us may know her from Gainsborough's portrait; and she was no other than Penelope Lady Ligonier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad twenty years before, for whom he had fought his famous duel in St.
James' Park, and got himself disgracefully mixed up in a peculiarly disgraceful divorce suit. He had several times inquired after her, and always in vain; and now he would scarcely have believed his eyes had his former mistress not given him a smile of recognition. Alfieri was terribly upset. The sight of this ghost from out of a disgraceful past, coming to haunt what he considered a dignified present, seems fairly to have terrified him; he ran back into the s.h.i.+p and dared not go to meet Mme. d'Albany, lest in so doing he should meet Lady Ligonier. Presently, Mme. d'Albany came on board. With the indifference of a woman of the world, of that easy-goingness which was rapidly effacing in her the romantic victim of Charles Edward, she told Alfieri that the friends who had escorted her to the s.h.i.+p (and who appear to have perfectly understood the temper of the Countess) had pointed out his former flame and entertained her with a brief biography of her predecessor in Alfieri's heart. Mme. d'Albany took it all as a matter of course: she was probably no longer at all in love with Alfieri, but she admired his genius and character as much and more than ever; and was probably beginning to develop a certain good-natured, half-motherly acquiescence in his eccentricities, such as women who have suffered much, and grown stout and strong, and cynically optimistic now that suffering is over, are apt to develop towards people accustomed to resort to them, like sick children, in all their ups and downs of temper.
”Between us,” says Alfieri, ”there was never any falsehood, or reticence, or coolness, or quarrel”;--and, indeed, when a woman, such as Mme.
d'Albany must have been at the age of forty, has once determined to adore and humour a particular individual in every single possible thing, all such painful results of more sensitive pa.s.sion naturally become unnecessary. If Mme. d'Albany merely smiled over bygone follies, Alfieri had been put into great agitation by the sight of Lady Ligonier. From Calais he sent her a letter, of which no copy has been preserved, but which, according to his account, ”was full, not indeed of love, but of a deep and sincere emotion at seeing her still leading a wandering life very unsuited to her birth and position; and of pain in thinking that I, although innocently (that ”although innocently”, on the part of a man who had been the cause of her scandalous downfall, is perfectly charming in its simple revelation of Continental morals), might have been the cause or the pretext thereof.”
Lady Ligonier's answer came to hand in Brussels. Written in bad French, it answered Alfieri's tragic grandiloquence with a cold civility, which shows how deeply his magnanimous compa.s.sion had wounded a woman who felt herself to be no more really corrupt than he.
”Monsieur,” so runs the letter, ”you could not doubt that the expression of your remembrance of me, and of the interest which you kindly take in my lot, would be duly appreciated and received gratefully by me; the more especially as I cannot consider you as the cause of my unhappiness, since I am not unhappy, although the uprightness of your soul makes you fear that I am. You were, on the contrary, the agent of my liberation from a world for which I was in no way suited, and which I have not for a moment regretted.... I am in the enjoyment of perfect health, increased by liberty and peace of mind. I seek the society only of simple and virtuous persons without pretensions either to particular genius or to particular learning; and besides such society I entertain myself with books, drawing, music, &c. But what const.i.tutes the basis of real happiness and satisfaction is the friends.h.i.+p and unalterable love of a brother whom I have always loved more than the whole world, and who possesses the best of hearts.” ”I hear,” goes on Lady Ligonier, after a few compliments on Alfieri's literary fame, ”that you are attached to the Princess with whom you are travelling, whose amiable and clever physiognomy seems indeed formed for the happiness of a soul as sensitive and delicate as yours. I am also told that she is afraid of you: I recognise you there. Without wis.h.i.+ng, or perhaps even knowing it, you have an irresistible ascendancy over all who are attached to you.”
Was it this disrespectful hint concerning what he wished the world to consider as his ideal love for Mme. d'Albany, or was it Lady Ligonier's determination to let him know that desertion by him had made her neither more disreputable nor more unhappy than before, I cannot tell; but certain it is that something in this letter appears to have put Alfieri, who had not objected to Mme. d'Albany's mean behaviour towards George III., into a condition of ruffled virtue and dignity.
”I copy this letter,” he writes in his memoirs, ”in order to give an idea of this woman's eccentric and obstinately evilly-inclined character.”
Did it never occur to Alfieri that his own character, whose faults during youth he so keenly appreciated, was not improving with years?
CHAPTER XVI.
THE MISOGALLO.
Alfieri and Madame d'Albany were scarcely back in Paris, and settled in a new house, when the disorders in Paris and the movements of the Imperial troops on the frontier began to make the situation of foreigners difficult and dangerous. The storming of the Tuileries, the great slaughter of the 10th August 1792, admonished them to sacrifice everything to their safety. With considerable difficulty a pa.s.sport for the Countess had been obtained from the Swedish Minister, one for Alfieri from the Venetian Resident (almost the only diplomatic representatives, says Alfieri, who still remained to that ghost of a king), and a pa.s.sport for each of them and for each of their servants from their communal section. Departure was fixed for the 20th August, but Alfieri's black presentiments hastened it to the 18th. Arrived at the Barriere Blanche, on the road to Calais, pa.s.sports were examined by two or three soldiers of the National Guard, and the gates were on the point of being opened to let the two heavily-loaded carriages pa.s.s, when suddenly, from out of a neighbouring pot-house, rushed some twenty-five or thirty ruffians, ragged, drunken, and furious. They surrounded the carriages, yelling that all the rich were running away and leaving them to starve without work; and a crowd rapidly formed round them and the National Guards, who wanted the travellers to be permitted to pa.s.s on.
Alfieri jumps out of the carriage, brandis.h.i.+ng his seven pa.s.sports, and throws himself, a long, lean, red-haired man, fiercely gesticulating and yelling at the top of his voice, among the crowd, forcing this man and that to read the pa.s.sports, crying frantically, ”Look! Listen! Name Alfieri. Italian and not French! Tall, thin, pale, red-haired; that is I; look at me. I have my pa.s.sport! We have our pa.s.sports all in order from the proper authorities! We want to pa.s.s; and, by G.o.d! we will pa.s.s!”
After half an hour of this altercation, with voices issuing from the crowd, ”Burn the carriages!” ”Throw stones at them!” ”They are running away, they are n.o.ble and rich; take them to the Hotel de Ville to be judged!” at last Alfieri's vociferations and gesticulations wearied even the Paris mob, the crowd became quieter, the National Guards gave the sign for departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the carriage where Mme.
d'Albany was sitting more dead than alive, shouted to the postillions to gallop off.
At a country house near Mons, belonging to the Countess of Albany's sister, the fugitives received the frightful news of the September ma.s.sacres; of those men and women driven, like beasts into an arena, down the prison-stairs into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Maillard's amateur executioners, on to the blood-soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, morally divided on separate benches, the gentlemen here, the ladies there, sat and looked on; of those men and women many had frequented the salon of the Rue de Bourgoyne, had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks back, with Alfieri and the Countess; amongst those men and women Alfieri and the Countess might themselves easily have been, had the ruffians of the Barriere Blanche dragged them back to their house, where an order to arrest Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 20th August which had originally been fixed for their departure. The thought of this narrow escape turned the recollection of that scene at the Barriere Blanche into a perfect nightmare, which focussed, so to speak, all the frenzied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French Revolution, for the ”Tiger-Apes” of France.
By November Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were in Florence, safe; but established in a miserable inn, without their furniture, their horses, their books; all left in Paris; nay, almost without the necessary clothes, and with very little money. From the dirty inn they migrated into rather unseemly furnished lodgings, and finally, after some debating about Siena and inquiring whether a house might not be had there on the promenade of the Lizza, they settled down in the house, one of a number formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi family, on the Lung Arno, close to the Ponte Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is one of the most delightful in Florence: across the narrow quay the windows look almost sheer down into the river, sparkling with a hundred facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut by the deep shadows of the old bridges, to where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars by the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of the Cascine, closed in by the pale blue peaks of the Carrara Alps; or else, in autumn and winter, scarcely moving, a ma.s.s of dark-greens and browns, wonderfully veined, like some strange oriental jasper, with transparent violet streakings, and above which arise, veiled, half washed out by mist, the old corbelled houses, the church-steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of pine and ilex plumes on the hill opposite.
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