he Countess of Albany, renouncing
all money supplies from the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a
share of the two pensions, French and Papal, granted to her husband,
was permitted to spend a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased,
provided she returned for awhile to show herself in the Papal States.
On hearing the unexpected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the Apennines
of Modena with fourteen horses that he had been to buy in England, was
seized with a violent temptation to send his caravan along the main
road, and gallop by cross-paths to meet the Countess, who was crossing
the Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome to the baths of Baden in
Switzerland. The thought of her honour and safety restrained him, and he
pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on a previous occasion, his stern
resolution not to seek his lady soon gave way; and two months later
followed that meeting at the _Two Keys_ at Colmar on the Rhine.

For the first time in those seven long years of platonic passion,
Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany found themselves settled beneath the same
roof. To the mind of this Italian man, and this half-French, half-German
woman of the eighteenth century, for whom marriage was one of the
sacraments of a religion in which they wholly disbelieved, and one
of the institutions of a society which alleviated it with universal
adultery; to Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation from Charles
Edward Stuart was equivalent to a divorce. The Pretender could no longer
prescribe any line of conduct to his wife; she was free to live where
and with whom she chose; and if she were not free to marry, the idea,
the wish for marriage, probably never crossed the brains of these two
platonic lovers of seven years' standing. Marriage was a social contract
between people who wished to obtain each other's money and titles and
lands--who wished to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all his
property to his sister, and the Countess, who lived on a pension, had no
money or titles or lands to throw together; and they certainly neither
of them, the man living entirely for his work, the woman living entirely
for the man, had the smallest desire to have children, heirs to nothing
at all. What injury could their living together now do to Charles Edward,
who had relinquished all his husband's rights? None, evidently. On the
other hand, what harm could their living together do to their own honour
or happiness, now that they had had seven