years' experience that only
death could extinguish their affection? None, again evidently. And as to
harm to the institutions of society, what were those institutions, and
what was their value, that they should be respected? Such, could we
have questioned them, would have been the answers of Alfieri and the
Countess. That they were setting an example to others less pure in mind,
less exceptional in position; that they were making it more difficult
for marriage to be reorganised on a more rational plan, by showing men
and women a something that might do instead of rationally organised
marriage; that they were, in short, preventing the law from being
rectified, by taking the law into their own hands: such thoughts could
not enter into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth century,
people for whom the great Revolution, Romanticism, and the new views
of society which grew out of both, were still in the future. That a
punishment should await them, that as time went on and youthful passion
diminished, their lives should be barren and silent and cold for want of
all those things: children, legal bonds, social recognition, by which
their union should fall short of a real marriage; this they could never
anticipate.

For the moment, united in the "excessively clean and comfortable" little
chateau, rented by Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Colmar;
riding and driving about in the lovely Rhine country; the Countess deep
in her reading again, Alfieri deep once more in his writings; together,
above all, after so many months of separation: they seemed perfectly
happy. So happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must come to restore
the natural balance of things; and the misfortune came, in the sudden
news of the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as of guiltiness at
having half forgotten that thoughtful and gentle friend in the first
flush of their happiness, seems to have come over them.

"O God," wrote Alfieri to Gori's friend Bianchi at Siena, "I don't know
what I shall do. I always see him and speak to him, and every smallest
word and thought and gesture of his returns to my mind, and stabs my
heart. I do not feel very sorry for him: he cared little for life for
its own sake, and the life which he was forced to lead was too far below
his great soul, and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, and the
nobility of his noble scornfulness. The person dearest to me of any,
and immediately next to whom I loved Checco [