s bound to spend the
greater part of every year. Hence the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those
in the succeeding years, were merely so many interludes of happiness in
the dreary life of separation; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one
of his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the thought that every day
and every hour was bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. The day
came: Alfieri had to take leave of Mme. d'Albany; and, as he expresses
it, had to return to much worse gloom than before, being separated from
his lady without having the consolation of seeing Gori once more.
Mechanically he returned to Siena, to Siena which it was impossible
to conceive without his friend Checco; but when he realised the empty
house, the empty town, he found the place he had so loved insupportable,
and went to spend his long solitary winter writing, reading, translating,
breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass the weary time, at
Pisa. In April 1785 Mme. d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna,
where she had spent the winter, and to go to her sisters in France. In
September she and her lover met once more in the beloved country-house
on the Rhine. But again, in December, came another separation; Mme.
d'Albany went to Paris, and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar.

"Shall we then be again separated," he writes in a sonnet, "by cruel and
lying opinion, which blames us for errors which the whole world commits
every day? Unhappy that I am! The more I love thee with true and loyal
love, the more must I ever refuse myself that for which I am always
longing: thy sweet sight, beyond which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar
cannot understand this, and knows us but little, and does not see that
thy pure heart is the seat of virtue."

Strange words, and which, coming from a man cynical and truthful as
Alfieri, may make us pause and refuse to affirm that this strange love,
platonic for seven long years, ceased to be a mere passionate friendship
even when it resorted to the secrecy and deceptions of a mere common
intrigue; even when it openly braved, in the semblance of marriage, the
opinion of the world at large. During those many months of solitude in
the villa at Colmar, with no other company than that of his Sienese
servant or secretary and of the horses, whose news he carefully sent, in
letters and sonnets, to the Countess, Alfieri appears for the first time
to have got into a habit of excessive overwork, and to have had the
fi