i, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely seen her except
for a few hours at rare intervals, looked up to her less with the
affection of a son than with the satisfaction of an artist who sees
in the woman of whom he is born the peculiar type of features or
character which he prizes most in womankind; if he, for all his
conscious weaknesses, was more like his own heroes than any man of his
acquaintance, if Mme. d'Albany might be judiciously got up as the Laura
of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri was even more unmistakably
the mother who suited his ideas, the living model of his mother of
Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha. To the Countess Alfieri he had,
already in 1784, introduced the Countess of Albany, whom she invited to
stay with her on her passage through Asti as she returned from Colmar
into Italy. Mme. d'Albany found an excuse for not accepting in the bad
state of the roads, which rendered another route than that of Asti
preferable. Frank and indifferent to the world's opinion as was Mme.
d'Albany, her originally cut and dry intellectual temper hardened by
many years' misery, one can conceive that she should shrink from
accepting the hospitality of Alfieri's mother. Alfieri had doubtless
shown her his mother's letters, and from these letters, as reflected in
his answers, it is clear that the Countess of Albany, returning from
that first stay with her lover at Colmar, would have felt that she was
tacitly deceiving the noble old lady under whose roof she was staying.
For the Countess Alfieri, noble, and Italian, and woman of the
eighteenth century though she was, seems to have been one of those
persons into whose mind, high removed above all worldly concerns, no
experience of vice, of weakness, nay, of mere equivocal situations, can
enter. Whatever she may have seen or heard in her youth of the habits of
women of her century and station, of the virtual divorce which, after a
few years, reigned in aristocratic houses, of authorised lovers and
socially accepted infidelity, seems to have passed out of her memory
and left her mind as innocent as it may have been during her convent
school-days. She had taken great interest in this poor young woman,
maltreated by a drunken husband, and finally saved from his clutches by
the benevolence of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and of a prince of the
church, about whom her son had written to her. That her son experienced
more than her own pity for so worthy an object, that he wa