tre and pinchbeck crown,
in state in the cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news reached
Paris, this woman, so confident of having been in the right, and who had
written so frankly that if she did not hate her husband it was from mere
Christian charity and the duty of forgiveness, felt herself smitten by
an unexpected grief.

Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, and to whose cut-and-dry
nature it must have seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in a
way overawed by this sudden emotion at the death of the man who had
made both lovers so miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so
narrow a temper, of all that may move our sympathy in that, to him,
unintelligible grief, is, I think, one of the facts in his life which
brings this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet repulsive
character, most within reach of our affection; as that same grief, so
unexpected by herself, at what was after all her final deliverance, is,
together with the letter to Alfieri's mother, telling of her hatred to
Charles Edward, and that exclamation in the hysterical love-letter at
Siena--"O God! how this degrades the soul!"--one of the things which
persuade us that this woman, whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly,
and cynical, did really possess at bottom what her lover called "a most
upright and sincere and incomparable soul."

"For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sienese friends on the occasion
of Charles Edward's death, "nothing will be altered in our mode of
life." In other words, the Countess of Albany and her lover, established
publicly beneath the same roof in Paris, did not intend getting married.
Whatever hopes may have filled Mme. d'Albany's heart when, years before,
she had hinted to Alfieri's mother that when certain circumstances
changed, the Alfieri family should be saved from extinction; whatever
ideas Alfieri had had in his mind when he prayed in a sonnet for the
happy day when he might call his love holy; whatever intention of
repairing the injury done to social institutions, may at one time have
mingled with the lovers' remorse and the lovers' temptations,--had now
been completely forgotten. We have seen how, more than once, love,
however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to put aside all his
Republican sternness and truthfulness, and to cringe before people
whom he thoroughly despised; we cannot easily forget that ignominious
stroking of the Brutus poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now see