how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical virtue, cultivated by
Alfieri in himself and in his beloved as the one admirable thing in
the world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-century baseness, had
nevertheless withered in several of its branches, beaten by the wind
of illegitimate passion, and dried up by the callousness of an immoral
state of society: an exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, come
before its season, and bleached and warped like a winter flower.

Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, simply, I think, because
they did not care to get married; because marriage would entail
reorganisation of a mode of life which had somehow organised itself;
because it would give a common-place prose solution to what appeared a
romantic and exceptional story; and finally because it might necessitate
certain losses in the way of money, of comfort, and of rank.

One sees throughout all his autobiography and letters that Alfieri drew
a sharp distinction between love and marriage; that he conceived
marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, so to say, in his native
place, goes in for having children, for being master in his own house,
administering and increasing his estates, and generally devoting himself
to the advancement of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essentially a
routinist, respected and approved of marriage; and anything different
would have struck his martinet, rule and compass, mind, as ridiculous
and contemptible. In giving up his fortune to his sister, Alfieri had
deliberately cut himself off from the possibility of such a marriage;
moreover, putting aside the financial question, his notion of the
liberty of a writer, who must be able to speak freely against any
government, was incompatible with his notion of a father of a family,
settled in dignity in his ancestral palace; and finally, I feel
perfectly persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which saw things only
in sharpest black and white contrasts, there existed a still more
complete incompatibility between a woman like the Countess of Albany,
and a wife such as he conceived a wife: to marry Mme. d'Albany would be
to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domesticity, and at the same
time to frightfully depart from the normal type of matrimony, which
required that the man be absolute master, and not afflicted with any
sort of sentimental respect for his better half.

According to Alfieri, there were two possibilities for the ideal