help to sort the dead man's papers;
he could, in his artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's
monument, write to Canova, correspond with the dignitaries of Santa
Croce, and so forth; come in contact with the Countess in those manifold
pieces of business, in those long conversations, which seem, for a time,
to keep the dead one still in the company of the living. There is
nothing difficult to understand or shameful to relate in all this; and
the friends of the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. de Souza,
puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, misanthropic or scoffing people like
Foscolo or Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to take umbrage,
nothing to rage or laugh at, in this long intimacy between a woman over
fifty and a man many years her junior; a man who lived at the other end
of Florence, who (if I may trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to
be attached to a woman well known to Mme. d'Albany; nor have we, I
think, any right to be less charitable than they.

Louise d'Albany, careless, like most women of her day, of social
institutions, and particularly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an
impure woman; her whole life goes to prove this. But Louise d'Albany was
an indifferent woman, and the extinction of all youthful passion and
enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical world, made her daily more
indifferent. She had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring one of
the most unendurable of companions, loving and admiring him while he was
still alive. But once the pressure of that strong personality removed,
the image of Alfieri appears to have been obliterated little by little
from the soft wax of her character. She continued, nay instituted,
a sort of cultus of Alfieri; became, as his beloved, the priestess
presiding over what had once been his house, and was now his temple. The
house on the Lung Arno remained the Casa Alfieri; the rooms which he
had inhabited were kept carefully untouched; his books and papers were
elaborated and preserved as he had left them; his portraits were
everywhere, and visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi, and the young
Lamartine, were expected to inquire respectfully into the legend of the
divinity, to ask to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might be
expected to enquire into the legend, to ask to see the relics, of some
great saint. Mme. d'Albany conscientiously devoted a portion of her time
to seeing that Alfieri's works were properly publishe