women pay people merely in the paper
money of attention, which can be multiplied at pleasure, rather than in
the gold coin of sympathy, of which the supply is extremely small?

Be this as it may, Mme. d'Albany, after having been, in the earlier
period of her life, essentially the woman who had one friend, who let
the wax of her nature be stamped in one clear die, became, in the twenty
years which separate the death of Alfieri from her own, pre-eminently
the woman with many friends, a blurred personality in which we recognise
traces of the mental effigy of many and various people. Mme. d'Albany
was, therefore, in superficial sympathy with nearly everyone, and in
deep antagonism with no one: she was the ideal of the woman who keeps a
literary and political salon. At that time especially, when Italy was
visited only by people of a certain social standing, society was carried
on by a most complicated system of letters of introduction, and everyone
of any note brought a letter to Mme. d'Albany. "_La grande lanterne
magique passe tout par votre salon_," wrote Sismondi to the Countess;
and the metaphor could not be truer. Writers and artists, beautiful
women, diplomatists, journalists, pedants, men of science, women of
fashion, Chateaubriand and Mme. de Stael, Lamartine and Paul Louis
Courier, Mme. Recamier and the Duchess of Devonshire, Canova and
Foscolo, and Sismondi and Werner, the whole intellectual world of the
Empire and the Restoration, all seem to be projected, figures now
flitting past like shadows, now dwelling long, clear and coloured, upon
the rather colourless and patternless background of Mme. d'Albany's
house; nay, of Mme. d'Albany herself. Such readers as may wish to have
all these figures, remembered or forgotten, pointed out to them, called
by their right names and titles, treated with the perfect impartiality
of a _valet de place_ expounding monuments, or of a chamberlain
announcing the guests at a _levee_, may refer to the two volumes of
Baron Alfred von Reumont; and such readers (and I hope they are more
numerous) as may wish to examine some of the nobler and more interesting
of these projected shadows of men and women, may read with pleasure and
profit the letters of Sismondi, Bonstetten, Mme. de Souza and Mme. de
Stael to the Countess of Albany, and the interesting pages of criticism
in which they have been imbedded by M. St.-Rene Taillandier. With regard
to myself, I feel that the time and space which