ign," "My dear Queen," and even when that vulgar woman of
genius, Lady Morgan, made a buffoonish scene about the "dead usurper,"
on the death of George III. But Mme. d'Albany herself was getting to
look and talk less and less like a queen, either the Queen of Great
Britain or the Queen of Hearts; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed with
an eternal red shawl (now the property of an intimate friend of mine),
in a dress extremely suggestive of an old house-keeper. She was, when
not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in manner, loving to have
children about her, to spoil them with cakes and see them romp and
dance; free and easy, cynical, Rabelaisian, if I may use the expression,
as such mongrel Frenchwomen are apt to grow with years; the nick-name
which she gave to a member of a family where the tradition of her and
her ways still persists, reveals a wealth of coarse fun which is rather
strange in a woman who was once the Beatrice or Laura of a poet. She was
active, mentally and bodily, never giving up her multifarious reading,
her letter-writing; never foregoing her invariable morning walk, in a
big bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the Lung Arno and into the
Cascine.

Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles
Edward, widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri; and such, at
the age of seventy-two, did death overtake her, on the 29th January
1824. Her property she bequeathed to Fabre whom a false rumour had
called her husband; and Fabre left it jointly to his native town of
Montpellier, and to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, who
still lives and recollects Mme. d'Albany.

The famous epitaph, composed by Alfieri for himself, had been mangled by
Mme. d'Albany and those who helped her and Canova in devising his tomb;
the companion epitaph, the one in which Alfieri described the Countess
as buried next to him, was also mangled in its adaptation to a tomb
erected in Santa Croce, entirely separate from Alfieri's. On that
monument of Mme. d'Albany, in the chapel where moulder the frescoes of
Masolino, there is not a word of that sentence of Alfieri's about the
dead woman having been to him dearer and more respected than any other
human thing. Mme. d'Albany had changed into quite another being between
1803 and 1824; the friend of Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Stael, the
worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have no connection with the
lady who had wept for Alfieri in the