th they poured across the Alps in ever-increasing
numbers, bringing confused contradictory tales of anarchy and outrage.
Among those whom chance thus carried to Pianura were certain familiars
of the Duke's earlier life--the Count Alfieri and his royal mistress,
flying from Paris, and arriving breathless with the tale of their
private injuries. To the poet of revolt this sudden realisation of his
doctrines seemed in fact a purely personal outrage. It was as though a
man writing an epic poem on an earthquake should suddenly find himself
engulphed. To Alfieri the downfall of the French monarchy and the
triumph of democratic ideas meant simply that his French investments had
shrunk to nothing, and that he, the greatest poet of the age, had been
obliged, at an immense sacrifice of personal dignity, to plead with a
drunken mob for leave to escape from Paris. To the wider aspect of the
"tragic farce," as he called it, his eyes remained obstinately closed.
He viewed the whole revolutionary movement as a conspiracy against his
comfort, and boasted that during his enforced residence in France he had
not so much as exchanged a word with one of the "French slaves,
instigators of false liberty," who, by trying to put into action the
principles taught in his previous works, had so grievously interfered
with the composition of fresh masterpieces.

The royal pretensions of the Countess of Albany--pretentions affirmed
rather than abated as the tide of revolution rose--made it impossible
that she should be received at the court of Pianura; but the Duke found
a mild entertainment in Alfieri's company. The poet's revulsion of
feeling seemed to Odo like the ironic laughter of the fates. His
thoughts returned to the midnight meetings of the Honey Bees, and to the
first vision of that face which men had lain down their lives to see.
Men had looked on that face since then, and its horror was reflected in
their own.

Other fugitives to Pianura brought another impression of events--that
comic note which life, the supreme dramatic artist, never omits from her
tragedies. These were the Duke's old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant,
fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and
arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable
and epigrammatic as ever. With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady,
stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was
whispered (though he introduced her as the da