Mme. d'Albany was far too shrewd and far too worldly not to see all this; and Alfieri was far too open and cynical to attempt to hide it. Mme. d'Albany, having her praises and his love read to her in innumerable sonnets, in the autobiography and in the epitaphs, probably merely smiled; she was a woman of the eighteenth century, a foreigner, an easy-going woman, and had learned to consider such escapades as these as an inevitable part of matrimony or quasi-matrimony. But, for all her worldly philosophy, did she never feel a vague craving, a void, as she sat in that big empty house reading her books while Alfieri was studying his Greek, a vague desire to have what consoles other women for coldness or infidelity, a son or a daughter, a normal object of devotion, something besides Alfieri, and which she could love whether deserving or not; something besides Alfieri's glory, in which she could take an interest whether other people did or did not agree? Such a connection as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction of romance, of poetry, connected with its very illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domestic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were young and passionately in love; but where was the romance, the poetry now, and where was the humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose expense that romance, that poetry, had been bought? Mme. d'Albany, if I may judge by the enormous piles of her letters which I have myself seen, and by the report of my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, who has examined another huge collection for my benefit, was getting to make herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, reading so many hours a day, writing letters so many more hours; taking the quite unenthusiastic, business-like interest in literature and politics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, it seems to me, from the tone of her letters, growing daily more indifferent to life, more desultory, more cynical, more misanthropic and tittle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was growing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more violent in temper, hanging a printed card stating that he wished no visits (one such is preserved in the library at Florence) in the hall, pursuing and flogging street-boys because they splashed his stockings by playing in the puddles; insulting Ginguene and General Miollis when they attempted to be civil; groaning over the victories of the French, rejoicing over the brutal massacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan populace; going to Florence (when they were spending the summer in a villa) for the pleasure of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of witnessing (as Gino Capponi records) the French prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines being pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary mob. Besides such demonstrations of an unamiable disposition as these, working with the fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a holiday at that house where the doggrel verses were written. The Countess of Albany, who had been so