Later, in his solitary wanderings, Foscolo's heart seems to have melted towards his former friend; he wrote her one or two letters, conciliating, friendly, but how different from the former ones! The Countess of Albany, whom he had loved and trusted, was dead; the woman who remained was dear to him as a mere relic of that dead ideal. Such is the story of Mme. d'Albany's friendship for two of the noblest spirits, Sismondi and Foscolo, of their day; the noblest, the one in his pure austerity, the other in his magnanimous passionateness, that ever crossed the path of the beloved of Alfieri. CHAPTER XX. SANTA CROCE. With her other friends, who gave less of their own heart and asked less of hers, Mme. d'Albany was more fortunate. She contrived to connect herself by correspondence with the most eminent men and women of the most different views and tempers; she made her salon in Florence, as M. St. Rene Taillandier has observed, a sort of adjunct to the cosmopolitan salon of Mme. de Stael at Coppet. Her efforts in so doing were crowned with the very highest success. In 1809 Napoleon requested Mme. d'Albany to leave Florence for Paris, where, he added with a mixture of brutality and sarcasm, she might indulge her love of art in the new galleries of the Louvre, and where her social talents could no longer spread dissatisfaction with his government, as was the case in Italy. The one year's residence in Paris, which Napoleon's jealous meddlesomeness forced upon her, was, in itself, a very enjoyable time, spent with the friends whom she had left in '93, and with a whole host of new ones whom she had made since. She returned to Florence with a larger number of devoted correspondents than ever; her salon became more and more brilliant; and when, after Waterloo, the whole English world of politics, fashion, and letters poured on to the Continent, her house became, as Sismondi said, the wall on which all the most brilliant figures of the great magic lantern were projected.