Alfieri found the Countess of Albany established in the palace of the Cancelleria, the mistress of the establishment, for her brother-in-law was living in his episcopal town of Frascati. They were free to see each other as much as they chose, to love each other as much as they would; for the Cardinal and the priestly circles seem to have gone completely to sleep in the presence of this critical situation; and the habits of Roman society, which were even a shade worse than those of Florence, were not such as to give umbrage to the lovers. But those years during which they had loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles Edward, had apparently fostered a love which was accustomed and satisfied with being only a more passionate kind of friendship; the indomitable power of resistance to himself, the passion for realising in himself some heroic attitude which he admired, and the almost furious desire to reverse completely his former habits of life, kept Alfieri up to the point of a platonic connexion; and the Countess of Albany, intellectual, cold, passive, easily moulded by a more vehement nature, loved Alfieri much more with the head than with the heart, and loved in him just that which made him prefer that they should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the Countess of Albany had much more mind than personality, and that she was therefore mere wax in the hands of a man who had become so exclusively and violently intellectual as Alfieri: she had seen too much of the coarse realities of life, of the brutal giving way to sensual impulse: the heroic, the ideal, nay the deliberately made up, the artificial, had a charm for her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Alfieri continued, in the opinion of all contemporaries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are equal, on the same footing as in Florence. And these months in Rome seem to have been the happiest months of Alfieri's life, the happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess of Albany. Alfieri hired the villa Strozzi, on the Esquiline, a small palace built by one of Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, including the use of furniture, stables, and garden, he paid the now incredibly small sum of ten scudi a month, about two pounds of our money. Permitting himself only two coats, the black one for the evening, and the famous blue one for ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to one dish of meat and vegetables, without wine or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make the comparatively small pension paid to him by his sister, go almost as far as had the fine fortune of which he had despoiled himself. He spent lavishly on books, and more lavishly on horses, on horses which, according to his own account, were his third passion, coming only after his love for Mme. d'Albany, and sometimes usurping the place of his love of literary glory.