But this, although it is probably correct with regard to his visits to Mme. d'Albany, with whom consideration for gossip prevented his staying much after ten at night, must not be taken as the invariable rule; for Alfieri, devoted as he was to his lady, by no means neglected other society. He was finishing his allotted number of tragedies, and, as the solemn moment of publication approached, he began to be tormented with that same desire to display his work to others, to hear their praises even if false, to understand their opinion even if unfavourable, which came, by gusts, as one of the passions of his life. Rome was at that time, like every Italian town, full of literary academies, conventicles of very small intellectual fry meeting in private drawing-rooms or at coffee-houses, and swayed by the overlordship of the famous Arcadia, which had now sunk into being a huge club to which every creature who scribbled, or daubed, or strummed, or had a coach-and-pair, or a bad tongue, or a pretty face, or a title, belonged without further claims. There were also several houses of women who affected intelligence or culture, having no claims to beauty or fashion; and foremost among these, but differing from them by the real originality and culture of the lady of the house, the charm of her young daughter, and the superior quality of the conversation and music to be enjoyed there, was the house of a Signora Maria Pizzelli, of all women in Rome the one to whom, after the Countess of Albany, Alfieri showed himself most assiduous. In her house and in many others Alfieri began to give almost public readings of his plays; trying to persuade himself that his object in so doing was to judge, from the expression of face and even more from the restlessness or quiescence of his listeners on their chairs, how his work might affect the mixed audience of a theatre; but admitting in his heart of hearts that the old desire to be remarked had as much to do with these exhibitions as with the six-horse gallops which used to astonish the people of Turin and Florence.