Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, perhaps, than at any other time of their lives; but this happiness had to be paid for. The false position in which, however faultlessly, they were placed; the illegitimate affection in which, however blamelessly, they were indulging; these things, offensive to social institutions, although in no manner wrong in themselves, had produced their fruit of humiliation, nay, of degradation. Fate is more of a Conservative than we are apt to think; it resents the efforts of any individual, be he as blameless as possible, to resist for his own comfort and satisfaction the uncomfortable and unsatisfactory arrangements of the world; it punishes the man who seeks to elude an unjust law by condemning him to the same moral police depot, to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed; and Fate, therefore, soiled the poetic passion of Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the base practices of any illicit love. The manner in which Fate executes these summary lynchings of people's honour could not usually be more ingenious; there seems to be a special arrangement by which offenders are punished in their most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri and of Mme. d'Albany for refusing to sacrifice their happiness to the proprieties of a society which married girls of nineteen to drunkards whom they had never seen, but which would not hear of divorce; this punishment, falling directly only upon the man, but probably just as heavy upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation of the person whom she most loved and respected, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, unflinching, into a toady, a liar, and an intriguer. The Countess of Albany, living in the palace of her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, and under the special protection of the Pope, was entirely dependent on the good pleasure of the priestly bureaucracy of the Rome of Pius VI., that is to say, of about the most contemptible and vilest set of fools and hypocrites and sinners that can well be conceived; the Papacy, just before the Revolution, had become one of the most corrupt of the many corrupt Governments of the day. Cardinal York himself was a weak and silly, but honest and kind-hearted man; but Cardinal York was entirely swayed by the prelates and priests and priestlets and semi-priestly semi-lay nondescripts among whom he lived. He was responsible for the honour of the Countess of Albany, that is to say, of her husband and his brother; and the honour of the Countess of Albany depended exactly upon the remarks which the most depraved and hypocritical clergy in Europe, the people who did or abetted all the dirty work of Pius VI. and his Sacred College, chose to make or not to make about her conduct.