Thus she runs on, repeating and re-repeating the same ideas, the same words, her love for Alfieri, her desperate situation, her hatred of life, her uselessness, her desire to play the harp well for Alfieri's sake, her hopes that Charles Edward may die; disconnected phrases, run into each other without so much as a comma or a full stop (since I have had to punctuate my translation, at least partially, to make it intelligible); the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discursive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as suddenly coming to a dead stop; everything rattled off as if between two sobs or two convulsions. Did Alfieri enjoy receiving letters such as these? Doubtless: they were echoes of his own ravings; fuel for his own passion and vanity. It did not strike him, for all the Greek and Roman heroes and heroines whom he had made to speak with stoical, unflinching curtness, that there could be anything to move shame, and compassion sickened by shame, in the fact that this should be the expression of that high and pure love imitated from Dante and Petrarch. What could he do? Give up Louise d'Albany, forget her; and bid her, who lived only in him, whom a few years must free, forget him at the price of breaking her heart? Certainly not. But he, the man, the man free to move about, to work, with friends and occupations, should surely have tried to teach resignation and patience to this poor lonely, sick, hysterical woman, pointing out to her that if only they would wait, and wait courageously, the moment of liberation and happiness must come. Surely more difficult and humiliating for this lover to bear than the sight of his lady degraded by the foul words and deeds of the drunken Pretender, ought to have been the reading of such letters as these; the sight of this once calm and dignified woman, of this Beatrice or Laura, in her disconnected hysterical ravings. And for myself, the thought of all that the Countess of Albany endured at the hands of Charles Edward awakens less pity, though pity mixed with indignation at the fate which humiliated her so deeply, and with shame for that deep humiliation, than that sudden cry with which she stops in the midst of the light-headed gabble about her miseries, and seems to start back ashamed as at the sight of her passion and tear-defiled face in a mirror: "What a cruel thing to expect one's happiness from the death of another! O God! how it degrades one's soul!" CHAPTER XII. COLMAR. "On the 17th August 1784, at eight in the morning, at the inn of the _Two Keys_, Colmar, I met her, and remained speechless from excess of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on the margin of one of his lyrics.