"The man who is the object of all this pomp is he whom I envy least?" The Pretender's was not a happy union; the Countess of Albany separated from him and fixed her residence in Rome: it was there that another traveller, Bonstetten[639], met her; the Bernese gentleman, in his old age, gave me to understand, at Geneva, that he had letters written in the first youth of the Countess of Albany[640]. Alfieri saw the wife of the Pretender at Florence, and fell in love with her for life: "Twelve years afterwards," he says, "at the moment I am writing, and at an age when the illusions of the passions have ceased to operate, I feel that I become daily more attached to her, in proportion as time destroys the brilliancy of her fleeting beauty, the only charm which she owes not to herself. Whenever I reflect on her virtues, my soul is elevated, improved and tranquillized, and I dare to affirm that the feelings of her mind, which I have uniformly endeavoured to fortify and confirm, are not dissimilar to my own[641]." I have met Madame d'Albany at Florence; age had apparently produced in her an effect contrary to that which it generally produces: time ennobles the countenance and, when it belongs to an old race, imprints some trace of that race on the brow which it has marked; the Countess of Albany was thick-set, with expressionless features and a common air. If the women in Rubens' pictures were to grow old, they would be like Madame d'Albany at the age at which I met her. I am sorry that that heart, "fortified and confirmed" by Alfieri, should have had need of another support[642]. I will here recall a passage from my Letter on Rome to M. de Fontanes: "Do you know that I only once saw Count Alfieri in my life, and could you guess how? I saw him laid in his bier: I was told that he had hardly altered; his physiognomy appeared to me to be noble and grave; death doubtless gave it an added severity; the coffin was a little too short, and they bent the dead man's head upon his breast, which caused him to make a terrible movement." Nothing is so sad as, at the end of our days, to read what we have written in our youth: all that was in the present is now in the past. [Sidenote: King Henry IX.] I saw for a moment in Rome, in 1803, the Cardinal of York, Henry IX., that last of the Stuarts[643], then seventy-nine years of age. He had had the weakness to accept a pension from George III.: the widow of Charles I.[644] had in vain begged one from Cromwell. Thus the House of Stuart took one hundred and nineteen years to die out after losing the throne which it never recovered. Three pretenders have handed on to one another in exile the shadow of a crown; they had intelligence and courage: what did they lack? The hand of God.