[Illustration: Louise of Stolberg (Countess of Albany)] The Marquis Capponi[62] arrived from Florence, bringing me letters of recommendation from ladies in Paris. I replied to one of these letters on the 21st of March 1829: "I have received your letters: the services I am able to do are nothing, but I am entirely at your orders. I was already well acquainted with the Marquis Capponi's merits. I can tell you that he is still good-looking; he has weathered time. I did not answer your first letter, so full of enthusiasm for the sublime Mahmud and for 'disciplined' barbarism, for those slaves 'bastinadoed' into soldiers[63]. I can imagine that women are carried away with admiration for men who marry hundreds of them at a time, and that they take that for the progress of enlightenment and civilization; but, as for me, I cling to my poor Greeks; I desire their liberty as I do that of France. I also want frontiers which will cover Paris and ensure our independence; and it is not by means of the triple alliance of the pale of Constantinople, the _schlag_ of Vienna and the fisticuffs of London that you will obtain the bank of the Rhine. Many thanks for the fur-coat of honour which our glory might obtain from the invincible Commander of the Faithful, who has not yet sallied from the outskirts of his seraglio; I prefer that glory naked; she is a woman and beautiful: Phidias would certainly never have robed her in a Turkish dressing-gown." TO MADAME RÉCAMIER ROME, 21 _March_ 1829. "Well, I am right and you are wrong! I went yesterday, between two ballots and while waiting for a pope, to Sant' Onofrio: and it is two _orange-trees_ that grow in the cloister, and not an evergreen oak. I am quite proud of this fidelity of my memory. I ran, almost with my eyes shut, to the little stone that covers your friend; I prefer it to the great monument they are going to raise to him. What a charming solitude! What an admirable view! What happiness to lie there between the frescoes of Domenichino[64] and Leonardo da Vinci! I wish I were there, I never felt so tempted. Did they let you enter the interior of the convent? Did you see, in a long corridor, that delicious, though half-obliterated, head of a Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci? Did you see in the library Tasso's mask, his withered laurel-wreath, a mirror which he used, his ink-stand, his pen and the letter written by his hand, pasted to a board that hangs below his bust? In this letter, in a small, scratched-out, but easily legible hand, he speaks of 'friendship' and the 'wind of fortune;' the latter scarcely ever blew for him, and the former often failed him.