The Countess of Albany

_From a pastel, painter unknown, once in the possession of the heir of the Countess of Albany's heir Fabre. Now in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Win...

On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week of the year 1772 the inhabitants of the squalid and dilapidated little mountain towns between Ancona and Loreto were thrown into great...

On the Wednesday after Easter the bride and bridegroom made their solemn entry into Rome; the two travelling carriages of the Prince and of the Princess were drawn by six horses...

Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or at least refrained from any excesses, in honour of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that France was again taking him up, a notion wel...

In 1765 Horace Walpole, mentioning the now-ascertained fact of the Pretender's abjuration of Catholicism, informed his friend Mann that a rumour was about that Charles Edward ha...

It is quite impossible to tell the precise moment at which began what Horace Mann, most light-hearted and chirpy of diplomatists, called the Countess of Albany's martyrdom. As w...

The childhood and early youth of Vittorio Alfieri had been strangely vacant, dreary, one might almost say intellectually and morally sordid; and the strangest, the dreariest cir...

Alfieri's greatest terror in life was to fall in love once more. All his love affairs had been degrading to his good sense, his will and his manhood; they had been odious, even...

Alfieri's fears had been groundless. His love for the wife of Charles Edward Stuart--a love, he tells us, quite different from any he had previously experienced, quiet, pure, an...

This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, as it were, of two long-repressed, long solitary intellectual lives, austerely satisfied with itself and contemptuous of all base...

About three months after the Countess of Albany's flight from her husband, the Pope granted her permission to leave the Ursuline convent; and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York,...

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 faultle...

"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...

Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme simplicity of mind and gentleness of spirit, was still living at Asti, cheerfully depriving herself of every luxury in order to devote h...

The well-born and amusing people of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century did not stickle at the question of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel...

The contradictions in complex and self-contradictory characters like those of the Frenchmen of the early revolution can be easily explained, and, say what we will, must be easil...

Alfieri and Madame d'Albany were scarcely back in Paris, and settled in a new house, when the disorders in Paris and the movements of the Imperial troops on the frontier began t...

Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened the house on the Lung Arno. A room was filled with chairs, arranged with curtains, an...

"Happiness has disappeared out of the world for me," wrote Mme. d'Albany, in January 1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. "I take interest in nothing; the world might b...

A shadowy being, nay, a shadow cast in the unmistakable shape of another, so long as Alfieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems to gain consistency and form, to become a su...

With her other friends, who gave less of their own heart and asked less of hers, Mme. d'Albany was more fortunate. She contrived to connect herself by correspondence with the mo...