could not find in her husband it was Louise of Albany. There were dames in plenty in Rome (where they were now living) who, not content with devoted husbands, had their cisibeos to play the lover to them; but Louise sought no such questionable escape from her unhappiness. Her books and the clever men who thronged her salon were all the solace she asked; and under temptation such as few women of that country and day would have resisted, she carried the shield of a blameless life.

From Rome the Countess and her husband fared to Florence in 1774; and here matters went from bad to worse. Charles was now seldom sober day or night; and his jealousy often found expression in filthy abuse and cowardly assaults. Hitherto he had been simply disgusting; now he was a constant menace, even to her life. She lived in hourly fear of his brutality; but in her darkest hour sunshine came again into her life with the coming of Vittorio Alfieri, whose name was to be linked with hers for so many years.

At this time Alfieri was in the very prime of his splendid manhood, one of the handsomest and most fascinating men in all Europe. Some four years older than herself, he was a tall, stalwart, soldierly man, blue-eyed and auburn-haired, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, a daring horseman, a poet, and a man of rare culture—just the man to set any woman's heart a-flutter, as he had already done in most of the capitals of the Continent.

He was a spoilt child of fortune, this Italian poet and soldier, a man who had drunk deep of the cup of life, and to whom all conquests came with such fatal ease that already he had drained life dry of its pleasures.

Such was the man who one autumn day in the year 1777 came into the unhappy life of the Countess of Albany, still full of the passions and yearnings of youth. It was surely fate that thus brought together these two young people of kindred tastes and kindred disillusions; and we cannot wonder that, of that first meeting, Alfieri should write, "At last I had met the one woman whom I had sought so long, the woman who could inspire my ambition and my work. Recognising this, and prizing so rare a treasure, I gave myself up wholly to her."

Those were happy days for the Countess that followed this fateful meeting—days of sweet communion of twin souls, hours of stolen bliss, when they could dwell apart in a region of high and ennobling thoughts, while the besotted husband was sleeping off the effects of his drunken orgies in the next room. To Alfieri, Louise was indeed "the anchor of his life," giving stability to his vacillating nature, and inspiring all that was best and noblest in him; while to her the association with this "splendid creature," who so thoroughly understood and sympathised with her, was the revelation of a new world.

Thus three happy years passed; and then the crisis came. One night the Prince, in a mood of drunken madness, inflamed by jealousy, attacked his wife, and, after severely beating her, flung her down on her bed and attempted to strangle her. This was the crowning outrage of years of brutality. She could not, dared not, spend another day with such a madman. At any cost she must leave him—and for ever.

When morning came, with Alfieri's assistance, the plan of escape was arranged. In the company of a lady friend—and also of her husband, now scared and penitent, but fearing to let her out of his sight—she drove to a neighbouring convent, ostensibly to inspect the nuns' needlework. On reaching her destination she ran up the convent steps, entered the building, and the door was slammed and bolted behind her in the very face of Charles Edward, who had followed as fast as his dropsical legs would carry him up the steps. The Prince, blazing at such an outrage, hammered fiercely at the door until at last the Lady Abbess herself showed her face at the grating, and told him in no ambiguous words that he would not be allowed to enter! His wife had come to her for protection; and if he had any grievance he had better appeal to the Duke of Tuscany.

Thus ended the tragic union of the "Bonnie Prince" and his Countess. Emancipation had come at last; and, while Louise was now free to devote her life to her beloved Alfieri, her brutal husband was left for eight years to the company of his bottle and the ministrations of his natural daughter, until a drunkard's grave at Frascati closed over his mis-spent life. The pity and the tragedy of it!

Louise of Albany and her poet-lover were now free to link their lives at the altar—but no such thought seems to have entered the head of either. They were perfectly happy without the bond of the wedding-ring, of which the Countess had such terrible memories; and together they walked through life, happy in each other and indifferent to the world's opinion.

Now in Florence, now in Rome; living together in Alsace, drifting to Paris; and, when the Revolution drove them from the French capital, seeking refuge in London, where we find the uncrowned Queen of England chatting amicably with the "usurper" George in the Royal box at the opera—always inseparable, and Louise always clinging to the shreds of her Royal dignity, with a throne in her ante-room, and "Your Majesty" on her servants' lips. Thus passed the careless, happy years for Countess and poet until, in 1803, Alfieri followed the "Bonnie Prince" behind the veil, and left a desolate Louise to moan amid her tears, "There is no more happiness for me."

But Louise was not left even now without the solace of a man's love, which seemed as indispensable to her nature as the air she breathed. Before Alfieri had been many months in his Florence tomb his place by the Countess's side had been taken by François Xavier Fabre, a good-looking painter of only moderate gifts, whose handsome face, plausible tongue, and sunny disposition soon made a captive of her middle-aged heart. At the time when Fabre came thus into her life Madame la Comtesse had passed her fiftieth birthday—youth and beauty had taken wings; and passion (if ever she had any—for her relations with Alfieri seem to have been quite platonic) had died down to its embers.

But a man's companionship and homage were always necessary to her, and in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier. Her salon now became more popular even than in the days of her young wifehood. It drew to it all the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship, letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture and with such rare gifts of conversation.

That she was now middle-aged, stout and dowdy—"like a cook with pretty hands," as Stendhal said of her—mattered nothing to her admirers, many of whom remembered her in the days of her lovely youth. She was, in their eyes, as much a Queen as if she wore a crown; and, moreover, she was a woman of magnetic charm and clever brain.

And thus, with her books and her salon and her cavalier, she spent the rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her beloved Alfieri. In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers sleep together their last sleep, beneath a beautiful monument fashioned by Canova's hands—Louise, wife of the "Bonnie Prince" (as we still choose to remember him) and Vittorio Alfieri, to whom, to quote his own words, "she was beyond all things beloved."

CHAPTER III

THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS

Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the "playthings of an hour"; and at least three of them have carried this contempt to the altar itself.

Peter, the first, as we have seen, offered a crown to Martha Skovronski, a Livonian scullery-maid,