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.