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