deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other
revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his
blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many
years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both
our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no
experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;" though
here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his
ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a
servant except as he would have done an equal--not with a cane, but
with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he
seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When
at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of
mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he
tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie
him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A
violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled
gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own
use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he
rose he was no longer a slave to his passion. Shortly after, he wrote
a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called
Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of
which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.

Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his
qualifications for tragical authorship being "a resolute spirit, very
obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every
kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its
furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against
all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of
various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ...