He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the
business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had
been making love. He abandoned everything else for it--country, home,
money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany,
and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without
which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not
reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his
sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his
former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in
that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet's expatriation. The
long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent
chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this
time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that
relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century,
with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The
countess's husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of
the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil
destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were
difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not
perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial
grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to
bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead,
she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact
is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and
intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the
best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a
sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing
its ties, and after Alfieri's death the countess gave to the painter
Fabre "a heart which," says Massimo d'Azeglio in his Memoirs,