Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri; and such, at the age of seventy-two, did death overtake her, on the 29th January 1824. Her property she bequeathed to Fabre whom a false rumour had called her husband; and Fabre left it jointly to his native town of Montpellier, and to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, who still lives and recollects Mme. d'Albany.
The famous epitaph, composed by Alfieri for himself, had been mangled by Mme. d'Albany and those who helped her and Canova in devising his tomb; the companion epitaph, the one in which Alfieri described the Countess as buried next to him, was also mangled in its adaptation to a tomb erected in Santa Croce, entirely separate from Alfieri's. On that monument of Mme. d'Albany, in the chapel where moulder the frescoes of Masolino, there is not a word of that sentence of Alfieri's about the dead woman having been to him dearer and more respected than any other human thing. Mme. d'Albany had changed into quite another being between 1803 and 1824; the friend of Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Staël, the worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have no connection with the lady who had wept for Alfieri in the convent at Rome, who had borne with all Alfieri's misanthropic furies after the Revolution, any more than with the delicate intellectual girl whom Charles Edward had nearly done to death in his drunken jealousy. So, on the whole, Fabre, and whosoever assisted Fabre, was right in concocting a new epitaph.
But to us, who have followed the career--whose lesson is that of the meanness which lurks in noble things, the nobility which lurks in mean ones--of this woman from her inauspicious wedding-day to the placid day of her death, to us Louise of Stolberg, Countess of Albany, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, will remain, for all blame we may give her and her times, a figure to remember and reflect upon, principally because of those suppressed words of her epitaph: "_A Victorio Alferio ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et observata._"
1: I have purposely quoted, almost textually, the account given by Ewald, lest I should be accused of following Alfieri's vague version.