[Illustration: LOUISE, COUNTESS OF ALBANY _From a pastel once in the possession of the heirs of Fabre, now in the possession of Mrs. Horace Walpole, of Heckfield Place, Winchfield, Hants._]
For virtuous and patient all accounts unite in showing the young Countess of Albany to have been. In that corrupt Florence of the corrupt eighteenth century, where every married woman was furnished, within two years of her marriage, with an officially appointed lover who sat in her dressing-room while she was finishing her toilet, who accompanied her on all her visits, who attended her to balls and theatres, and, in fact, entirely replaced, by the strict social necessities of the system of cicisbeism, the husband, who was similarly employed about the wife of another; in this society, where conjugal infidelity was a social organisation supplemented by every kind of individual caprice of gallantry; where women were none the worse thought of if they added to the official _cavaliere servente_ a whole string of other lovers, varying from the Cardinals of the Holy Church to the singers who played women's parts, in powder and hoops, at the opera; in this world of jog-trot immorality, where jealousy was tolerated in lovers, but ridiculous in husbands, such a couple as the Count and Countess of Albany was indeed a source of pity, wonder, and amazement. But if a husband who barricaded his wife's room, never went out without her, nor permitted her to go out without him, who was never further off than the next room during the presence of any visitor, was a marvellous sight; still more marvellous was a beautiful and charming woman of twenty-three or twenty-four, who cast no glances of longing at the brilliant cavaliers all round her, who consoled her dreary prison-hours with reading hard enough for a professor at the university, and who showed towards the peevish, violent, disgustingly-ailing old toper who overshadowed her life with his presence nothing, as Horace Mann tells us, but attention and tenderness. The fact is that Louise of Stolberg, much as her subsequent life and ways of thought proved her to be a woman of the eighteenth century, and not at all above the eighteenth century's easy-going habits and conventional ideas, was a kind of woman rare at all times and rarest of all in a time like her own, With a kindly and affectionate temper, the immense bulk of her nature, the overbalance, the top-heaviness of it, was intellectual; and intellectual not in the sense of the ready society intelligence, so common among eighteenth-century women, but in the sense of actual engrossing interest and in abstract questions and ideals. The portraits done of her immediately after her marriage show, as I have said, a remarkably childish person; and childish, without much ballast of passion or even likings, the likeness sketched by Bonstetten seems certainly to show her. But there are women who, while immature as women and human beings, are precocious as intellects, and in whom the character, instead of rapidly developing itself by the force of its own emotions and passions, seems in a manner to be called into existence by the intelligence: retarded natures, in whom the thoughts seem to determine the feelings. Of this sort, I think, we must imagine the Countess of Albany, if we would understand the anomalies of her life: a person rather deficient in sensitiveness; indifferent, light-hearted, in her girlhood; not rebelling against the frightful negativeness of existence, the want of love, of youth, of brightness, of all that a young girl can want in the early part of her married life; not rebelling against the positive miseries, the constant presence of everything that was mentally and physically loathsome in the second period of this wedded slavery; a woman of cold temperament, and even, you might say, of cold heart, and safe, safe in the routine of duty and suffering, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, white and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical problems; and going through life by the side of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, perhaps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and probably not envying other women their meaningless liberty, their inane lovers, their empty wholeness of life.