From Rome the Countess and her husband fared to Florence in 1774; and here matters went from bad to worse.  Charles was now seldom sober day or night; and his jealousy often found expression in filthy abuse and cowardly assaults.  Hitherto he had been simply disgusting; now he was a constant menace, even to her life.  She lived in hourly fear of his brutality; but in her darkest hour sunshine came again into her life with the coming of Vittorio Alfieri, whose name was to be linked with hers for so many years.

At this time Alfieri was in the very prime of his splendid manhood, one of the handsomest and most fascinating men in all Europe.  Some four years older than herself, he was a tall, stalwart, soldierly man, blue-eyed and auburn-haired, an aristocrat to his finger-tips, a daring horseman, a poet, and a man of rare culture—­just the man to set any woman’s heart a-flutter, as he had already done in most of the capitals of the Continent.

He was a spoilt child of fortune, this Italian poet and soldier, a man who had drunk deep of the cup of life, and to whom all conquests came with such fatal ease that already he had drained life dry of its pleasures.

Such was the man who one autumn day in the year 1777 came into the unhappy life of the Countess of Albany, still full of the passions and yearnings of youth.  It was surely fate that thus brought together these two young people of kindred tastes and kindred disillusions; and we cannot wonder that, of that first meeting, Alfieri should write, “At last I had met the one woman whom I had sought so long, the woman who could inspire my ambition and my work.  Recognising this, and prizing so rare a treasure, I gave myself up wholly to her.”

Those were happy days for the Countess that followed this fateful meeting—­days of sweet communion of twin souls, hours of stolen bliss, when they could dwell apart in a region of high and ennobling thoughts, while the besotted husband was sleeping off the effects of his drunken orgies in the next room.  To Alfieri, Louise was indeed “the anchor of his life,” giving stability to his vacillating nature, and inspiring all that was best and noblest in him; while to her the association with this “splendid creature,” who so thoroughly understood and sympathised with her, was the revelation of a new world.

Thus three happy years passed; and then the crisis came.  One night the Prince, in a mood of drunken madness, inflamed by jealousy, attacked his wife, and, after severely beating her, flung her down on her bed and attempted to strangle her.  This was the crowning outrage of years of brutality.  She could not, dared not, spend another day with such a madman.  At any cost she must leave him—­and for ever.