The meeting between the two friends was all that Odo could have wished.  Though affecting to scorn the courts of princes, Alfieri was not averse to showing himself there as the poet of the democracy, and to hearing his heroes mouth their tyrannicidal speeches on the boards of royal and ducal stages.  He had lately made some stay in Milan, where he had arrived in time to see his Antigone performed before the vice-regal court, and to be enthusiastically acclaimed as the high-priest of liberty by a community living placidly under the Austrian yoke.  Alfieri was not the man to be struck by such incongruities.  It was his fate to formulate creeds in which he had no faith:  to recreate the political ideals of Italy while bitterly opposed to any actual effort at reform, and to be regarded as the mouthpiece of the Revolution while he execrated the Revolution with the whole force of his traditional instincts.  As usual he was too deeply engrossed in his own affairs to feel much interest in any others; but it was enough for Odo to clasp the hand of the man who had given a voice to the highest aspirations of his countrymen.  The poet gave more than he could expect from the friend; and he was satisfied to listen to Alfieri’s account of his triumphs, interspersed with bitter diatribes against the public whose applause he courted, and the Pope to whom, on bended knee, he had offered a copy of his plays.

Odo eagerly pressed Alfieri to remain in Pianura, offering to put one of the ducal villas at his disposal, and suggesting that the Virginia should be performed before the court on the Duchess’s birthday.

“It is true,” he said, “that we can offer you but an indifferent company of actors; but it might be possible to obtain one or two of the leading tragedians from Turin or Milan, so that the principal parts should at least be worthily filled.”

Alfieri replied with a contemptuous gesture.  “Your Highness, our leading tragedians are monkeys trained to dance to the tune of Goldoni and Metastasio.  The best are no better than the worst.  We have no tragedians in Italy because—­hitherto—­we have had no tragic dramatist.”  He drew himself up and thrust a hand in his bosom.  “Ah!” he exclaimed, “if I could see the part of Virginia acted by the lady who recently recited, before a small company in Milan, my Odes to Free America!  There indeed were fire, sublimity and passion!  And the countenance had not lost its freshness, the eye its lustre.  But,” he suddenly added, “your Highness knows of whom I speak.  The lady is Fulvia Vivaldi, the daughter of the philosopher at whose feet we sat in our youth.”

Fulvia Vivaldi!  Odo raised his head with a start.  She had left Geneva then, had returned to Italy.  The Alps no longer divided them—­a scant day’s journey would bring him to her side!  It was strange how the mere thought seemed to fill the room with her presence.  He felt her in the quickened beat of his pulses, in the sudden lightness of the air, in a lifting and widening of the very bounds of thought.