of democratic ideas meant simply that his French investments had shrunk to nothing, and that he, the greatest poet of the age, had been obliged, at an immense sacrifice of personal dignity, to plead with a drunken mob for leave to escape from Paris.  To the wider aspect of the “tragic farce,” as he called it, his eyes remained obstinately closed.  He viewed the whole revolutionary movement as a conspiracy against his comfort, and boasted that during his enforced residence in France he had not so much as exchanged a word with one of the “French slaves, instigators of false liberty,” who, by trying to put into action the principles taught in his previous works, had so grievously interfered with the composition of fresh masterpieces.

The royal pretensions of the Countess of Albany—­pretentions affirmed rather than abated as the tide of revolution rose—­made it impossible that she should be received at the court of Pianura; but the Duke found a mild entertainment in Alfieri’s company.  The poet’s revulsion of feeling seemed to Odo like the ironic laughter of the fates.  His thoughts returned to the midnight meetings of the Honey Bees, and to the first vision of that face which men had lain down their lives to see.  Men had looked on that face since then, and its horror was reflected in their own.

Other fugitives to Pianura brought another impression of events—­that comic note which life, the supreme dramatic artist, never omits from her tragedies.  These were the Duke’s old friend the Marquis de Coeur-Volant, fleeing from his chateau as the peasants put the torch to it, and arriving in Pianura destitute, gouty and middle-aged, but imperturbable and epigrammatic as ever.  With him came his Marquise, a dark-eyed lady, stout to unwieldiness and much given to devotion, in whom it was whispered (though he introduced her as the daughter of a Venetian Senator) that a reminiscent eye might still detect the outline of the gracefullest Columbine who had ever flitted across the Italian stage.  These visitors were lodged by the Duke’s kindness in the Palazzo Cerveno, near the ducal residence; and though the ladies of Pianura were inclined to look askance on the Marquise’s genealogy, yet his Highness’s condescension, and her own edifying piety, had soon allayed these scruples, and the salon of Madame de Coeur-Volant became the rival of Madame d’Albany’s.

It was, in fact, the more entertaining of the two; for, in spite of his lady’s austere views, the Marquis retained that gift of social flexibility that was already becoming the tradition of a happier day.  To the Marquis, indeed, the revolution was execrable not so much because of the hardships it inflicted, as because it was the forerunner of social dissolution—­the breaking-up of the regime which had made manners the highest morality, and conversation the chief end of man.  He could have lived gaily on a crust in good company and amid smiling faces; but the social deficiencies of Pianura were more difficult to endure