The one year's residence in Paris, which Napoleon's jealous meddlesomeness forced upon her, was, in itself, a very enjoyable time, spent with the friends whom she had left in '93, and with a whole host of new ones whom she had made since. She returned to Florence with a larger number of devoted correspondents than ever; her salon became more and more brilliant; and when, after Waterloo, the whole English world of politics, fashion, and letters poured on to the Continent, her house became, as Sismondi said, the wall on which all the most brilliant figures of the great magic lantern were projected.
Thus, seeing crowds of the most distinguished and delightful people, receiving piles of the most interesting and adoring letters, happy, self-satisfied, Mme. d'Albany grew into an old woman. Every evening until ten, the rooms of the Casa Alfieri were thrown open; the servants in the Stuart liveries ushered in the guests, the tea was served in those famous services emblazoned with the royal arms of England. The Countess had not yet abandoned her regal pretensions; for all her condescending cordiality towards the elect, she could assume airs of social superiority which some folk scarcely brooked, and she was evidently pleased when, half in earnest, Mme. de Staël addressed her as "My dear Sovereign," "My dear Queen," and even when that vulgar woman of genius, Lady Morgan, made a buffoonish scene about the "dead usurper," on the death of George III. But Mme. d'Albany herself was getting to look and talk less and less like a queen, either the Queen of Great Britain or the Queen of Hearts; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed with an eternal red shawl (now the property of an intimate friend of mine), in a dress extremely suggestive of an old house-keeper. She was, when not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in manner, loving to have children about her, to spoil them with cakes and see them romp and dance; free and easy, cynical, Rabelaisian, if I may use the expression, as such mongrel Frenchwomen are apt to grow with years; the nick-name which she gave to a member of a family where the tradition of her and her ways still persists, reveals a wealth of coarse fun which is rather strange in a woman who was once the Beatrice or Laura of a poet. She was active, mentally and bodily, never giving up her multifarious reading, her letter-writing; never foregoing her invariable morning walk, in a big bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the Lung Arno and into the Cascine.