At which, with a stare and a straightening of his long awkward body, the other haughtily returned:  “A poet, sir?  I am the Count Vittorio Alfieri of Asti.”

1.9.

The singular being with whom chance had thus brought him acquainted was to have a lasting influence on the formation of Odo’s character.

Vittorio Alfieri, then just concluding, at the age of sixteen, his desultory years of academic schooling, was probably the most extraordinary youth in Charles Emmanuel’s dominion.  Of the future student, of the tragic poet who was to prepare the liberation of Italy by raising the political ideals of his generation, this moody boy with his craze for dress and horses, his pride of birth and contempt for his own class, his liberal theories and insolently aristocratic practice, must have given small promise to the most discerning observer.  It seems indeed probable that none thought him worth observing and that he passed among his townsmen merely as one of the most idle and extravagant young noblemen in a society where idleness and extravagance were held to be the natural attributes of the great.  But in the growth of character the light on the road to Damascus is apt to be preceded by faint premonitory gleams; and even in his frivolous days at the Academy Alfieri carried a Virgil in his pocket and wept and trembled over Ariosto’s verse.

It was the instant response of Odo’s imagination that drew the two together.  Odo, as one of the foreign pupils, was quartered in the same wing of the Academy with the students of Alfieri’s class, and enjoyed an almost equal freedom.  Thus, despite the difference of age, the lads found themselves allied by taste and circumstances.  Among the youth of their class they were perhaps the only two who already felt, however obscurely, the stirring of unborn ideals, the pressure of that tide of renovation that was to sweep them, on widely-sundered currents, to the same uncharted deep.  Alfieri, at any rate, represented to the younger lad the seer who held in his hands the keys of knowledge and beauty.  Odo could never forget the youth who first leant him Annibale Caro’s Aeneid and Metastasio’s opera libretti, Voltaire’s Zaire and the comedies of Goldoni; while Alfieri perhaps found in his companion’s sympathy with his own half-dormant tastes the first incentive to a nobler activity.  Certain it is that, in the interchange of their daily comradeship, the elder gave his friend much that he was himself unconscious of possessing, and perhaps first saw reflected in Odo’s more vivid sensibility an outline of the formless ideals coiled in the depths of his own sluggish nature.

The difference in age, and the possession of an independent fortune, which the laws of Savoy had left Alfieri free to enjoy since his fifteenth year, gave him an obvious superiority over Odo; but if Alfieri’s amusements separated him from his young friend, his tastes were always drawing them together; and Odo was happily of those who are more engaged in profiting by what comes their way than in pining for what escapes them.  Much as he admired Alfieri, it was somehow impossible for the latter to condescend to him; and the equality of intercourse between the two was perhaps its chief attraction to a youth surfeited with adulation.