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Title: Famous Affinities of History (Complete)
       The Romance of Devotion
ŒFú‰^øëeÄ^ø&€uN&Ä_&ƒ
Author: Lyndon Orr

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FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY

THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION

BY LYNDON ORR

VOLUME I OF IV.





CONTENTS


THE STORY OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
ABELARD AND HELOISE
QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE EARL OF LEICESTER
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND LORD BOTHWELL
QUEEN CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN AND THE MARQUIS MONALDESCHI
KING CHARLES II. AND NELL GWYN
MAURICE OF SAXONY AND ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR
THE STORY OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART





THE STORY OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA


Of all love stories that are known to human history, the love
story of Antony and Cleopatra has been for nineteen centuries the
most remarkable. It has tasked the resources of the plastic and
the graphic arts. It has been made the theme of poets and of prose
narrators. It has appeared and reappeared in a thousand forms, and
it appeals as much to the imagination to-day as it did when Antony
deserted his almost victorious troops and hastened in a swift
galley from Actium in pursuit of Cleopatra.

The wonder of the story is explained by its extraordinary nature.
Many men in private life have lost fortune and fame for the love
of woman. Kings have incurred the odium of their people, and have
cared nothing for it in comparison with the joys of sense that
come from the lingering caresses and clinging kisses. Cold-blooded
statesmen, such as Parnell, have lost the leadership of their
party and have gone down in history with a clouded name because of
the fascination exercised upon them by some woman, often far from
beautiful, and yet possessing the mysterious power which makes the
triumphs of statesmanship seem slight in comparison with the
swiftly flying hours of pleasure.

But in the case of Antony and Cleopatra alone do we find a man
flinging away not merely the triumphs of civic honors or the
headship of a state, but much more than these--the mastery of what
was practically the world--in answer to the promptings of a
woman's will. Hence the story of the Roman triumvir and the
Egyptian queen is not like any other story that has yet been told.
The sacrifice involved in it was so overwhelming, so
instantaneous, and so complete as to set this narrative above all
others. Shakespeare's genius has touched it with the glory of a
great imagination. Dryden, using it in the finest of his plays,
expressed its nature in the title "All for Love."

The distinguished Italian historian, Signor Ferrero, the author of
many books, has tried hard to eliminate nearly all the romantic
elements from the tale, and to have us see in it not the triumph
of love, but the blindness of ambition. Under his handling it
becomes almost a sordid drama of man's pursuit of power and of
woman's selfishness. Let us review the story as it remains, even
after we have taken full account of Ferrero's criticism. Has the
world for nineteen hundred years been blinded by a show of
sentiment? Has it so absolutely been misled by those who lived and
wrote in the days which followed closely on the events that make
up this extraordinary narrative?

In answering these questions we must consider, in the first place,
the scene, and, in the second place, the psychology of the two
central characters who for so long a time have been regarded as
the very embodiment of unchecked passion.

As to the scene, it must be remembered that the Egypt of those
days was not Egyptian as we understand the word, but rather Greek.
Cleopatra herself was of Greek descent. The kingdom of Egypt had
been created by a general of Alexander the Great after that
splendid warrior's death. Its capital, the most brilliant city of
the Greco-Roman world, had been founded by Alexander himself, who
gave to it his name. With his own hands he traced out the limits
of the city and issued the most peremptory orders that it should
be made the metropolis of the entire world. The orders of a king
cannot give enduring greatness to a city; but Alexander's keen eye
and marvelous brain saw at once that the site of Alexandria was
such that a great commercial community planted there would live
and flourish throughout out succeeding ages. He was right; for
within a century this new capital of Egypt leaped to the forefront
among the exchanges of the world's commerce, while everything that
art could do was lavished on its embellishment.

Alexandria lay upon a projecting tongue of land so situated that
the whole trade of the Mediterranean centered there. Down the Nile
there floated to its gates the barbaric wealth of Africa. To it
came the treasures of the East, brought from afar by caravans--
silks from China, spices and pearls from India, and enormous
masses of gold and silver from lands scarcely known. In its harbor
were the vessels of every country, from Asia in the East to Spain
and Gaul and even Britain in the West.

When Cleopatra, a young girl of seventeen, succeeded to the throne
of Egypt the population of Alexandria amounted to a million souls.
The customs duties collected at the port would, in terms of modern
money, amount each year to more than thirty million dollars, even
though the imposts were not heavy. The people, who may be
described as Greek at the top and Oriental at the bottom, were
boisterous and pleasure-loving, devoted to splendid spectacles,
with horse-racing, gambling, and dissipation; yet at the same time
they were an artistic people, loving music passionately, and by no
means idle, since one part of the city was devoted to large and
prosperous manufactories of linen, paper, glass, and muslin.

To the outward eye Alexandria was extremely beautiful. Through its
entire length ran two great boulevards, shaded and diversified by
mighty trees and parterres of multicolored flowers, amid which
fountains plashed and costly marbles gleamed. One-fifth of the
whole city was known as the Royal Residence. In it were the
palaces of the reigning family, the great museum, and the famous
library which the Arabs later burned. There were parks and gardens
brilliant with tropical foliage and adorned with the masterpieces
of Grecian sculpture, while sphinxes and obelisks gave a
suggestion of Oriental strangeness. As one looked seaward his eye
beheld over the blue water the snow-white rocks of the sheltering
island, Pharos, on which was reared a lighthouse four hundred feet
in height and justly numbered among the seven wonders of the
world. Altogether, Alexandria was a city of wealth, of beauty, of
stirring life, of excitement, and of pleasure. Ferrero has aptly
likened it to Paris--not so much the Paris of to-day as the Paris
of forty years ago, when the Second Empire flourished in all its
splendor as the home of joy and strange delights.

Over the country of which Alexandria was the capital Cleopatra
came to reign at seventeen. Following the odd custom which the
Greek dynasty of the Ptolemies had inherited from their Egyptian
predecessors, she was betrothed to her own brother. He, however,
was a mere child of less than twelve, and was under the control of
evil counselors, who, in his name, gained control of the capital
and drove Cleopatra into exile. Until then she had been a mere
girl; but now the spirit of a woman who was wronged blazed up in
her and called out all her latent powers. Hastening to Syria, she
gathered about herself an army and led it against her foes.

But meanwhile Julius Caesar, the greatest man of ancient times,
had arrived at Alexandria backed by an army of his veterans.
Against him no resistance would avail. Then came a brief moment
during which the Egyptian king and the Egyptian queen each strove
to win the favor of the Roman imperator. The king and his advisers
had many arts, and so had Cleopatra. One thing, however, she
possessed which struck the balance in her favor, and this was a
woman's fascination.

According to the story, Caesar was unwilling to receive her. There
came into his presence, as he sat in the palace, a group of slaves
bearing a long roll of matting, bound carefully and seeming to
contain some precious work of art. The slaves made signs that they
were bearing a gift to Caesar. The master of Egypt bade them
unwrap the gift that he might see it. They did so, and out of the
wrapping came Cleopatra--a radiant vision, appealing,
irresistible. Next morning it became known everywhere that
Cleopatra had remained in Caesar's quarters through the night and
that her enemies were now his enemies. In desperation they rushed
upon his legions, casting aside all pretense of amity. There
ensued a fierce contest, but the revolt was quenched in blood.

This was a crucial moment in Cleopatra's life. She had sacrificed
all that a woman has to give; but she had not done so from any
love of pleasure or from wantonness. She was queen of Egypt, and
she had redeemed her kingdom and kept it by her sacrifice. One
should not condemn her too severely. In a sense, her act was one
of heroism like that of Judith in the tent of Holofernes. But
beyond all question it changed her character. It taught her the
secret of her own great power. Henceforth she was no longer a mere
girl, nor a woman of the ordinary type. Her contact with so great
a mind as Caesar's quickened her intellect. Her knowledge that, by
the charms of sense, she had mastered even him transformed her
into a strange and wonderful creature. She learned to study the
weaknesses of men, to play on their emotions, to appeal to every
subtle taste and fancy. In her were blended mental power and that
illusive, indefinable gift which is called charm.

For Cleopatra was never beautiful. Signor Ferrero seems to think
this fact to be discovery of his own, but it was set down by
Plutarch in a very striking passage written less than a century
after Cleopatra and Antony died. We may quote here what the Greek
historian said of her:

Her actual beauty was far from being so remarkable that none could
be compared with her, nor was it such that it would strike your
fancy when you saw her first. Yet the influence of her presence,
if you lingered near her, was irresistible. Her attractive
personality, joined with the charm of her conversation, and the
individual touch that she gave to everything she said or did, were
utterly bewitching. It was delightful merely to hear the music of
her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she
could pass from one language to another.

Caesar had left Cleopatra firmly seated on the throne of Egypt.
For six years she reigned with great intelligence, keeping order
in her dominions, and patronizing with discrimination both arts
and letters. But ere long the convulsions of the Roman state once
more caused her extreme anxiety. Caesar had been assassinated, and
there ensued a period of civil war. Out of it emerged two striking
figures which were absolutely contrasted in their character. One
was Octavian, the adopted son of Caesar, a man who, though still
quite young and possessed of great ability, was cunning, cold-
blooded, and deceitful. The other was Antony, a soldier by
training, and with all a soldier's bluntness, courage, and
lawlessness.

The Roman world was divided for the time between these two men,
Antony receiving the government of the East, Octavian that of the
West. In the year which had preceded this division Cleopatra had
wavered between the two opposite factions at Rome. In so doing she
had excited the suspicion of Antony, and he now demanded of her an
explanation.

One must have some conception of Antony himself in order to
understand the events that followed. He was essentially a soldier,
of excellent family, being related to Caesar himself. As a very
young man he was exceedingly handsome, and bad companions led him
into the pursuit of vicious pleasure. He had scarcely come of age
when he found that he owed the enormous sum of two hundred and
fifty talents, equivalent to half a million dollars in the money
of to-day. But he was much more than a mere man of pleasure, given
over to drinking and to dissipation. Men might tell of his
escapades, as when he drove about the streets of Rome in a common
cab, dangling his legs out of the window while he shouted forth
drunken songs of revelry. This was not the whole of Antony.
Joining the Roman army in Syria, he showed himself to be a soldier
of great personal bravery, a clever strategist, and also humane
and merciful in the hour of victory.

Unlike most Romans, Antony wore a full beard. His forehead was
large, and his nose was of the distinctive Roman type. His look
was so bold and masculine that people likened him to Hercules. His
democratic manners endeared him to the army. He wore a plain tunic
covered with a large, coarse mantle, and carried a huge sword at
his side, despising ostentation. Even his faults and follies added
to his popularity. He would sit down at the common soldiers' mess
and drink with them, telling them stories and clapping them on the
back. He spent money like water, quickly recognizing any daring
deed which his legionaries performed. In this respect he was like
Napoleon; and, like Napoleon, he had a vein of florid eloquence
which was criticized by literary men, but which went straight to
the heart of the private soldier. In a word, he was a powerful,
virile, passionate, able man, rough, as were nearly all his
countrymen, but strong and true.

It was to this general that Cleopatra was to answer, and with a
firm reliance on the charms which had subdued Antony's great
commander, Caesar, she set out in person for Cilicia, in Asia
Minor, sailing up the river Cydnus to the place where Antony was
encamped with his army. Making all allowance for the exaggeration
of historians, there can be no doubt that she appeared to him like
some dreamy vision. Her barge was gilded, and was wafted on its
way by swelling sails of Tyrian purple. The oars which smote the
water were of shining silver. As she drew near the Roman general's
camp the languorous music of flutes and harps breathed forth a
strain of invitation.

Cleopatra herself lay upon a divan set upon the deck of the barge
beneath a canopy of woven gold. She was dressed to resemble Venus,
while girls about her personated nymphs and Graces. Delicate
perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel; and at last, as she
drew near the shore, all the people for miles about were gathered
there, leaving Antony to sit alone in the tribunal where he was
dispensing justice.

Word was brought to him that Venus had come to feast with Bacchus.
Antony, though still suspicious of Cleopatra, sent her an
invitation to dine with him in state. With graceful tact she sent
him a counter-invitation, and he came. The magnificence of his
reception dazzled the man who had so long known only a soldier's
fare, or at most the crude entertainments which he had enjoyed in
Rome. A marvelous display of lights was made. Thousands upon
thousands of candles shone brilliantly, arranged in squares and
circles; while the banquet itself was one that symbolized the
studied luxury of the East.

At this time Cleopatra was twenty-seven years of age--a period of
life which modern physiologists have called the crisis in a
woman's growth. She had never really loved before, since she had
given herself to Caesar, not because she cared for him, but to
save her kingdom. She now came into the presence of one whose
manly beauty and strong passions were matched by her own subtlety
and appealing charm.

When Antony addressed her he felt himself a rustic in her
presence. Almost resentful, he betook himself to the coarse
language of the camp. Cleopatra, with marvelous adaptability, took
her tone from his, and thus in a moment put him at his ease.
Ferrero, who takes a most unfavorable view of her character and
personality, nevertheless explains the secret of her fascination:

Herself utterly cold and callous, insensitive by nature to the
flame of true devotion, Cleopatra was one of those women gifted
with an unerring instinct for all the various roads to men's
affections. She could be the shrinking, modest girl, too shy to
reveal her half-unconscious emotions of jealousy and depression
and self-abandonment, or a woman carried away by the sweep of a
fiery and uncontrollable passion. She could tickle the esthetic
sensibilities of her victims by rich and gorgeous festivals, by
the fantastic adornment of her own person and her palace, or by
brilliant discussions on literature and art; she could conjure up
all their grossest instincts with the vilest obscenities of
conversation, with the free and easy jocularity of a woman of the
camps.

These last words are far too strong, and they represent only
Ferrero's personal opinion; yet there is no doubt that she met
every mood of Antony's so that he became enthralled with her at
once. No such woman as this had ever cast her eyes on him before.
He had a wife at home--a most disreputable wife--so that he cared
little for domestic ties. Later, out of policy, he made another
marriage with the sister of his rival, Octavian, but this wife he
never cared for. His heart and soul were given up to Cleopatra,
the woman who could be a comrade in the camp and a fount of
tenderness in their hours of dalliance, and who possessed the keen
intellect of a man joined to the arts and fascinations of a woman.

On her side she found in Antony an ardent lover, a man of vigorous
masculinity, and, moreover, a soldier whose armies might well
sustain her on the throne of Egypt. That there was calculation
mingled with her love, no one can doubt. That some calculation
also entered into Antony's affection is likewise certain. Yet this
does not affect the truth that each was wholly given to the other.
Why should it have lessened her love for him to feel that he could
protect her and defend her? Why should it have lessened his love
for her to know that she was queen of the richest country in the
world--one that could supply his needs, sustain his armies, and
gild his triumphs with magnificence?

There are many instances in history of regnant queens who loved
and yet whose love was not dissociated from the policy of state.
Such were Anne of Austria, Elizabeth of England, and the
unfortunate Mary Stuart. Such, too, we cannot fail to think, was
Cleopatra.

The two remained together for ten years. In this time Antony was
separated from her only during a campaign in the East. In
Alexandria he ceased to seem a Roman citizen and gave himself up
wholly to the charms of this enticing woman. Many stories are told
of their good fellowship and close intimacy. Plutarch quotes Plato
as saying that there are four kinds of flattery, but he adds that
Cleopatra had a thousand. She was the supreme mistress of the art
of pleasing.

Whether Antony were serious or mirthful, she had at the instant
some new delight or some new charm to meet his wishes. At every
turn she was with him both day and night. With him she threw dice;
with him she drank; with him she hunted; and when he exercised
himself in arms she was there to admire and applaud.

At night the pair would disguise themselves as servants and wander
about the streets of Alexandria. In fact, more than once they were
set upon in the slums and treated roughly by the rabble who did
not recognize them. Cleopatra was always alluring, always tactful,
often humorous, and full of frolic.

Then came the shock of Antony's final breach with Octavian. Either
Antony or his rival must rule the world. Cleopatra's lover once
more became the Roman general, and with a great fleet proceeded to
the coast of Greece, where his enemy was encamped. Antony had
raised a hundred and twelve thousand troops and five hundred
ships--a force far superior to that commanded by Octavian.
Cleopatra was there with sixty ships.

In the days that preceded the final battle much took place which
still remains obscure. It seems likely that Antony desired to
become again the Roman, while Cleopatra wished him to thrust Rome
aside and return to Egypt with her, to reign there as an
independent king. To her Rome was almost a barbarian city. In it
she could not hold sway as she could in her beautiful Alexandria,
with its blue skies and velvet turf and tropical flowers. At Rome
Antony would be distracted by the cares of state, and she would
lose her lover. At Alexandria she would have him for her very own.

The clash came when the hostile fleets met off the promontory of
Actium. At its crisis Cleopatra, prematurely concluding that the
battle was lost, of a sudden gave the signal for retreat and put
out to sea with her fleet. This was the crucial moment. Antony,
mastered by his love, forgot all else, and in a swift ship started
in pursuit of her, abandoning his fleet and army to win or lose as
fortune might decide. For him the world was nothing; the dark-
browed Queen of Egypt, imperious and yet caressing, was
everything. Never was such a prize and never were such great hopes
thrown carelessly away. After waiting seven days Antony's troops,
still undefeated, finding that their commander would not return to
them, surrendered to Octavian, who thus became the master of an
empire.

Later his legions assaulted Alexandria, and there Antony was twice
defeated. At last Cleopatra saw her great mistake. She had made
her lover give up the hope of being Rome's dictator, but in so
doing she had also lost the chance of ruling with him tranquilly
in Egypt. She shut herself behind the barred doors of the royal
sepulcher; and, lest she should be molested there, she sent forth
word that she had died. Her proud spirit could not brook the
thought that she might be seized and carried as a prisoner to
Rome. She was too much a queen in soul to be led in triumph up the
Sacred Way to the Capitol with golden chains clanking on her
slender wrists.

Antony, believing the report that she was dead, fell upon his
sword; but in his dying moments he was carried into the presence
of the woman for whom he had given all. With her arms about him,
his spirit passed away; and soon after she, too, met death,
whether by a poisoned draught or by the storied asp no one can
say.

Cleopatra had lived the mistress of a splendid kingdom. She had
successively captivated two of the greatest men whom Rome had ever
seen. She died, like a queen, to escape disgrace. Whatever modern
critics may have to say concerning small details, this story still
remains the strangest love story of which the world has any
record.





ABELARD AND HELOISE

Many a woman, amid the transports of passionate and languishing
love, has cried out in a sort of ecstasy:

"I love you as no woman ever loved a man before!"

When she says this she believes it. Her whole soul is aflame with
the ardor of emotion. It really seems to her that no one ever
could have loved so much as she.

This cry--spontaneous, untaught, sincere--has become almost one
of those conventionalities of amorous expression which belong to
the vocabulary of self-abandonment. Every woman who utters it,
when torn by the almost terrible extravagance of a great love,
believes that no one before her has ever said it, and that in her
own case it is absolutely true.

Yet, how many women are really faithful to the end? Very many,
indeed, if circumstances admit of easy faithfulness. A high-
souled, generous, ardent nature will endure an infinity of
disillusionment, of misfortune, of neglect, and even of ill
treatment. Even so, the flame, though it may sink low, can be
revived again to burn as brightly as before. But in order that
this may be so it is necessary that the object of such a wonderful
devotion be alive, that he be present and visible; or, if he be
absent, that there should still exist some hope of renewing the
exquisite intimacy of the past.

A man who is sincerely loved may be compelled to take long
journeys which will separate him for an indefinite time from the
woman who has given her heart to him, and she will still be
constant. He may be imprisoned, perhaps for life, yet there is
always the hope of his release or of his escape; and some women
will be faithful to him and will watch for his return. But, given
a situation which absolutely bars out hope, which sunders two
souls in such a way that they can never be united in this world,
and there we have a test so terribly severe that few even of the
most loyal and intensely clinging lovers can endure it.

Not that such a situation would lead a woman to turn to any other
man than the one to whom she had given her very life; but we might
expect that at least her strong desire would cool and weaken. She
might cherish his memory among the precious souvenirs of her love
life; but that she should still pour out the same rapturous,
unstinted passion as before seems almost too much to believe. The
annals of emotion record only one such instance; and so this
instance has become known to all, and has been cherished for
nearly a thousand years. It involves the story of a woman who did
love, perhaps, as no one ever loved before or since; for she was
subjected to this cruel test, and she met the test not alone
completely, but triumphantly and almost fiercely.

The story is, of course, the story of Abelard and Heloise. It has
many times been falsely told. Portions of it have been omitted,
and other portions of it have been garbled. A whole literature has
grown up around the subject. It may well be worth our while to
clear away the ambiguities and the doubtful points, and once more
to tell it simply, without bias, and with a strict adherence to
what seems to be the truth attested by authentic records.

There is one circumstance connected with the story which we must
specially note. The narrative does something more than set forth
the one quite unimpeachable instance of unconquered constancy. It
shows how, in the last analysis, that which touches the human
heart has more vitality and more enduring interest than what
concerns the intellect or those achievements of the human mind
which are external to our emotional nature.

Pierre Abelard was undoubtedly the boldest and most creative
reasoner of his time. As a wandering teacher he drew after him
thousands of enthusiastic students. He gave a strong impetus to
learning. He was a marvelous logician and an accomplished orator.
Among his pupils were men who afterward became prelates of the
church and distinguished scholars. In the Dark Age, when the
dictates of reason were almost wholly disregarded, he fought
fearlessly for intellectual freedom. He was practically the
founder of the University of Paris, which in turn became the
mother of medieval and modern universities.

He was, therefore, a great and striking figure in the history of
civilization. Nevertheless he would to-day be remembered only by
scholars and students of the Middle Ages were it not for the fact
that he inspired the most enduring love that history records. If
Heloise had never loved him, and if their story had not been so
tragic and so poignant, he would be to-day only a name known to
but a few. His final resting-place, in the cemetery of Pere
Lachaise, in Paris, would not be sought out by thousands every
year and kept bright with flowers, the gift of those who have
themselves both loved and suffered.

Pierre Abelard--or, more fully, Pierre Abelard de Palais--was a
native of Brittany, born in the year 1079. His father was a
knight, the lord of the manor; but Abelard cared little for the
life of a petty noble; and so he gave up his seigniorial rights to
his brothers and went forth to become, first of all a student, and
then a public lecturer and teacher.

His student days ended abruptly in Paris, where he had enrolled
himself as the pupil of a distinguished philosopher, Guillaume de
Champeaux; but one day Abelard engaged in a disputation with his
master. His wonderful combination of eloquence, logic, and
originality utterly routed Champeaux, who was thus humiliated in
the presence of his disciples. He was the first of many enemies
that Abelard was destined to make in his long and stormy career.
From that moment the young Breton himself set up as a teacher of
philosophy, and the brilliancy of his discourses soon drew to him
throngs of students from all over Europe.

Before proceeding with the story of Abelard it is well to
reconstruct, however slightly, a picture of the times in which he
lived. It was an age when Western Europe was but partly civilized.
Pedantry and learning of the most minute sort existed side by side
with the most violent excesses of medieval barbarism. The Church
had undertaken the gigantic task of subduing and enlightening the
semi-pagan peoples of France and Germany and England.

When we look back at that period some will unjustly censure Rome
for not controlling more completely the savagery of the medievals.
More fairly should we wonder at the great measure of success which
had already been achieved. The leaven of a true Christianity was
working in the half-pagan populations. It had not yet completely
reached the nobles and the knights, or even all the ecclesiastics
who served it and who were consecrated to its mission. Thus, amid
a sort of political chaos were seen the glaring evils of
feudalism. Kings and princes and their followers lived the lives
of swine. Private blood-feuds were regarded lightly. There was as
yet no single central power. Every man carried his life in his
hand, trusting to sword and dagger for protection.

The cities were still mere hamlets clustered around great castles
or fortified cathedrals. In Paris itself the network of dark
lanes, ill lighted and unguarded, was the scene of midnight murder
and assassination. In the winter-time wolves infested the town by
night. Men-at-arms, with torches and spears, often had to march
out from their barracks to assail the snarling, yelping packs of
savage animals that hunger drove from the surrounding forests.

Paris of the twelfth century was typical of France itself, which
was harried by human wolves intent on rapine and wanton plunder.
There were great schools of theology, but the students who
attended them fought and slashed one another. If a man's life was
threatened he must protect it by his own strength or by gathering
about him a band of friends. No one was safe. No one was tolerant.
Very few were free from the grosser vices. Even in some of the
religious houses the brothers would meet at night for unseemly
revels, splashing the stone floors with wine and shrieking in a
delirium of drunkenness. The rules of the Church enjoined
temperance, continence, and celibacy; but the decrees of Leo IX.
and Nicholas II. and Alexander II. and Gregory were only partially
observed.

In fact, Europe was in a state of chaos--political and moral and
social. Only very slowly was order emerging from sheer anarchy. We
must remember this when we recall some facts which meet us in the
story of Abelard and Heloise.

The jealousy of Champeaux drove Abelard for a time from Paris. He
taught and lectured at several other centers of learning, always
admired, and yet at the same time denounced by many for his
advocacy of reason as against blind faith. During the years of his
wandering he came to have a wide knowledge of the world and of
human nature. If we try to imagine him as he was in his thirty-
fifth year we shall find in him a remarkable combination of
attractive qualities.

It must be remembered that though, in a sense, he was an
ecclesiastic, he had not yet been ordained to the priesthood, but
was rather a canon--a person who did not belong to any religious
order, though he was supposed to live according to a definite set
of religious rules and as a member of a religious community.
Abelard, however, made rather light of his churchly associations.
He was at once an accomplished man of the world and a profound
scholar. There was nothing of the recluse about him. He mingled
with his fellow men, whom he dominated by the charm of his
personality. He was eloquent, ardent, and persuasive. He could
turn a delicate compliment as skilfully as he could elaborate a
syllogism. His rich voice had in it a seductive quality which was
never without its effect.

Handsome and well formed, he possessed as much vigor of body as of
mind. Nor were his accomplishments entirely those of the scholar.
He wrote dainty verses, which he also set to music, and which he
sang himself with a rare skill. Some have called him "the first of
the troubadours," and many who cared nothing for his skill in
logic admired him for his gifts as a musician and a poet.
Altogether, he was one to attract attention wherever he went, for
none could fail to recognize his power.

It was soon after his thirty-fifth year that he returned to Paris,
where he was welcomed by thousands. With much tact he reconciled
himself to his enemies, so that his life now seemed to be full of
promise and of sunshine.

It was at this time that he became acquainted with a very
beautiful young girl named Heloise. She was only eighteen years of
age, yet already she possessed not only beauty, but many
accomplishments which were then quite rare in women, since she
both wrote and spoke a number of languages, and, like Abelard, was
a lover of music and poetry. Heloise was the illegitimate daughter
of a canon of patrician blood; so that she is said to have been a
worthy representative of the noble house of the Montmorencys--
famous throughout French history for chivalry and charm.

Up to this time we do not know precisely what sort of life Abelard
had lived in private. His enemies declared that he had squandered
his substance in vicious ways. His friends denied this, and
represented him as strict and chaste. The truth probably lies
between these two assertions. He was naturally a pleasure-loving
man of the world, who may very possibly have relieved his severer
studies by occasional revelry and light love. It is not at all
likely that he was addicted to gross passions and low practices.

But such as he was, when he first saw Heloise he conceived for her
a violent attachment. Carefully guarded in the house of her uncle,
Fulbert, it was difficult at first for Abelard to meet her save in
the most casual way; yet every time that he heard her exquisite
voice and watched her graceful manners he became more and more
infatuated. His studies suddenly seemed tame and colorless beside
the fierce scarlet flame which blazed up in his heart.

Nevertheless, it was because of these studies and of his great
reputation as a scholar that he managed to obtain access to
Heloise. He flattered her uncle and made a chance proposal that he
should himself become an inmate of Fulbert's household in order
that he might teach this girl of so much promise. Such an offer
coming from so brilliant a man was joyfully accepted.

From that time Abelard could visit Heloise without restraint. He
was her teacher, and the two spent hours together, nominally in
the study of Greek and Hebrew; but doubtless very little was said
between them upon such unattractive subjects. On the contrary,
with all his wide experience of life, his eloquence, his perfect
manners, and his fascination, Abelard put forth his power to
captivate the senses of a girl still in her teens and quite
ignorant of the world. As Remusat says, he employed to win her the
genius which had overwhelmed all the great centers of learning in
the Western world.

It was then that the pleasures of knowledge, the joys of thought,
the emotions of eloquence, were all called into play to charm and
move and plunge into a profound and strange intoxication this
noble and tender heart which had never known either love or
sorrow. ... One can imagine that everything helped on the
inevitable end. Their studies gave them opportunities to see each
other freely, and also permitted them to be alone together. Then
their books lay open between them; but either long periods of
silence stilled their reading, or else words of deepening intimacy
made them forget their studies altogether. The eyes of the two
lovers turned from the book to mingle their glances, and then to
turn away in a confusion that was conscious.

Hand would touch hand, apparently by accident; and when
conversation ceased, Abelard would often hear the long, quivering
sigh which showed the strange, half-frightened, and yet exquisite
joy which Heloise experienced.

It was not long before the girl's heart had been wholly won.
Transported by her emotion, she met the caresses of her lover with
those as unrestrained as his. Her very innocence deprived her of
the protection which older women would have had. All was given
freely, and even wildly, by Heloise; and all was taken by Abelard,
who afterward himself declared:

"The pleasure of teaching her to love surpassed the delightful
fragrance of all the perfumes in the world."

Yet these two could not always live in a paradise which was
entirely their own. The world of Paris took notice of their close
association. Some poems written to Heloise by Abelard, as if in
letters of fire, were found and shown to Fulbert, who, until this
time, had suspected nothing. Angrily he ordered Abelard to leave
his house. He forbade his niece to see her lover any more.

But the two could not be separated; and, indeed, there was good
reason why they should still cling together. Secretly Heloise left
her uncle's house and fled through the narrow lanes of Paris to
the dwelling of Abelard's sister, Denyse, where Abelard himself
was living. There, presently, the young girl gave birth to a son,
who was named Astrolabe, after an instrument used by astronomers,
since both the father and the mother felt that the offspring of so
great a love should have no ordinary name.

Fulbert was furious, and rightly so. His hospitality had been
outraged and his niece dishonored. He insisted that the pair
should at once be married. Here was revealed a certain weakness in
the character of Abelard. He consented to the marriage, but
insisted that it should be kept an utter secret.

Oddly enough, it was Heloise herself who objected to becoming the
wife of the man she loved. Unselfishness could go no farther. She
saw that, were he to marry her, his advancement in the Church
would be almost impossible; for, while the very minor clergy
sometimes married in spite of the papal bulls, matrimony was
becoming a fatal bar to ecclesiastical promotion. And so Heloise
pleaded pitifully, both with her uncle and with Abelard, that
there should be no marriage. She would rather bear all manner of
disgrace than stand in the way of Abelard's advancement.

He has himself given some of the words in which she pleaded with
him:

What glory shall I win from you, when I have made you quite
inglorious and have humbled both of us? What vengeance will the
world inflict on me if I deprive it of one so brilliant? What
curses will follow such a marriage? How outrageous would it be
that you, whom nature created for the universal good, should be
devoted to one woman and plunged into such disgrace? I loathe the
thought of a marriage which would humiliate you.

Indeed, every possible effort which another woman in her place
would employ to make him marry her she used in order to dissuade
him. Finally, her sweet face streaming with tears, she uttered
that tremendous sentence which makes one really think that she
loved him as no other woman ever loved a man. She cried out, in an
agony of self-sacrifice:

"I would rather be your mistress than the wife even of an
emperor!"

Nevertheless, the two were married, and Abelard returned to his
lecture-room and to his studies. For months they met but seldom.
Meanwhile, however, the taunts and innuendos directed against
Heloise so irritated Fulbert that he broke his promise of secrecy,
and told his friends that Abelard and Heloise were man and wife.
They went to Heloise for confirmation. Once more she showed in an
extraordinary way the depth of her devotion.

"I am no wife," she said. "It is not true that Abelard has married
me. My uncle merely tells you this to save my reputation."

They asked her whether she would swear to this; and, without a
moment's hesitation, this pure and noble woman took an oath upon
the Scriptures that there had been no marriage.

Fulbert was enraged by this. He ill-treated Heloise, and,
furthermore, he forbade Abelard to visit her. The girl, therefore,
again left her uncle's house and betook herself to a convent just
outside of Paris, where she assumed the habit of a nun as a
disguise. There Abelard continued from time to time to meet her.

When Fulbert heard of this he put his own interpretation on it. He
believed that Abelard intended to ignore the marriage altogether,
and that possibly he might even marry some other woman. In any
case, he now hated Abelard with all his heart; and he resolved to
take a fearful and unnatural vengeance which would at once prevent
his enemy from making any other marriage, while at the same time
it would debar him from ecclesiastical preferment.

To carry out his plot Fulbert first bribed a man who was the body-
servant of Abelard, watching at the door of his room each night.
Then he hired the services of four ruffians. After Abelard had
retired and was deep in slumber the treacherous valet unbarred the
door. The hirelings of Fulbert entered and fell upon the sleeping
man. Three of them bound him fast, while the fourth, with a razor,
inflicted on him the most shameful mutilation that is possible.
Then, extinguishing the lights, the wretches slunk away and were
lost in darkness, leaving behind their victim bound to his couch,
uttering cries of torment and bathed in his own blood.

It is a shocking story, and yet it is intensely characteristic of
the lawless and barbarous era in which it happened. Early the next
morning the news flew rapidly through Paris. The city hummed like
a bee-hive. Citizens and students and ecclesiastics poured into
the street and surrounded the house of Abelard.

"Almost the entire city," says Fulques, as quoted by McCabe, "went
clamoring toward his house. Women wept as if each one had lost her
husband."

Unmanned though he was, Abelard still retained enough of the
spirit of his time to seek vengeance. He, in his turn, employed
ruffians whom he set upon the track of those who had assaulted
him. The treacherous valet and one of Fulbert's hirelings were run
down, seized, and mutilated precisely as Abelard had been; and
their eyes were blinded. A third was lodged in prison. Fulbert
himself was accused before one of the Church courts, which alone
had power to punish an ecclesiastic, and all his goods were
confiscated.

But, meantime, how did it fare with Heloise? Her grief was greater
than his own, while her love and her devotion were absolutely
undiminished. But Abelard now showed a selfishness--and indeed, a
meanness--far beyond any that he had before exhibited. Heloise
could no more be his wife. He made it plain that he put no trust
in her fidelity. He was unwilling that she should live in the
world while he could not; and so he told her sternly that she must
take the veil and bury herself for ever in a nunnery.

The pain and shame which she experienced at this came wholly from
the fact that evidently Abelard did not trust her. Long afterward
she wrote:

God knows I should not have hesitated, at your command, to precede
or to follow you to hell itself!

It was his distrust that cut her to the heart. Still, her love for
him was so intense that she obeyed his order. Soon after she took
the vows; and in the convent chapel, shaken with sobs, she knelt
before the altar and assumed the veil of a cloistered nun. Abelard
himself put on the black tunic of a Benedictine monk and entered
the Abbey of St. Denis.

It is unnecessary here to follow out all the details of the lives
of Abelard and Heloise after this heart-rendering scene. Abelard
passed through many years of strife and disappointment, and even
of humiliation; for on one occasion, just as he had silenced
Guillaume de Champeaux, so he himself was silenced and put to rout
by Bernard of Clairvaux--"a frail, tense, absorbed, dominant
little man, whose face was white and worn with suffering," but in
whose eyes there was a light of supreme strength. Bernard
represented pure faith, as Abelard represented pure reason; and
the two men met before a great council to match their respective
powers.

Bernard, with fiery eloquence, brought a charge of heresy against
Abelard in an oration which was like a charge of cavalry. When he
had concluded Abelard rose with an ashen face, stammered out a few
words, and sat down. He was condemned by the council, and his
works were ordered to be burned.

All his later life was one of misfortune, of humiliation, and even
of personal danger. The reckless monks whom he tried to rule rose
fiercely against him. His life was threatened. He betook himself
to a desolate and lonely place, where he built for himself a hut
of reeds and rushes, hoping to spend his final years in
meditation. But there were many who had not forgotten his ability
as a teacher. These flocked by hundreds to the desert place where
he abode. His hut was surrounded by tents and rude hovels, built
by his scholars for their shelter.

Thus Abelard resumed his teaching, though in a very different
frame of mind. In time he built a structure of wood and stone,
which he called the Paraclete, some remains of which can still be
seen.

All this time no word had passed between him and Heloise. But
presently Abelard wrote and gave to the world a curious and
exceedingly frank book, which he called The Story of My
Misfortunes. A copy of it reached the hands of Heloise, and she at
once sent to Abelard the first of a series of letters which have
remained unique in the literature of love.

Ten years had passed, and yet the woman's heart was as faithful
and as full of yearning as on the day when the two had parted. It
has been said that the letters are not genuine, and they must be
read with this assertion in mind; yet it is difficult to believe
that any one save Heloise herself could have flung a human soul
into such frankly passionate utterances, or that any imitator
could have done the work.

In her first letter, which was sent to Abelard written upon
parchment, she said:

At thy command I would change, not merely my costume, but my very
soul, so entirely art thou the sole possessor of my body and my
spirit. Never, God is my witness, never have I sought anything in
thee but thyself; I have sought thee, and not thy gifts. I have
not looked to the marriage-bond or dowry.

She begged him to write to her, and to lead her to God, as once he
had led her into the mysteries of pleasure. Abelard answered in a
letter, friendly to be sure, but formal--the letter of a priest to
a cloistered nun. The opening words of it are characteristic of
the whole:

To Heloise, his sister in Christ, from Abelard, her brother in
Him.

The letter was a long one, but throughout the whole of it the
writer's tone was cold and prudent. Its very coldness roused her
soul to a passionate revolt. Her second letter bursts forth in a
sort of anguish:

How hast thou been able to frame such thoughts, dearest? How hast
thou found words to convey them? Oh, if I dared but call God cruel
to me! Oh, most wretched of all creatures that I am! So sweet did
I find the pleasures of our loving days that I cannot bring myself
to reject them or to banish them from my memory. Wheresoever I go,
they thrust themselves upon my vision, and rekindle the old
desire.

But Abelard knew only too well that not in this life could there
be anything save spiritual love between himself and Heloise. He
wrote to her again and again, always in the same remote and
unimpassioned way. He tells her about the history of monasticism,
and discusses with her matters of theology and ethics; but he
never writes one word to feed the flame that is consuming her. The
woman understood at last; and by degrees her letters became as
calm as his--suffused, however, with a tenderness and feeling
which showed that in her heart of hearts she was still entirely
given to him.

After some years Abelard left his dwelling at the Paraclete, and
there was founded there a religious house of which Heloise became
the abbess. All the world respected her for her sweetness, her
wisdom, and the purity of her character. She made friends as
easily as Abelard made enemies. Even Bernard, who had overthrown
her husband, sought out Heloise to ask for her advice and counsel.

Abelard died while on his way to Rome, whither he was journeying
in order to undergo a penalty; and his body was brought back to
the Paraclete, where it was entombed. Over it for twenty-two years
Heloise watched with tender care; and when she died, her body was
laid beside that of her lover.

To-day their bones are mingled as she would have desired them to
be mingled. The stones of their tomb in the great cemetery of Pere
Lachaise were brought from the ruins of the Paraclete, and above
the sarcophagus are two recumbent figures, the whole being the
work of the artist Alexandra Lenoir, who died in 1836. The figure
representing Heloise is not, however, an authentic likeness. The
model for it was a lady belonging to a noble family of France, and
the figure itself was brought to Pere Lachaise from the ancient
College de Beauvais.

The letters of Heloise have been read and imitated throughout the
whole of the last nine centuries. Some have found in them the
utterances of a woman whose love of love was greater than her love
of God and whose intensity of passion nothing could subdue; and so
these have condemned her. But others, like Chateaubriand, have
more truly seen in them a pure and noble spirit to whom fate had
been very cruel; and who was, after all, writing to the man who
had been her lawful husband.

Some of the most famous imitations of her letters are those in the
ancient poem entitled, "The Romance of the Rose," written by Jean
de Meung, in the thirteenth century; and in modern times her first
letter was paraphrased by Alexander Pope, and in French by
Colardeau. There exist in English half a dozen translations of
them, with Abelard's replies. It is interesting to remember that
practically all the other writings of Abelard remained unpublished
and unedited until a very recent period. He was a remarkable
figure as a philosopher and scholar; but the world cares for him
only because he was loved by Heloise.





QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE EARL OF LEICESTER


History has many romantic stories to tell of the part which women
have played in determining the destinies of nations. Sometimes it
is a woman's beauty that causes the shifting of a province. Again
it is another woman's rich possessions that incite invasion and
lead to bloody wars. Marriages or dowries, or the refusal of
marriages and the lack of dowries, inheritance through an heiress,
the failure of a male succession--in these and in many other ways
women have set their mark indelibly upon the trend of history.

However, if we look over these different events we shall find that
it is not so much the mere longing for a woman--the desire to have
her as a queen--that has seriously affected the annals of any
nation. Kings, like ordinary men, have paid their suit and then
have ridden away repulsed, yet not seriously dejected. Most royal
marriages are made either to secure the succession to a throne by
a legitimate line of heirs or else to unite adjoining states and
make a powerful kingdom out of two that are less powerful. But, as
a rule, kings have found greater delight in some sheltered bower
remote from courts than in the castled halls and well-cared-for
nooks where their own wives and children have been reared with all
the appurtenances of legitimacy.

There are not many stories that hang persistently about the love-
making of a single woman. In the case of one or another we may
find an episode or two--something dashing, something spirited or
striking, something brilliant and exhilarating, or something sad.
But for a woman's whole life to be spent in courtship that meant
nothing and that was only a clever aid to diplomacy--this is
surely an unusual and really wonderful thing.

It is the more unusual because the woman herself was not intended
by nature to be wasted upon the cold and cheerless sport of
chancellors and counselors and men who had no thought of her
except to use her as a pawn. She was hot-blooded, descended from a
fiery race, and one whose temper was quick to leap into the
passion of a man.

In studying this phase of the long and interesting life of
Elizabeth of England we must notice several important facts. In
the first place, she gave herself, above all else, to the
maintenance of England--not an England that would be half Spanish
or half French, or even partly Dutch and Flemish, but the Merry
England of tradition--the England that was one and undivided, with
its growing freedom of thought, its bows and bills, its nut-brown
ale, its sturdy yeomen, and its loyalty to crown and Parliament.
She once said, almost as in an agony:

"I love England more than anything!"

And one may really hold that this was true.

For England she schemed and planned. For England she gave up many
of her royal rights. For England she descended into depths of
treachery. For England she left herself on record as an arrant
liar, false, perjured, yet successful; and because of her success
for England's sake her countrymen will hold her in high
remembrance, since her scheming and her falsehood are the offenses
that one pardons most readily in a woman.

In the second place, it must be remembered that Elizabeth's
courtships and pretended love-makings were almost always a part of
her diplomacy. When not a part of her diplomacy they were a mere
appendage to her vanity. To seem to be the flower of the English
people, and to be surrounded by the noblest, the bravest, and the
most handsome cavaliers, not only of her own kingdom, but of
others--this was, indeed, a choice morsel of which she was fond of
tasting, even though it meant nothing beyond the moment.

Finally, though at times she could be very cold, and though she
made herself still colder in order that she might play fast and
loose with foreign suitors who played fast and loose with her--the
King of Spain, the Duc d'Alencon, brother of the French king, with
an Austrian archduke, with a magnificent barbarian prince of
Muscovy, with Eric of Sweden, or any other Scandinavian suitor--
she felt a woman's need for some nearer and more tender
association to which she might give freer play and in which she
might feel those deeper emotions without the danger that arises
when love is mingled with diplomacy.

Let us first consider a picture of the woman as she really was in
order that we may understand her triple nature--consummate
mistress of every art that statesmen know, and using at every
moment her person as a lure; a vain-glorious queen who seemed to
be the prey of boundless vanity; and, lastly, a woman who had all
a woman's passion, and who could cast suddenly aside the check and
balance which restrained her before the public gaze and could
allow herself to give full play to the emotion that she inherited
from the king, her father, who was himself a marvel of fire and
impetuosity. That the daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn
should be a gentle, timid maiden would be to make heredity a
farce.

Elizabeth was about twenty-five years of age when she ascended the
throne of England. It is odd that the date of her birth cannot be
given with precision. The intrigues and disturbances of the
English court, and the fact that she was a princess, made her
birth a matter of less account than if there had been no male heir
to the throne. At any rate, when she ascended it, after the deaths
of her brother, King Edward VI., and her sister, Queen Mary, she
was a woman well trained both in intellect and in physical
development.

Mr. Martin Hume, who loves to dwell upon the later years of Queen
Elizabeth, speaks rather bitterly of her as a "painted old
harridan"; and such she may well have seemed when, at nearly
seventy years of age, she leered and grinned a sort of skeleton
smile at the handsome young courtiers who pretended to see in her
the queen of beauty and to be dying for love of her.

Yet, in her earlier years, when she was young and strong and
impetuous, she deserved far different words than these. The
portrait of her by Zucchero, which now hangs in Hampton Court,
depicts her when she must have been of more than middle age; and
still the face is one of beauty, though it be a strange and almost
artificial beauty--one that draws, attracts, and, perhaps, lures
you on against your will.

It is interesting to compare this painting with the frank word-
picture of a certain German agent who was sent to England by his
emperor, and who seems to have been greatly fascinated by Queen
Elizabeth. She was at that time in the prime of her beauty and her
power. Her complexion was of that peculiar transparency which is
seen only in the face of golden blondes. Her figure was fine and
graceful, and her wit an accomplishment that would have made a
woman of any rank or time remarkable. The German envoy says:

She lives a life of such magnificence and feasting as can hardly
be imagined, and occupies a great portion of her time with balls,
banquets, hunting, and similar amusements, with the utmost
possible display, but nevertheless she insists upon far greater
respect being shown her than was exacted by Queen Mary. She
summons Parliament, but lets them know that her orders must be
obeyed in any case.

If any one will look at the painting by Zucchero he will see how
much is made of Elizabeth's hands--a distinctive feature quite as
noble with the Tudors as is the "Hapsburg lip" among the
descendants of the house of Austria. These were ungloved, and were
very long and white, and she looked at them and played with them a
great deal; and, indeed, they justified the admiration with which
they were regarded by her flatterers.

Such was the personal appearance of Elizabeth. When a young girl,
we have still more favorable opinions of her that were written by
those who had occasion to be near her. Not only do they record
swift glimpses of her person, but sometimes in a word or two they
give an insight into certain traits of mind which came out
prominently in her later years.

It may, perhaps, be well to view her as a woman before we regard
her more fully as a queen. It has been said that Elizabeth
inherited many of the traits of her father--the boldness of
spirit, the rapidity of decision, and, at the same time, the fox-
like craft which often showed itself when it was least expected.

Henry had also, as is well known, a love of the other sex, which
has made his reign memorable. And yet it must be noted that while
he loved much, it was not loose love. Many a king of England, from
Henry II. to Charles II., has offended far more than Henry VIII.
Where Henry loved, he married; and it was the unfortunate result
of these royal marriages that has made him seem unduly fond of
women. If, however, we examine each one of the separate espousals
we shall find that he did not enter into it lightly, and that he
broke it off unwillingly. His ardent temperament, therefore, was
checked by a certain rational or conventional propriety, so that
he was by no means a loose liver, as many would make him out to
be.

We must remember this when we recall the charges that have been
made against Elizabeth, and the strange stories that were told of
her tricks--by no means seemly tricks--which she used to play with
her guardian, Lord Thomas Seymour. The antics she performed with
him in her dressing-room were made the subject of an official
inquiry; yet it came out that while Elizabeth was less than
sixteen, and Lord Thomas was very much her senior, his wife was
with him on his visits to the chamber of the princess.

Sir Robert Tyrwhitt and his wife were also sent to question her,
Tyrwhitt had a keen mind and one well trained to cope with any
other's wit in this sort of cross-examination. Elizabeth was only
a girl of fifteen, yet she was a match for the accomplished
courtier in diplomacy and quick retort. He was sent down to worm
out of her everything that she knew. Threats and flattery and
forged letters and false confessions were tried on her; but they
were tried in vain. She would tell nothing of importance. She
denied everything. She sulked, she cried, she availed herself of a
woman's favorite defense in suddenly attacking those who had
attacked her. She brought counter charges against Tyrwhitt, and
put her enemies on their own defense. Not a compromising word
could they wring out of her.

She bitterly complained of the imprisonment of her governess, Mrs.
Ashley, and cried out:

"I have not so behaved that you need put more mistresses upon me!"

Altogether, she was too much for Sir Robert, and he was wise
enough to recognize her cleverness.

"She hath a very good wit," said he, shrewdly; "and nothing is to
be gotten of her except by great policy." And he added: "If I had
to say my fancy, I think it more meet that she should have two
governesses than one."

Mr. Hume notes the fact that after the two servants of the
princess had been examined and had told nothing very serious they
found that they had been wise in remaining friends of the royal
girl. No sooner had Elizabeth become queen than she knighted the
man Parry and made him treasurer of the household, while Mrs.
Ashley, the governess, was treated with great consideration. Thus,
very naturally, Mr. Hume says: "They had probably kept back far
more than they told."

Even Tyrwhitt believed that there was a secret compact between
them, for he said, quaintly: "They all sing one song, and she hath
set the note for them."

Soon after this her brother Edward's death brought to the throne
her elder sister, Mary, who has harshly become known as Bloody
Mary. During this time Elizabeth put aside her boldness, and
became apparently a shy and simple-minded virgin. Surrounded on
every side by those who sought to trap her, there was nothing in
her bearing to make her seem the head of a party or the young
chief of a faction. Nothing could exceed her in meekness. She
spoke of her sister in the humblest terms. She exhibited no signs
of the Tudor animation that was in reality so strong a part of her
character.

But, coming to the throne, she threw away her modesty and brawled
and rioted with very little self-restraint. The people as a whole
found little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the
bluff King Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only
partially. They thought much better of her than they had of her
saturnine sister, the first Queen Mary.

The life of Elizabeth has been very oddly misunderstood, not so
much for the facts in it as for the manner in which these have
been arranged and the relation which they have to one another. We
ought to recollect that this woman did not live in a restricted
sphere, that her life was not a short one, and that it was crowded
with incidents and full of vivid color. Some think of her as
living for a short period of time and speak of the great
historical characters who surrounded her as belonging to a single
epoch. To them she has one set of suitors all the time--the Duc
d'Alencon, the King of Denmark's brother, the Prince of Sweden,
the russian potentate, the archduke sending her sweet messages
from Austria, the melancholy King of Spain, together with a number
of her own brilliant Englishmen--Sir William Pickering, Sir Robert
Dudley, Lord Darnley, the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney, and
Sir Walter Raleigh.

Of course, as a matter of fact, Elizabeth lived for nearly seventy
years--almost three-quarters of a century--and in that long time
there came and went both men and women, those whom she had used
and cast aside, with others whom she had also treated with
gratitude, and who had died gladly serving her. But through it all
there was a continual change in her environment, though not in
her. The young soldier went to the battle-field and died; the wise
counselor gave her his advice, and she either took it or cared
nothing for it. She herself was a curious blending of forwardness
and folly, of wisdom and wantonness, of frivolity and unbridled
fancy. But through it all she loved her people, even though she
often cheated them and made them pay her taxes in the harsh old
way that prevailed before there was any right save the king's
will.

At the same time, this was only by fits and starts, and on the
whole she served them well. Therefore, to most of them she was
always the good Queen Bess. What mattered it to the ditcher and
yeoman, far from the court, that the queen was said to dance in
her nightdress and to swear like a trooper?

It was, indeed, largely from these rustic sources that such
stories were scattered throughout England. Peasants thought them
picturesque. More to the point with them were peace and prosperity
throughout the country, the fact that law was administered with
honesty and justice, and that England was safe from her deadly
enemies--the swarthy Spaniards and the scheming French.

But, as I said, we must remember always that the Elizabeth of one
period was not the Elizabeth of another, and that the England of
one period was not the England of another. As one thinks of it,
there is something wonderful in the almost star-like way in which
this girl flitted unharmed through a thousand perils. Her own
countrymen were at first divided against her; a score of greedy,
avaricious suitors sought her destruction, or at least her hand to
lead her to destruction; all the great powers of the Continent
were either demanding an alliance with England or threatening to
dash England down amid their own dissensions.

What had this girl to play off against such dangers? Only an
undaunted spirit, a scheming mind that knew no scruples, and
finally her own person and the fact that she was a woman, and,
therefore, might give herself in marriage and become the mother of
a race of kings.

It was this last weapon, the weapon of her sex, that proved,
perhaps, the most powerful of all. By promising a marriage or by
denying it, or by neither promising nor denying but withholding
it, she gave forth a thousand wily intimations which kept those
who surrounded her at bay until she had made still another deft
and skilful combination, escaping like some startled creature to a
new place of safety.

In 1583, when she was fifty years of age, she had reached a point
when her courtships and her pretended love-making were no longer
necessary. She had played Sweden against Denmark, and France
against Spain, and the Austrian archduke against the others, and
many suitors in her own land against the different factions which
they headed. She might have sat herself down to rest; for she
could feel that her wisdom had led her up into a high place,
whence she might look down in peace and with assurance of the
tranquillity that she had won. Not yet had the great Armada rolled
and thundered toward the English shores. But she was certain that
her land was secure, compact, and safe.

It remains to see what were those amatory relations which she may
be said to have sincerely held. She had played at love-making with
foreign princes, because it was wise and, for the moment, best.
She had played with Englishmen of rank who aspired to her hand,
because in that way she might conciliate, at one time her Catholic
and at another her Protestant subjects. But what of the real and
inward feeling of her heart, when she was not thinking of
political problems or the necessities of state!

This is an interesting question. One may at least seek the answer,
hoping thereby to solve one of the most interesting phases of this
perplexing and most remarkable woman.

It must be remembered that it was not a question of whether
Elizabeth desired marriage. She may have done so as involving a
brilliant stroke of policy. In this sense she may have wished to
marry one of the two French princes who were among her suitors.
But even here she hesitated, and her Parliament disapproved; for
by this time England had become largely Protestant. Again, had she
married a French prince and had children, England might have
become an appanage of France.

There is no particular evidence that she had any feeling at all
for her Flemish, Austrian, or Russian suitors, while the Swede's
pretensions were the laughing-stock of the English court. So we
may set aside this question of marriage as having nothing to do
with her emotional life. She did desire a son, as was shown by her
passionate outcry when she compared herself with Mary of Scotland.

"The Queen of Scots has a bonny son, while I am but a barren
stock!"

She was too wise to wed a subject; though. had she married at all,
her choice would doubtless have been an Englishman. In this
respect, as in so many others, she was like her father, who chose
his numerous wives, with the exception of the first, from among
the English ladies of the court; just as the showy Edward IV. was
happy in marrying "Dame Elizabeth Woodville." But what a king may
do is by no means so easy for a queen; and a husband is almost
certain to assume an authority which makes him unpopular with the
subjects of his wife.

Hence, as said above, we must consider not so much whom she would
have liked to marry, but rather to whom her love went out
spontaneously, and not as a part of that amatory play which amused
her from the time when she frisked with Seymour down to the very
last days, when she could no longer move about, but when she still
dabbled her cheeks with rouge and powder and set her skeleton face
amid a forest of ruffs.

There were many whom she cared for after a fashion. She would not
let Sir Walter Raleigh visit her American colonies, because she
could not bear to have him so long away from her. She had great
moments of passion for the Earl of Essex, though in the end she
signed his death-warrant because he was as dominant in spirit as
the queen herself.

Readers of Sir Walter Scott's wonderfully picturesque novel,
Kenilworth, will note how he throws the strongest light upon
Elizabeth's affection for Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.
Scott's historical instinct is united here with a vein of
psychology which goes deeper than is usual with him. We see
Elizabeth trying hard to share her favor equally between two
nobles; but the Earl of Essex fails to please her because he
lacked those exquisite manners which made Leicester so great a
favorite with the fastidious queen.

Then, too, the story of Leicester's marriage with Amy Robsart is
something more than a myth, based upon an obscure legend and an
ancient ballad. The earl had had such a wife, and there were
sinister stories about the manner of her death. But it is Scott
who invents the villainous Varney and the bulldog Anthony Foster;
just as he brought the whole episode into the foreground and made
it occur at a period much later than was historically true. Still,
Scott felt--and he was imbued with the spirit and knowledge of
that time--a strong conviction that Elizabeth loved Leicester as
she really loved no one else.

There is one interesting fact which goes far to convince us. Just
as her father was, in a way, polygamous, so Elizabeth was even
more truly polyandrous. It was inevitable that she should surround
herself with attractive men, whose love-locks she would caress and
whose flatteries she would greedily accept. To the outward eye
there was very little difference in her treatment of the handsome
and daring nobles of her court; yet a historian of her time makes
one very shrewd remark when he says: "To every one she gave some
power at times--to all save Leicester."

Cecil and Walsingham in counsel and Essex and Raleigh in the field
might have their own way at times, and even share the sovereign's
power, but to Leicester she intrusted no high commands and no
important mission. Why so? Simply because she loved him more than
any of the rest; and, knowing this, she knew that if besides her
love she granted him any measure of control or power, then she
would be but half a queen and would be led either to marry him or
else to let him sway her as he would.

For the reason given, one may say with confidence that, while
Elizabeth's light loves were fleeting, she gave a deep affection
to this handsome, bold, and brilliant Englishman and cherished him
in a far different way from any of the others. This was as near as
she ever came to marriage, and it was this love at least which
makes Shakespeare's famous line as false as it is beautiful, when
he describes "the imperial votaress" as passing by "in maiden
meditation, fancy free."





MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND LORD BOTHWELL


Mary Stuart and Cleopatra are the two women who have most
attracted the fancy of poets, dramatists, novelists, and painters,
from their own time down to the present day.

In some respects there is a certain likeness in their careers.
Each was queen of a nation whose affairs were entangled with those
of a much greater one. Each sought for her own ideal of love until
she found it. Each won that love recklessly, almost madly. Each,
in its attainment, fell from power and fortune. Each died before
her natural life was ended. One caused the man she loved to cast
away the sovereignty of a mighty state. The other lost her own
crown in order that she might achieve the whole desire of her
heart.

There is still another parallel which may be found. Each of these
women was reputed to be exquisitely beautiful; yet each fell short
of beauty's highest standards. They are alike remembered in song
and story because of qualities that are far more powerful than any
physical charm can be. They impressed the imagination of their own
contemporaries just as they had impressed the imagination of all
succeeding ages, by reason of a strange and irresistible
fascination which no one could explain, but which very few could
experience and resist.

Mary Stuart was born six days before her father's death, and when
the kingdom which was her heritage seemed to be almost in its
death-throes. James V. of Scotland, half Stuart and half Tudor,
was no ordinary monarch. As a mere boy he had burst the bonds with
which a regency had bound him, and he had ruled the wild Scotland
of the sixteenth century. He was brave and crafty, keen in
statesmanship, and dissolute in pleasure.

His first wife had given him no heirs; so at her death he sought
out a princess whom he pursued all the more ardently because she
was also courted by the burly Henry VIII. of England. This girl
was Marie of Lorraine, daughter of the Duc de Guise. She was fit
to be the mother of a lion's brood, for she was above six feet in
height and of proportions so ample as to excite the admiration of
the royal voluptuary who sat upon the throne of England.

"I am big," said he, "and I want a wife who is as big as I am."

But James of Scotland wooed in person, and not by embassies, and
he triumphantly carried off his strapping princess. Henry of
England gnawed his beard in vain; and, though in time he found
consolation in another woman's arms, he viewed James not only as a
public but as a private enemy.

There was war between the two countries. First the Scots repelled
an English army; but soon they were themselves disgracefully
defeated at Solway Moss by a force much their inferior in numbers.
The shame of it broke King James's heart. As he was galloping from
the battle-field the news was brought him that his wife had given
birth to a daughter. He took little notice of the message; and in
a few days he had died, moaning with his last breath the
mysterious words:

"It came with a lass--with a lass it will go!"

The child who was born at this ill-omened crisis was Mary Stuart,
who within a week became, in her own right, Queen of Scotland. Her
mother acted as regent of the kingdom. Henry of England demanded
that the infant girl should be betrothed to his young son, Prince
Edward, who afterward reigned as Edward VI., though he died while
still a boy. The proposal was rejected, and the war between
England and Scotland went on its bloody course; but meanwhile the
little queen was sent to France, her mother's home, so that she
might be trained in accomplishments which were rare in Scotland.

In France she grew up at the court of Catherine de' Medici, that
imperious intriguer whose splendid surroundings were tainted with
the corruption which she had brought from her native Italy. It
was, indeed, a singular training-school for a girl of Mary
Stuart's character. She saw about her a superficial chivalry and a
most profound depravity. Poets like Ronsard graced the life of the
court with exquisite verse. Troubadours and minstrels sang sweet
music there. There were fetes and tournaments and gallantry of
bearing; yet, on the other hand, there was every possible
refinement and variety of vice. Men were slain before the eyes of
the queen herself. The talk of the court was of intrigue and lust
and evil things which often verged on crime. Catherine de' Medici
herself kept her nominal husband at arm's-length; and in order to
maintain her grasp on France she connived at the corruption of her
own children, three of whom were destined in their turn to sit
upon the throne.

Mary Stuart grew up in these surroundings until she was sixteen,
eating the fruit which gave a knowledge of both good and evil. Her
intelligence was very great. She quickly learned Italian, French,
and Latin. She was a daring horsewoman. She was a poet and an
artist even in her teens. She was also a keen judge of human
motives, for those early years of hers had forced her into a
womanhood that was premature but wonderful. It had been proposed
that she should marry the eldest son of Catherine, so that in time
the kingdom of Scotland and that of France might be united, while
if Elizabeth of England were to die unmarried her realm also would
fall to this pair of children.

And so Mary, at sixteen, wedded the Dauphin Francis, who was a
year her junior. The prince was a wretched, whimpering little
creature, with a cankered body and a blighted soul. Marriage with
such a husband seemed absurd. It never was a marriage in reality.
The sickly child would cry all night, for he suffered from
abscesses in his ears, and his manhood had been prematurely taken
from him. Nevertheless, within a twelvemonth the French king died
and Mary Stuart was Queen of France as well as of Scotland,
hampered only by her nominal obedience to the sick boy whom she
openly despised. At seventeen she showed herself a master spirit.
She held her own against the ambitious Catherine de' Medici, whom
she contemptuously nicknamed "the apothecary's daughter." For the
brief period of a year she was actually the ruler of France; but
then her husband died and she was left a widow, restless,
ambitious, and yet no longer having any of the power she loved.

Mary Stuart at this time had become a woman whose fascination was
exerted over all who knew her. She was very tall and very slim,
with chestnut hair, "like a flower of the heat, both lax and
delicate." Her skin was fair and pale, so clear and so transparent
as to make the story plausible that when she drank from a flask of
wine, the red liquid could be seen passing down her slender
throat.

Yet with all this she was not fine in texture, but hardy as a man.
She could endure immense fatigue without yielding to it. Her
supple form had the strength of steel. There was a gleam in her
hazel eyes that showed her to be brimful of an almost fierce
vitality. Young as she was, she was the mistress of a thousand
arts, and she exhaled a sort of atmosphere that turned the heads
of men. The Stuart blood made her impatient of control, careless
of state, and easy-mannered. The French and the Tudor strain gave
her vivacity. She could be submissive in appearance while still
persisting in her aims. She could be languorous and seductive
while cold within. Again, she could assume the haughtiness which
belonged to one who was twice a queen.

Two motives swayed her, and they fought together for supremacy.
One was the love of power, and the other was the love of love. The
first was natural to a girl who was a sovereign in her own right.
The second was inherited, and was then forced into a rank
luxuriance by the sort of life that she had seen about her. At
eighteen she was a strangely amorous creature, given to fondling
and kissing every one about her, with slight discrimination. From
her sense of touch she received emotions that were almost
necessary to her existence. With her slender, graceful hands she
was always stroking the face of some favorite--it might be only
the face of a child, or it might be the face of some courtier or
poet, or one of the four Marys whose names are linked with hers--
Mary Livingstone, Mary Fleming, Mary Beaton, and Mary Seton, the
last of whom remained with her royal mistress until her death.

But one must not be too censorious in thinking of Mary Stuart. She
was surrounded everywhere by enemies. During her stay in France
she was hated by the faction of Catherine de' Medici. When she
returned to Scotland she was hated because of her religion by the
Protestant lords. Her every action was set forth in the worst
possible light. The most sinister meaning was given to everything
she said or did. In truth, we must reject almost all the stories
which accuse her of anything more than a certain levity of
conduct.

She was not a woman to yield herself in love's last surrender
unless her intellect and heart alike had been made captive. She
would listen to the passionate outpourings of poets and courtiers,
and she would plunge her eyes into theirs, and let her hair just
touch their faces, and give them her white hands to kiss--but
that was all. Even in this she was only following the fashion of
the court where she was bred, and she was not unlike her royal
relative, Elizabeth of England, who had the same external
amorousness coupled with the same internal self-control.

Mary Stuart's love life makes a piteous story, for it is the life
of one who was ever seeking--seeking for the man to whom she
could look up, who could be strong and brave and ardent like
herself, and at the same time be more powerful and more steadfast
even than she herself in mind and thought. Whatever may be said of
her, and howsoever the facts may be colored by partisans, this
royal girl, stung though she was by passion and goaded by desire,
cared nothing for any man who could not match her in body and mind
and spirit all at once.

It was in her early widowhood that she first met the man, and when
their union came it brought ruin on them both. In France there
came to her one day one of her own subjects, the Earl of Bothwell.
He was but a few years older than she, and in his presence for the
first time she felt, in her own despite, that profoundly moving,
indescribable, and never-to-be-forgotten thrill which shakes a
woman to the very center of her being, since it is the recognition
of a complete affinity.

Lord Bothwell, like Queen Mary, has been terribly maligned. Unlike
her, he has found only a few defenders. Maurice Hewlett has drawn
a picture of him more favorable than many, and yet it is a picture
that repels. Bothwell, says he, was of a type esteemed by those
who pronounce vice to be their virtue. He was "a galliard, flushed
with rich blood, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with a laugh so
happy and so prompt that the world, rejoicing to hear it, thought
all must be well wherever he might be. He wore brave clothes, sat
a brave horse, and kept brave company bravely. His high color,
while it betokened high feeding, got him the credit of good
health. His little eyes twinkled so merrily that you did not see
they were like a pig's, sly and greedy at once, and bloodshot. His
tawny beard concealed a jaw underhung, a chin jutting and
dangerous. His mouth had a cruel twist; but his laughing hid that
too. The bridge of his nose had been broken; few observed it, or
guessed at the brawl which must have given it to him. Frankness
was his great charm, careless ease in high places."

And so, when Mary Stuart first met him in her eighteenth year,
Lord Bothwell made her think as she had never thought of any other
man, and as she was not to think of any other man again. She grew
to look eagerly for the frank mockery "in those twinkling eyes, in
that quick mouth"; and to wonder whether it was with him always--
asleep, at prayers, fighting, furious, or in love.

Something more, however, must be said of Bothwell. He was
undoubtedly a roisterer, but he was very much a man. He made easy
love to women. His sword leaped quickly from its sheath. He could
fight, and he could also think. He was no brawling ruffian, no
ordinary rake. Remembering what Scotland was in those days,
Bothwell might well seem in reality a princely figure. He knew
Italian; he was at home in French; he could write fluent Latin. He
was a collector of books and a reader of them also. He was perhaps
the only Scottish noble of his time who had a book-plate of his
own. Here is something more than a mere reveler. Here is a man of
varied accomplishments and of a complex character.

Though he stayed but a short time near the queen in France, he
kindled her imagination, so that when she seriously thought of men
she thought of Bothwell. And yet all the time she was fondling the
young pages in her retinue and kissing her maids of honor with her
scarlet lips, and lying on their knees, while poets like Ronsard
and Chastelard wrote ardent love sonnets to her and sighed and
pined for something more than the privilege of kissing her two
dainty hands.

In 1561, less than a year after her widowhood, Mary set sail for
Scotland, never to return. The great high-decked ships which
escorted her sailed into the harbor of Leith, and she pressed on
to Edinburgh. A depressing change indeed from the sunny terraces
and fields of France! In her own realm were fog and rain and only
a hut to shelter her upon her landing. When she reached her
capital there were few welcoming cheers; but as she rode over the
cobblestones to Holyrood, the squalid wynds vomited forth great
mobs of hard-featured, grim-visaged men and women who stared with
curiosity and a half-contempt at the girl queen and her retinue of
foreigners.

The Scots were Protestants of the most dour sort, and they
distrusted their new ruler because of her religion and because she
loved to surround herself with dainty things and bright colors and
exotic elegance. They feared lest she should try to repeal the law
of Scotland's Parliament which had made the country Protestant.

The very indifference of her subjects stirred up the nobler part
of Mary's nature. For a time she was indeed a queen. She governed
wisely. She respected the religious rights of her Protestant
subjects. She strove to bring order out of the chaos into which
her country had fallen. And she met with some success. The time
came when her people cheered her as she rode among them. Her
subtle fascination was her greatest source of strength. Even John
Knox, that iron-visaged, stentorian preacher, fell for a time
under the charm of her presence. She met him frankly and pleaded
with him as a woman, instead of commanding him as a queen. The
surly ranter became softened for a time, and, though he spoke of
her to others as "Honeypot," he ruled his tongue in public. She
had offers of marriage from Austrian and Spanish princes. The new
King of France, her brother-in-law, would perhaps have wedded her.
It mattered little to Mary that Elizabeth of England was hostile.
She felt that she was strong enough to hold her own and govern
Scotland.

But who could govern a country such as Scotland was? It was a land
of broils and feuds, of clan enmities and fierce vendettas. Its
nobles were half barbarous, and they fought and slashed at one
another with drawn dirks almost in the presence of the queen
herself. No matter whom she favored, there rose up a swarm of
enemies. Here was a Corsica of the north, more savage and untamed
than even the other Corsica.

In her perplexity Mary felt a woman's need of some man on whom she
would have the right to lean, and whom she could make king
consort. She thought that she had found him in the person of her
cousin, Lord Darnley, a Catholic, and by his upbringing half an
Englishman. Darnley came to Scotland, and for the moment Mary
fancied that she had forgotten Bothwell. Here again she was in
love with love, and she idealized the man who came to give it to
her. Darnley seemed, indeed, well worthy to be loved, for he was
tall and handsome, appearing well on horseback and having some of
the accomplishments which Mary valued.

It was a hasty wooing, and the queen herself was first of all the
wooer. Her quick imagination saw in Darnley traits and gifts of
which he really had no share. Therefore, the marriage was soon
concluded, and Scotland had two sovereigns, King Henry and Queen
Mary. So sure was Mary of her indifference to Bothwell that she
urged the earl to marry, and he did marry a girl of the great
house of Gordon.

Mary's self-suggested love for Darnley was extinguished almost on
her wedding-night. The man was a drunkard who came into her
presence befuddled and almost bestial. He had no brains. His
vanity was enormous. He loved no one but himself, and least of all
this queen, whom he regarded as having thrown herself at his empty
head.

The first-fruits of the marriage were uprisings among the
Protestant lords. Mary then showed herself a heroic queen. At the
head of a motley band of soldiery who came at her call--half-
clad, uncouth, and savage--she rode into the west, sleeping at
night upon the bare ground, sharing the camp food, dressed in
plain tartan, but swift and fierce as any eagle. Her spirit ran
like fire through the veins of those who followed her. She crushed
the insurrection, scattered its leaders, and returned in triumph
to her capital.

Now she was really queen, but here came in the other motive which
was interwoven in her character. She had shown herself a man in
courage. Should she not have the pleasures of a woman? To her
court in Holyrood came Bothwell once again, and this time Mary
knew that he was all the world to her. Darnley had shrunk from the
hardships of battle. He was steeped in low intrigues. He roused
the constant irritation of the queen by his folly and utter lack
of sense and decency. Mary felt she owed him nothing, but she
forgot that she owed much to herself.

Her old amorous ways came back to her, and she relapsed into the
joys of sense. The scandal-mongers of the capital saw a lover in
every man with whom she talked. She did, in fact, set convention
at defiance. She dressed in men's clothing. She showed what the
unemotional Scots thought to be unseemly levity. The French poet,
Chastelard, misled by her external signs of favor, believed
himself to be her choice. At the end of one mad revel he was found
secreted beneath her bed, and was driven out by force. A second
time he ventured to secrete himself within the covers of the bed.
Then he was dragged forth, imprisoned, and condemned to death. He
met his fate without a murmur, save at the last when he stood upon
the scaffold and, gazing toward the palace, cried in French:

"Oh, cruel queen! I die for you!"

Another favorite, the Italian, David Rizzio, or Riccio, in like
manner wrote love verses to the queen, and she replied to them in
kind; but there is no evidence that she valued him save for his
ability, which was very great. She made him her foreign secretary,
and the man whom he supplanted worked on the jealousy of Darnley;
so that one night, while Mary and Rizzio were at dinner in a small
private chamber, Darnley and the others broke in upon her. Darnley
held her by the waist while Rizzio was stabbed before her eyes
with a cruelty the greater because the queen was soon to become a
mother.

From that moment she hated Darnley as one would hate a snake. She
tolerated him only that he might acknowledge her child as his son.
This child was the future James VI. of Scotland and James I. of
England. It is recorded of him that never throughout his life
could he bear to look upon drawn steel.

After this Mary summoned Bothwell again and again. It was revealed
to her as in a blaze of light that, after all, he was the one and
only man who could be everything to her. His frankness, his
cynicism, his mockery, his carelessness, his courage, and the
power of his mind matched her moods completely. She threw away all
semblance of concealment. She ignored the fact that he had married
at her wish. She was queen. She desired him. She must have him at
any cost.

"Though I lose Scotland and England both," she cried in a passion
of abandonment, "I shall have him for my own!"

Bothwell, in his turn, was nothing loath, and they leaped at each
other like two flames.

It was then that Mary wrote those letters which were afterward
discovered in a casket and which were used against her when she
was on trial for her life. These so-called Casket Letters, though
we have not now the originals, are among the most extraordinary
letters ever written. All shame, all hesitation, all innocence,
are flung away in them. The writer is so fired with passion that
each sentence is like a cry to a lover in the dark. As De Peyster
says: "In them the animal instincts override and spur and lash the
pen." Mary was committing to paper the frenzied madness of a woman
consumed to her very marrow by the scorching blaze of unedurable
desire.

Events moved quickly. Darnley, convalescent from an attack of
smallpox, was mysteriously destroyed by an explosion of gunpowder.
Bothwell was divorced from his young wife on curious grounds. A
dispensation allowed Mary to wed a Protestant, and she married
Bothwell three months after Darnley's death.

Here one sees the consummation of what had begun many years before
in France. From the moment that she and Bothwell met, their union
was inevitable. Seas could not sunder them. Other loves and other
fancies were as nothing to them. Even the bonds of marriage were
burst asunder so that these two fiery, panting souls could meet.

It was the irony of fate that when they had so met it was only to
be parted. Mary's subjects, outraged by her conduct, rose against
her. As she passed through the streets of Edinburgh the women
hurled after her indecent names. Great banners were raised with
execrable daubs representing the murdered Darnley. The short and
dreadful monosyllable which is familiar to us in the pages of the
Bible was hurled after her wherever she went.

With Bothwell by her side she led a wild and ragged horde of
followers against the rebellious nobles, whose forces met her at
Carberry Hill. Her motley followers melted away, and Mary
surrendered to the hostile chieftains, who took her to the castle
at Lochleven. There she became the mother of twins--a fact that is
seldom mentioned by historians. These children were the fruit of
her union with Bothwell. From this time forth she cared but little
for herself, and she signed, without great reluctance, a document
by which she abdicated in favor of her infant son.

Even in this place of imprisonment, however, her fascination had
power to charm. Among those who guarded her, two of the Douglas
family--George Douglas and William Douglas--for love of her,
effected her escape. The first attempt failed. Mary, disguised as
a laundress, was betrayed by the delicacy of her hands. But a
second attempt was successful. The queen passed through a postern
gate and made her way to the lake, where George Douglas met her
with a boat. Crossing the lake, fifty horsemen under Lord Claude
Hamilton gave her their escort and bore her away in safety.

But Mary was sick of Scotland, for Bothwell could not be there.
She had tasted all the bitterness of life, and for a few months
all the sweetness; but she would have no more of this rough and
barbarous country. Of her own free will she crossed the Solway
into England, to find herself at once a prisoner.

Never again did she set eyes on Bothwell. After the battle of
Carberry Hill he escaped to the north, gathered some ships
together, and preyed upon English merchantmen, very much as a
pirate might have done. Ere long, however, when he had learned of
Mary's fate, he set sail for Norway. King Frederick of Denmark
made him a prisoner of state. He was not confined within prison
walls, however, but was allowed to hunt and ride in the vicinity
of Malmo Castle and of Dragsholm. It is probably in Malmo Castle
that he died. In 1858 a coffin which was thought to be the coffin
of the earl was opened, and a Danish artist sketched the head--
which corresponds quite well with the other portraits of the ill-
fated Scottish noble.

It is a sad story. Had Mary been less ambitious when she first met
Bothwell, or had he been a little bolder, they might have reigned
together and lived out their lives in the plenitude of that great
love which held them both in thrall. But a queen is not as other
women; and she found too late that the teaching of her heart was,
after all, the truest teaching. She went to her death as Bothwell
went to his, alone, in a strange, unfriendly land.

Yet, even this, perhaps, was better so. It has at least touched
both their lives with pathos and has made the name of Mary Stuart
one to be remembered throughout all the ages.





QUEEN CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN AND THE MARQUIS MONALDESCHI


Sweden to-day is one of the peaceful kingdoms of the world, whose
people are prosperous, well governed, and somewhat apart from the
clash and turmoil of other states and nations. Even the secession
of Norway, a few years ago, was accomplished without bloodshed,
and now the two kingdoms exist side by side as free from strife as
they are with Denmark, which once domineered and tyrannized over
both.

It is difficult to believe that long ago, in the Middle Ages, the
cities of southern Sweden were among the great commercial centers
of the world. Stockholm and Lund ranked with London and Paris.
They absorbed the commerce of the northern seas, and were the
admiration of thousands of travelers and merchants who passed
through them and trafficked with them.

Much nearer to our own time, Sweden was the great military power
of northern Europe. The ambassadors of the Swedish kings were
received with the utmost deference in every court. Her soldiers
won great battles and ended mighty wars. The England of Cromwell
and Charles II. was unimportant and isolated in comparison with
this northern kingdom, which could pour forth armies of gigantic
blond warriors, headed by generals astute as well as brave.

It was no small matter, then, in 1626, that the loyal Swedes were
hoping that their queen would give birth to a male heir to succeed
his splendid father, Gustavus Adolphus, ranked by military
historians as one of the six great generals whom the world had so
far produced. The queen, a German princess of Brandenburg, had
already borne two daughters, who died in infancy. The expectation
was wide-spread and intense that she should now become the mother
of a son; and the king himself was no less anxious.

When the event occurred, the child was seen to be completely
covered with hair, and for this reason the attendants at first
believed that it was the desired boy. When their mistake was
discovered they were afraid to tell the king, who was waiting in
his study for the announcement to be made. At last, when no one
else would go to him, his sister, the Princess Caroline,
volunteered to break the news.

Gustavus was in truth a chivalrous, high-bred monarch. Though he
must have been disappointed at the advent of a daughter, he showed
no sign of dissatisfaction or even of surprise; but, rising, he
embraced his sister, saying:

"Let us thank God. I hope this girl will be as good as a boy to
me. May God preserve her now that He has sent her!"

It is customary at almost all courts to pay less attention to the
birth of a princess than to that of a prince; but Gustavus
displayed his chivalry toward this little daughter, whom he named
Christina. He ordered that the full royal salute should be fired
in every fortress of his kingdom and that displays of fireworks,
balls of honor, and court functions should take place; "for," as
he said, "this is the heir to my throne." And so from the first he
took his child under his own keeping and treated her as if she
were a much-loved son as well as a successor.

He joked about her looks when she was born, when she was mistaken
for a boy.

"She will be clever," he said, "for she has taken us all in!"

The Swedish people were as delighted with their little princess as
were the people of Holland when the present Queen Wilhelmina was
born, to carry on the succession of the House of Orange. On one
occasion the king and the small Christina, who were inseparable
companions, happened to approach a fortress where they expected to
spend the night. The commander of the castle was bound to fire a
royal salute of fifty cannon in honor of his sovereign; yet he
dreaded the effect upon the princess of such a roaring and
bellowing of artillery. He therefore sent a swift horseman to meet
the royal party at a distance and explain his perplexity. Should
he fire these guns or not? Would the king give an order?

Gustavus thought for a moment, and then replied:

"My daughter is the daughter of a soldier, and she must learn to
lead a soldier's life. Let the guns be fired!"

The procession moved on. Presently fire spurted from the
embrasures of the fort, and its batteries thundered in one great
roar. The king looked down at Christina. Her face was aglow with
pleasure and excitement; she clapped her hands and laughed, and
cried out:

"More bang! More! More! More!"

This is only one of a score of stories that were circulated about
the princess, and the Swedes were more and more delighted with the
girl who was to be their queen.

Somewhat curiously, Christina's mother, Queen Maria, cared little
for the child, and, in fact, came at last to detest her almost as
much as the king loved her. It is hard to explain this dislike.
Perhaps she had a morbid desire for a son and begrudged the honors
given to a daughter. Perhaps she was a little jealous of her own
child, who took so much of the king's attention. Afterward, in
writing of her mother, Christina excuses her, and says quite
frankly:

She could not bear to see me, because I was a girl, and an ugly
girl at that. And she was right enough, for I was as tawny as a
little Turk.

This candid description of herself is hardly just. Christina was
never beautiful, and she had a harsh voice. She was apt to be
overbearing even as a little girl. Yet she was a most interesting
child, with an expressive face, large eyes, an aquiline nose, and
the blond hair of her people. There was nothing in this to account
for her mother's intense dislike for her.

It was currently reported at the time that attempts were made to
maim or seriously injure the little princess. By what was made to
seem an accident, she would be dropped upon the floor, and heavy
articles of furniture would somehow manage to strike her. More
than once a great beam fell mysteriously close to her, either in
the palace or while she was passing through the streets. None of
these things did her serious harm, however. Most of them she
luckily escaped; but when she had grown to be a woman one of her
shoulders was permanently higher than the other.

"I suppose," said Christina, "that I could be straightened if I
would let the surgeons attend to it; but it isn't worth while to
take the trouble."

When Christina was four, Sweden became involved in the great war
that had been raging for a dozen years between the Protestant and
the Catholic states of Germany. Gradually the neighboring powers
had been drawn into the struggle, either to serve their own ends
or to support the faith to which they adhered. Gustavus Adolphus
took up the sword with mixed motives, for he was full of
enthusiasm for the imperiled cause of the Reformation, and at the
same time he deemed it a favorable opportunity to assert his
control over the shores of the Baltic.

The warrior king summoned his army and prepared to invade Germany.
Before departing he took his little daughter by the hand and led
her among the assembled nobles and councilors of state. To them he
intrusted the princess, making them kneel and vow that they would
regard her as his heir, and, if aught should happen to him, as his
successor. Amid the clashing of swords and the clang of armor this
vow was taken, and the king went forth to war.

He met the ablest generals of his enemies, and the fortunes of
battle swayed hither and thither; but the climax came when his
soldiers encountered those of Wallenstein--that strange,
overbearing, arrogant, mysterious creature whom many regarded with
a sort of awe. The clash came at Lutzen, in Saxony. The Swedish
king fought long and hard, and so did his mighty opponent; but at
last, in the very midst of a tremendous onset that swept all
before him, Gustavus received a mortal wound and died, even while
Wallenstein was fleeing from the field of battle.

The battle of Lutzen made Christina Queen of Sweden at the age of
six. Of course, she could not yet be crowned, but a council of
able ministers continued the policy of the late king and taught
the young queen her first lessons in statecraft. Her intellect
soon showed itself as more than that of a child. She understood
all that was taking place, and all that was planned and arranged.
Her tact was unusual. Her discretion was admired by every one; and
after a while she had the advice and training of the great Swedish
chancellor, Oxenstierna, whose wisdom she shared to a remarkable
degree.

Before she was sixteen she had so approved herself to her
counselors, and especially to the people at large, that there was
a wide-spread clamor that she should take the throne and govern in
her own person. To this she gave no heed, but said:

"I am not yet ready."

All this time she bore herself like a king. There was nothing
distinctly feminine about her. She took but slight interest in her
appearance. She wore sword and armor in the presence of her
troops, and often she dressed entirely in men's clothes. She would
take long, lonely gallops through the forests, brooding over
problems of state and feeling no fatigue or fear. And indeed why
should she fear, who was beloved by all her subjects?

When her eighteenth year arrived, the demand for her coronation
was impossible to resist. All Sweden wished to see a ruling queen,
who might marry and have children to succeed her through the royal
line of her great father. Christina consented to be crowned, but
she absolutely refused all thought of marriage. She had more
suitors from all parts of Europe than even Elizabeth of England;
but, unlike Elizabeth, she did not dally with them, give them
false hopes, or use them for the political advantage of her
kingdom.

At that time Sweden was stronger than England, and was so situated
as to be independent of alliances. So Christina said, in her
harsh, peremptory voice:

"I shall never marry; and why should you speak of my having
children! I am just as likely to give birth to a Nero as to an
Augustus."

Having assumed the throne, she ruled with a strictness of
government such as Sweden had not known before. She took the reins
of state into her own hands and carried out a foreign policy of
her own, over the heads of her ministers, and even against the
wishes of her people. The fighting upon the Continent had dragged
out to a weary length, but the Swedes, on the whole, had scored a
marked advantage. For this reason the war was popular, and every
one wished it to go on; but Christina, of her own will, decided
that it must stop, that mere glory was not to be considered
against material advantages. Sweden had had enough of glory; she
must now look to her enrichment and prosperity through the
channels of peace.

Therefore, in 1648, against Oxenstierna, against her generals, and
against her people, she exercised her royal power and brought the
Thirty Years' War to an end by the so-called Peace of Westphalia.
At this time she was twenty-two, and by her personal influence she
had ended one of the greatest struggles of history. Nor had she
done it to her country's loss. Denmark yielded up rich provinces,
while Germany was compelled to grant Sweden membership in the
German diet.

Then came a period of immense prosperity through commerce, through
economies in government, through the improvement of agriculture
and the opening of mines. This girl queen, without intrigue,
without descending from her native nobility to peep and whisper
with shady diplomats, showed herself in reality a great monarch, a
true Semiramis of the north, more worthy of respect and reverence
than Elizabeth of England. She was highly trained in many arts.
She was fond of study, spoke Latin fluently, and could argue with
Salmasius, Descartes, and other accomplished scholars without
showing any inferiority to them.

She gathered at her court distinguished persons from all
countries. She repelled those who sought her hand, and she was
pure and truthful and worthy of all men's admiration. Had she died
at this time history would rank her with the greatest of women
sovereigns. Naude, the librarian of Cardinal Mazarin, wrote of her
to the scientist Gassendi in these words:

To say truth, I am sometimes afraid lest the common saying should
be verified in her, that short is the life and rare the old age of
those who surpass the common limits. Do not imagine that she is
learned only in books, for she is equally so in painting,
architecture, sculpture, medals, antiquities, and all curiosities.
There is not a cunning workman in these arts but she has him
fetched. There are as good workers in wax and in enamel,
engravers, singers, players, dancers here as will be found
anywhere.

She has a gallery of statues, bronze and marble, medals of gold,
silver, and bronze, pieces of ivory, amber, coral, worked crystal,
steel mirrors, clocks and tables, bas-reliefs and other things of
the kind; richer I have never seen even in Italy; finally, a great
quantity of pictures. In short, her mind is open to all
impressions.

But after she began to make her court a sort of home for art and
letters it ceased to be the sort of court that Sweden was prepared
for. Christina's subjects were still rude and lacking in
accomplishments; therefore she had to summon men of genius from
other countries, especially from France and Italy. Many of these
were illustrious artists or scholars, but among them were also
some who used their mental gifts for harm.

Among these latter was a French physician named Bourdelot--a man
of keen intellect, of winning manners, and of a profound cynicism,
which was not apparent on the surface, but the effect of which
last lasting. To Bourdelot we must chiefly ascribe the mysterious
change which gradually came over Queen Christina. With his
associates he taught her a distaste for the simple and healthy
life that she had been accustomed to lead. She ceased to think of
the welfare of the state and began to look down with scorn upon
her unsophisticated Swedes. Foreign luxury displayed itself at
Stockholm, and her palaces overflowed with beautiful things.

By subtle means Bourdelot undermined her principles. Having been a
Stoic, she now became an Epicurean. She was by nature devoid of
sentiment. She would not spend her time in the niceties of love-
making, as did Elizabeth; but beneath the surface she had a sort
of tigerish, passionate nature, which would break forth at
intervals, and which demanded satisfaction from a series of
favorites. It is probable that Bourdelot was her first lover, but
there were many others whose names are recorded in the annals of
the time.

When she threw aside her virtue Christina ceased to care about
appearances. She squandered her revenues upon her favorites. What
she retained of her former self was a carelessness that braved the
opinion of her subjects. She dressed almost without thought, and
it is said that she combed her hair not more than twice a month.
She caroused with male companions to the scandal of her people,
and she swore like a trooper when displeased.

Christina's philosophy of life appears to have been compounded of
an almost brutal licentiousness, a strong love of power, and a
strange, freakish longing for something new. Her political
ambitions were checked by the rising discontent of her people, who
began to look down upon her and to feel ashamed of her shame.
Knowing herself as she did, she did not care to marry.

Yet Sweden must have an heir. Therefore she chose out her cousin
Charles, declared that he was to be her successor, and finally
caused him to be proclaimed as such before the assembled estates
of the realm. She even had him crowned; and finally, in her
twenty-eighth year, she abdicated altogether and prepared to leave
Sweden. When asked whither she would go, she replied in a Latin
quotation:

"The Fates will show the way."

In her act of abdication she reserved to herself the revenues of
some of the richest provinces in Sweden and absolute power over
such of her subjects as should accompany her. They were to be her
subjects until the end.

The Swedes remembered that Christina was the daughter of their
greatest king, and that, apart from personal scandals, she had
ruled them well; and so they let her go regretfully and accepted
her cousin as their king. Christina, on her side, went joyfully
and in the spirit of a grand adventuress. With a numerous suite
she entered Germany, and then stayed for a year at Brussels, where
she renounced Lutheranism. After this she traveled slowly into
Italy, where she entered Borne on horseback, and was received by
the Pope, Alexander VII., who lodged her in a magnificent palace,
accepted her conversion, and baptized her, giving her a new name,
Alexandra.

In Rome she was a brilliant but erratic personage, living
sumptuously, even though her revenues from Sweden came in slowly,
partly because the Swedes disliked her change of religion. She was
surrounded by men of letters, with whom she amused herself, and
she took to herself a lover, the Marquis Monaldeschi. She thought
that at last she had really found her true affinity, while
Monaldeschi believed that he could count on the queen's fidelity.

He was in attendance upon her daily, and they were almost
inseparable. He swore allegiance to her and thereby made himself
one of the subjects over whom she had absolute power. For a time
he was the master of those intense emotions which, in her,
alternated with moods of coldness and even cruelty.

Monaldeschi was a handsome Italian, who bore himself with a fine
air of breeding. He understood the art of charming, but he did not
know that beyond a certain time no one could hold the affections
of Christina.

However, after she had quarreled with various cardinals and
decided to leave Rome for a while, Monaldeschi accompanied her to
France, where she had an immense vogue at the court of Louis XIV.
She attracted wide attention because of her eccentricity and utter
lack of manners. It gave her the greatest delight to criticize the
ladies of the French court--their looks, their gowns, and their
jewels. They, in return, would speak of Christina's deformed
shoulder and skinny frame; but the king was very gracious to her
and invited her to his hunting-palace at Fontainebleau.

While she had been winning triumphs of sarcasm the infatuated
Monaldeschi had gradually come to suspect, and then to know, that
his royal mistress was no longer true to him. He had been
supplanted in her favor by another Italian, one Sentanelli, who
was the captain of her guard.

Monaldeschi took a tortuous and roundabout revenge. He did not let
the queen know of his discovery; nor did he, like a man, send a
challenge to Sentanelli. Instead he began by betraying her secrets
to Oliver Cromwell, with whom she had tried to establish a
correspondence. Again, imitating the hand and seal of Sentanelli,
he set in circulation a series of the most scandalous and
insulting letters about Christina. By this treacherous trick he
hoped to end the relations between his rival and the queen; but
when the letters were carried to Christina she instantly
recognized their true source. She saw that she was betrayed by her
former favorite and that he had taken a revenge which might
seriously compromise her.

This led to a tragedy, of which the facts were long obscure. They
were carefully recorded, however, by the queen's household
chaplain, Father Le Bel; and there is also a narrative written by
one Marco Antonio Conti, which confirms the story. Both were
published privately in 1865, with notes by Louis Lacour.

The narration of the priest is dreadful in its simplicity and
minuteness of detail. It may be summed up briefly here, because it
is the testimony of an eye-witness who knew Christina.

Christina, with the marquis and a large retinue, was at
Fontainebleau in November, 1657. A little after midnight, when all
was still, the priest, Father Le Bel, was aroused and ordered to
go at once to the Galerie des Cerfs, or Hall of Stags, in another
part of the palace. When he asked why, he was told:

"It is by the order of her majesty the Swedish queen."

The priest, wondering, hurried on his garments. On reaching the
gloomy hall he saw the Marquis Monaldeschi, evidently in great
agitation, and at the end of the corridor the queen in somber
robes. Beside the queen, as if awaiting orders, stood three
figures, who could with some difficulty be made out as three
soldiers of her guard.

The queen motioned to Father Le Bel and asked him for a packet
which she had given him for safe-keeping some little time before.
He gave it to her, and she opened it. In it were letters and other
documents, which, with a steely glance, she displayed to
Monaldeschi. He was confused by the sight of them and by the
incisive words in which Christina showed how he had both insulted
her and had tried to shift the blame upon Sentanelli.

Monaldeschi broke down completely. He fell at the queen's feet and
wept piteously, begging for pardon, only to be met by the cold
answer:

"You are my subject and a traitor to me. Marquis, you must prepare
to die!"

Then she turned away and left the hall, in spite of the cries of
Monaldeschi, to whom she merely added the advice that he should
make his peace with God by confessing to Father Le Bel.

After she had gone the marquis fell into a torrent of self-
exculpation and cried for mercy. The three armed men drew near and
urged him to confess for the good of his soul. They seemed to have
no malice against him, but to feel that they must obey the orders
given them. At the frantic urging of the marquis their leader even
went to the queen to ask whether she would relent; but he returned
shaking his head, and said:

"Marquis, you must die."

Father Le Bel undertook a like mission, but returned with the
message that there was no hope. So the marquis made his confession
in French and Latin, but even then he hoped; for he did not wait
to receive absolution, but begged still further for delay or
pardon.

Then the three armed men approached, having drawn their swords.
The absolution was pronounced; and, following it, one of the
guards slashed the marquis across the forehead. He stumbled and
fell forward, making signs as if to ask that he might have his
throat cut. But his throat was partly protected by a coat of mail,
so that three or four strokes delivered there had slight effect.
Finally, however, a long, narrow sword was thrust into his side,
after which the marquis made no sound.

Father Le Bel at once left the Galerie des Cerfs and went into the
queen's apartment, with the smell of blood in his nostrils. He
found her calm and ready to justify herself. Was she not still
queen over all who had voluntarily become members of her suite?
This had been agreed to in her act of abdication. Wherever she set
her foot, there, over her own, she was still a monarch, with full
power to punish traitors at her will. This power she had
exercised, and with justice. What mattered it that she was in
France? She was queen as truly as Louis XIV. was king.

The story was not long in getting out, but the truth was not
wholly known until a much later day. It was said that Sentanelli
had slapped the marquis in a fit of jealousy, though some added
that it was done with the connivance of the queen. King Louis, the
incarnation of absolutism, knew the truth, but he was slow to act.
He sympathized with the theory of Christina's sovereignty. It was
only after a time that word was sent to Christina that she must
leave Fontainebleau. She took no notice of the order until it
suited her convenience, and then she went forth with all the
honors of a reigning monarch.

This was the most striking episode in all the strange story of her
private life. When her cousin Charles, whom she had made king,
died without an heir she sought to recover her crown; but the
estates of the realm refused her claim, reduced her income, and
imposed restraints upon her power. She then sought the vacant
throne of Poland; but the Polish nobles, who desired a weak ruler
for their own purposes, made another choice. So at last she
returned to Rome, where the Pope received her with a splendid
procession and granted her twelve thousand crowns a year to make
up for her lessened Swedish revenue.

From this time she lived a life which she made interesting by her
patronage of learning and exciting by her rather unseemly quarrels
with cardinals and even with the Pope. Her armed retinue marched
through the streets with drawn swords and gave open protection to
criminals who had taken refuge with her. She dared to criticize
the pontiff, who merely smiled and said:

"She is a woman!"

On the whole, the end of her life was pleasant. She was much
admired for her sagacity in politics. Her words were listened to
at every court in Europe. She annotated the classics, she made
beautiful collections, and she was regarded as a privileged person
whose acts no one took amiss. She died at fifty-three, and was
buried in St. Peter's.

She was bred a man, she was almost a son to her great father; and
yet, instead of the sonorous epitaph that is inscribed beside her
tomb, perhaps a truer one would be the words of the vexed Pope:

"E DONNA!"





KING CHARLES II. AND NELL GWYN


One might classify the kings of England in many ways. John was
undoubtedly the most unpopular. The impetuous yet far-seeing Henry
II., with the other two great warriors, Edward I. and Edward III.,
and William of Orange, did most for the foundation and development
of England's constitutional law. Some monarchs, such as Edward II.
and the womanish Henry VI., have been contemptible. Hard-working,
useful kings have been Henry VII., the Georges, William IV., and
especially the last Edward.

If we consider those monarchs who have in some curious way touched
the popular fancy without reference to their virtues we must go
back to Richard of the Lion Heart, who saw but little of England,
yet was the best essentially English king, and to Henry V.,
gallant soldier and conqueror of France. Even Henry VIII. had a
warm place in the affection of his countrymen, few of whom saw him
near at hand, but most of whom made him a sort of regal
incarnation of John Bull--wrestling and tilting and boxing, eating
great joints of beef, and staying his thirst with flagons of ale--
a big, healthy, masterful animal, in fact, who gratified the
national love of splendor and stood up manfully in his struggle
with the Pope.

But if you look for something more than ordinary popularity--
something that belongs to sentiment and makes men willing to
become martyrs for a royal cause--we must find these among the
Stuart kings. It is odd, indeed, that even at this day there are
Englishmen and Englishwomen who believe their lawful sovereign to
be a minor Bavarian princess in whose veins there runs the Stuart
blood. Prayers are said for her at English shrines, and toasts are
drunk to her in rare old wine.

Of course, to-day this cult of the Stuarts is nothing but a fad.
No one ever expects to see a Stuart on the English throne. But it
is significant of the deep strain of romance which the six Stuarts
who reigned in England have implanted in the English heart. The
old Jacobite ballads still have power to thrill. Queen Victoria
herself used to have the pipers file out before her at Balmoral to
the "skirling" of "Bonnie Dundee," "Over the Water to Charlie,"
and "Wha'll Be King but Charlie!" It is a sentiment that has never
died. Her late majesty used to say that when she heard these tunes
she became for the moment a Jacobite; just as the Empress Eugenie
at the height of her power used pertly to remark that she herself
was the only Legitimist left in France.

It may be suggested that the Stuarts are still loved by many
Englishmen because they were unfortunate; yet this is hardly true,
after all. Many of them were fortunate enough. The first of them,
King James, an absurd creature, speaking broad Scotch, timid,
foolishly fond of favorites, and having none of the dignity of a
monarch, lived out a lengthy reign. The two royal women of the
family--Anne and Mary--had no misfortunes of a public nature.
Charles II. reigned for more than a quarter of a century, lapped
in every kind of luxury, and died a king.

The first Charles was beheaded and afterward styled a "saint"; yet
the majority of the English people were against his arrogance, or
else he would have won his great struggle against Parliament. The
second James was not popular at all. Nevertheless, no sooner had
he been expelled, and been succeeded by a Dutchman gnawing
asparagus and reeking of cheeses, than there was already a Stuart
legend. Even had there been no pretenders to carry on the cult,
the Stuarts would still have passed into history as much loved by
the people.

It only shows how very little in former days the people expected
of a regnant king. Many monarchs have had just a few popular
traits, and these have stood out brilliantly against the darkness
of the background.

No one could have cared greatly for the first James, but Charles
I. was indeed a kingly personage when viewed afar. He was
handsome, as a man, fully equaling the French princess who became
his wife. He had no personal vices. He was brave, and good to look
upon, and had a kingly mien. Hence, although he sought to make his
rule over England a tyranny, there were many fine old cavaliers to
ride afield for him when he raised his standard, and who, when he
died, mourned for him as a "martyr."

Many hardships they underwent while Cromwell ruled with his iron
hand; and when that iron hand was relaxed in death, and poor,
feeble Richard Cromwell slunk away to his country-seat, what
wonder is it that young Charles came back to England and caracoled
through the streets of London with a smile for every one and a
happy laugh upon his lips? What wonder is it that the cannon in
the Tower thundered a loud welcome, and that all over England, at
one season or another, maypoles rose and Christmas fires blazed?
For Englishmen at heart are not only monarchists, but they are
lovers of good cheer and merrymaking and all sorts of mirth.

Charles II. might well at first have seemed a worthier and wiser
successor to his splendid father. As a child, even, he had shown
himself to be no faint-hearted creature. When the great Civil War
broke out he had joined his father's army. It met with disaster at
Edgehill, and was finally shattered by the crushing defeat of
Naseby, which afterward inspired Macaulay's most stirring ballad.

Charles was then only a child of twelve, and so his followers did
wisely in hurrying him out of England, through the Scilly isles
and Jersey to his mother's place of exile. Of course, a child so
very young could be of no value as a leader, though his presence
might prove an inspiration.

In 1648, however, when he was eighteen years of age, he gathered a
fleet of eighteen ships and cruised along the English coast,
taking prizes, which he carried to the Dutch ports. When he was at
Holland's capital, during his father's trial, he wrote many
messages to the Parliamentarians, and even sent them a blank
charter, which they might fill in with any stipulations they
desired if only they would save and restore their king.

When the head of Charles rolled from the velvet-covered block his
son showed himself to be no loiterer or lover of an easy life. He
hastened to Scotland, skilfully escaping an English force, and was
proclaimed as king and crowned at Scone, in 1651. With ten
thousand men he dashed into England, where he knew there were many
who would rally at his call. But it was then that Cromwell put
forth his supreme military genius and with his Ironsides crushed
the royal troops at Worcester.

Charles knew that for the present all was lost. He showed courage
and address in covering the flight of his beaten soldiers; but he
soon afterward went to France, remaining there and in the
Netherlands for eight years as a pensioner of Louis XIV. He knew
that time would fight for him far more surely than infantry and
horse. England had not been called "Merry England" for nothing;
and Cromwell's tyranny was likely to be far more resented than the
heavy hand of one who was born a king. So Charles at Paris and
Liege, though he had little money at the time, managed to maintain
a royal court, such as it was.

Here there came out another side of his nature. As a child he had
borne hardship and privation and had seen the red blood flow upon
the battlefield. Now, as it were, he allowed a certain sensuous,
pleasure-loving ease to envelop him. The red blood should become
the rich red burgundy; the sound of trumpets and kettledrums
should give way to the melody of lutes and viols. He would be a
king of pleasure if he were to be king at all. And therefore his
court, even in exile, was a court of gallantry and ease. The Pope
refused to lend him money, and the King of France would not
increase his pension, but there were many who foresaw that Charles
would not long remain in exile; and so they gave him what he
wanted and waited until he could give them what they would ask for
in their turn.

Charles at this time was not handsome, like his father. His
complexion was swarthy, his figure by no means imposing, though
always graceful. When he chose he could bear himself with all the
dignity of a monarch. He had a singularly pleasant manner, and a
word from him could win over the harshest opponent.

The old cavaliers who accompanied their master in exile were like
Napoleon's veterans in Elba. With their tall, powerful forms they
stalked about the courtyards, sniffing their disapproval at these
foreign ways and longing grimly for the time when they could once
more smell the pungent powder of the battle-field. But, as Charles
had hoped, the change was coming. Not merely were his own subjects
beginning to long for him and to pray in secret for the king, but
continental monarchs who maintained spies in England began to know
of this. To them Charles was no longer a penniless exile. He was a
king who before long would take possession of his kingdom.

A very wise woman--the Queen Regent of Portugal--was the first to
act on this information. Portugal was then very far from being a
petty state. It had wealth at home and rich colonies abroad, while
its flag was seen on every sea. The queen regent, being at odds
with Spain, and wishing to secure an ally against that power, made
overtures to Charles, asking him whether a match might not be made
between him and the Princess Catharine of Braganza. It was not
merely her daughter's hand that she offered, but a splendid dowry.
She would pay Charles a million pounds in gold and cede to England
two valuable ports.

The match was not yet made, but by 1659 it had been arranged. The
Spaniards were furious, for Charles's cause began to appear
successful.

She was a quaint and rather piteous little figure, she who was
destined to be the wife of the Merry Monarch. Catharine was dark,
petite, and by no means beautiful; yet she had a very sweet
expression and a heart of utter innocence. She had been wholly
convent-bred. She knew nothing of the world. She was told that in
marriage she must obey in all things, and that the chief duty of a
wife was to make her husband happy.

Poor child! It was a too gracious preparation for a very graceless
husband. Charles, in exile, had already made more than one
discreditable connection and he was already the father of more
than one growing son.

First of all, he had been smitten by the bold ways of one Lucy
Walters. Her impudence amused the exiled monarch. She was not
particularly beautiful, and when she spoke as others did she was
rather tiresome; but her pertness and the inexperience of the king
when he went into exile made her seem attractive. She bore him a
son, in the person of that brilliant adventurer whom Charles
afterward created Duke of Monmouth. Many persons believe that
Charles had married Lucy Walters, just as George IV. may have
married Mrs. Fitzherbert; yet there is not the slightest proof of
it, and it must be classed with popular legends.

There was also one Catherine Peg, or Kep, whose son was afterward
made Earl of Plymouth. It must be confessed that in his
attachments to English women Charles showed little care for rank
or station. Lucy Walters and Catherine Peg were very illiterate
creatures.

In a way it was precisely this sort of preference that made
Charles so popular among the people. He seemed to make rank of no
account, but would chat in the most familiar and friendly way with
any one whom he happened to meet. His easy, democratic manner,
coupled with the grace and prestige of royalty, made friends for
him all over England. The treasury might be nearly bankrupt; the
navy might be routed by the Dutch; the king himself might be too
much given to dissipation; but his people forgave him all, because
everybody knew that Charles would clap an honest citizen on the
back and joke with all who came to see him feed the swans in
Regent's Park.

The popular name for him was "Rowley," or "Old Rowley"--a nickname
of mysterious origin, though it is said to have been given him
from a fancied resemblance to a famous hunter in his stables.
Perhaps it is the very final test of popularity that a ruler
should have a nickname known to every one.

Cromwell's death roused all England to a frenzy of king-worship.
The Roundhead, General Monk, and his soldiers proclaimed Charles
King of England and escorted him to London in splendid state. That
was a day when national feeling reached a point such as never has
been before or since. Oughtred, the famous mathematician, died of
joy when the royal emblems were restored. Urquhart, the translator
of Rabelais, died, it is said, of laughter at the people's wild
delight--a truly Rabelaisian end.

There was the king once more; and England, breaking through its
long period of Puritanism, laughed and danced with more vivacity
than ever the French had shown. All the pipers and the players and
panderers to vice, the mountebanks, the sensual men, and the
lawless women poured into the presence of the king, who had been
too long deprived of the pleasure that his nature craved.
Parliament voted seventy thousand pounds for a memorial to
Charles's father, but the irresponsible king spent the whole sum
on the women who surrounded him. His severest counselor, Lord
Clarendon, sent him a remonstrance.

"How can I build such a memorial," asked Charles, "when I don't
know where my father's remains are buried!"

He took money from the King of France to make war against the
Dutch, who had befriended him. It was the French king, too, who
sent him that insidious, subtle daughter of Brittany, Louise de
Keroualle--Duchess of Portsmouth--a diplomat in petticoats, who
won the king's wayward affections, and spied on what he did and
said, and faithfully reported all of it to Paris. She became the
mother of the Duke of Lenox, and she was feared and hated by the
English more than any other of his mistresses. They called her
"Madam Carwell," and they seemed to have an instinct that she was
no mere plaything of his idle hours, but was like some strange
exotic serpent, whose poison might in the end sting the honor of
England.

There is a pitiful little episode in the marriage of Charles with
his Portuguese bride, Catharine of Braganza. The royal girl came
to him fresh from the cloisters of her convent. There was
something about her grace and innocence that touched the dissolute
monarch, who was by no means without a heart. For a time he
treated her with great respect, and she was happy. At last she
began to notice about her strange faces--faces that were evil,
wanton, or overbold. The court became more and more a seat of
reckless revelry.

Finally Catharine was told that the Duchess of Cleveland--that
splendid termagant, Barbara Villiers--had been appointed lady of
the bedchamber. She was told at the same time who this vixen was--
that she was no fit attendant for a virtuous woman, and that her
three sons, the Dukes of Southampton, Grafton, and Northumberland,
were also the sons of Charles.

Fluttered and frightened and dismayed, the queen hastened to her
husband and begged him not to put this slight upon her. A year or
two before, she had never dreamed that life contained such things
as these; but now it seemed to contain nothing else. Charles spoke
sternly to her until she burst into tears, and then he petted her
and told her that her duty as a queen compelled her to submit to
many things which a lady in private life need not endure.

After a long and poignant struggle with her own emotions the
little Portuguese yielded to the wishes of her lord. She never
again reproached him. She even spoke with kindness to his
favorites and made him feel that she studied his happiness alone.
Her gentleness affected him so that he always spoke to her with
courtesy and real friendship. When the Protestant mobs sought to
drive her out of England he showed his courage and manliness by
standing by her and refusing to allow her to be molested.

Indeed, had Charles been always at his best he would have had a
very different name in history. He could be in every sense a king.
He had a keen knowledge of human nature. Though he governed
England very badly, he never governed it so badly as to lose his
popularity.

The epigram of Rochester, written at the king's own request, was
singularly true of Charles. No man relied upon his word, yet men
loved him. He never said anything that was foolish, and he very
seldom did anything that was wise; yet his easy manners and
gracious ways endeared him to those who met him.

One can find no better picture of his court than that which Sir
Walter Scott has drawn so vividly in Peveril of the Peak; or, if
one wishes first-hand evidence, it can be found in the diaries of
Evelyn and of Samuel Pepys. In them we find the rakes and dicers,
full of strange oaths, deep drunkards, vile women and still viler
men, all striving for the royal favor and offering the filthiest
lures, amid routs and balls and noisy entertainments, of which it
is recorded that more than once some woman gave birth to a child
among the crowd of dancers.

No wonder that the little Portuguese queen kept to herself and did
not let herself be drawn into this swirling, roaring, roistering
saturnalia. She had less influence even than Moll Davis, whom
Charles picked out of a coffee-house, and far less than "Madam
Carwell," to whom it is reported that a great English nobleman
once presented pearls to the value of eight thousand pounds in
order to secure her influence in a single stroke of political
business.

Of all the women who surrounded Charles there was only one who
cared anything for him or for England. The rest were all either
selfish or treacherous or base. This one exception has been so
greatly written of, both in fiction and in history, as to make it
seem almost unnecessary to add another word; yet it may well be
worth while to separate the fiction from the fact and to see how
much of the legend of Eleanor Gwyn is true.

The fanciful story of her birthplace is most surely quite
unfounded. She was not the daughter of a Welsh officer, but of two
petty hucksters who had their booth in the lowest precincts of
London. In those days the Strand was partly open country, and as
it neared the city it showed the mansions of the gentry set in
their green-walled parks. At one end of the Strand, however, was
Drury Lane, then the haunt of criminals and every kind of wretch,
while nearer still was the notorious Coal Yard, where no citizen
dared go unarmed.

Within this dreadful place children were kidnapped and trained to
various forms of vice. It was a school for murderers and robbers
and prostitutes; and every night when the torches flared it
vomited forth its deadly spawn. Here was the earliest home of
Eleanor Gwyn, and out of this den of iniquity she came at night to
sell oranges at the entrance to the theaters. She was stage-
struck, and endeavored to get even a minor part in a play; but
Betterton, the famous actor, thrust her aside when she ventured to
apply to him.

It must be said that in everything that was external, except her
beauty, she fell short of a fastidious taste. She was intensely
ignorant even for that time. She spoke in a broad Cockney dialect.
She had lived the life of the Coal Yard, and, like Zola's Nana,
she could never remember the time when she had known the meaning
of chastity.

Nell Gwyn was, in fact, a product of the vilest slums of London;
and precisely because she was this we must set her down as
intrinsically a good woman--one of the truest, frankest, and most
right-minded of whom the history of such women has anything to
tell. All that external circumstances could do to push her down
into the mire was done; yet she was not pushed down, but emerged
as one of those rare souls who have in their natures an
uncontaminated spring of goodness and honesty. Unlike Barbara
Villiers or Lucy Walters or Louise de Keroualle, she was neither a
harpy nor a foe to England.

Charles is said first to have met her when he, incognito, with
another friend, was making the rounds of the theaters at night.
The king spied her glowing, nut-brown face in one of the boxes,
and, forgetting his incognito, went up and joined her. She was
with her protector of the time, Lord Buckhurst, who, of course,
recognized his majesty.

Presently the whole party went out to a neighboring coffee-house,
where they drank and ate together. When it came time to pay the
reckoning the king found that he had no money, nor had his friend.
Lord Buckhurst, therefore, paid the bill, while Mistress Nell
jeered at the other two, saying that this was the most poverty-
stricken party that she had ever met.

Charles did not lose sight of her. Her frankness and honest manner
pleased him. There came a time when she was known to be a mistress
of the king, and she bore a son, who was ennobled as the Duke of
St. Albans, but who did not live to middle age. Nell Gwyn was much
with Charles; and after his tempestuous scenes with Barbara
Villiers, and the feeling of dishonor which the Duchess of
Portsmouth made him experience, the girl's good English bluntness
was a pleasure far more rare than sentiment.

Somehow, just as the people had come to mistrust "Madam Carwell,"
so they came to like Nell Gwyn. She saw enough of Charles, and she
liked him well enough, to wish that he might do his duty by his
people; and she alone had the boldness to speak out what she
thought. One day she found him lolling in an arm-chair and
complaining that the people were not satisfied.

"You can very easily satisfy them," said Nell Gwyn. "Dismiss your
women and attend to the proper business of a king."

Again, her heart was touched at the misfortunes of the old
soldiers who had fought for Charles and for his father during the
Civil War, and who were now neglected, while the treasury was
emptied for French favorites, and while the policy of England
itself was bought and sold in France. Many and many a time, when
other women of her kind used their lures to get jewels or titles
or estates or actual heaps of money, Nell Gwyn besought the king
to aid these needy veterans. Because of her efforts Chelsea
Hospital was founded. Such money as she had she shared with the
poor and with those who had fought for her royal lover.

As I have said, she is a historical type of the woman who loses
her physical purity, yet who retains a sense of honor and of
honesty which nothing can take from her. There are not many such
examples, and therefore this one is worth remembering.

Of anecdotes concerning her there are many, but not often has
their real import been detected. If she could twine her arms about
the monarch's neck and transport him in a delirium of passion,
this was only part of what she did. She tried to keep him right
and true and worthy of his rank; and after he had ceased to care
much for her as a lover he remembered that she had been faithful
in many other things.

Then there came the death-bed scene, when Charles, in his
inimitable manner, apologized to those about him because he was so
long in dying. A far sincerer sentence was that which came from
his heart, as he cried out, in the very pangs of death:

"Do not let poor Nelly starve!"





MAURICE OF SAXONY AND ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR


It is an old saying that to every womanly woman self-sacrifice is
almost a necessity of her nature. To make herself of small account
as compared with the one she loves; to give freely of herself,
even though she may receive nothing in return; to suffer, and yet
to feel an inner poignant joy in all this suffering--here is a
most wonderful trait of womanhood. Perhaps it is akin to the
maternal instinct; for to the mother, after she has felt the throb
of a new life within her, there is no sacrifice so great and no
anguish so keen that she will not welcome it as the outward sign
and evidence of her illimitable love.

In most women this spirit of self-sacrifice is checked and kept
within ordinary bounds by the circumstances of their lives. In
many small things they do yield and they do suffer; yet it is not
in yielding and in suffering that they find their deepest joy.

There are some, however, who seem to have been born with an
abnormal capacity for enduring hardship and mental anguish; so
that by a sort of contradiction they find their happiness in
sorrow. Such women are endowed with a remarkable degree of
sensibility. They feel intensely. In moments of grief and
disappointment, and even of despair, there steals over them a sort
of melancholy pleasure. It is as if they loved dim lights and
mournful music and scenes full of sad suggestion.

If everything goes well with them, they are unwilling to believe
that such good fortune will last. If anything goes wrong with
them, they are sure that this is only the beginning of something
even worse. The music of their lives is written in a minor key.

Now, for such women as these, the world at large has very little
charity. It speaks slightingly of them as "agonizers." It believes
that they are "fond of making scenes." It regards as an
affectation something that is really instinctive and inevitable.
Unless such women are beautiful and young and charming they are
treated badly; and this is often true in spite of all their
natural attractiveness, for they seem to court ill usage as if
they were saying frankly:

"Come, take us! We will give you everything and ask for nothing.
We do not expect true and enduring love. Do not be constant or
generous or even kind. We know that we shall suffer. But, none the
less, in our sorrow there will be sweetness, and even in our
abasement we shall feel a sort of triumph."

In history there is one woman who stands out conspicuously as a
type of her melancholy sisterhood, one whose life was full of
disappointment even when she was most successful, and of indignity
even when she was most sought after and admired. This woman was
Adrienne Lecouvreur, famous in the annals of the stage, and still
more famous in the annals of unrequited--or, at any rate, unhappy
--love.

Her story is linked with that of a man no less remarkable than
herself, a hero of chivalry, a marvel of courage, of fascination,
and of irresponsibility.

Adrienne Lecouvreur--her name was originally Couvreur--was born
toward the end of the seventeenth century in the little French
village of Damery, not far from Rheims, where her aunt was a
laundress and her father a hatter in a small way. Of her mother,
who died in childbirth, we know nothing; but her father was a man
of gloomy and ungovernable temper, breaking out into violent fits
of passion, in one of which, long afterward, he died, raving and
yelling like a maniac.

Adrienne was brought up at the wash-tub, and became accustomed to
a wandering life, in which she went from one town to another. What
she had inherited from her mother is, of course, not known; but
she had all her father's strangely pessimistic temper, softened
only by the fact that she was a girl. From her earliest years she
was unhappy; yet her unhappiness was largely of her own choosing.
Other girls of her own station met life cheerfully, worked away
from dawn till dusk, and then had their moments of amusement, and
even jollity, with their companions, after the fashion of all
children. But Adrienne Lecouvreur was unhappy because she chose to
be. It was not the wash-tub that made her so, for she had been
born to it; nor was it the half-mad outbreaks of her father,
because to her, at least, he was not unkind. Her discontent sprang
from her excessive sensibility.

Indeed, for a peasant child she had reason to think herself far
more fortunate than her associates. Her intelligence was great.
Ambition was awakened in her before she was ten years of age, when
she began to learn and to recite poems--learning them, as has been
said, "between the wash-tub and the ironing-board," and reciting
them to the admiration of older and wiser people than she. Even at
ten she was a very beautiful child, with great lambent eyes, an
exquisite complexion, and a lovely form, while she had the further
gift of a voice that thrilled the listener and, when she chose,
brought tears to every eye. She was, indeed, a natural
elocutionist, knowing by instinct all those modulations of tone
and varied cadences which go to the hearer's heart.

It was very like Adrienne Lecouvreur to memorize only such poems
as were mournful, just as in after life she could win success upon
the stage only in tragic parts. She would repeat with a sort of
ecstasy the pathetic poems that were then admired; and she was
soon able to give up her menial work, because many people asked
her to their houses so that they could listen to the divinely
beautiful voice charged with the emotion which was always at her
command.

When she was thirteen her father moved to Paris, where she was
placed at school--a very humble school in a very humble quarter of
the city. Yet even there her genius showed itself at that early
age. A number of children and young people, probably influenced by
Adrienne, formed themselves into a theatrical company from the
pure love of acting. A friendly grocer let them have an empty
store-room for their performances, and in this store-room Adrienne
Lecouvreur first acted in a tragedy by Corneille, assuming the
part of leading woman.

Her genius for the stage was like the genius of Napoleon for war.
She had had no teaching. She had never been inside of any theater;
and yet she delivered the magnificent lines with all the power and
fire and effectiveness of a most accomplished actress. People
thronged to see her and to feel the tempest of emotion which shook
her as she sustained her part, which for the moment was as real to
her as life itself.

At first only the people of the neighborhood knew anything about
these amateur performances; but presently a lady of rank, one Mme.
du Gue, came out of curiosity and was fascinated by the little
actress. Mme. du Gue offered the spacious courtyard of her own
house, and fitted it with some of the appurtenances of a theater.
From that moment the fame of Adrienne spread throughout all Paris.
The courtyard was crowded by gentlemen and ladies, by people of
distinction from the court, and at last even by actors and
actresses from the Comedie Franchise.

It is, in fact, a remarkable tribute to Adrienne that in her
thirteenth year she excited so much jealousy among the actors of
the Comedie that they evoked the law against her. Theaters
required a royal license, and of course poor little Adrienne's
company had none. Hence legal proceedings were begun, and the most
famous actresses in Paris talked of having these clever children
imprisoned! Upon this the company sought the precincts of the
Temple, where no legal warrant could be served without the express
order of the king himself.

There for a time the performances still went on. Finally, as the
other children were not geniuses, but merely boys and girls in
search of fun, the little company broke up. Its success, however,
had determined for ever the career of Adrienne. With her beautiful
face, her lithe and exquisite figure, her golden voice, and her
instinctive art, it was plain enough that her future lay upon the
stage; and so at fourteen or fifteen she began where most
actresses leave off--accomplished and attractive, and having had a
practical training in her profession.

Diderot, in that same century, observed that the truest actor is
one who does not feel his part at all, but produces his effects by
intellectual effort and intelligent observation. Behind the figure
on the stage, torn with passion or rollicking with mirth, there
must always be the cool and unemotional mind which directs and
governs and controls. This same theory was both held and practised
by the late Benoit Constant Coquelin. To some extent it was the
theory of Garrick and Fechter and Edwin Booth; though it was
rejected by the two Keans, and by Edwin Forrest, who entered so
throughly into the character which he assumed, and who let loose
such tremendous bursts of passion that other actors dreaded to
support him on the stage in such parts as Spartacus and Metamora.

It is needless to say that a girl like Adrienne Lecouvreur flung
herself with all the intensity of her nature into every role she
played. This was the greatest secret of her success; for, with
her, nature rose superior to art. On the other hand, it fixed her
dramatic limitations, for it barred her out of comedy. Her
melancholy, morbid disposition was in the fullest sympathy with
tragic heroines; but she failed when she tried to represent the
lighter moods and the merry moments of those who welcome mirth.
She could counterfeit despair, and unforced tears would fill her
eyes; but she could not laugh and romp and simulate a gaiety that
was never hers.

Adrienne would have been delighted to act at one of the theaters
in Paris; but they were closed to her through jealousy. She went
into the provinces, in the eastern part of France, and for ten
years she was a leading lady there in many companies and in many
towns. As she blossomed into womanhood there came into her life
the love which was to be at once a source of the most profound
interest and of the most intense agony.

It is odd that all her professional success never gave her any
happiness. The life of the actress who traveled from town to town,
the crude and coarse experiences which she had to undergo, the
disorder and the unsettled mode of living, all produced in her a
profound disgust. She was of too exquisite a fiber to live in such
a way, especially in a century when the refinements of existence
were for the very few.

She speaks herself of "obligatory amusements, the insistence of
men, and of love affairs." Yet how could such a woman as Adrienne
Lecouvreur keep herself from love affairs? The motion of the stage
and its mimic griefs satisfied her only while she was actually
upon the boards. Love offered her an emotional excitement that
endured and that was always changing. It was "the profoundest
instinct of her being"; and she once wrote: "What could one do in
the world without loving?"

Still, through these ten years she seems to have loved only that
she might be unhappy. There was a strange twist in her mind. Men
who were honorable and who loved her with sincerity she treated
very badly. Men who were indifferent or ungrateful or actually
base she seemed to choose by a sort of perverse instinct. Perhaps
the explanation of it is that during those ten years, though she
had many lovers, she never really loved. She sought excitement,
passion, and after that the mournfulness which comes when passion
dies. Thus, one man after another came into her life--some of them
promising marriage--and she bore two children, whose fathers were
unknown, or at least uncertain. But, after all, one can scarcely
pity her, since she had not yet in reality known that great
passion which comes but once in life. So far she had learned only
a sort of feeble cynicism, which she expressed in letters and in
such sayings as these:

"There are sweet errors which I would not venture to commit again.
My experiences, all too sad, have served to illumine my reason."

"I am utterly weary of love and prodigiously tempted to have no
more of it for the rest of my life; because, after all, I don't
wish either to die or to go mad."

Yet she also said: "I know too well that no one dies of grief."

She had had, indeed, some very unfortunate experiences. Men of
rank had loved her and had then cast her off. An actor, one
Clavel, would have married her, but she would not accept his
offer. A magistrate in Strasburg promised marriage; and then, when
she was about to accept him, he wrote to her that he was going to
yield to the wishes of his family and make a more advantageous
alliance. And so she was alternately caressed and repulsed--a
mere plaything; and yet this was probably all that she really
needed at the time--something to stir her, something to make her
mournful or indignant or ashamed.

It was inevitable that at last Adrienne Lecouvreur should appear
in Paris. She had won such renown throughout the provinces that
even those who were intensely jealous of her were obliged to give
her due consideration. In 1717, when she was in her twenty-fifth
year, she became a member of the Comedie Franchise. There she made
an immediate and most brilliant impression. She easily took the
leading place. She was one of the glories of Paris, for she became
the fashion outside the theater. For the first time the great
classic plays were given, not in the monotonous singsong which had
become a sort of theatrical convention, but with all the fire and
naturalness of life.

Being the fashion, Mlle. Lecouvreur elevated the social rank of
actors and of actresses. Her salon was thronged by men and women
of rank. Voltaire wrote poems in her honor. To be invited to her
dinners was almost like receiving a decoration from the king. She
ought to have been happy, for she had reached the summit of her
profession and something more.

Yet still she was unhappy. In all her letters one finds a
plaintive tone, a little moaning sound that shows how slightly her
nature had been changed. No longer, however, did she throw herself
away upon dullards or brutes. An English peer--Lord Peterborough--
not realizing that she was different from other actresses of that
loose-lived age, said to her coarsely at his first introduction:

"Come now! Show me lots of wit and lots of love."

The remark was characteristic of the time. Yet Adrienne had
learned at least one thing, and that was the discontent which came
from light affairs. She had thrown herself away too often. If she
could not love with her entire being, if she could not give all
that was in her to be given, whether of her heart or mind or soul,
then she would love no more at all.

At this time there came to Paris a man remarkable in his own
century, and one who afterward became almost a hero of romance.
This was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, as the French called him, his
German name and title being Moritz, Graf von Sachsen, while we
usually term him, in English, Marshal Saxe. Maurice de Saxe was
now, in 1721, entering his twenty-fifth year. Already, though so
young, his career had been a strange one; and it was destined to
be still more remarkable. He was the natural son of Duke Augustus
II. of Saxony, who later became King of Poland, and who is known
in history as Augustus the Strong.

Augustus was a giant in stature and in strength, handsome, daring,
unscrupulous, and yet extremely fascinating. His life was one of
revelry and fighting and display. When in his cups he would often
call for a horseshoe and twist it into a knot with his powerful
fingers. Many were his mistresses; but the one for whom he cared
the most was a beautiful and high-spirited Swedish girl of rank,
Aurora von Konigsmarck. She was descended from a rough old field-
marshal who in the Thirty Years' War had slashed and sacked and
pillaged and plundered to his heart's content. From him Aurora von
Konigsmarck seemed to have inherited a high spirit and a sort of
lawlessness which charmed the stalwart Augustus of Poland.

Their son, Maurice de Saxe, inherited everything that was good in
his parents, and a great deal that was less commendable. As a mere
child of twelve he had insisted on joining the army of Prince
Eugene, and had seen rough service in a very strenuous campaign.
Two years later he showed such daring on the battle-field that
Prince Eugene summoned him and paid him a compliment under the
form of a rebuke.

"Young man," he said, "you must not mistake mere recklessness for
valor."

Before he was twenty he had attained the stature and strength of
his royal father; and, to prove it, he in his turn called for a
horseshoe, which he twisted and broke in his fingers. He fought on
the side of the Russians and Poles, and again against the Turks,
everywhere displaying high courage and also genius as a commander;
for he never lost his self-possession amid the very blackest
danger, but possessed, as Carlyle says, "vigilance, foresight, and
sagacious precaution."

Exceedingly handsome, Maurice was a master of all the arts that
pleased, with just a touch of roughness, which seemed not
unfitting in so gallant a soldier. His troops adored him and would
follow wherever he might choose to lead them; for he exercised
over these rude men a magnetic power resembling that of Napoleon
in after years. In private life he was a hard drinker and fond of
every form of pleasure. Having no fortune of his own, a marriage
was arranged for him with the Countess von Loben, who was
immensely wealthy; but in three years he had squandered all her
money upon his pleasures, and had, moreover, got himself heavily
in debt.

It was at this time that he first came to Paris to study military
tactics. He had fought hard against the French in the wars that
were now ended; but his chivalrous bearing, his handsome person,
and his reckless joviality made him at once a universal favorite
in Paris. To the perfumed courtiers, with their laces and
lovelocks and mincing ways, Maurice de Saxe came as a sort of
knight of old--jovial, daring, pleasure-loving. Even his broken
French was held to be quite charming; and to see him break a
horseshoe with his fingers threw every one into raptures.

No wonder, then, that he was welcomed in the very highest circles.
Almost at once he attracted the notice of the Princesse de Conti,
a beautiful woman of the blood royal. Of her it has been said that
she was "the personification of a kiss, the incarnation of an
embrace, the ideal of a dream of love." Her chestnut hair was
tinted with little gleams of gold. Her eyes were violet black. Her
complexion was dazzling. But by the king's orders she had been
forced to marry a hunchback--a man whose very limbs were so
weakened by disease and evil living that they would often fail to
support him, and he would fall to the ground, a writhing,
screaming mass of ill-looking flesh.

It is not surprising that his lovely wife should have shuddered
much at his abuse of her and still more at his grotesque
endearments. When her eyes fell on Maurice de Saxe she saw in him
one who could free her from her bondage. By a skilful trick he led
the Prince de Conti to invade the sleeping-room of the princess,
with servants, declaring that she was not alone. The charge proved
quite untrue, and so she left her husband, having won the sympathy
of her own world, which held that she had been insulted. But it
was not she who was destined to win and hold the love of Maurice
de Saxe.

Not long after his appearance in the French capital he was invited
to dine with the "Queen of Paris," Adrienne Lecouvreur. Saxe had
seen her on the stage. He knew her previous history. He knew that
she was very much of a soiled dove; but when he met her these two
natures, so utterly dissimilar, leaped together, as it were,
through the indescribable attraction of opposites. He was big and
powerful; she was small and fragile. He was merry, and full of
quips and jests; she was reserved and melancholy. Each felt in the
other a need supplied.

At one of their earliest meetings the climax came. Saxe was not
the man to hesitate; while she already, in her thoughts, had made
a full surrender. In one great sweep he gathered her into his
arms. It appeared to her as if no man had ever laid his hand upon
her until that moment. She cried out:

"Now, for the first time in my life, I seem to live!"

It was, indeed, the very first love which in her checkered career
was really worthy of the name. She had supposed that all such
things were passed and gone, that her heart was closed for ever,
that she was invulnerable; and yet here she found herself clinging
about the neck of this impetuous soldier and showing him all the
shy fondness and the unselfish devotion of a young girl. From this
instant Adrienne Lecouvreur never loved another man and never even
looked at any other man with the slightest interest. For nine long
years the two were bound together, though there were strange
events to ruffle the surface of their love.

Maurice de Saxe had been sired by a king. He had the lofty
ambition to be a king himself, and he felt the stirrings of that
genius which in after years was to make him a great soldier, and
to win the brilliant victory of Fontenoy, which to this very day
the French are never tired of recalling. Already Louis XV. had
made him a marshal of France; and a certain restlessness came over
him. He loved Adrienne; yet he felt that to remain in the
enjoyment of her witcheries ought not to be the whole of a man's
career.

Then the Grand Duchy of Courland--at that time a vassal state of
Poland, now part of Russia--sought a ruler. Maurice de Saxe was
eager to secure its throne, which would make him at least semi-
royal and the chief of a principality. He hastened thither and
found that money was needed to carry out his plans. The widow of
the late duke--the Grand Duchess Anna, niece of Peter the Great,
and later Empress of Russia--as soon as she had met this dazzling
genius, offered to help him to acquire the duchy if he would only
marry her. He did not utterly refuse. Still another woman of high
rank, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Peter the Great's
daughter, made him very much the same proposal.

Both of these imperial women might well have attracted a man like
Maurice de Saxe, had he been wholly fancy-free, for the second of
them inherited the high spirit and the genius of the great Peter,
while the first was a pleasure-seeking princess, resembling some
of those Roman empresses who loved to stoop that they might
conquer. She is described as indolent and sensual, and she once
declared that the chief good in the world was love. Yet, though
she neglected affairs of state and gave them over to favorites,
she won and kept the affections of her people. She was
unquestionably endowed with the magnetic gift of winning hearts.

Adrienne, who was left behind in Paris, knew very little of what
was going on. Only two things were absolutely clear to her. One
was that if her lover secured the duchy he must be parted from
her. The other was that without money his ambition must be
thwarted, and that he would then return to her. Here was a test to
try the soul of any woman. It proved the height and the depth of
her devotion. Come what might, Maurice should be Duke of Courland,
even though she lost him. She gathered together her whole fortune,
sold every jewel that she possessed, and sent her lover the sum of
nearly a million francs.

This incident shows how absolutely she was his. But in fact,
because of various intrigues, he failed of election to the ducal
throne of Courland, and he returned to Adrienne with all her money
spent, and without even the grace, at first, to show his
gratitude. He stormed and raged over his ill luck. She merely
soothed and petted him, though she had heard that he had thought
of marrying another woman to secure the dukedom. In one of her
letters she bursts out with the pitiful exclamation:

I am distracted with rage and anguish. Is it not natural to cry
out against such treachery? This man surely ought to know me--he
ought to love me. Oh, my God! What are we--what ARE we?

But still she could not give him up, nor could he give her up,
though there were frightful scenes between them--times when he
cruelly reproached her and when her native melancholy deepened
into outbursts of despair. Finally there occurred an incident
which is more or less obscure in parts. The Duchesse de Bouillon,
a great lady of the court--facile, feline, licentious, and eager
for delights--resolved that she would win the love of Maurice de
Saxe. She set herself to win it openly and without any sense of
shame. Maurice himself at times, when the tears of Adrienne proved
wearisome, flirted with the duchess.

Yet, even so, Adrienne held the first place in his heart, and her
rival knew it. Therefore she resolved to humiliate Adrienne, and
to do so in the place where the actress had always reigned
supreme. There was to be a gala performance of Racine's great
tragedy, "Phedre," with Adrienne, of course, in the title-role.
The Duchesse de Bouillon sent a large number of her lackeys with
orders to hiss and jeer, and, if possible, to break off the play.
Malignantly delighted with her plan, the duchess arrayed herself
in jewels and took her seat in a conspicuous stage-box, where she
could watch the coming storm and gloat over the discomfiture of
her rival.

When the curtain rose, and when Adrienne appeared as Phedre, an
uproar began. It was clear to the great actress that a plot had
been devised against her. In an instant her whole soul was afire.
The queen-like majesty of her bearing compelled silence throughout
the house. Even the hired lackeys were overawed by it. Then
Adrienne moved swiftly across the stage and fronted her enemy,
speaking into her very face the three insulting lines which came
to her at that moment of the play:

    I am not of those women void of shame,
    Who, savoring in crime the joys of peace,
    Harden their faces till they cannot blush!

The whole house rose and burst forth into tremendous applause.
Adrienne had won, for the woman who had tried to shame her rose in
trepidation and hurried from the theater.

But the end was not yet. Those were evil times, when dark deeds
were committed by the great almost with impunity. Secret poisoning
was a common trade. To remove a rival was as usual a thing in the
eighteenth century as to snub a rival is usual in the twentieth.

Not long afterward, on the night of March 15, 1730, Adrienne
Lecouvreur was acting in one of Voltaire's plays with all her
power and instinctive art when suddenly she was seized with the
most frightful pains. Her anguish was obvious to every one who saw
her, and yet she had the courage to go through her part. Then she
fainted and was carried home.

Four days later she died, and her death was no less dramatic than
her life had been. Her lover and two friends of his were with her,
and also a Jesuit priest. He declined to administer extreme
unction unless she would declare that she repented of her
theatrical career. She stubbornly refused, since she believed that
to be the greatest actress of her time was not a sin. Yet still
the priest insisted.

Then came the final moment.

"Weary and revolting against this death, this destiny, she
stretched her arms with one of the old lovely gestures toward a
bust which stood near by and cried--her last cry of passion:

"'There is my world, my hope--yes, and my God!'"

The bust was one of Maurice de Saxe.





THE STORY OF PRINCE CHARLES EDWARD STUART


The royal families of Europe are widely known, yet not all of them
are equally renowned. Thus, the house of Romanoff, although
comparatively young, stands out to the mind with a sort of
barbaric power, more vividly than the Austrian house of Hapsburg,
which is the oldest reigning family in Europe, tracing its
beginnings backward until they are lost in the Dark Ages. The
Hohenzollerns of Prussia are comparatively modern, so far as
concerns their royalty. The offshoots of the Bourbons carry on a
very proud tradition in the person of the King of Spain, although
France, which has been ruled by so many members of the family,
will probably never again behold a Bourbon king. The deposed
Braganzas bear a name which is ancient, but which has a somewhat
tinsel sound.

The Bonapartes, of course, are merely parvenus, and they have had
the good taste to pretend to no antiquity of birth. The first
Napoleon, dining at a table full of monarchs, when he heard one of
them deferentially alluding to the Bonaparte family as being very
old and noble, exclaimed:

"Pish! My nobility dates from the day of Marengo!"

And the third Napoleon, in announcing his coming marriage with
Mlle. de Montijo, used the very word "parvenu" in speaking of
himself and of his family. His frankness won the hearts of the
French people and helped to reconcile them to a marriage in which
the bride was barely noble.

In English history there are two great names to conjure by, at
least to the imaginative. One is Plantagenet, which seems to
contain within itself the very essence of all that is patrician,
magnificent, and royal. It calls to memory at once the lion-
hearted Richard, whose short reign was replete with romance in
England and France and Austria and the Holy Land.

But perhaps a name of greater influence is that which links the
royal family of Britain today with the traditions of the past, and
which summons up legend and story and great deeds of history. This
is the name of Stuart, about which a whole volume might be written
to recall its suggestions and its reminiscences.

The first Stuart (then Stewart) of whom anything is known got his
name from the title of "Steward of Scotland," which remained in
the family for generations, until the sixth of the line, by
marriage with Princess Marjory Bruce, acquired the Scottish crown.
That was in the early years of the fourteenth century; and
finally, after the death of Elizabeth of England, her rival's son,
James VI. of Scotland and I. of England, united under one crown
two kingdoms that had so long been at almost constant war.

It is almost characteristic of the Scot that, having small
territory, little wealth, and a seat among his peers that is
almost ostentatiously humble, he should bit by bit absorb the
possessions of all the rest and become their master. Surely, the
proud Tudors, whose line ended with Elizabeth, must have despised
the "Stewards," whose kingdom was small and bleak and cold, and
who could not control their own vassals.

One can imagine also, with Sir Walter Scott, the haughty nobles of
the English court sneering covertly at the awkward, shambling
James, pedant and bookworm. Nevertheless, his diplomacy was almost
as good as that of Elizabeth herself; and, though he did some
foolish things, he was very far from being a fool.

In his appearance James was not unlike Abraham Lincoln--an
unkingly figure; and yet, like Lincoln, when occasion required it
he could rise to the dignity which makes one feel the presence of
a king. He was the only Stuart who lacked anything in form or
feature or external grace. His son, Charles I., was perhaps one of
the worst rulers that England has ever had; yet his uprightness of
life, his melancholy yet handsome face, his graceful bearing, and
the strong religious element in his character, together with the
fact that he was put to death after being treacherously
surrendered to his enemies--all these have combined to make almost
a saint of him. There are Englishmen to-day who speak of him as
"the martyr king," and who, on certain days of the year, say
prayers that beg the Lord's forgiveness because of Charles's
execution.

The members of the so-called League of the White Rose, founded to
perpetuate English allegiance to the direct line of Stuarts, do
many things that are quite absurd. They refuse to pray for the
present King of England and profess to think that the Princess
Mary of Bavaria is the true ruler of Great Britain. All this
represents that trace of sentiment which lingers among the English
to-day. They feel that the Stuarts were the last kings of England
to rule by the grace of God rather than by the grace of
Parliament. As a matter of fact, the present reigning family in
England is glad to derive its ancient strain of royal blood
through a Stuart--descended on the distaff side from James I.,
and winding its way through Hanover.

This sentiment for the Stuarts is a thing entirely apart from
reason and belongs to the realm of poetry and romance; yet so
strong is it that it has shown itself in the most inconsistent
fashion. For instance, Sir Walter Scott was a devoted adherent of
the house of Hanover. When George IV. visited Edinburgh, Scott was
completely carried away by his loyal enthusiasm. He could not see
that the man before him was a drunkard and braggart. He viewed him
as an incarnation of all the noble traits that ought to hedge
about a king. He snatched up a wine-glass from which George had
just been drinking and carried it away to be an object of
reverence for ever after. Nevertheless, in his heart, and often in
his speech, Scott seemed to be a high Tory, and even a Jacobite.

There are precedents for this. The Empress Eugenie used often to
say with a laugh that she was the only true royalist at the
imperial court of France. That was well enough for her in her days
of flightiness and frivolity. No one, however, accused Queen
Victoria of being frivolous, and she was not supposed to have a
strong sense of humor. None the less, after listening to the
skirling of the bagpipes and to the romantic ballads which were
sung in Scotland she is said to have remarked with a sort of sigh:

"Whenever I hear those ballads I feel that England belongs really
to the Stuarts!"

Before Queen Victoria was born, when all the sons of George III.
were childless, the Duke of Kent was urged to marry, so that he
might have a family to continue the succession. In resenting the
suggestion he said many things, and among them this was the most
striking:

"Why don't you call the Stuarts back to England? They couldn't
possibly make a worse mess of it than our fellows have!"

But he yielded to persuasion and married. From this marriage came
Victoria, who had the sacred drop of Stuart blood which gave
England to the Hanoverians; and she was to redeem the blunders and
tyrannies of both houses.

The fascination of the Stuarts, which has been carried overseas to
America and the British dominions, probably began with the
striking history of Mary Queen of Scots. Her brilliancy and
boldness and beauty, and especially the pathos of her end, have
made us see only her intense womanliness, which in her own day was
the first thing that any one observed in her. So, too, with
Charles I., romantic figure and knightly gentleman. One regrets
his death upon the scaffold, even though his execution was
necessary to the growth of freedom.

Many people are no less fascinated by Charles II., that very
different type, with his gaiety, his good-fellowship, and his
easy-going ways. It is not surprising that his people, most of
whom never saw him, were very fond of him, and did not know that
he was selfish, a loose liver, and almost a vassal of the king of
France.

So it is not strange that the Stuarts, with all their arts and
graces, were very hard to displace. James II., with the aid of the
French, fought hard before the British troops in Ireland broke the
backs of both his armies and sent him into exile. Again in 1715--an
episode perpetuated in Thackeray's dramatic story of Henry Esmond
--came the son of James to take advantage of the vacancy caused by
the death of Queen Anne. But it is perhaps to this claimant's son,
the last of the militant Stuarts, that more chivalrous feeling has
been given than to any other.

To his followers he was the Young Chevalier, the true Prince of
Wales; to his enemies, the Whigs and the Hanoverians, he was "the
Pretender." One of the most romantic chapters of history is the
one which tells of that last brilliant dash which he made upon the
coast of Scotland, landing with but a few attendants and rejecting
the support of a French army.

"It is not with foreigners," he said, "but with my own loyal
subjects, that I wish to regain the kingdom for my father."

It was a daring deed, and the spectacular side of it has been
often commemorated, especially in Sir Walter Scott's Waverley.
There we see the gallant prince moving through a sort of military
panorama. Most of the British troops were absent in Flanders, and
the few regiments that could be mustered to meet him were appalled
by the ferocity and reckless courage of the Highlanders, who
leaped down like wildcats from their hills and flung themselves
with dirk and sword upon the British cannon.

We see Sir John Cope retiring at Falkirk, and the astonishing
victory of Prestonpans, where disciplined British troops fled in
dismay through the morning mist, leaving artillery and supplies
behind them. It is Scott again who shows us the prince, master of
Edinburgh for a time, while the white rose of Stuart royalty held
once more the ancient keep above the Scottish capital. Then we see
the Chevalier pressing southward into England, where he hoped to
raise an English army to support his own. But his Highlanders
cared nothing for England, and the English--even the Catholic
gentry--would not rise to support his cause.

Personally, he had every gift that could win allegiance. Handsome,
high-tempered, and brave, he could also control his fiery spirit
and listen to advice, however unpalatable it might be.

The time was favorable. The British troops had been defeated on
the Continent by Marshal Saxe, of whom I have already written, and
by Marshal d'Estrees. George II. was a king whom few respected. He
could scarcely speak anything but German. He grossly ill-treated
his wife. It is said that on one occasion, in a fit of temper, he
actually kicked the prime minister. Not many felt any personal
loyalty to him, and he spent most of his time away from England in
his other domain of Hanover.

But precisely here was a reason why Englishmen were willing to put
up with him. As between him and the brilliant Stuart there would
have been no hesitation had the choice been merely one of men; but
it was believed that the return of the Stuarts meant the return of
something like absolute government, of taxation without sanction
of law, and of religious persecution. Under the Hanoverian George
the English people had begun to exercise a considerable measure of
self-government. Sharp opposition in Parliament compelled him time
and again to yield; and when he was in Hanover the English were
left to work out the problem of free government.

Hence, although Prince Charles Edward fascinated all who met him,
and although a small army was raised for his support, still the
unromantic, common-sense Englishmen felt that things were better
than in the days gone by, and most of them refused to take up arms
for the cause which sentimentally they favored. Therefore,
although the Chevalier stirred all England and sent a thrill
through the officers of state in London, his soldiers gradually
deserted, and the Scots insisted on returning to their own
country. Although the Stuart troops reached a point as far south
as Derby, they were soon pushed backward into Scotland, pursued by
an army of about nine thousand men under the Duke of Cumberland,
son of George II.

Cumberland was no soldier; he had been soundly beaten by the
French on the famous field of Fontenoy. Yet he had firmness and a
sort of overmastering brutality, which, with disciplined troops
and abundant artillery, were sufficient to win a victory over the
untrained Highlanders.

When the battle came five thousand of these mountaineers went
roaring along the English lines, with the Chevalier himself at
their head. For a moment there was surprise. The Duke of
Cumberland had been drinking so heavily that he could give no
verbal orders. One of his officers, however, is said to have come
to him in his tent, where he was trying to play cards.

"What disposition shall we make of the prisoners?" asked the
officer.

The duke tried to reply, but his utterance was very thick.

"No quarter!" he was believed to say.

The officer objected and begged that such an order as that should
be given in writing. The duke rolled over and seized a sheaf of
playing-cards. Pulling one out, he scrawled the necessary order,
and that was taken to the commanders in the field.

The Highlanders could not stand the cannon fire, and the English
won. Then the fury of the common soldiery broke loose upon the
country.

There was a reign of fantastic and fiendish brutality. One provost
of the town was violently kicked for a mild remonstrance about the
destruction of the Episcopalian meeting-house; another was
condemned to clean out dirty stables. Men and women were whipped
and tortured on slight suspicion or to extract information.
Cumberland frankly professed his contempt and hatred of the people
among whom he found himself, but he savagely punished robberies
committed by private soldiers for their own profit.

"Mild measures will not do," he wrote to Newcastle.

When leaving the North in July, he said:

"All the good we have done is but a little blood-letting, which
has only weakened the madness, but not at all cured it; and I
tremble to fear that this vile spot may still be the ruin of this
island and of our family."

Such was the famous battle of Culloden, fought in 1746, and
putting a final end to the hopes of all the Stuarts. As to
Cumberland's order for "No quarter," if any apology can be made
for such brutality, it must be found in the fact that the Highland
chiefs had on their side agreed to spare no captured enemy.

The battle has also left a name commonly given to the nine of
diamonds, which is called "the curse of Scotland," because it is
said that on that card Cumberland wrote his bloodthirsty order.

Such, in brief, was the story of Prince Charlie's gallant attempt
to restore the kingdom of his ancestors. Even when defeated, he
would not at once leave Scotland. A French squadron appeared off
the coast near Edinburgh. It had been sent to bring him troops and
a large supply of money, but he turned his back upon it and made
his way into the Highlands on foot, closely pursued by English
soldiers and Lowland spies.

This part of his career is in reality the most romantic of all. He
was hunted closely, almost as by hounds. For weeks he had only
such sleep as he could snatch during short periods of safety, and
there were times when his pursuers came within an inch of
capturing him. But never in his life were his spirits so high.

It was a sort of life that he had never seen before, climbing the
mighty rocks, and listening to the thunder of the cataracts, among
which he often slept, with only one faithful follower to guard
him. The story of his escape is almost incredible, but he laughed
and drank and rolled upon the grass when he was free from care. He
hobnobbed with the most suspicious-looking caterans, with whom he
drank the smoky brew of the North, and lived as he might on fish
and onions and bacon and wild fowl, with an appetite such as he
had never known at the luxurious court of Versailles or St.-Germain.

After the battle of Culloden the prince would have been captured
had not a Scottish girl named Flora Macdonald met him, caused him
to be dressed in the clothes of her waiting-maid, and thus got
him off to the Isle of Skye.

There for a time it was impossible to follow him; and there the
two lived almost alone together. Such a proximity could not fail
to stir the romantic feeling of one who was both a youth and a
prince. On the other hand, no thought of love-making seems to have
entered Flora's mind. If, however, we read Campbell's narrative
very closely we can see that Prince Charles made every advance
consistent with a delicate remembrance of her sex and services.

It seems to have been his thought that if she cared for him, then
the two might well love; and he gave her every chance to show him
favor. The youth of twenty-five and the girl of twenty-four
roamed together in the long, tufted grass or lay in the sunshine
and looked out over the sea. The prince would rest his head in her
lap, and she would tumble his golden hair with her slender fingers
and sometimes clip off tresses which she preserved to give to
friends of hers as love-locks. But to the last he was either too
high or too low for her, according to her own modest thought. He
was a royal prince, the heir to a throne, or else he was a boy
with whom she might play quite fancy-free. A lover he could not
be--so pure and beautiful was her thought of him.

These were perhaps the most delightful days of all his life, as
they were a beautiful memory in hers. In time he returned to
France and resumed his place amid the intrigues that surrounded
that other Stuart prince who styled himself James III., and still
kept up the appearance of a king in exile. As he watched the
artifice and the plotting of these make-believe courtiers he may
well have thought of his innocent companion of the Highland wilds.

As for Flora, she was arrested and imprisoned for five months on
English vessels of war. After her release she was married, in
1750; and she and her husband sailed for the American colonies
just before the Revolution. In that war Macdonald became a British
officer and served against his adopted countrymen. Perhaps because
of this reason Flora returned alone to Scotland, where she died at
the age of sixty-eight.

The royal prince who would have given her his easy love lived a
life of far less dignity in the years that followed his return to
France. There was no more hope of recovering the English throne.
For him there were left only the idle and licentious diversions of
such a court as that in which his father lived.

At the death of James III., even this court was disintegrated, and
Prince Charles led a roving life under the title of Earl of
Albany. In his wanderings he met Louise Marie, the daughter of a
German prince, Gustavus Adolphus of Stolberg. She was only
nineteen years of age when she first felt the fascination that he
still possessed; but it was an unhappy marriage for the girl when
she discovered that her husband was a confirmed drunkard.

Not long after, in fact, she found her life with him so utterly
intolerable that she persuaded the Pope to allow her a formal
separation. The pontiff intrusted her to her husband's brother,
Cardinal York, who placed her in a convent and presently removed
her to his own residence in Rome.

Here begins another romance. She was often visited by Vittorio
Alfieri, the great Italian poet and dramatist. Alfieri was a man
of wealth. In early years he divided his time into alternate
periods during which he either studied hard in civil and canonical
law, or was a constant attendant upon the race-course, or rushed
aimlessly all over Europe without any object except to wear out
the post-horses which he used in relays over hundreds of miles of
road. His life, indeed, was eccentric almost to insanity; but when
he had met the beautiful and lonely Countess of Albany there came
over him a striking change. She influenced him for all that was
good, and he used to say that he owed her all that was best in his
dramatic works.

Sixteen years after her marriage her royal husband died, a worn-
out, bloated wreck of one who had been as a youth a model of
knightliness and manhood. During his final years he had fallen to
utter destitution, and there was either a touch of half contempt
or a feeling of remote kinship in the act of George III., who
bestowed upon the prince an annual pension of four thousand
pounds. It showed most plainly that England was now consolidated
under Hanoverian rule.

When Cardinal York died, in 1807, there was no Stuart left in the
male line; and the countess was the last to bear the royal
Scottish name of Albany.

After the prince's death his widow is said to have been married to
Alfieri, and for the rest of her life she lived in Florence,
though Alfieri died nearly twenty-one years before her.

Here we have seen a part of the romance which attaches itself to
the name of Stuart--in the chivalrous young prince, leading his
Highlanders against the bayonets of the British, lolling idly
among the Hebrides, or fallen, at the last, to be a drunkard and
the husband of an unwilling consort, who in her turn loved a
famous poet. But it is this Stuart, after all, of whom we think
when we hear the bagpipes skirling "Over the Water to Charlie" or
"Wha'll be King but Charlie?"






FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY

THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION

BY LYNDON ORR

VOLUME II of IV.





CONTENTS


THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN
MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN
THE STORY OF AARON BURR
GEORGE IV. AND MRS. FITZHERBERT
CHARLOTTE CORDAY AND ADAM LUX
NAPOLEON AND MARIE WALEWSKA
THE STORY OF PAULINE BONAPARTE
THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG





THE EMPRESS CATHARINE AND PRINCE POTEMKIN


It has often been said that the greatest Frenchman who ever lived
was in reality an Italian. It might with equal truth be asserted
that the greatest Russian woman who ever lived was in reality a
German. But the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Catharine II.
resemble each other in something else. Napoleon, though Italian in
blood and lineage, made himself so French in sympathy and
understanding as to be able to play upon the imagination of all
France as a great musician plays upon a splendid instrument, with
absolute sureness of touch and an ability to extract from it every
one of its varied harmonies. So the Empress Catharine of Russia--
perhaps the greatest woman who ever ruled a nation--though born of
German parents, became Russian to the core and made herself the
embodiment of Russian feeling and Russian aspiration.

At the middle of the eighteenth century Russia was governed by the
Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. In her own time,
and for a long while afterward, her real capacity was obscured by
her apparent indolence, her fondness for display, and her seeming
vacillation; but now a very high place is accorded her in the
history of Russian rulers. She softened the brutality that had
reigned supreme in Russia. She patronized the arts. Her armies
twice defeated Frederick the Great and raided his capital, Berlin.
Had Elizabeth lived, she would probably have crushed him.

In her early years this imperial woman had been betrothed to Louis
XV. of France, but the match was broken off. Subsequently she
entered into a morganatic marriage and bore a son who, of course,
could not be her heir. In 1742, therefore, she looked about for a
suitable successor, and chose her nephew, Prince Peter of
Holstein-Gottorp.

Peter, then a mere youth of seventeen, was delighted with so
splendid a future, and came at once to St. Petersburg. The empress
next sought for a girl who might marry the young prince and thus
become the future Czarina. She thought first of Frederick the
Great's sister; but Frederick shrank from this alliance, though it
would have been of much advantage to him. He loved his sister--
indeed, she was one of the few persons for whom he ever really
cared. So he declined the offer and suggested instead the young
Princess Sophia of the tiny duchy of Anhalt-Zerbst.

The reason for Frederick's refusal was his knowledge of the semi-
barbarous conditions that prevailed at the Russian court.

The Russian capital, at that time, was a bizarre, half-civilized,
half-oriental place, where, among the very highest-born, a thin
veneer of French elegance covered every form of brutality and
savagery and lust. It is not surprising, therefore, that Frederick
the Great was unwilling to have his sister plunged into such a
life.

But when the Empress Elizabeth asked the Princess Sophia of
Anhalt-Zerbst to marry the heir to the Russian throne the young
girl willingly accepted, the more so as her mother practically
commanded it. This mother of hers was a grim, harsh German woman
who had reared her daughter in the strictest fashion, depriving
her of all pleasure with a truly puritanical severity. In the case
of a different sort of girl this training would have crushed her
spirit; but the Princess Sophia, though gentle and refined in
manner, had a power of endurance which was toughened and
strengthened by the discipline she underwent.

And so in 1744, when she was but sixteen years of age, she was
taken by her mother to St. Petersburg. There she renounced the
Lutheran faith and was received into the Greek Church, changing
her name to Catharine. Soon after, with great magnificence, she
was married to Prince Peter, and from that moment began a career
which was to make her the most powerful woman in the world.

At this time a lady of the Russian court wrote down a description
of Catharine's appearance. She was fair-haired, with dark-blue
eyes; and her face, though never beautiful, was made piquant and
striking by the fact that her brows were very dark in contrast
with her golden hair. Her complexion was not clear, yet her look
was a very pleasing one. She had a certain diffidence of manner at
first; but later she bore herself with such instinctive dignity as
to make her seem majestic, though in fact she was beneath the
middle size. At the time of her marriage her figure was slight and
graceful; only in after years did she become stout. Altogether,
she came to St. Petersburg an attractive, pure-minded German
maiden, with a character well disciplined, and possessing reserves
of power which had not yet been drawn upon.

Frederick the Great's forebodings, which had led him to withhold
his sister's hand, were almost immediately justified in the case
of Catharine. Her Russian husband revealed to her a mode of life
which must have tried her very soul. This youth was only
seventeen--a mere boy in age, and yet a full-grown man in the rank
luxuriance of his vices. Moreover, he had eccentricities which
sometimes verged upon insanity. Too young to be admitted to the
councils of his imperial aunt, he occupied his time in ways that
were either ridiculous or vile.

Next to the sleeping-room of his wife he kept a set of kennels,
with a number of dogs, which he spent hours in drilling as if they
had been soldiers. He had a troop of rats which he also drilled.
It was his delight to summon a court martial of his dogs to try
the rats for various military offenses, and then to have the
culprits executed, leaving their bleeding carcasses upon the
floor. At any hour of the day or night Catharine, hidden in her
chamber, could hear the yapping of the curs, the squeak of rats,
and the word of command given by her half-idiot husband.

When wearied of this diversion Peter would summon a troop of
favorites, both men and women, and with them he would drink deep
of beer and vodka, since from his early childhood he had been both
a drunkard and a debauchee. The whoops and howls and vile songs of
his creatures could be heard by Catharine; and sometimes he would
stagger into her rooms, accompanied by his drunken minions. With a
sort of psychopathic perversity he would insist on giving
Catharine the most minute and repulsive narratives of his amours,
until she shrank from him with horror at his depravity and came to
loathe the sight of his bloated face, with its little, twinkling,
porcine eyes, his upturned nose and distended nostrils, and his
loose-hung, lascivious mouth. She was scarcely less repelled when
a wholly different mood would seize upon him and he would declare
himself her slave, attending her at court functions in the garb of
a servant and professing an unbounded devotion for his bride.

Catharine's early training and her womanly nature led her for a
long time to submit to the caprices of her husband. In his saner
moments she would plead with him and strive to interest him in
something better than his dogs and rats and venal mistresses; but
Peter was incorrigible. Though he had moments of sense and even of
good feeling, these never lasted, and after them he would plunge
headlong into the most frantic excesses that his half-crazed
imagination could devise.

It is not strange that in course of time Catharine's strong good
sense showed her that she could do nothing with this creature. She
therefore gradually became estranged from him and set herself to
the task of doing those things which Peter was incapable of
carrying out.

She saw that ever since the first awakening of Russia under Peter
the Great none of its rulers had been genuinely Russian, but had
tried to force upon the Russian people various forms of western
civilization which were alien to the national spirit. Peter the
Great had striven to make his people Dutch. Elizabeth had tried to
make them French. Catharine, with a sure instinct, resolved that
they should remain Russian, borrowing what they needed from other
peoples, but stirred always by the Slavic spirit and swayed by a
patriotism that was their own. To this end she set herself to
become Russian. She acquired the Russian language patiently and
accurately. She adopted the Russian costume, appearing, except on
state occasions, in a simple gown of green, covering her fair
hair, however, with a cap powdered with diamonds. Furthermore, she
made friends of such native Russians as were gifted with talent,
winning their favor, and, through them, the favor of the common
people.

It would have been strange, however, had Catharine, the woman,
escaped the tainting influences that surrounded her on every side.
The infidelities of Peter gradually made her feel that she owed
him nothing as his wife. Among the nobles there were men whose
force of character and of mind attracted her inevitably. Chastity
was a thing of which the average Russian had no conception; and
therefore it is not strange that Catharine, with her intense and
sensitive nature, should have turned to some of these for the love
which she had sought in vain from the half imbecile to whom she
had been married.

Much has been written of this side of her earlier and later life;
yet, though it is impossible to deny that she had favorites, one
should judge very gently the conduct of a girl so young and thrust
into a life whence all the virtues seemed to be excluded. She bore
several children before her thirtieth year, and it is very certain
that a grave doubt exists as to their paternity. Among the nobles
of the court were two whose courage and virility specially
attracted her. The one with whom her name has been most often
coupled was Gregory Orloff. He and his brother, Alexis Orloff,
were Russians of the older type--powerful in frame, suave in
manner except when roused, yet with a tigerish ferocity slumbering
underneath. Their power fascinated Catharine, and it was currently
declared that Gregory Orloff was her lover.

When she was in her thirty-second year her husband was proclaimed
Czar, after the death of the Empress Elizabeth. At first in some
ways his elevation seemed to sober him; but this period of sanity,
like those which had come to him before, lasted only a few weeks.
Historians have given him much credit for two great reforms that
are connected with his name; and yet the manner in which they were
actually brought about is rather ludicrous. He had shut himself up
with his favorite revelers, and had remained for several days
drinking and carousing until he scarcely knew enough to speak. At
this moment a young officer named Gudovitch, who was really loyal
to the newly created Czar, burst into the banquet-hall, booted and
spurred and his eyes aflame with indignation. Standing before
Peter, his voice rang out with the tone of a battle trumpet, so
that the sounds of revelry were hushed.

"Peter Feodorovitch," he cried, "do you prefer these swine to
those who really wish to serve you? Is it in this way that you
imitate the glories of your ancestor, that illustrious Peter whom
you have sworn to take as your model? It will not be long before
your people's love will be changed to hatred. Rise up, my Czar!
Shake off this lethargy and sloth. Prove that you are worthy of
the faith which I and others have given you so loyally!"

With these words Gudovitch thrust into Peter's trembling hand two
proclamations, one abolishing the secret bureau of police, which
had become an instrument of tyrannous oppression, and the other
restoring to the nobility many rights of which they had been
deprived.

The earnestness and intensity of Gudovitch temporarily cleared the
brain of the drunken Czar. He seized the papers, and, without
reading them, hastened at once to his great council, where he
declared that they expressed his wishes. Great was the rejoicing
in St. Petersburg, and great was the praise bestowed on Peter;
yet, in fact, he had acted only as any drunkard might act under
the compulsion of a stronger will than his.

As before, his brief period of good sense was succeeded by another
of the wildest folly. It was not merely that he reversed the wise
policy of his aunt, but that he reverted to his early fondness for
everything that was German. His bodyguard was made up of German
troops--thus exciting the jealousy of the Russian soldiers. He
introduced German fashions. He boasted that his father had been an
officer in the Prussian army. His crazy admiration for Frederick
the Great reached the utmost verge of sycophancy.

As to Catharine, he turned on her with something like ferocity. He
declared in public that his eldest son, the Czarevitch Paul, was
really fathered by Catharine's lovers. At a state banquet he
turned to Catharine and hurled at her a name which no woman could
possibly forgive--and least of all a woman such as Catharine,
with her high spirit and imperial pride. He thrust his mistresses
upon her; and at last he ordered her, with her own hand, to
decorate the Countess Vorontzoff, who was known to be his
maitresse en titre.

It was not these gross insults, however, so much as a concern for
her personal safety that led Catharine to take measures for her
own defense. She was accustomed to Peter's ordinary
eccentricities. On the ground of his unfaithfulness to her she now
had hardly any right to make complaint. But she might reasonably
fear lest he was becoming mad. If he questioned the paternity of
their eldest son he might take measures to imprison Catharine or
even to destroy her. Therefore she conferred with the Orloffs and
other gentlemen, and their conference rapidly developed into a
conspiracy.

The soldiery, as a whole, was loyal to the empress. It hated
Peter's Holstein guards. What she planned was probably the
deposition of Peter. She would have liked to place him under guard
in some distant palace. But while the matter was still under
discussion she was awakened early one morning by Alexis Orloff. He
grasped her arm with scant ceremony.

"We must act at once," said he. "We have been betrayed!"

Catharine was not a woman to waste time. She went immediately to
the barracks in St. Petersburg, mounted upon a charger, and,
calling out the Russian guards, appealed to them for their
support. To a man they clashed their weapons and roared forth a
thunderous cheer. Immediately afterward the priests anointed her
as regent in the name of her son; but as she left the church she
was saluted by the people, as well as by the soldiers, as empress
in her own right.

It was a bold stroke, and it succeeded down to the last detail.
The wretched Peter, who was drilling his German guards at a
distance from the capital, heard of the revolt, found that his
sailors at Kronstadt would not acknowledge him, and then finally
submitted. He was taken to Ropsha and confined within a single
room. To him came the Orloffs, quite of their own accord. Gregory
Orloff endeavored to force a corrosive poison into Peter's mouth.
Peter, who was powerful of build and now quite desperate, hurled
himself upon his enemies. Alexis Orloff seized him by the throat
with a tremendous clutch and strangled him till the blood gushed
from his ears. In a few moments the unfortunate man was dead.

Catharine was shocked by the intelligence, but she had no choice
save to accept the result of excessive zeal. She issued a note to
the foreign ambassadors informing them that Peter had died of a
violent colic. When his body was laid out for burial the
extravasated blood is said to have oozed out even through his
hands, staining the gloves that had been placed upon them. No one
believed the story of the colic; and some six years later Alexis
Orloff told the truth with the utmost composure. The whole
incident was characteristically Russian.

It is not within the limits of our space to describe the reign of
Catharine the Great--the exploits of her armies, the acuteness of
her statecraft, the vast additions which she made to the Russian
Empire, and the impulse which she gave to science and art and
literature. Yet these things ought to be remembered first of all
when one thinks of the woman whom Voltaire once styled "the
Semiramis of the North." Because she was so powerful, because no
one could gainsay her, she led in private a life which has been
almost more exploited than her great imperial achievements. And
yet, though she had lovers whose names have been carefully
recorded, even she fulfilled the law of womanhood--which is to
love deeply and intensely only once,

One should not place all her lovers in the same category. As a
girl, and when repelled by the imbecility of Peter, she gave
herself to Gregory Orloff. She admired his strength, his daring,
and his unscrupulousness. But to a woman of her fine intelligence
he came to seem almost more brute than man. She could not turn to
him for any of those delicate attentions which a woman loves so
much, nor for that larger sympathy which wins the heart as well as
captivates the senses. A writer of the time has said that Orloff
would hasten with equal readiness from the arms of Catharine to
the embraces of any flat-nosed Finn or filthy Calmuck or to the
lowest creature whom he might encounter in the streets.

It happened that at the time of Catharine's appeal to the imperial
guards there came to her notice another man who--as he proved in a
trifling and yet most significant manner--had those traits which
Orloff lacked. Catharine had mounted, man--fashion, a cavalry
horse, and, with a helmet on her head, had reined up her steed
before the barracks. At that moment One of the minor nobles, who
was also favorable to her, observed that her helmet had no plume.
In a moment his horse was at her side. Bowing low over his saddle,
he took his own plume from his helmet and fastened it to hers.
This man was Prince Gregory Potemkin, and this slight act gives a
clue to the influence which he afterward exercised over his
imperial mistress!

When Catharine grew weary of the Orloffs, and when she had
enriched them with lands and treasures, she turned to Potemkin;
and from then until the day of his death he was more to her than
any other man had ever been. With others she might flirt and might
go even further than flirtation; but she allowed no other favorite
to share her confidence, to give advice, or to direct her
policies.

To other men she made munificent gifts, either because they
pleased her for the moment or because they served her on one
occasion or another; but to Potemkin she opened wide the whole
treasury of her vast realm. There was no limit to what she would
do for him. When he first knew her he was a man of very moderate
fortune. Within two years after their intimate acquaintance had
begun she had given him nine million rubles, while afterward he
accepted almost limitless estates in Poland and in every province
of Greater Russia.

He was a man of sumptuous tastes, and yet he cared but little for
mere wealth. What he had, he used to please or gratify or surprise
the woman whom he loved. He built himself a great palace in St.
Petersburg, usually known as the Taurian Palace, and there he gave
the most sumptuous entertainments, reversing the story of Antony
and Cleopatra.

In a superb library there stood one case containing volumes bound
with unusual richness. When the empress, attracted by the
bindings, drew forth a book she found to her surprise that its
pages were English bank-notes. The pages of another proved to be
Dutch bank-notes, and, of another, notes on the Bank of Venice. Of
the remaining volumes some were of solid gold, while others had
pages of fine leather in which were set emeralds and rubies and
diamonds and other gems. The story reads like a bit of fiction
from the Arabian Nights. Yet, after all, this was only a small
affair compared with other undertakings with which Potemkin sought
to please her.

Thus, after Taurida and the Crimea had been added to the empire by
Potemkin's agency, Catharine set out with him to view her new
possessions. A great fleet of magnificently decorated galleys bore
her down the river Dnieper. The country through which she passed
had been a year before an unoccupied waste. Now, by Potemkin's
extraordinary efforts, the empress found it dotted thick with
towns and cities which had been erected for the occasion, filled
with a busy population which swarmed along the riverside to greet
the sovereign with applause. It was only a chain of fantom towns
and cities, made of painted wood and canvas; but while Catharine
was there they were very real, seeming to have solid buildings,
magnificent arches, bustling industries, and beautiful stretches
of fertile country. No human being ever wrought on so great a
scale so marvelous a miracle of stage-management.

Potemkin was, in fact, the one man who could appeal with unfailing
success to so versatile and powerful a spirit as Catharine's. He
was handsome of person, graceful of manner, and with an intellect
which matched her own. He never tried to force her inclination,
and, on the other hand, he never strove to thwart it. To him, as
to no other man, she could turn at any moment and feel that, no
matter what her mood, he could understand her fully. And this,
according to Balzac, is the thing that woman yearns for most--a
kindred spirit that can understand without the slightest need of
explanation.

Thus it was that Gregory Potemkin held a place in the soul of this
great woman such as no one else attained. He might be absent,
heading armies or ruling provinces, and on his return he would be
greeted with even greater fondness than before. And it was this
rather than his victories over Turk and other oriental enemies
that made Catharine trust him absolutely.

When he died, he died as the supreme master of her foreign policy
and at a time when her word was powerful throughout all Europe.
Death came upon him after he had fought against it with singular
tenacity of purpose. Catharine had given him a magnificent
triumph, and he had entertained her in his Taurian Palace with a
splendor such as even Russia had never known before. Then he fell
ill, though with high spirit he would not yield to illness. He ate
rich meats and drank rich wines and bore himself as gallantly as
ever. Yet all at once death came upon him while he was traveling
in the south of Russia. His carriage was stopped, a rug was spread
beneath a tree by the roadside, and there he died, in the country
which he had added to the realms of Russia,

The great empress who loved him mourned him deeply during the five
years of life that still remained to her. The names of other men
for whom she had imagined that she cared were nothing to her. But
this one man lived in her heart in death as he had done in life.

Many have written of Catharine as a great ruler, a wise diplomat,
a creature of heroic mold. Others have depicted her as a royal
wanton and have gathered together a mass of vicious tales, the
gossip of the palace kitchens, of the clubs, and of the barrack-
rooms. But perhaps one finds the chief interest of her story to
lie in this--that besides being empress and diplomat and a lover
of pleasure she was, beyond all else, at heart a woman.





MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN


The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view
of Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one
brilliant passage has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring
picture of this unhappy queen.

When we speak or think of her we speak and think first of all of a
dazzling and beautiful woman surrounded by the chivalry of France
and gleaming like a star in the most splendid court of Europe. And
then there comes to us the reverse of the picture. We see her
despised, insulted, and made the butt of brutal men and still more
fiendish women; until at last the hideous tumbrel conveys her to
the guillotine, where her head is severed from her body and her
corpse is cast down into a bloody pool.

In these two pictures our emotions are played upon in turn--
admiration, reverence, devotion, and then pity, indignation, and
the shudderings of horror.

Probably in our own country and in England this will remain the
historic Marie Antoinette. Whatever the impartial historian may
write, he can never induce the people at large to understand that
this queen was far from queenly, that the popular idea of her is
almost wholly false, and that both in her domestic life and as the
greatest lady in France she did much to bring on the terrors of
that revolution which swept her to the guillotine.

In the first place, it is mere fiction that represents Maria
Antoinette as having been physically beautiful. The painters and
engravers have so idealized her face as in most cases to have
produced a purely imaginary portrait.

She was born in Vienna, in 1755, the daughter of the Emperor
Francis and of that warrior-queen, Maria Theresa. She was a very
German-looking child. Lady Jackson describes her as having a
long, thin face, small, pig-like eyes, a pinched-up mouth, with
the heavy Hapsburg lip, and with a somewhat misshapen form, so
that for years she had to be bandaged tightly to give her a more
natural figure.

At fourteen, when she was betrothed to the heir to the French
throne, she was a dumpy, mean-looking little creature, with no
distinction whatever, and with only her bright golden hair to make
amends for her many blemishes. At fifteen she was married and
joined the Dauphin in French territory.

We must recall for a moment the conditions which prevailed in
France. King Louis XV. was nearing his end. He was a man of the
most shameless life; yet he had concealed or gilded his infamies
by an external dignity and magnificence which, were very pleasing
to his people. The French, liked to think that their king was the
most splendid monarch and the greatest gentleman in Europe. The
courtiers about him might be vile beneath the surface, yet they
were compelled to deport themselves with the form and the
etiquette that had become traditional in France. They might be
panders, or stock-jobbers, or sellers of political offices; yet
they must none the less have wit and grace and outward nobility of
manner.

There was also a tradition regarding the French queen. However
loose in character the other women of the court might be, she
alone, like Caesar's wife, must remain above suspicion. She must
be purer than the pure. No breath, of scandal must reach her or be
directed against her.

In this way the French court, even under so dissolute a monarch as
Louis XV., maintained its hold upon the loyalty of the people.
Crowds came every morning to view the king in his bed before he
arose; the same crowds watched him as he was dressed by the
gentlemen of the bedchamber, and as he breakfasted and went
through all the functions which are usually private. The King of
France must be a great actor. He must appear to his people as in
reality a king-stately, dignified, and beyond all other human
beings in his remarkable presence.

When the Dauphin and Marie Antoinette came to the French court
King Louis XV. kept up in the case the same semblance of
austerity. He forbade these children to have their sleeping-
apartments together. He tried to teach them that if they were to
govern as well as to reign they must conform to the rigid
etiquette of Paris and Versailles.

It proved a difficult task, however. The little German princess
had no natural dignity, though she came from a court where the
very strictest imperial discipline prevailed. Marie Antoinette
found that she could have her own way in many things, and she
chose to enjoy life without regard to ceremony. Her escapades at
first would have been thought mild enough had she not been a
"daughter of France"; but they served to shock the old French
king, and likewise, perhaps even more, her own imperial mother,
Maria Theresa.

When a report of the young girl's conduct was brought to her the
empress was at first mute with indignation. Then she cried out:

"Can this girl be a child of mine? She surely must be a
changeling!"

The Austrian ambassador to France was instructed to warn the
Dauphiness to be more discreet.

"Tell her," said Maria Theresa, "that she will lose her throne,
and even her life, unless she shows more prudence."

But advice and remonstrance were of no avail. Perhaps they might
have been had her husband possessed a stronger character; but the
young Louis was little more fitted to be a king than was his wife
to be a queen. Dull of perception and indifferent to affairs of
state, he had only two interests that absorbed him. One was the
love of hunting, and the other was his desire to shut himself up
in a sort of blacksmith shop, where he could hammer away at the
anvil, blow the bellows, and manufacture small trifles of
mechanical inventions. From this smudgy den he would emerge, sooty
and greasy, an object of distaste to his frivolous princess, with
her foamy laces and perfumes and pervasive daintiness.

It was hinted in many quarters, and it has been many times
repeated, that Louis was lacking in virility. Certainly he had no
interest in the society of women and was wholly continent. But
this charge of physical incapacity seems to have had no real
foundation. It had been made against some of his predecessors. It
was afterward hurled at Napoleon the Great, and also Napoleon the
Little. In France, unless a royal personage was openly licentious,
he was almost sure to be jeered at by the people as a weakling.

And so poor Louis XVI., as he came to be, was treated with a
mixture of pity and contempt because he loved to hammer and mend
locks in his smithy or shoot game when he might have been
caressing ladies who would have been proud to have him choose them
out.

On the other hand, because of this opinion regarding Louis, people
were the more suspicious of Marie Antoinette. Some of them, in
coarse language, criticized her assumed infidelities; others, with
a polite sneer, affected to defend her. But the result of it all
was dangerous to both, especially as France was already verging
toward the deluge which Louis XV. had cynically predicted would
follow after him.

In fact, the end came sooner than any one had guessed. Louis XV.,
who had become hopelessly and helplessly infatuated with the low-
born Jeanne du Barry, was stricken down with smallpox of the most
virulent type. For many days he lay in his gorgeous bed. Courtiers
crowded his sick-room and the adjacent hall, longing for the
moment when the breath would leave his body. He had lived an evil
life, and he was to die a loathsome death; yet he had borne
himself before men as a stately monarch. Though his people had
suffered in a thousand ways from his misgovernment, he was still
Louis the Well Beloved, and they blamed his ministers of state for
all the shocking wrongs that France had felt.

The abler men, and some of the leaders of the people, however,
looked forward to the accession of Louis XVI. He at least was
frugal in his habits and almost plebeian in his tastes, and seemed
to be one who would reduce the enormous taxes that had been levied
upon France.

The moment came when the Well Beloved died. His death-room was
fetid with disease, and even the long corridors of the palace
reeked with infection, while the motley mob of men and women, clad
in silks and satins and glittering with jewels, hurried from the
spot to pay their homage to the new Louis, who was spoken of as
"the Desired." The body of the late monarch was hastily thrown
into a mass of quick-lime, and was driven away in a humble wagon,
without guards and with no salute, save from a single veteran, who
remembered the glories of Fontenoy and discharged his musket as
the royal corpse was carried through the palace gates.

This was a critical moment in the history of France; but we have
to consider it only as a critical moment in the history of Marie
Antoinette. She was now queen. She had it in her power to restore
to the French court its old-time grandeur, and, so far as the
queen was concerned, its purity. Above all, being a foreigner, she
should have kept herself free from reproach and above every shadow
of suspicion.

But here again the indifference of the king undoubtedly played a
strange part in her life. Had he borne himself as her lord and
master she might have respected him. Had he shown her the
affection of a husband she might have loved him. But he was
neither imposing, nor, on the other hand, was he alluring. She
wrote very frankly about him in a letter to the Count Orsini:

My tastes are not the same as those of the king, who cares only
for hunting and blacksmith work. You will admit that I should not
show to advantage in a forge. I could not appear there as Vulcan,
and the part of Venus might displease him even more than my
tastes.

Thus on the one side is a woman in the first bloom of youth,
ardent, eager--and neglected. On the other side is her husband,
whose sluggishness may be judged by quoting from a diary which he
kept during the month in which he was married. Here is a part of
it:

Sunday, 13--Left Versailles. Supper and slept at Compignee, at the
house of M. de Saint-Florentin.

Monday, 14--Interview with Mme. la Dauphine.

Tuesday, 15--Supped at La Muette. Slept at Versailles.

Wednesday, 16--My marriage. Apartment in the gallery. Royal
banquet in the Salle d'Opera.

Thursday, 17--Opera of "Perseus."

Friday, 18--Stag-hunt. Met at La Belle Image. Took one.

Saturday, 19--Dress-ball in the Salle d'Opera. Fireworks.

Thursday, 31--I had an indigestion.

What might have been expected from a young girl placed as this
queen was placed? She was indeed an earlier Eugenie. The first was
of royal blood, the second was almost a plebeian; but each was
headstrong, pleasure-loving, and with no real domestic ties. As
Mr. Kipling expresses it--

    The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady
    Are sisters under their skins;

and so the Austrian woman of 1776 and the Spanish woman of 1856
found amusement in very similar ways. They plunged into a sea of
strange frivolity, such as one finds to-day at the centers of high
fashion. Marie Antoinette bedecked herself with eccentric
garments. On her head she wore a hat styled a "what-is-it,"
towering many feet in height and flaunting parti-colored plumes.
Worse than all this, she refused to wear corsets, and at some
great functions she would appear in what looked exactly like a
bedroom gown.

She would even neglect the ordinary niceties of life. Her hands
were not well cared for. It was very difficult for the ladies in
attendance to persuade her to brush her teeth with regularity.
Again, she would persist in wearing her frilled and lace-trimmed
petticoats long after their dainty edges had been smirched and
blackened.

Yet these things might have been counteracted had she gone no
further. Unfortunately, she did go further. She loved to dress at
night like a shop-girl and venture out into the world of Paris,
where she was frequently followed and recognized. Think of it--the
Queen of France, elbowed in dense crowds and seeking to attract
the attention of common soldiers!

Of course, almost every one put the worst construction upon this,
and after a time upon everything she did. When she took a fancy
for constructing labyrinths and secret passages in the palace, all
Paris vowed that she was planning means by which her various
lovers might enter without observation. The hidden printing-
presses of Paris swarmed with gross lampoons about this reckless
girl; and, although there was little truth in what they said,
there was enough to cloud her reputation. When she fell ill with
the measles she was attended in her sick-chamber by four gentlemen
of the court. The king was forbidden to enter lest he might catch
the childish disorder.

The apathy of the king, indeed, drove her into many a folly. After
four years of marriage, as Mrs. Mayne records, he had only reached
the point of giving her a chilly kiss. The fact that she had no
children became a serious matter. Her brother, the Emperor Joseph
of Austria, when he visited Paris, ventured to speak to the king
upon the subject. Even the Austrian ambassador had thrown out
hints that the house of Bourbon needed direct heirs. Louis grunted
and said little, but he must have known how good was the advice.

It was at about this time when there came to the French court a
young Swede named Axel de Fersen, who bore the title of count, but
who was received less for his rank than for his winning manner,
his knightly bearing, and his handsome, sympathetic face. Romantic
in spirit, he threw himself at once into a silent inner worship of
Marie Antoinette, who had for him a singular attraction. Wherever
he could meet her they met. To her growing cynicism this breath of
pure yet ardent affection was very grateful. It came as something
fresh and sweet into the feverish life she led.

Other men had had the audacity to woo her--among them Duc de
Lauzun, whose complicity in the famous affair of the diamond
necklace afterward cast her, though innocent, into ruin; the Duc
de Biron; and the Baron de Besenval, who had obtained much
influence over her, which he used for the most evil purposes.
Besenval tainted her mind by persuading her to read indecent
books, in the hope that at last she would become his prey.

But none of these men ever meant to Marie Antoinette what Fersen
meant. Though less than twenty years of age, he maintained the
reserve of a great gentleman, and never forced himself upon her
notice. Yet their first acquaintance had occurred in such a way as
to give to it a touch of intimacy. He had gone to a masked ball,
and there had chosen for his partner a lady whose face was quite
concealed. Something drew the two together. The gaiety of the
woman and the chivalry of the man blended most harmoniously. It
was only afterward that he discovered that his chance partner was
the first lady in France. She kept his memory in her mind; for
some time later, when he was at a royal drawing-room and she heard
his voice, she exclaimed:

"Ah, an old acquaintance!"

From this time Fersen was among those who were most intimately
favored by the queen. He had the privilege of attending her
private receptions at the palace of the Trianon, and was a
conspicuous figure at the feasts given in the queen's honor by the
Princess de Lamballe, a beautiful girl whose head was destined
afterward to be severed from her body and borne upon a bloody pike
through the streets of Paris. But as yet the deluge had not
arrived and the great and noble still danced upon the brink of a
volcano.

Fersen grew more and more infatuated, nor could he quite conceal
his feelings. The queen, in her turn, was neither frightened nor
indignant. His passion, so profound and yet so respectful, deeply
moved her. Then came a time when the truth was made clear to both
of them. Fersen was near her while she was singing to the
harpsichord, and "she was betrayed by her own music into an avowal
which song made easy." She forgot that she was Queen of France.
She only felt that her womanhood had been starved and slighted,
and that here was a noble-minded lover of whom she could be proud.

Some time after this announcement was officially made of the
approaching accouchement of the queen. It was impossible that
malicious tongues should be silent. The king's brother, the Comte
de Provence, who hated the queen, just as the Bonapartes afterward
hated Josephine, did his best to besmirch her reputation. He had,
indeed, the extraordinary insolence to do so at a time when one
would suppose that the vilest of men would remain silent. The
child proved to be a princess, and she afterward received the
title of Duchesse d'Angouleme. The King of Spain asked to be her
godfather at the christening, which was to be held in the
cathedral of Notre Dame. The Spanish king was not present in
person, but asked the Comte de Provence to act as his proxy.

On the appointed day the royal party proceeded to the cathedral,
and the Comte de Provence presented the little child at the
baptismal font. The grand almoner, who presided, asked;

"What name shall be given to this child?"

The Comte de Provence answered in a sneering tone:

"Oh, we don't begin with that. The first thing to find out is who
the father and the mother are!"

These words, spoken at such a place and such a time, and with a
strongly sardonic ring, set all Paris gossiping. It was a thinly
veiled innuendo that the father of the child was not the King of
France. Those about the court immediately began to look at Fersen
with significant smiles. The queen would gladly have kept him near
her; but Fersen cared even more for her good name than for his
love of her. It would have been so easy to remain in the full
enjoyment of his conquest; but he was too chivalrous for that, or,
rather, he knew that the various ambassadors in Paris had told
their respective governments of the rising scandal. In fact, the
following secret despatch was sent to the King of Sweden by his
envoy:

I must confide to your majesty that the young Count Fersen has
been so well received by the queen that various persons have taken
it amiss. I own that I am sure that she has a liking for him. I
have seen proofs of it too certain to be doubted. During the last
few days the queen has not taken her eyes off him, and as she
gazed they were full of tears. I beg your majesty to keep their
secret to yourself.

The queen wept because Fersen had resolved to leave her lest she
should be exposed to further gossip. If he left her without any
apparent reason, the gossip would only be the more intense.
Therefore he decided to join the French troops who were going to
America to fight under Lafayette. A brilliant but dissolute
duchess taunted him when the news became known.

"How is this?" said she. "Do you forsake your conquest?"

But, "lying like a gentleman," Fersen answered, quietly:

"Had I made a conquest I should not forsake it. I go away free,
and, unfortunately, without leaving any regret."

Nothing could have been more chivalrous than the pains which
Fersen took to shield the reputation of the queen. He even allowed
it to be supposed that he was planning a marriage with a rich
young Swedish woman who had been naturalized in England. As a
matter of fact, he departed for America, and not very long
afterward the young woman in question married an Englishman.

Fersen served in America for a time, returning, however, at the
end of three years. He was one of the original Cincinnati, being
admitted to the order by Washington himself. When he returned to
France he was received with high honors and was made colonel of
the royal Swedish regiment.

The dangers threatening Louis and his court, which were now
gigantic and appalling, forbade him to forsake the queen. By her
side he did what he could to check the revolution; and, failing
this, he helped her to maintain an imperial dignity of manner
which she might otherwise have lacked. He faced the bellowing mob
which surrounded the Tuileries. Lafayette tried to make the
National Guard obey his orders, but he was jeered at for his
pains. Violent epithets were hurled at the king. The least
insulting name which they could give him was "a fat pig." As for
the queen, the most filthy phrases were showered upon her by the
men, and even more so by the women, who swarmed out of the slums
and sought her life.

At last, in 1791, it was decided that the king and the queen and
their children, of whom they now had three, should endeavor to
escape from Paris. Fersen planned their flight, but it proved to
be a failure. Every one remembers how they were discovered and
halted at Varennes. The royal party was escorted back to Paris by
the mob, which chanted with insolent additions:

"We've brought back the baker, the baker's wife, and the baker's
boy! Now we shall have bread!"

Against the savage fury which soon animated the French a foreigner
like Fersen could do very little; but he seems to have endeavored,
night and day, to serve the woman whom he loved. His efforts have
been described by Grandat; but they were of no avail. The king and
queen were practically made prisoners. Their eldest son died. They
went through horrors that were stimulated by the wretch Hebert, at
the head of his so-called Madmen (Enrages). The king was executed
in January, 1792. The queen dragged out a brief existence in a
prison where she was for ever under the eyes of human brutes, who
guarded her and watched her and jeered at her at times when even
men would be sensitive. Then, at last, she mounted the scaffold,
and her head, with its shining hair, fell into the bloody basket.

Marie Antoinette shows many contradictions in her character. As a
young girl she was petulant and silly and almost unseemly in her
actions. As a queen, with waning power, she took on a dignity
which recalled the dignity of her imperial mother. At first a
flirt, she fell deeply in love when she met a man who was worthy
of that love. She lived for most part like a mere cocotte. She
died every inch a queen.

One finds a curious resemblance between the fate of Marie
Antoinette and that of her gallant lover, who outlived her for
nearly twenty years. She died amid the shrieks and execrations of
a maddened populace in Paris; he was practically torn in pieces by
a mob in the streets of Stockholm. The day of his death was the
anniversary of the flight to Varennes. To the last moment of his
existence he remained faithful to the memory of the royal woman
who had given herself so utterly to him.





THE STORY OF AARON BURR


There will come a time when the name of Aaron Burr will be cleared
from the prejudice which now surrounds it, when he will stand in
the public estimation side by side with Alexander Hamilton, whom
he shot in a duel in 1804, but whom in many respects he curiously
resembled. When the white light of history shall have searched
them both they will appear as two remarkable men, each having his
own undoubted faults and at the same time his equally undoubted
virtues.

Burr and Hamilton were born within a year of each other--Burr
being a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, and Alexander Hamilton being
the illegitimate son of a Scottish merchant in the West Indies.
Each of them was short in stature, keen of intellect, of great
physical endurance, courage, and impressive personality. Each as a
young man served on the staff of Washington during the
Revolutionary War, and each of them quarreled with him, though in
a different way.

On one occasion Burr was quite unjustly suspected by Washington of
looking over the latter's shoulder while he was writing.
"Washington leaped to his feet with the exclamation:

"How dare you, Colonel Burr?"

Burr's eyes flashed fire at the question, and he retorted,
haughtily:

"Colonel Burr DARE do anything."

This, however, was the end of their altercation The cause of
Hamilton's difference with his chief is not known, but it was a
much more serious quarrel; so that the young officer left his
staff position in a fury and took no part in the war until the
end, when he was present at the battle of Yorktown.

Burr, on the other hand, helped Montgomery to storm the heights of
Quebec, and nearly reached the upper citadel when his commander
was shot dead and the Americans retreated. In all this confusion
Burr showed himself a man of mettle. The slain Montgomery was six
feet high, but Burr carried his body away with wonderful strength
amid a shower of musket-balls and grape-shot.

Hamilton had no belief in the American Constitution, which he
called "a shattered, feeble thing." He could never obtain an
elective office, and he would have preferred to see the United
States transformed into a kingdom. Washington's magnanimity and
clear-sightedness made Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury. Burr,
on the other hand, continued his military service until the war
was ended, routing the enemy at Hackensack, enduring the horrors
of Valley Forge, commanding a brigade at the battle of Monmouth,
and heading the defense of the city of New Haven. He was also
attorney-general of New York, was elected to the United States
Senate, was tied with Jefferson for the Presidency, and then
became Vice-President.

Both Hamilton and Burr were effective speakers; but, while
Hamilton was wordy and diffuse, Burr spoke always to the point,
with clear and cogent reasoning. Both were lavish spenders of
money, and both were engaged in duels before the fatal one in
which Hamilton fell. Both believed in dueling as the only way of
settling an affair of honor. Neither of them was averse to love
affairs, though it may be said that Hamilton sought women, while
Burr was rather sought by women. When Secretary of the Treasury,
Hamilton was obliged to confess an adulterous amour in order to
save himself from the charge of corrupt practices in public
office. So long as Burr's wife lived he was a devoted, faithful
husband to her. Hamilton was obliged to confess his illicit acts
while his wife, formerly Miss Elizabeth Schuyler, was living. She
spent her later years in buying and destroying the compromising
documents which her husband had published for his countrymen to
read.

The most extraordinary thing about Aaron Burr was the magnetic
quality that was felt by every one who approached him. The roots
of this penetrated down into a deep vitality. He was always young,
always alert, polished in manner, courageous with that sort of
courage which does not even recognize the presence of danger,
charming in conversation, and able to adapt it to men or women of
any age whatever. His hair was still dark in his eightieth year.
His step was still elastic, his motions were still as spontaneous
and energetic, as those of a youth.

So it was that every one who knew him experienced his fascination.
The rough troops whom he led through the Canadian swamps felt the
iron hand of his discipline; yet they were devoted to him, since
he shared all their toils, faced all their dangers, and ate with
them the scraps of hide which they gnawed to keep the breath of
life in their shrunken bodies.

Burr's discipline was indeed very strict, so that at first raw
recruits rebelled against it. On one occasion the men of an
untrained company resented it so bitterly that they decided to
shoot Colonel Burr as he paraded them for roll-call that evening.
Burr somehow got word of it and contrived to have all the
cartridges drawn from their muskets. When the time for the roll-
call came one of the malcontents leaped from the front line and
leveled his weapon at Burr.

"Now is the time, boys!" he shouted.

Like lightning Burr's sword flashed from its scabbard with such a
vigorous stroke as to cut the man's arm completely off and partly
to cleave the musket.

"Take your place in the ranks," said Burr.

The mutineer obeyed, dripping with blood. A month later every man
in that company was devoted to his commander. They had learned
that discipline was the surest source of safety.

But with this high spirit and readiness to fight Burr had a most
pleasing way of meeting every one who came to him. When he was
arrested in the Western forests, charged with high treason, the
sound of his voice won from jury after jury verdicts of acquittal.
Often the sheriffs would not arrest him. One grand jury not merely
exonerated him from all public misdemeanors, but brought in a
strong presentment against the officers of the government for
molesting him.

It was the same everywhere. Burr made friends and devoted allies
among all sorts of men. During his stay in France, England,
Germany, and Sweden he interested such men as Charles Lamb, Jeremy
Bentham, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Heeren. They found his mind
able to meet with theirs on equal terms. Burr, indeed, had
graduated as a youth with honors from Princeton, and had continued
his studies there after graduation, which was then a most unusual
thing to do. But, of course, he learned most from his contact with
men and women of the world.

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in The Minister's Wooing, has given
what is probably an exact likeness of Aaron Burr, with his
brilliant gifts and some of his defects. It is strong testimony to
the character of Burr that Mrs. Stowe set out to paint him as a
villain; but before she had written long she felt his fascination
and made her readers, in their own despite, admirers of this
remarkable man. There are many parallels, indeed, between him and
Napoleon--in the quickness of his intellect, the ready use of his
resources, and his power over men, while he was more than Napoleon
in his delightful gift of conversation and the easy play of his
cultured mind.

Those who are full of charm are willing also to be charmed. All
his life Burr was abstemious in food and drink. His tastes were
most refined. It is difficult to believe that such a man could
have been an unmitigated profligate.

In his twentieth year there seems to have begun the first of the
romances that run through the story of his long career. Perhaps
one ought not to call it the first romance, for at eighteen, while
he was studying law at Litchfield, a girl, whose name has been
suppressed, made an open avowal of love for him. Almost at the
same time an heiress with a large fortune would have married him
had he been willing to accept her hand. But at this period he was
only a boy and did not take such things seriously.

Two years later, after Burr had seen hard service at Quebec and on
Manhattan Island, his name was associated with that of a very
beautiful girl named Margaret Moncrieffe. She was the daughter of
a British major, but in some way she had been captured while
within the American lines. Her captivity was regarded as little
more than a joke; but while she was thus a prisoner she saw a
great deal of Burr. For several months they were comrades, after
which General Putnam sent her with his compliments to her father.

Margaret Moncrieffe had a most emotional nature. There can be no
doubt that she deeply loved the handsome young American officer,
whom she never saw again. It is doubtful how far their intimacy
was carried. Later she married a Mr. Coghlan. After reaching
middle life she wrote of Burr in a way which shows that neither
years nor the obligations of marriage could make her forget that
young soldier, whom she speaks of as "the conqueror of her soul."
In the rather florid style of those days the once youthful
Margaret Moncrieffe expresses herself as follows:

Oh, may these pages one day meet the eye of him who subdued my
virgin heart, whom the immutable, unerring laws of nature had
pointed out for my husband, but whose sacred decree the barbarous
customs of society fatally violated!

Commenting on this paragraph, Mr. H. C. Merwin justly remarks
that, whatever may have been Burr's conduct toward Margaret
Moncrieffe, the lady herself, who was the person chiefly
concerned, had no complaint to make of it. It certainly was no
very serious affair, since in the following year Burr met a lady
who, while she lived, was the only woman for whom he ever really
cared.

This was Theodosia Prevost, the wife of a major in the British
army. Burr met her first in 1777, while she was living with her
sister in Westchester County. Burr's command was fifteen miles
across the river, but distance and danger made no difference to
him. He used to mount a swift horse, inspect his sentinels and
outposts, and then gallop to the Hudson, where a barge rowed by
six soldiers awaited him. The barge was well supplied with
buffalo-skins, upon which the horse was thrown with his legs
bound, and then half an hour's rowing brought them to the other
side. There Burr resumed his horse, galloped to the house of Mrs.
Prevost, and, after spending a few hours with her, returned in the
same way.

Mrs. Prevost was by no means beautiful, but she had an
attractiveness of her own. She was well educated and possessed
charming manners, with a disposition both gentle and affectionate.
Her husband died soon after the beginning of the war, and then
Burr married her. No more ideal family life could be conceived
than his, and the letters which passed between the two are full of
adoration. Thus she wrote to him:

Tell me, why do I grow every day more tenacious of your regard? Is
it because each revolving day proves you more deserving?

And thus Burr answered her:

Continue to multiply your letters to me. They are all my solace.
The last six are constantly within my reach. I read them once a
day at least. Write me all that I have asked, and a hundred things
which I have not.

When it is remembered that these letters were written after nine
years of marriage it is hard to believe all the evil things that
have been said of Burr.

His wife died in 1794, and he then gave a double affection to his
daughter Theodosia, whose beauty and accomplishments were known
throughout the country. Burr took the greatest pains in her
education, and believed that she should be trained, as he had
been, to be brave, industrious, and patient. He himself, who has
been described as a voluptuary, delighted in the endurance of cold
and heat and of severe labor.

After his death one of his younger admirers was asked what Burr
had done for him. The reply was characteristic.

"He made me iron," was the answer.

No father ever gave more attention to his daughter's welfare. As
to Theodosia's studies he was very strict, making her read Greek
and Latin every day, with drawing and music and history, in
addition to French. Not long before her marriage to Joseph
Allston, of South Carolina, Burr wrote to her:

I really think, my dear Theo, that you will be very soon beyond
all verbal criticism, and that my whole attention will be
presently directed to the improvement of your style.

Theodosia Burr married into a family of good old English stock,
where riches were abundant, and high character was regarded as the
best of all possessions. Every one has heard of the mysterious
tragedy which is associated with her history. In 1812, when her
husband had been elected Governor of his state, her only child--a
sturdy boy of eleven--died, and Theodosia's health was shattered
by her sorrow. In the same year Burr returned from a sojourn in
Europe, and his loving daughter embarked from Charleston on a
schooner, the Patriot, to meet her father in New York. When Burr
arrived he was met by a letter which told him that his grandson
was dead and that Theodosia was coming to him.

Weeks sped by, and no news was heard of the ill-fated Patriot. At
last it became evident that she must have gone down or in some
other way have been lost. Burr and Governor Allston wrote to each
other letter after letter, of which each one seems to surpass the
agony of the other. At last all hope was given up. Governor
Allston died soon after of a broken heart; but Burr, as became a
Stoic, acted otherwise.

He concealed everything that reminded him of Theodosia. He never
spoke of his lost daughter. His grief was too deep-seated and too
terrible for speech. Only once did he ever allude to her, and this
was in a letter written to an afflicted friend, which contained
the words:

Ever since the event which separated me from mankind I have been
able neither to give nor to receive consolation.

In time the crew of a pirate vessel was captured and sentenced to
be hanged. One of the men, who seemed to be less brutal than the
rest, told how, in 1812, they had captured a schooner, and, after
their usual practice, had compelled the passengers to walk the
plank. All hesitated and showed cowardice, except only one--a
beautiful woman whose eyes were as bright and whose bearing was as
unconcerned as if she were safe on shore. She quickly led the way,
and, mounting the plank with a certain scorn of death, said to the
others:

"Come, I will show you how to die."

It has always been supposed that this intrepid girl may have been
Theodosia Allston. If so, she only acted as her father would have
done and in strict accordance with his teachings.

This resolute courage, this stern joy in danger, this perfect
equanimity, made Burr especially attractive to women, who love
courage, the more so when it is coupled with gentleness and
generosity.

Perhaps no man in our country has been so vehemently accused
regarding his relations with the other sex. The most improbable
stories were told about him, even by his friends. As to his
enemies, they took boundless pains to paint him in the blackest
colors. According to them, no woman was safe from his intrigues.
He was a perfect devil in leading them astray and then casting
them aside.

Thus one Matthew L. Davis, in whom Burr had confided as a friend,
wrote of him long afterward a most unjust account--unjust because
we have proofs that it was false in the intensity of its abuse.
Davis wrote:

It is truly surprising how any individual could become so eminent
as a soldier, as a statesman, and as a professional man who
devoted so much time to the other sex as was devoted by Colonel
Burr. For more than half a century of his life they seemed to
absorb his whole thought. His intrigues were without number; the
sacred bonds of friendship were unhesitatingly violated when they
operated as barriers to the indulgence of his passions. In this
particular Burr appears to have been unfeeling and heartless.

It is impossible to believe that the Spartan Burr, whose life was
one of incessant labor and whose kindliness toward every one was
so well known, should have deserved a commentary like this. The
charge of immorality is so easily made and so difficult of
disproof that it has been flung promiscuously at all the great men
of history, including, in our own country,

Washington and Jefferson as well as Burr. In England, when
Gladstone was more than seventy years of age, he once stopped to
ask a question of a woman in the street. Within twenty-four hours
the London clubs were humming with a sort of demoniac glee over
the story that this aged and austere old gentleman was not above
seeking common street amours.

And so with Aaron Burr to a great extent. That he was a man of
strict morality it would be absurd to maintain. That he was a
reckless and licentious profligate would be almost equally untrue.
Mr. H. O. Merwin has very truly said:

Part of Burr's reputation for profligacy was due, no doubt, to
that vanity respecting women of which Davis himself speaks. He
never refused to accept the parentage of a child.

"Why do you allow this woman to saddle you with her child when you
KNOW you are not the father of it?" said a friend to him a few
months before his death.

"Sir," he replied, "when a lady does me the honor to name me the
father of her child I trust I shall always be too gallant to show
myself ungrateful for the favor."

There are two curious legends relating to Aaron Burr. They serve
to show that his reputation became such that he could not enjoy
the society of a woman without having her regarded as his
mistress.

When he was United States Senator from New York he lived in
Philadelphia at the lodging-house of a Mrs. Payne, whose daughter,
Dorothy Todd, was the very youthful widow of an officer. This
young woman was rather free in her manners, and Burr was very
responsive in his. At the time, however, nothing was thought of
it; hut presently Burr brought to the house the serious and
somewhat pedantic James Madison and introduced him to the hoyden.

Madison was then forty-seven years of age, a stranger to society,
but gradually rising to a prominent position in politics--"the
great little Madison," as Burr rather lightly called him. Before
very long he had proposed marriage to the young widow. She
hesitated, and some one referred the matter to President
Washington. The Father of his Country answered in what was perhaps
the only opinion that he ever gave on the subject of matrimony. It
is worth preserving because it shows that he had a sense of
humor:

For my own part, I never did nor do I believe I ever shall give
advice to a woman who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage ... A
woman very rarely asks an opinion or seeks advice on such an
occasion till her mind is wholly made up, and then it is with the
hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, and not that she
means to be governed by your disapproval.

Afterward when Dolly Madison with, her yellow turban and kittenish
ways was making a sensation in Washington society some one
recalled her old association with Burr. At once the story sprang
to light that Burr had been her lover and that he had brought
about the match with Madison as an easy way of getting rid of her.

There is another curious story which makes Martin Van Buren,
eighth President of the United States, to have been the
illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. There is no earthly reason for
believing this, except that Burr sometimes stopped overnight at
the tavern in Kinderhook which was kept by Van Buren's putative
father, and that Van Buren in later life showed an astuteness
equal to that of Aaron Burr himself, so that he was called by his
opponents "the fox of Kinderhook." But, as Van Buren was born in
December of the same year (1782) in which Burr was married to
Theodosia Prevost, the story is utterly improbable when we
remember, as we must, the ardent affection which Burr showed his
wife, not only before their marriage, but afterward until her
death.

Putting aside these purely spurious instances, as well as others
cited by Mr. Parton, the fact remains that Aaron Burr, like Daniel
Webster, found a great attraction in the society of women; that he
could please them and fascinate them to an extraordinary degree;
and that during his later life he must be held quite culpable in
this respect. His love-making was ardent and rapid, as we shall
afterward see in the case of his second marriage.

Many other stories are told of him. For instance, it is said that
he once took a stage-coach from Jersey City to Philadelphia. The
only other occupant was a woman of high standing and one whose
family deeply hated Aaron Burr. Nevertheless, so the story goes,
before they had reached Newark she was absolutely swayed by his
charm of manner; and when the coach made its last stop before
Philadelphia she voluntarily became his mistress.

It must also be said that, unlike those of Webster and Hamilton,
his intrigues were never carried on with women of the lower sort.
This may be held by some to deepen the charge against him; but
more truly does it exonerate him, since it really means that in
many cases these women of the world threw themselves at him and
sought him as a lover, when otherwise he might never have thought
of them.

That he was not heartless and indifferent to those who had loved
him may be shown by the great care which he took to protect their
names and reputations. Thus, on the day before his duel with
Hamilton, he made a will in which he constituted his son-in-law as
his executor. At the same time he wrote a sealed letter to
Governor Allston in which he said:

If you can pardon and indulge a folly, I would suggest that Mme. ----,
too well known under the name of Leonora, has claims on my
recollection. She is now with her husband at Santiago, in Cuba.

Another fact has been turned to his discredit. From many women, in
the course of his long life, he had received a great quantity of
letters written by aristocratic hands on scented paper, and these
letters he had never burned. Here again, perhaps, was shown the
vanity of the man who loved love for its own sake. He kept all
these papers in a huge iron-clamped chest, and he instructed
Theodosia in case he should die to burn every letter which might
injure any one.

After Theodosia's death Burr gave the same instructions to Matthew
L. Davis, who did, indeed, burn them, though he made their
existence a means of blackening the character of Burr. He should
have destroyed them unopened, and should never have mentioned them
in his memoirs of the man who trusted him as a friend.

Such was Aaron Burr throughout a life which lasted for eighty
years. His last romance, at the age of seventy-eight, is worth
narrating because it has often been misunderstood.

Mme. Jumel was a Rhode Island girl who at seventeen years of age
eloped with an English officer, Colonel Peter Croix. Her first
husband died while she was still quite young, and she then married
a French wine-merchant, Stephen Jumel, some twenty years her
senior, but a man of much vigor and intelligence. M. Jumel made a
considerable fortune in New York, owning a small merchant fleet;
and after Napoleon's downfall he and his wife went to Paris, where
she made a great impression in the salons by her vivacity and wit
and by her lavish expenditures.

Losing, however, part of what she and her husband possessed, Mme.
Jumel returned to New York, bringing with her a great amount of
furniture and paintings, with which she decorated the historic
house still standing in the upper part of Manhattan Island--a
mansion held by her in her own right. She managed her estate with
much ability; and in 1828 M. Jumel returned to live with her in
what was in those days a splendid villa.

Four years later, however, M. Jumel suffered an accident from
which he died in a few days, leaving his wife still an attractive
woman and not very much past her prime. Soon after she had
occasion to seek for legal advice, and for this purpose visited
the law-office of Aaron Burr. She had known him a good many years
before; and, though he was now seventy-eight years of age, there
was no perceptible change in him. He was still courtly in manner,
tactful, and deferential, while physically he was straight,
active, and vigorous.

A little later she invited him to a formal banquet, where he
displayed all his charms and shone to great advantage. When he was
about to lead her in to dinner, he said:

"I give my hand, madam; my heart has long been yours."

These attentions he followed up with several other visits, and
finally proposed that she should marry him. Much fluttered and no
less flattered, she uttered a sort of "No" which was not likely to
discourage a man like Aaron Burr.

"I shall come to you before very long," he said, "accompanied by a
clergyman; and then you will give me your hand because I want it."

This rapid sort of wooing was pleasantly embarrassing. The lady
rather liked it; and so, on an afternoon when the sun was shining
and the leaves were rustling in the breeze, Burr drove up to Mme.
Jumel's mansion accompanied by Dr. Bogart--the very clergyman who
had married him to his first wife fifty years before.

Mme. Jumel was now seriously disturbed, but her refusal was not a
strong one. There were reasons why she should accept the offer.
The great house was lonely. The management of her estate required
a man's advice. Moreover, she was under the spell of Burr's
fascination. Therefore she arrayed herself in one of her most
magnificent Paris gowns; the members of her household and eight
servants were called in and the ceremony was duly performed by Dr.
Bogart. A banquet followed. A dozen cobwebbed bottles of wine were
brought up from the cellar, and the marriage feast went on merrily
until after midnight.

This marriage was a singular one from many points of view. It was
strange that a man of seventy-eight should take by storm the
affections of a woman so much younger than he--a woman of wealth
and knowledge of the world. In the second place, it is odd that
there was still another woman--a mere girl--who was so infatuated
with Burr that when she was told of his marriage it nearly broke
her heart. Finally, in the early part of that same year he had
been accused of being the father of a new-born child, and in spite
of his age every one believed the charge to be true. Here is a
case that it would be hard to parallel.

The happiness of the newly married pair did not, however, last
very long. They made a wedding journey into Connecticut, of which
state Burr's nephew was then Governor, and there Burr saw a
monster bridge over the Connecticut River, in which his wife had
shares, though they brought her little income. He suggested that
she should transfer the investment, which, after all, was not a
very large one, and place it in a venture in Texas which looked
promising. The speculation turned out to be a loss, however, and
this made Mrs. Burr extremely angry, the more so as she had reason
to think that her ever-youthful husband had been engaged in
flirting with the country girls near the Jumel mansion.

She was a woman of high spirit and had at times a violent temper.
One day the post-master at what was then the village of Harlem
was surprised to see Mrs. Burr drive up before the post-office in
an open carriage. He came out to ask what she desired, and was
surprised to find her in a violent temper and with an enormous
horse-pistol on each cushion at her side.

"What do you wish, madam?" said he, rather mildly.

"What do I wish?" she cried. "Let me get at that villain Aaron
Burr!"

Presently Burr seems to have succeeded in pacifying her; but in
the end they separated, though she afterward always spoke most
kindly of him. When he died, only about a year later, she is said
to have burst into a flood of tears--another tribute to the
fascination which Aaron Burr exercised through all his checkered
life.

It is difficult to come to any fixed opinion regarding the moral
character of Aaron Burr. As a soldier he was brave to the point of
recklessness. As a political leader he was almost the equal of
Jefferson and quite superior to Hamilton. As a man of the world he
was highly accomplished, polished in manner, charming in
conversation. He made friends easily, and he forgave his enemies
with a broadmindedness that is unusual.

On the other hand, in his political career there was a touch of
insincerity, and it can scarcely be denied that he used his charm
too often to the injury of those women who could not resist his
insinuating ways and the caressing notes of his rich voice. But as
a husband, in his youth, he was devoted, affectionate, and loyal;
while as a father he was little less than worshiped by the
daughter whom he reared so carefully.

One of his biographers very truly says that no such wretch as Burr
has been declared to be could have won and held the love of such a
wife and such a daughter as Burr had.

When all the other witnesses have been heard, let the two
Theodosias be summoned, and especially that daughter who showed
toward him an affectionate veneration unsurpassed by any recorded
in history or romance. Such an advocate as Theodosia the younger
must avail in some degree, even though the culprit were brought
before the bar of Heaven itself.





GEORGE IV. AND MRS. FITZHERBERT


In the last decade of the eighteenth century England was perhaps
the most brilliant nation of the world. Other countries had been
humbled by the splendid armies of France and were destined to be
still further humbled by the emperor who came from Corsica. France
had begun to seize the scepter of power; yet to this picture there
was another side--fearful want and grievous poverty and the
horrors of the Revolution. Russia was too far away, and was still
considered too barbarous, for a brilliant court to flourish there.
Prussia had the prestige that Frederick the Great won for her, but
she was still a comparatively small state. Italy was in a
condition of political chaos; the banks of the Rhine were running
blood where the Austrian armies faced the gallant Frenchmen under
the leadership of Moreau. But England, in spite of the loss of her
American colonies, was rich and prosperous, and her invincible
fleets were extending her empire over the seven seas.

At no time in modern England has the court at London seen so much
real splendor or such fine manners. The royalist emigres who fled
from France brought with them names and pedigrees that were older
than the Crusades, and many of them were received with the
frankest, freest English hospitality. If here and there some
marquis or baron of ancient blood was perforce content to teach
music to the daughters of tradesmen in suburban schools,
nevertheless they were better off than they had been in France,
harried by the savage gaze-hounds of the guillotine. Afterward,
in the days of the Restoration, when they came back to their
estates, they had probably learned more than one lesson from the
bouledogues of Merry England, who had little tact, perhaps, but
who were at any rate kindly and willing to share their goods with
pinched and poverty-stricken foreigners.

The court, then, as has been said, was brilliant with notables
from Continental countries, and with the historic wealth of the
peerage of England. Only one cloud overspread it; and that was the
mental condition of the king. We have become accustomed to think
of George III as a dull creature, almost always hovering on the
verge of that insanity which finally swept him into a dark
obscurity; but Thackeray's picture of him is absurdly untrue to
the actual facts. George III. was by no means a dullard, nor was
he a sort of beefy country squire who roved about the palace
gardens with his unattractive spouse.

Obstinate enough he was, and ready for a combat with the rulers of
the Continent or with his self-willed sons; but he was a man of
brains and power, and Lord Rosebery has rightly described him as
the most striking constitutional figure of his time. Had he
retained his reason, and had his erratic and self-seeking son not
succeeded him during his own lifetime, Great Britain might very
possibly have entered upon other ways than those which opened to
her after the downfall of Napoleon.

The real center of fashionable England, however, was not George
III., but rather his son, subsequently George IV., who was made
Prince of Wales three days after his birth, and who became prince
regent during the insanity of the king. He was the leader of the
social world, the fit companion of Beau Brummel and of a choice
circle of rakes and fox-hunters who drank pottle-deep. Some called
him "the first gentleman of Europe." Others, who knew him better,
described him as one who never kept his word to man or woman and
who lacked the most elementary virtues.

Yet it was his good luck during the first years of his regency to
be popular as few English kings have ever been. To his people he
typified old England against revolutionary France; and his youth
and gaiety made many like him. He drank and gambled; he kept packs
of hounds and strings of horses; he ran deeply into debt that he
might patronize the sports of that uproarious day. He was a
gallant "Corinthian," a haunter of dens where there were prize-
fights and cock-fights, and there was hardly a doubtful resort in
London where his face was not familiar.

He was much given to gallantry--not so much, as it seemed, for
wantonness, but from sheer love of mirth and chivalry. For a time,
with his chosen friends, such as Fox and Sheridan, he ventured
into reckless intrigues that recalled the amours of his
predecessor, Charles II. He had by no means the wit and courage of
Charles; and, indeed, the house of Hanover lacked the outward show
of chivalry which made the Stuarts shine with external splendor.
But he was good-looking and stalwart, and when he had half a dozen
robust comrades by his side he could assume a very manly
appearance. Such was George IV. in his regency and in his prime.
He made that period famous for its card-playing, its deep
drinking, and for the dissolute conduct of its courtiers and
noblemen no less than for the gallantry of its soldiers and its
momentous victories on sea and land. It came, however, to be seen
that his true achievements were in reality only escapades, that
his wit was only folly, and his so-called "sensibility" was but
sham. He invented buckles, striped waistcoats, and flamboyant
collars, but he knew nothing of the principles of kingship or the
laws by which a state is governed.

The fact that he had promiscuous affairs with women appealed at
first to the popular sense of the romantic. It was not long,
however, before these episodes were trampled down into the mire of
vulgar scandal.

One of the first of them began when he sent a letter, signed
"Florizel," to a young actress, "Perdita" Robinson. Mrs. Robinson,
whose maiden name was Mary Darby, and who was the original of
famous portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds, was a woman of
beauty, talent, and temperament. George, wishing in every way to
be "romantic," insisted upon clandestine meetings on the Thames at
Kew, with all the stage trappings of the popular novels--cloaks,
veils, faces hidden, and armed watchers to warn her of approaching
danger. Poor Perdita took this nonsense so seriously that she gave
up her natural vocation for the stage, and forsook her husband,
believing that the prince would never weary of her.

He did weary of her very soon, and, with the brutality of a man of
such a type, turned her away with the promise of some money; after
which he cut her in the Park and refused to speak to her again. As
for the money, he may have meant to pay it, but Perdita had a long
struggle before she succeeded in getting it. It may be assumed
that the prince had to borrow it and that this obligation formed
part of the debts which Parliament paid for him.

It is not necessary to number the other women whose heads he
turned. They are too many for remembrance here, and they have no
special significance, save one who, as is generally believed,
became his wife so far as the church could make her so. An act of
1772 had made it illegal for any member of the English royal
family to marry without the permission of the king. A marriage
contracted without the king's consent might be lawful in the eyes
of the church, but the children born of it could not inherit any
claim to the throne.

It may be remarked here that this withholding of permission was
strictly enforced. Thus William IV., who succeeded George IV., was
married, before his accession to the throne, to Mrs. Jordan
(Dorothy Bland). Afterward he lawfully married a woman of royal
birth who was known as Queen Adelaide.

There is an interesting story which tells how Queen Victoria came
to be born because her father, the Duke of Kent, was practically
forced to give up a morganatic union which he greatly preferred to
a marriage arranged for him by Parliament. Except the Duke of
Cambridge, the Duke of Kent was the only royal duke who was likely
to have children in the regular line. The only daughter of George
IV. had died in childhood. The Duke of Cumberland was for various
reasons ineligible; the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.,
was almost too old; and therefore, to insure the succession, the
Duke of Kent was begged to marry a young and attractive woman, a
princess of the house of Saxe-Coburg, who was ready for the honor.
It was greatly to the Duke's credit that he showed deep and
sincere feeling in this matter. As he said himself in effect:

"This French lady has stood by me in hard times and in good times,
too--why should I cast her off? She has been more than a wife to
me. And what do I care for your plans in Parliament? Send over for
one of the Stuarts--they are better men than the last lot of our
fellows that you have had!"

In the end, however, he was wearied out and was persuaded to
marry, but he insisted that a generous sum should be settled on
the lady who had been so long his true companion, and to whom, no
doubt, he gave many a wistful thought in his new but unfamiliar
quarters in Kensington Palace, which was assigned as his
residence.

Again, the second Duke of Cambridge, who died only a few years
ago, greatly desired to marry a lady who was not of royal rank,
though of fine breeding and of good birth. He besought his young
cousin, as head of the family, to grant him this privilege of
marriage; but Queen Victoria stubbornly refused. The duke was
married according to the rites of the church, but he could not
make his wife a duchess. The queen never quite forgave him for his
partial defiance of her wishes, though the duke's wife--she was
usually spoken of as Mrs. FitzGeorge--was received almost
everywhere, and two of her sons hold high rank in the British army
and navy, respectively.

The one real love story in the life of George IV. is that which
tells of his marriage with a lady who might well have been the
wife of any king. This was Maria Anne Smythe, better known as Mrs.
Fitzherbert, who was six years older than the young prince when
she first met him in company with a body of gentlemen and ladies
in 1784.

Maria Fitzherbert's face was one which always displayed its best
advantages. Her eyes were peculiarly languishing, and, as she had
already been twice a widow, and was six years his senior, she had
the advantage over a less experienced lover. Likewise, she was a
Catholic, and so by another act of Parliament any marriage with
her would be illegal. Yet just because of all these different
objections the prince was doubly drawn to her, and was willing to
sacrifice even the throne if he could but win her.

His father, the king, called him into the royal presence and said:

"George, it is time that you should settle down and insure the
succession to the throne."

"Sir," replied the prince, "I prefer to resign the succession and
let my brother have it, and that I should live as a private
English gentleman."

Mrs. Fitzherbert was not the sort of woman to give herself up
readily to a morganatic connection. Moreover, she soon came to
love Prince George too well to entangle him in a doubtful alliance
with one of another faith than his. Not long after he first met
her the prince, who was always given to private theatricals, sent
messengers riding in hot haste to her house to tell her that he
had stabbed himself, that he begged to see her, and that unless
she came he would repeat the act. The lady yielded, and hurried to
Carlton House, the prince's residence; but she was prudent enough
to take with her the Duchess of Devonshire, who was a reigning
beauty of the court.

The scene which followed was theatrical rather than impressive.--
The prince was found in his sleeping-chamber, pale and with his
ruffles blood-stained. He played the part of a youthful and love-
stricken wooer, vowing that he would marry the woman of his heart
or stab himself again. In the presence of his messengers, who,
with the duchess, were witnesses, he formally took the lady as his
wife, while Lady Devonshire's wedding-ring sealed the troth. The
prince also acknowledged it in a document.

Mrs. Fitzherbert was, in fact, a woman of sound sense. Shortly
after this scene of melodramatic intensity her wits came back to
her, and she recognized that she had merely gone through a
meaningless farce. So she sent back the prince's document and the
ring and hastened to the Continent, where he could not reach her,
although his detectives followed her steps for a year.

At the last she yielded, however, and came home to marry the
prince in such fashion as she could--a marriage of love, and
surely one of morality, though not of parliamentary law. The
ceremony was performed "in her own drawing-room in her house in
London, in the presence of the officiating Protestant clergyman
and two of her own nearest relatives."

Such is the serious statement of Lord Stourton, who was Mrs.
Fitzherbert's cousin and confidant. The truth of it was never
denied, and Mrs. Fitzherbert was always treated with respect, and
even regarded as a person of great distinction. Nevertheless, on
more than one occasion the prince had his friends in Parliament
deny the marriage in order that his debts might be paid and new
allowances issued to him by the Treasury.

George certainly felt himself a husband. Like any other married
prince, he set himself to build a palace for his country home.
While in search of some suitable spot he chanced to visit the
"pretty fishing-village" of Brighton to see his uncle, the Duke of
Cumberland. Doubtless he found it an attractive place, yet this
may have been not so much because of its view of the sea as for
the reason that Mrs. Fitzherbert had previously lived there.

However, in 1784 the prince sent down his chief cook to make
arrangements for the next royal visit. The cook engaged a house on
the spot where the Pavilion now stands, and from that time
Brighton began to be an extremely fashionable place. The court
doctors, giving advice that was agreeable, recommended their royal
patient to take sea-bathing at Brighton. At once the place sprang
into popularity.

At first the gentry were crowded into lodging-houses and the
accommodations were primitive to a degree. But soon handsome
villas arose on every side; hotels appeared; places of amusement
were opened. The prince himself began to build a tasteless but
showy structure, partly Chinese and partly Indian in style, on the
fashionable promenade of the Steyne.

During his life with Mrs. Fitzherbert at Brighton the prince held
what was practically a court. Hundreds of the aristocracy came
down from London and made their temporary dwellings there; while
thousands who were by no means of the court made the place what is
now popularly called "London by the Sea." There were the Duc de
Chartres, of France; statesmen and rakes, like Fox, Sheridan, and
the Earl of Barrymore; a very beautiful woman, named Mrs. Couch, a
favorite singer at the opera, to whom the prince gave at one time
jewels worth ten thousand pounds; and a sister of the Earl of
Barrymore, who was as notorious as her brother. She often took the
president's chair at a club which George's friends had organized
and which she had christened the Hell Fire Club.

Such persons were not the only visitors at Brighton. Men of much
more serious demeanor came down to visit the prince and brought
with them quieter society. Nevertheless, for a considerable time
the place was most noted for its wild scenes of revelry, into
which George frequently entered, though his home life with Mrs.
Fitzherbert at the Pavilion was a decorous one.

No one felt any doubt as to the marriage of the two persons, who
seemed so much like a prince and a princess. Some of the people of
the place addressed Mrs. Fitzherbert as "Mrs. Prince." The old
king and his wife, however, much deplored their son's relation
with her. This was partly due to the fact that Mrs. Fitzherbert
was a Catholic and that she had received a number of French nuns
who had been driven out of France at the time of the Revolution.
But no less displeasure was caused by the prince's racing and
dicing, which swelled his debts to almost a million pounds, so
that Parliament and, indeed, the sober part of England were set
against him.

Of course, his marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert had no legal status;
nor is there any reason for believing that she ever became a
mother. She had no children by her former two husbands, and Lord
Stourton testified positively that she never had either son or
daughter by Prince George. Nevertheless, more than one American
claimant has risen to advance some utterly visionary claim to the
English throne by reason of alleged descent from Prince George and
Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Neither William IV. nor Queen Victoria ever spent much time at
Brighton. In King William's case it was explained that the
dampness of the Pavilion did not suit him; and as to Queen
Victoria, it was said that she disliked the fact that buildings
had been erected so as to cut off the view of the sea. It is quite
likely, however, that the queen objected to the associations of
the place, and did not care to be reminded of the time when her
uncle had lived there so long in a morganatic state of marriage.

At length the time came when the king, Parliament, and the people
at large insisted that the Prince of Wales should make a legal
marriage, and a wife was selected for him in the person of
Caroline, daughter of the Duke of Brunswick. This marriage took
place exactly ten years after his wedding with the beautiful and
gentle-mannered Mrs. Fitzherbert. With the latter he had known
many days and hours of happiness. With Princess Caroline he had no
happiness at all.

Prince George met her at the pier to greet her. It is said that as
he took her hand he kissed her, and then, suddenly recoiling, he
whispered to one of his friends:

"For God's sake, George, give me a glass of brandy!"

Such an utterance was more brutal and barbaric than anything his
bride could have conceived of, though it is probable, fortunately,
that she did not understand him by reason of her ignorance of
English.

We need not go through the unhappy story of this unsympathetic,
neglected, rebellious wife. Her life with the prince soon became
one of open warfare; but instead of leaving England she remained
to set the kingdom in an uproar. As soon as his father died and he
became king, George sued her for divorce. Half the people sided
with the queen, while the rest regarded her as a vulgar creature
who made love to her attendants and brought dishonor on the
English throne. It was a sorry, sordid contrast between the young
Prince George who had posed as a sort of cavalier and this now
furious gray old man wrangling with his furious German wife.

Well might he look back to the time when he met Perdita in the
moonlight on the Thames, or when he played the part of Florizel,
or, better still, when he enjoyed the sincere and disinterested
love of the gentle woman who was his wife in all but legal status.
Caroline of Brunswick was thrust away from the king's coronation.
She took a house within sight of Westminster Abbey, so that she
might make hag-like screeches to the mob and to the king as he
passed by. Presently, in August, 1821, only a month after the
coronation, she died, and her body was taken back to Brunswick for
burial.

George himself reigned for nine years longer. When he died in 1830
his executor was the Duke of Wellington. The duke, in examining
the late king's private papers, found that he had kept with the
greatest care every letter written to him by his morganatic wife.
During his last illness she had sent him an affectionate missive
which it is said George "read eagerly." Mrs. Fitzherbert wished
the duke to give up her letters; but he would do so only in return
for those which he had written to her.

It was finally decided that it would be best to burn both his and
hers. This work was carried out in Mrs. Fitzherbert's own house by
the lady, the duke, and the Earl of Albemarle.

Of George it may be said that he has left as memories behind him
only three things that will be remembered. The first is the
Pavilion at Brighton, with its absurdly oriental decorations, its
minarets and flimsy towers. The second is the buckle which he
invented and which Thackeray has immortalized with his biting
satire. The last is the story of his marriage to Maria
Fitzherbert, and of the influence exercised upon him by the
affection of a good woman.





CHARLOTTE CORDAY AND ADAM LUX


Perhaps some readers will consider this story inconsistent with
those that have preceded it. Yet, as it is little known to most
readers and as it is perhaps unique in the history of romantic
love, I cannot forbear relating it; for I believe that it is full
of curious interest and pathetic power.

All those who have written of the French Revolution have paused in
their chronicle of blood and flame to tell the episode of the
peasant Royalist, Charlotte Corday; but in telling it they have
often omitted the one part of the story that is personal and not
political. The tragic record of this French girl and her self-
sacrifice has been told a thousand times by writers in many
languages; yet almost all of them have neglected the brief romance
which followed her daring deed and which was consummated after her
death upon the guillotine. It is worth our while to speak first of
Charlotte herself and of the man she slew, and then to tell that
other tale which ought always to be entwined with her great deed
of daring.

Charlotte Corday--Marie Anne Charlotte Corday d'Armand--was a
native of Normandy, and was descended, as her name implies, from
noble ancestors. Her forefathers, indeed, had been statesmen,
civil rulers, and soldiers, and among them was numbered the famous
poet Corneille, whom the French rank with Shakespeare. But a
century or more of vicissitudes had reduced her branch of the
family almost to the position of peasants--a fact which partly
justifies the name that some give her when they call her "the
Jeanne d'Arc of the Revolution."

She did not, however, spend her girlish years amid the fields and
woods tending her sheep, as did the other Jeanne d'Arc; but she
was placed in charge of the sisters in a convent, and from them
she received such education as she had. She was a lonely child,
and her thoughts turned inward, brooding over many things.

After she had left the convent she was sent to live with an aunt.
Here she devoted herself to reading over and over the few books
which the house contained. These consisted largely of the deistic
writers, especially Voltaire, and to some extent they destroyed
her convent faith, though it is not likely that she understood
them very fully.

More to her taste was a copy of Plutarch's Lives. These famous
stories fascinated her. They told her of battle and siege, of
intrigue and heroism, and of that romantic love of country which
led men to throw away their lives for the sake of a whole people.
Brutus and Regulus were her heroes. To die for the many seemed to
her the most glorious end that any one could seek. When she
thought of it she thrilled with a sort of ecstasy, and longed with
all the passion of her nature that such a glorious fate might be
her own.

Charlotte had nearly come to womanhood at the time when the French
Revolution first broke out. Royalist though she had been in her
sympathies, she felt the justice of the people's cause. She had
seen the suffering of the peasantry, the brutality of the tax-
gatherers, and all the oppression of the old regime. But what she
hoped for was a democracy of order and equality and peace. Could
the king reign as a constitutional monarch rather than as a
despot, this was all for which she cared.

In Normandy, where she lived, were many of those moderate
republicans known as Girondists, who felt as she did and who hoped
for the same peaceful end to the great outbreak. On the other
hand, in Paris, the party of the Mountain, as it was called, ruled
with a savage violence that soon was to culminate in the Reign of
Terror. Already the guillotine ran red with noble blood. Already
the king had bowed his head to the fatal knife. Already the threat
had gone forth that a mere breath of suspicion or a pointed finger
might be enough to lead men and women to a gory death.

In her quiet home near Caen Charlotte Corday heard as from afar
the story of this dreadful saturnalia of assassination which was
making Paris a city of bloody mist. Men and women of the Girondist
party came to tell her of the hideous deeds that were perpetrated
there. All these horrors gradually wove themselves in the young
girl's imagination around the sinister and repulsive figure of
Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and
Robespierre. It was in Marat alone that she saw the monster who
sent innocent thousands to their graves, and who reveled like some
arch-fiend in murder and gruesome death.

In his earlier years Marat had been a very different figure--an
accomplished physician, the friend of nobles, a man of science and
original thought, so that he was nearly elected to the Academy of
Sciences. His studies in electricity gained for him the admiration
of Benjamin Franklin and the praise of Goethe. But when he turned
to politics he left all this career behind him. He plunged into
the very mire of red republicanism, and even there he was for a
time so much hated that he sought refuge in London to save his
life.

On his return he was hunted by his enemies, so that his only place
of refuge was in the sewers and drains of Paris. A woman, one
Simonne Evrard, helped him to escape his pursuers. In the sewers,
however, he contracted a dreadful skin-disease from which he never
afterward recovered, and which was extremely painful as well as
shocking to behold.

It is small wonder that the stories about Marat circulated through
the provinces made him seem more a devil than a man. His
vindictiveness against the Girondists brought all of this straight
home to Charlotte Corday and led her to dream of acting the part
of Brutus, so that she might free her country from this hideous
tyrant.

In January, 1793, King Louis XVI. met his death upon the scaffold;
and the queen was thrust into a foul prison. This was a signal for
activity among the Girondists in Normandy, and especially at Caen,
where Charlotte was present at their meetings and heard their
fervid oratory. There was a plot to march on Paris, yet in some
instinctive way she felt that such a scheme must fail. It was then
that she definitely formed the plan of going herself, alone, to
the French capital to seek out the hideous Marat and to kill him
with her own hands.

To this end she made application for a passport allowing her to
visit Paris. This passport still exists, and it gives us an
official description of the girl. It reads:

Allow citizen Marie Corday to pass. She is twenty-four years of
age, five feet and one inch in height, hair and eyebrows chestnut
color, eyes gray, forehead high, mouth medium size, chin dimpled,
and an oval face.

Apart from this verbal description we have two portraits painted
while she was in prison. Both of them make the description of the
passport seem faint and pale. The real Charlotte had a wealth of
chestnut hair which fell about her face and neck in glorious
abundance. Her great gray eyes spoke eloquently of truth and
courage. Her mouth was firm yet winsome, and her form combined
both strength and grace. Such is the girl who, on reaching Paris,
wrote to Marat in these words:

Citizen, I have just arrived from Caen. Your love for your native
place doubtless makes you wish to learn the events which have
occurred in that part of the republic. I shall call at your
residence in about an hour. Be so good as to receive me and give
me a brief interview. I will put you in such condition as to
render great service to France.

This letter failed to gain her admission, and so did another which
she wrote soon after. The fact is that Marat was grievously ill.
His disease had reached a point where the pain could be assuaged
only by hot water; and he spent the greater part of his time
wrapped in a blanket and lying in a large tub.

A third time, however, the persistent girl called at his house and
insisted that she must see him, saying that she was herself in
danger from the enemies of the Republic. Through an open door
Marat heard her mellow voice and gave orders that she should be
admitted.

As she entered she gazed for a moment upon the lank figure rolling
in the tub, the rat-like face, and the shifting eyes. Then she
approached him, concealing in the bosom of her dress a long
carving-knife which she had purchased for two francs. In answer to
Marat's questioning look she told him that there was much
excitement at Caen and that the Girondists were plotting there.

To this Marat answered, in his harsh voice:

"All these men you mention shall be guillotined in the next few
days!"

As he spoke Charlotte flashed out the terrible knife and with all
her strength she plunged it into his left side, where it pierced a
lung and a portion of his heart.

Marat, with the blood gushing from his mouth, cried out:

"Help, darling!"

His cry was meant for one of the two women in the house. Both
heard it, for they were in the next room; and both of them rushed
in and succeeded in pinioning Charlotte Corday, who, indeed, made
only a slight effort to escape. Troops were summoned, she was
taken to the Prison de l'Abbaye, and soon after she was arraigned
before the revolutionary tribunal.

Placed in the dock, she glanced about her with an air of pride, as
of one who gloried in the act which she had just performed. A
written charge was read. She was asked what she had to say.
Lifting her head with a look of infinite satisfaction, she
answered in a ringing voice:

"Nothing--except that I succeeded!"

A lawyer was assigned for her defense. He pleaded for her
earnestly, declaring that she must he regarded as insane; but
those clear, calm eyes and that gentle face made her sanity a
matter of little doubt. She showed her quick wit in the answers
which she gave to the rough prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, who
tried to make her confess that she had accomplices.

"Who prompted you to do this deed?" roared Tinville.

"I needed no prompting. My own heart was sufficient."

"In what, then, had Marat wronged you?"

"He was a savage beast who was going to destroy the remains of
France in the fires of civil war."

"But whom did you expect to benefit?" insinuated the prosecutor.

"I have killed one man to save a hundred thousand."

"What? Did you imagine that you had murdered all the Marats?"

"No, but, this one being dead, the rest will perhaps take
warning."

Thus her directness baffled all the efforts of the prosecution to
trap her into betraying any of her friends. The court, however,
sentenced her to death. She was then immured in the Conciergerie.

This dramatic court scene was the beginning of that strange, brief
romance to which one can scarcely find a parallel. At the time
there lived in Paris a young German named Adam Lux. The continual
talk about Charlotte Corday had filled him with curiosity
regarding this young girl who had been so daring and so patriotic.
She was denounced on every hand as a murderess with the face of a
Medusa and the muscles of a Vulcan. Street songs about her were
dinned into the ears of Adam Lux.

As a student of human nature he was anxious to see this terrible
creature. He forced his way to the front of the crowded benches in
the court-room and took his stand behind a young artist who was
finishing a beautiful sketch. From that moment until the end of
the trial the eyes of Adam Lux were fastened on the prisoner. What
a contrast to the picture he had imagined!

A mass of regal chestnut hair crowned with the white cap of a
Norman peasant girl; gray eyes, very sad and serious, but looking
serenely forth from under long, dark lashes; lips slightly curved
with an expression of quiet humor; a face the color of the sun and
wind, a bust indicative of perfect health, the chin of a Caesar,
and the whole expression one of almost divine self-sacrifice. Such
were the features that the painter was swiftly putting upon his
canvas; but behind them Adam Lux discerned the soul for which he
gladly sacrificed both his liberty and his life.

He forgot his surroundings and seemed to see only that beautiful,
pure face and to hear only the exquisite cadences of the wonderful
voice. When Charlotte was led forth by a file of soldiers Adam
staggered from the scene and made his way as best he might to his
lodgings. There he lay prostrate, his whole soul filled with the
love of her who had in an instant won the adoration of his heart.

Once, and only once again, when the last scene opened on the
tragedy, did he behold the heroine of his dreams.

On the 17th of July Charlotte Corday was taken from her prison to
the gloomy guillotine. It was toward evening, and nature had given
a setting fit for such an end. Blue-black thunder-clouds rolled in
huge masses across the sky until their base appeared to rest on
the very summit of the guillotine. Distant thunder rolled and
grumbled beyond the river. Great drops of rain fell upon the
soldiers' drums. Young, beautiful, unconscious of any wrong,
Charlotte Corday stood beneath the shadow of the knife.

At the supreme moment a sudden ray from the setting sun broke
through the cloud-wrack and fell upon her slender figure until she
glowed in the eyes of the startled spectators like a statue cut in
burnished bronze. Thus illumined, as it were, by a light from
heaven itself, she bowed herself beneath the knife and paid the
penalty of a noble, if misdirected, impulse. As the blade fell her
lips quivered with her last and only plea:

"My duty is enough--the rest is nothing!"

Adam Lux rushed from the scene a man transformed. He bore graven
upon his heart neither the mob of tossing red caps nor the glare
of the sunset nor the blood-stained guillotine, but that last look
from those brilliant eyes. The sight almost deprived him of his
reason. The self-sacrifice of the only woman he had ever loved,
even though she had never so much as seen him, impelled him with a
sort of fury to his own destruction.

He wrote a bitter denunciation of the judges, of the officers, and
of all who had been followers of Marat. This document he printed,
and scattered copies of it through every quarter in Paris. The
last sentences are as follows:

The guillotine is no longer a disgrace. It has become a sacred
altar, from which every taint has been removed by the innocent
blood shed there on the 17th of July. Forgive me, my divine
Charlotte, if I find it impossible at the last moment to show the
courage and the gentleness that were yours! I glory because you
are superior to me, for it is right that she who is adored should
be higher and more glorious than her adorer!

This pamphlet, spread broadcast among the people, was soon
reported to the leaders of the rabble. Adam Lux was arrested for
treason against the Republic; but even these men had no desire to
make a martyr of this hot-headed youth. They would stop his mouth
without taking his life. Therefore he was tried and speedily found
guilty, but an offer was made him that he might have passports
that would allow him to return to Germany if only he would sign a
retraction of his printed words.

Little did the judges understand the fiery heart of the man they
had to deal with. To die on the same scaffold as the woman whom he
had idealized was to him the crowning triumph of his romantic
love. He gave a prompt and insolent refusal to their offer. He
swore that if released he would denounce his darling's murderers
with a still greater passion.

In anger the tribunal sentenced him to death. Only then he smiled
and thanked his judges courteously, and soon after went blithely
to the guillotine like a bridegroom to his marriage feast.

Adam Lux! Spirit courtship had been carried on silently all
through that terrible cross-examination of Charlotte Corday. His
heart was betrothed to hers in that single gleam of the setting
sun when she bowed beneath the knife. One may believe that these
two souls were finally united when the same knife fell sullenly
upon his neck and when his life-blood sprinkled the altar that was
still stained with hers.





NAPOLEON AND MARIE WALEWSKA


There are four women who may be said to have deeply influenced the
life of Napoleon. These four are the only ones who need to be
taken into account by the student of his imperial career. The
great emperor was susceptible to feminine charms at all times; but
just as it used to be said of him that "his smile never rose above
his eyes," so it might as truly be said that in most instances the
throbbing of his heart did not affect his actions.

Women to him were the creatures of the moment, although he might
seem to care for them and to show his affection in extravagant
ways, as in his affair with Mlle. Georges, the beautiful but
rather tiresome actress. As for Mme. de Stael, she bored him to
distraction by her assumption of wisdom. That was not the kind of
woman that Napoleon cared for. He preferred that a woman should be
womanly, and not a sort of owl to sit and talk with him about the
theory of government.

When it came to married women they interested him only because of
the children they might bear to grow up as recruits for his
insatiate armies. At the public balls given at the Tuileries he
would walk about the gorgeous drawing-rooms, and when a lady was
presented to him he would snap out, sharply:

"How many children have you?"

If she were able to answer that she had several the emperor would
look pleased and would pay her some compliment; but if she said
that she had none he would turn upon her sharply and say:

"Then go home and have some!"

Of the four women who influenced his life, first must come
Josephine, because she secured him his earliest chance of
advancement. She met him through Barras, with whom she was said to
be rather intimate. The young soldier was fascinated by her--the
more because she was older than he and possessed all the practised
arts of the creole and the woman of the world. When she married
him she brought him as her dowry the command of the army of Italy,
where in a few months he made the tri-color, borne by ragged
troops, triumphant over the splendidly equipped hosts of Austria.

She was his first love, and his knowledge of her perfidy gave him
the greatest shock and horror of his whole life; yet she might
have held him to the end if she had borne an heir to the imperial
throne. It was her failure to do so that led Napoleon to divorce
Josephine and marry the thick-lipped Marie Louise of Austria.
There were times later when he showed signs of regret and said:

"I have had no luck since I gave up Josephine!"

Marie Louise was of importance for a time--the short time when
she entertained her husband and delighted him by giving birth to
the little King of Rome. Yet in the end she was but an episode;
fleeing from her husband in his misfortune, becoming the mistress
of Count Neipperg, and letting her son--l'Aiglon--die in a land
that was far from France.

Napoleon's sister, Pauline Bonaparte, was the third woman who
comes to mind when we contemplate the great Corsican's career.
She, too, is an episode. During the period of his ascendancy she
plagued him with her wanton ways, her sauciness and trickery. It
was amusing to throw him into one of his violent rages; but
Pauline was true at heart, and when her great brother was sent to
Elba she followed him devotedly and gave him all her store of
jewels, including the famous Borghese diamonds, perhaps the most
superb of all gems known to the western world. She would gladly
have followed him, also, to St. Helena had she been permitted.
Remaining behind, she did everything possible in conspiring to
secure his freedom.

But, after all, Pauline and Marie Louise count for comparatively
little. Josephine's fate was interwoven with Napoleon's; and, with
his Corsican superstition, he often said so. The fourth woman, of
whom I am writing here, may be said to have almost equaled
Josephine in her influence on the emperor as well as in the pathos
of her life-story.

On New-Year's Day of 1807 Napoleon, who was then almost Emperor of
Europe, passed through the little town of Bronia, in Poland.
Riding with his cavalry to Warsaw, the ancient capital of the
Polish kingdom, he seemed a very demigod of battle.

True, he had had to abandon his long-cherished design of invading
and overrunning England, and Nelson had shattered his fleets and
practically driven his flag from the sea; but the naval disaster
of Trafalgar had speedily been followed by the triumph of
Austerlitz, the greatest and most brilliant of all Napoleon's
victories, which left Austria and Russia humbled to the very
ground before him.

Then Prussia had dared to defy the over-bearing conqueror and had
put into the field against him her armies trained by Frederick the
Great; but these he had shattered almost at a stroke, winning in
one day the decisive battles of Jena and Auerstadt. He had stabled
his horses in the royal palace of the Hohenzollerns and had
pursued the remnant of the Prussian forces to the Russian border.

As he marched into the Polish provinces the people swarmed by
thousands to meet him and hail him as their country's savior. They
believed down to the very last that Bonaparte would make the Poles
once more a free and independent nation and rescue them from the
tyranny of Russia.

Napoleon played upon this feeling in every manner known to his
artful mind. He used it to alarm the Czar. He used it to
intimidate the Emperor of Austria; but more especially did he use
it among the Poles themselves to win for his armies thousands upon
thousands of gallant soldiers, who believed that in fighting for
Napoleon they were fighting for the final independence of their
native land.

Therefore, with the intensity of patriotism which is a passion
among the Poles, every man and every woman gazed at Napoleon with
something like adoration; for was not he the mighty warrior who
had in his gift what all desired? Soldiers of every rank swarmed
to his standards. Princes and nobles flocked about him. Those who
stayed at home repeated wonderful stories of his victories and
prayed for him and fed the flame which spread through all the
country. It was felt that no sacrifice was too great to win his
favor; that to him, as to a deity, everything that he desired
should be yielded up, since he was to restore the liberty of
Poland.

And hence, when the carriage of the emperor dashed into Bronia,
surrounded by Polish lancers and French cuirassiers, the enormous
crowd surged forward and blocked the way so that their hero could
not pass because of their cheers and cries and supplications.

In the midst of it all there came a voice of peculiar sweetness
from the thickest portion of the crowd.

"Please let me pass!" said the voice. "Let me see him, if only for
a moment!"

The populace rolled backward, and through the lane which they made
a beautiful girl with dark blue eyes that flamed and streaming
hair that had become loosened about her radiant face was
confronting the emperor. Carried away by her enthusiasm, she
cried:

"Thrice welcome to Poland! We can do or say nothing to express our
joy in the country which you will surely deliver from its tyrant."

The emperor bowed and, with a smile, handed a great bouquet of
roses to the girl, for her beauty and her enthusiasm had made a
deep impression on him.

"Take it," said he, "as a proof of my admiration. I trust that I
may have the pleasure of meeting you at Warsaw and of hearing your
thanks from those beautiful lips."

In a moment more the trumpets rang out shrilly, the horsemen
closed up beside the imperial carriage, and it rolled away amid
the tumultuous shouting of the populace.

The girl who had so attracted Napoleon's attention was Marie
Walewska, descended from an ancient though impoverished family in
Poland. When she was only fifteen she was courted by one of the
wealthiest men in Poland, the Count Walewska. He was three or four
times her age, yet her dark blue eyes, her massive golden hair,
and the exquisite grace of her figure led him to plead that she
might become his wife. She had accepted him, but the marriage was
that of a mere child, and her interest still centered upon her
country and took the form of patriotism rather than that of
wifehood and maternity.

It was for this reason that the young Countess had visited Bronia.
She was now eighteen years of age and still had the sort of
romantic feeling which led her to think that she would keep in
some secret hiding-place the bouquet which the greatest man alive
had given her.

But Napoleon was not the sort of man to forget anything that had
given him either pleasure or the reverse. He who, at the height of
his cares, could recall instantly how many cannon were in each
seaport of France and could make out an accurate list of all his
military stores; he who could call by name every soldier in his
guard, with a full remembrance of the battles each man had fought
in and the honors that he had won--he was not likely to forget so
lovely a face as the one which had gleamed with peculiar radiance
through the crowd at Bronia.

On reaching Warsaw he asked one or two well-informed persons about
this beautiful stranger. Only a few hours had passed before Prince
Poniatowski, accompanied by other nobles, called upon her at her
home.

"I am directed, madam," said he, "by order of the Emperor of
France, to bid you to be present at a ball that is to be given in
his honor to-morrow evening."

Mme. Walewska was startled, and her face grew hot with blushes.
Did the emperor remember her escapade at Bronia? If so, how had he
discovered her? Why should he seek her out and do her such an
honor?

"That, madam, is his imperial majesty's affair," Poniatowski told
her. "I merely obey his instructions and ask your presence at the
ball. Perhaps Heaven has marked you out to be the means of saving
our unhappy country."

In this way, by playing on her patriotism, Poniatowski almost
persuaded her, and yet something held her back. She trembled,
though she was greatly fascinated; and finally she refused to go.

Scarcely had the envoy left her, however, when a great company of
nobles entered in groups and begged her to humor the emperor.
Finally her own husband joined in their entreaties and actually
commanded her to go; so at last she was compelled to yield.

It was by no means the frank and radiant girl who was now
preparing again to meet the emperor. She knew not why, and yet her
heart was full of trepidation and nervous fright, the cause of
which she could not guess, yet which made her task a severe
ordeal. She dressed herself in white satin, with no adornment save
a wreath of foliage in her hair.

As she entered the ballroom she was welcomed by hundreds whom she
had never seen before, but who were of the highest nobility of
Poland. Murmurs of admiration followed her, and finally
Poniatowski came to her and complimented her, besides bringing her
a message that the emperor desired her to dance with him.

"I am very sorry," she said, with a quiver of the lips, "but I
really cannot dance. Be kind enough to ask the emperor to excuse
me."

But at that very moment she felt some strange magnetic influence;
and without looking up she could feel that Napoleon himself was
standing by her as she sat with blanched face and downcast eyes,
not daring to look up at him.

"White upon white is a mistake, madam," said the emperor, in his
gentlest tones. Then, stooping low, he whispered, "I had expected
a far different reception."

She neither smiled nor met his eyes. He stood there for a moment
and then passed on, leaving her to return to her home with a heavy
heart. The young countess felt that she had acted wrongly, and yet
there was an instinct--an instinct that she could not conquer.

In the gray of the morning, while she was still tossing
feverishly, her maid knocked at the door and brought her a hastily
scribbled note. It ran as follows:

I saw none but you, I admired none but you; I desire only you.
Answer at once, and calm the impatient ardor of--N.

These passionate words burned from her eyes the veil that had
hidden the truth from her. What before had been mere blind
instinct became an actual verity. Why had she at first rushed
forth into the very streets to hail the possible deliverer of her
country, and then why had she shrunk from him when he sought to
honor her! It was all clear enough now. This bedside missive meant
that he had intended her dishonor and that he had looked upon her
simply as a possible mistress.

At once she crushed the note angrily in her hand.

"There is no answer at all," said she, bursting into bitter tears
at the very thought that he should dare to treat her in this way.

But on the following morning when she awoke her maid was standing
beside her with a second letter from Napoleon. She refused to open
it and placed it in a packet with the first letter, and ordered
that both of them should be returned to the emperor.

She shrank from speaking to her husband of what had happened, and
there was no one else in whom she dared confide. All through that
day there came hundreds of visitors, either of princely rank or
men who had won fame by their gallantry and courage. They all
begged to see her, but to them all she sent one answer--that she
was ill and could see no one.

After a time her husband burst into her room, and insisted that
she should see them.

"Why," exclaimed he, "you are insulting the greatest men and the
noblest women of Poland! More than that, there are some of the
most distinguished Frenchmen sitting at your doorstep, as it were.
There is Duroc, grand marshal of France, and in refusing to see
him you are insulting the great emperor on whom depends everything
that our country longs for. Napoleon has invited you to a state
dinner and you have given him no answer whatever. I order you to
rise at once and receive these ladies and gentlemen who have done
you so much honor!"

She could not refuse. Presently she appeared in her drawing-room,
where she was at once surrounded by an immense throng of her own
countrymen and countrywomen, who made no pretense of
misunderstanding the situation. To them, what was one woman's
honor when compared with the freedom and independence of their
nation? She was overwhelmed by arguments and entreaties. She was
even accused of being disloyal to the cause of Poland if she
refused her consent.

One of the strangest documents of that period was a letter sent to
her and signed by the noblest men in Poland. It contained a
powerful appeal to her patriotism. One remarkable passage even
quotes the Bible to point out her line of duty. A portion of this
letter ran as follows:

Did Esther, think you, give herself to Ahasuerus out of the
fulness of her love for him? So great was the terror with which he
inspired her that she fainted at the sight of him. We may
therefore conclude that affection had but little to do with her
resolve. She sacrificed her own inclinations to the salvation of
her country, and that salvation it was her glory to achieve. May
we be enabled to say the same of you, to your glory and our own
happiness!

After this letter came others from Napoleon himself, full of the
most humble pleading. It was not wholly distasteful thus to have
the conqueror of the world seek her out and offer her his
adoration any more than it was distasteful to think that the
revival of her own nation depended on her single will. M. Frederic
Masson, whose minute studies regarding everything relating to
Napoleon have won him a seat in the French Academy, writes of
Marie Walewska at this time: Every force was now brought into play
against her. Her country, her friends, her religion, the Old and
the New Testaments, all urged her to yield; they all combined for
the ruin of a simple and inexperienced girl of eighteen who had no
parents, whose husband even thrust her into temptation, and whose
friends thought that her downfall would be her glory.

Amid all these powerful influences she consented to attend the
dinner. To her gratification Napoleon treated her with distant
courtesy, and, in fact, with a certain coldness.

"I heard that Mme. Walewska was indisposed. I trust that she has
recovered," was all the greeting that he gave her when they met.

Every one else with whom she spoke overwhelmed her with flattery
and with continued urging; but the emperor himself for a time
acted as if she had displeased him. This was consummate art; for
as soon as she was relieved of her fears she began to regret that
she had thrown her power away.

During the dinner she let her eyes wander to those of the emperor
almost in supplication. He, the subtlest of men, knew that he had
won. His marvelous eyes met hers and drew her attention to him as
by an electric current; and when the ladies left the great dining-
room Napoleon sought her out and whispered in her ear a few words
of ardent love.

It was too little to alarm her seriously now. It was enough to
make her feel that magnetism which Napoleon knew so well how to
evoke and exercise. Again every one crowded about her with
congratulations. Some said:

"He never even saw any of US. His eyes were all for YOU! They
flashed fire as he looked at you."

"You have conquered his heart," others said, "and you can do what
you like with him. The salvation of Poland is in your hands."

The company broke up at an early hour, but Mme. Walewska was asked
to remain. When she was alone General Duroc--one of the emperor's
favorite officers and most trusted lieutenants--entered and placed
a letter from Napoleon in her lap. He tried to tell her as
tactfully as possible how much harm she was doing by refusing the
imperial request. She was deeply affected, and presently, when
Duroc left her, she opened the letter which he had given her and
read it. It was worded thus:

There are times when all splendors become oppressive, as I feel
but too deeply at the present moment. How can I satisfy the
desires of a heart that yearns to cast itself at your feet, when
its impulses are checked at every point by considerations of the
highest moment? Oh, if you would, you alone might overcome the
obstacles that keep us apart. MY FRIEND DUROC WILL MAKE ALL EASY
FOR YOU. Oh, come, come! Your every wish shall be gratified! Your
country will be dearer to me when you take pity on my poor heart.
N.

Every chance of escape seemed to be closed. She had Napoleon's own
word that he would free Poland in return for her self-sacrifice.
Moreover, her powers of resistance had been so weakened that, like
many women, she temporized. She decided that she would meet the
emperor alone. She would tell him that she did not love him, and
yet would plead with him to save her beloved country.

As she sat there every tick of the clock stirred her to a new
excitement. At last there came a knock upon the door, a cloak was
thrown about her from behind, a heavy veil was drooped about her
golden hair, and she was led, by whom she knew not, to the street,
where a finely appointed carriage was waiting for her.

No sooner had she entered it than she was driven rapidly through
the darkness to the beautifully carved entrance of a palace. Half
led, half carried, she was taken up the steps to a door which was
eagerly opened by some one within. There were warmth and light and
color and the scent of flowers as she was placed in a comfortable
arm-chair. Her wrappings were taken from her, the door was closed
behind her; and then, as she looked up, she found herself in the
presence of Napoleon, who was kneeling at her feet and uttering
soothing words.

Wisely, the emperor used no violence. He merely argued with her;
he told her over and over his love for her; and finally he
declared that for her sake he would make Poland once again a
strong and splendid kingdom.

Several hours passed. In the early morning, before daylight, there
came a knock at the door.

"Already?" said Napoleon. "Well, my plaintive dove, go home and
rest. You must not fear the eagle. In time you will come to love
him, and in all things you shall command him."

Then he led her to the door, but said that he would not open it
unless she promised to see him the next day--a promise which she
gave the more readily because he had treated her with such
respect.

On the following morning her faithful maid came to her bedside
with a cluster of beautiful violets, a letter, and several
daintily made morocco cases. When these were opened there leaped
out strings and necklaces of exquisite diamonds, blazing in the
morning sunlight. Mme. Walewska seized the jewels and flung them
across the room with an order that they should be taken back at
once to the imperial giver; but the letter, which was in the same
romantic strain as the others, she retained.

On that same evening there was another dinner, given to the
emperor by the nobles, and Marie Walewska attended it, but of
course without the diamonds, which she had returned. Nor did she
wear the flowers which had accompanied the diamonds.

When Napoleon met her he frowned upon her and made her tremble
with the cold glances that shot from his eyes of steel. He
scarcely spoke to her throughout the meal, but those who sat
beside her were earnest in their pleading.

Again she waited until the guests had gone away, and with a
lighter heart, since she felt that she had nothing to fear. But
when she met Napoleon in his private cabinet, alone, his mood was
very different from that which he had shown before. Instead of
gentleness and consideration he was the Napoleon of camps, and not
of courts. He greeted her bruskly.

"I scarcely expected to see you again," said he. "Why did you
refuse my diamonds and my flowers? Why did you avoid my eyes at
dinner? Your coldness is an insult which I shall not brook." Then
he raised his voice to that rasping, almost blood-curdling tone
which even his hardiest soldiers dreaded: "I will have you know
that I mean to conquer you. You SHALL--yes, I repeat it, you
SHALL love me! I have restored the name of your country. It owes
its very existence to me."

Then he resorted to a trick which he had played years before in
dealing with the Austrians at Campo Formio.

"See this watch which I am holding in my hand. Just as I dash it
to fragments before you, so will I shatter Poland if you drive me
to desperation by rejecting my heart and refusing me your own."

As he spoke he hurled the watch against the opposite wall with
terrific force, dashing it to pieces. In terror, Mme. Walewska
fainted. When she resumed consciousness there was Napoleon wiping
away her tears with the tenderness of a woman and with words of
self-reproach.

The long siege was over. Napoleon had conquered, and this girl of
eighteen gave herself up to his caresses and endearments, thinking
that, after all, her love of country was more than her own honor.

Her husband, as a matter of form, put her away from him, though at
heart he approved what she had done, while the Polish people
regarded her as nothing less than a national heroine. To them she
was no minister to the vices of an emperor, but rather one who
would make him love Poland for her sake and restore its greatness.

So far as concerned his love for her, it was, indeed, almost
idolatry. He honored her in every way and spent all the time at
his disposal in her company. But his promise to restore Poland he
never kept, and gradually she found that he had never meant to
keep it.

"I love your country," he would say, "and I am willing to aid in
the attempt to uphold its rights, but my first duty is to France.
I cannot shed French blood in a foreign cause."

By this time, however, Marie Walewska had learned to love Napoleon
for his own sake. She could not resist his ardor, which matched
the ardor of the Poles themselves. Moreover, it flattered her to
see the greatest soldier in the world a suppliant for her smiles.

For some years she was Napoleon's close companion, spending long
hours with him and finally accompanying him to Paris. She was the
mother of Napoleon's only son who lived to manhood. This son, who
bore the name of Alexandre Florian de Walewski, was born in Poland
in 1810, and later was created a count and duke of the second
French Empire. It may be said parenthetically that he was a man of
great ability. Living down to 1868, he was made much of by
Napoleon III., who placed him in high offices of state, which he
filled with distinction. In contrast with the Duc de Morny, who
was Napoleon's illegitimate half-brother, Alexandre de Walewski
stood out in brilliant contrast. He would have nothing to do with
stock-jobbing and unseemly speculation.

"I may be poor," he said--though he was not poor--"but at least I
remember the glory of my father and what is due to his great
name."

As for Mme. Walewska, she was loyal to the emperor, and lacked the
greed of many women whom he had made his favorites. Even at Elba,
when he was in exile and disgrace, she visited him that she might
endeavor to console him. She was his counselor and friend as well
as his earnestly loved mate. When she died in Paris in 1817, while
the dethroned emperor was a prisoner at St. Helena, the word
"Napoleon" was the last upon her lips.





THE STORY OF PAULINE BONAPARTE


It was said of Napoleon long ago that he could govern emperors and
kings, but that not even he could rule his relatives. He himself
once declared:

"My family have done me far more harm than I have been able to do
them good."

It would be an interesting historical study to determine just how
far the great soldier's family aided in his downfall by their
selfishness, their jealousy, their meanness, and their
ingratitude.

There is something piquant in thinking of Napoleon as a domestic
sort of person. Indeed, it is rather difficult to do so. When we
speak his name we think of the stern warrior hurling his armies up
bloody slopes and on to bloody victory. He is the man whose steely
eyes made his haughtiest marshals tremble, or else the wise, far-
seeing statesman and lawgiver; but decidedly he is not a household
model. We read of his sharp speech to women, of his outrageous
manners at the dinner-table, and of the thousand and one details
which Mme. de Remusat has chronicled--and perhaps in part
invented, for there has always existed the suspicion that her
animus was that of a woman who had herself sought the imperial
favor and had failed to win it.

But, in fact, all these stories relate to the Napoleon of courts
and palaces, and not to the Napoleon of home. In his private life
this great man was not merely affectionate and indulgent, but he
even showed a certain weakness where his relatives were concerned,
so that he let them prey upon him almost without end.

He had a great deal of the Italian largeness and lavishness of
character with his family. When a petty officer he nearly starved
himself in order to give his younger brother, Louis, a military
education. He was devotedly fond of children, and they were fond
of him, as many anecdotes attest. His passionate love for
Josephine before he learned of her infidelity is almost painful to
read of; and even afterward, when he had been disillusioned, and
when she was paying Fouche a thousand francs a day to spy upon
Napoleon's every action, he still treated her with friendliness
and allowed her extravagance to embarrass him.

He made his eldest brother, Joseph, King of Spain, and Spain
proved almost as deadly to him as did Russia. He made his youngest
brother, Jerome, King of Westphalia, and Jerome turned the palace
into a pigsty and brought discredit on the very name of Bonaparte.
His brother Louis, for whom he had starved himself, he placed upon
the throne of Holland, and Louis promptly devoted himself to his
own interests, conniving at many things which were inimical to
France. He was planning high advancement for his brother Lucien,
and Lucien suddenly married a disreputable actress and fled with
her to England, where he was received with pleasure by the most
persistent of all Napoleon's enemies.

So much for his brothers--incompetent, ungrateful, or openly his
foes. But his three sisters were no less remarkable in the
relations which they bore to him. They have been styled "the three
crowned courtesans," and they have been condemned together as
being utterly void of principle and monsters of ingratitude.

Much of this censure was well deserved by all of them--by Caroline
and Elise and Pauline. But when we look at the facts impartially
we shall find something which makes Pauline stand out alone as
infinitely superior to her sisters. Of all the Bonapartes she was
the only one who showed fidelity and gratitude to the great
emperor, her brother. Even Mme. Mere, Napoleon's mother, who
beyond all question transmitted to him his great mental and
physical power, did nothing for him. At the height of his splendor
she hoarded sous and francs and grumblingly remarked:

"All this is for a time. It isn't going to last!"

Pauline, however, was in one respect different from all her
kindred. Napoleon made Elise a princess in her own right and gave
her the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. He married Caroline to Marshal
Murat, and they became respectively King and Queen of Naples. For
Pauline he did very little--less, in fact, than for any other
member of his family--and yet she alone stood by him to the end.

This feather-headed, languishing, beautiful, distracting morsel of
frivolity, who had the manners of a kitten and the morals of a
cat, nevertheless was not wholly unworthy to be Napoleon's sister.
One has to tell many hard things of her; and yet one almost
pardons her because of her underlying devotion to the man who made
the name of Bonaparte illustrious for ever. Caroline, Queen of
Naples, urged her husband to turn against his former chief. Elise,
sour and greedy, threw in her fortunes with the Murats. Pauline,
as we shall see, had the one redeeming trait of gratitude.

To those who knew her she was from girlhood an incarnation of what
used to be called "femininity." We have to-day another and a
higher definition of womanhood, but to her contemporaries, and to
many modern writers, she has seemed to be first of all woman--
"woman to the tips of her rosy finger-nails," says Levy. Those who
saw her were distracted by her loveliness. They say that no one
can form any idea of her beauty from her pictures. "A veritable
masterpiece of creation," she had been called. Frederic Masson
declares:

 She was so much more the typical woman that with her the defects
common to women reached their highest development, while her
beauty attained a perfection which may justly be called unique.

 No one speaks of Pauline Bonaparte's character or of her
intellect, but wholly of her loveliness and charm, and, it must be
added, of her utter lack of anything like a moral sense.

Even as a child of thirteen, when the Bonapartes left Corsica and
took up their abode in Marseilles, she attracted universal
attention by her wonderful eyes, her grace, and also by the utter
lack of decorum which she showed. The Bonaparte girls at this time
lived almost on charity. The future emperor was then a captain of
artillery and could give them but little out of his scanty pay.

Pauline--or, as they called her in those days, Paulette--wore
unbecoming hats and shabby gowns, and shoes that were full of
holes. None the less, she was sought out by several men of note,
among them Freron, a commissioner of the Convention. He visited
Pauline so often as to cause unfavorable comment; but he was in
love with her, and she fell in love with him to the extent of her
capacity. She used to write him love letters in Italian, which
were certainly not lacking in ardor. Here is the end of one of
them:

I love you always and most passionately. I love you for ever, my
beautiful idol, my heart, my appealing lover. I love you, love
you, love you, the most loved of lovers, and I swear never to love
any one else!

This was interesting in view of the fact that soon afterward she
fell in love with Junot, who became a famous marshal. But her love
affairs never gave her any serious trouble; and the three sisters,
who now began to feel the influence of Napoleon's rise to power,
enjoyed themselves as they had never done before. At Antibes they
had a beautiful villa, and later a mansion at Milan.

By this time Napoleon had routed the Austrians in Italy, and all
France was ringing with his name. What was Pauline like in her
maidenhood? Arnault says:

She was an extraordinary combination of perfect physical beauty
and the strangest moral laxity. She was as pretty as you please,
but utterly unreasonable. She had no more manners than a school-
girl--talking incoherently, giggling at everything and nothing,
and mimicking the most serious persons of rank.

General de Ricard, who knew her then, tells in his monograph of
the private theatricals in which Pauline took part, and of the
sport which they had behind the scenes. He says:

The Bonaparte girls used literally to dress us. They pulled our
ears and slapped us, but they always kissed and made up later. We
used to stay in the girls' room all the time when they were
dressing.

Napoleon was anxious to see his sisters in some way settled. He
proposed to General Marmont to marry Pauline. The girl was then
only seventeen, and one might have had some faith in her
character. But Marmont was shrewd and knew her far too well. The
words in which he declined the honor are interesting:

"I know that she is charming and exquisitely beautiful; yet I have
dreams of domestic happiness, of fidelity, and of virtue. Such
dreams are seldom realized, I know. Still, in the hope of winning
them--"

And then he paused, coughed, and completed what he had to say in a
sort of mumble, but his meaning was wholly clear. He would not
accept the offer of Pauline in marriage, even though she was the
sister of his mighty chief.

Then Napoleon turned to General Leclerc, with whom Pauline had for
some time flirted, as she had flirted with almost all the officers
of Napoleon's staff. Leclerc was only twenty-six. He was rich and
of good manners, but rather serious and in poor health. This was
not precisely the sort of husband for Pauline, if we look at it in
the conventional way; but it served Napoleon's purpose and did not
in the least interfere with his sister's intrigues.

Poor Leclerc, who really loved Pauline, grew thin, and graver
still in manner. He was sent to Spain and Portugal, and finally
was made commander-in-chief of the French expedition to Haiti,
where the famous black rebel, Toussaint l'Ouverture, was heading
an uprising of the negroes.

Napoleon ordered Pauline to accompany her husband. Pauline flatly
refused, although she made this an occasion for ordering
"mountains of pretty clothes and pyramids of hats." But still she
refused to go on board the flag-ship. Leclerc expostulated and
pleaded, but the lovely witch laughed in his face and still
persisted that she would never go.

Word was brought to Napoleon. He made short work of her
resistance.

"Bring a litter," he said, with one of his steely glances. "Order
six grenadiers to thrust her into it, and see that she goes on
board forthwith."

And so, screeching like an angry cat, she was carried on board,
and set sail with her husband and one of her former lovers. She
found Haiti and Santo Domingo more agreeable than she had
supposed. She was there a sort of queen who could do as she
pleased and have her orders implicitly obeyed. Her dissipation was
something frightful. Her folly and her vanity were beyond belief.

But at the end of two years both she and her husband fell ill. He
was stricken down by the yellow fever, which was decimating the
French army. Pauline was suffering from the results of her life in
a tropical climate. Leclerc died, the expedition was abandoned,
and Pauline brought the general's body back to France. When he was
buried she, still recovering from her fever, had him interred in a
costly coffin and paid him the tribute of cutting off her
beautiful hair and burying it with him.

"What a touching tribute to her dead husband!" said some one to
Napoleon.

The emperor smiled cynically as he remarked:

"H'm! Of course she knows that her hair is bound to fall out after
her fever, and that it will come in longer and thicker for being
cropped."

Napoleon, in fact, though he loved Pauline better than his other
sisters--or perhaps because he loved her better--was very strict
with her. He obliged her to wear mourning, and to observe some of
the proprieties; but it was hard to keep her within bounds.

Presently it became noised about that Prince Camillo Borghese was
exceedingly intimate with her. The prince was an excellent
specimen of the fashionable Italian. He was immensely rich. His
palace at Rome was crammed with pictures, statues, and every sort
of artistic treasure. He was the owner, moreover, of the famous
Borghese jewels, the finest collection of diamonds in the world.

Napoleon rather sternly insisted upon her marrying Borghese.
Fortunately, the prince was very willing to be connected with
Napoleon; while Pauline was delighted at the idea of having
diamonds that would eclipse all the gems which Josephine
possessed; for, like all of the Bonapartes, she detested her
brother's wife. So she would be married and show her diamonds to
Josephine. It was a bit of feminine malice which she could not
resist.

The marriage took place very quietly at Joseph Bonaparte's house,
because of the absence of Napoleon; but the newly made princess
was invited to visit Josephine at the palace of Saint-Cloud. Here
was to be the triumph of her life. She spent many days in planning
a toilet that should be absolutely crushing to Josephine. Whatever
she wore must be a background for the famous diamonds. Finally she
decided on green velvet.

When the day came Pauline stood before a mirror and gazed at
herself with diamonds glistening in her hair, shimmering around
her neck, and fastened so thickly on her green velvet gown as to
remind one of a moving jewel-casket. She actually shed tears for
joy. Then she entered her carriage and drove out to Saint-Cloud.

But the Creole Josephine, though no longer young, was a woman of
great subtlety as well as charm. Stories had been told to her of
the green velvet, and therefore she had her drawing-room
redecorated in the most uncompromising blue. It killed the green
velvet completely. As for the diamonds, she met that maneuver by
wearing not a single gem of any kind. Her dress was an Indian
muslin with a broad hem of gold.

Her exquisite simplicity, coupled with her dignity of bearing,
made the Princess Pauline, with her shower of diamonds, and her
green velvet displayed against the blue, seem absolutely vulgar.
Josephine was most generous in her admiration of the Borghese
gems, and she kissed Pauline on parting. The victory was hers.

There is another story of a defeat which Pauline met from another
lady, one Mme. de Coutades. This was at a magnificent ball given
to the most fashionable world of Paris. Pauline decided upon
going, and intended, in her own phrase, to blot out every woman
there. She kept the secret of her toilet absolutely, and she
entered the ballroom at the psychological moment, when all the
guests had just assembled.

She appeared; and at sight of her the music stopped, silence fell
upon the assemblage, and a sort of quiver went through every one.
Her costume was of the finest muslin bordered with golden palm-
leaves. Four bands, spotted like a leopard's skin, were wound
about her head, while these in turn were supported by little
clusters of golden grapes. She had copied the head-dress of a
Bacchante in the Louvre. All over her person were cameos, and just
beneath her breasts she wore a golden band held in place by an
engraved gem. Her beautiful wrists, arms, and hands were bare. She
had, in fact, blotted out her rivals.

Nevertheless, Mme. de Coutades took her revenge. She went up to
Pauline, who was lying on a divan to set off her loveliness, and
began gazing at the princess through a double eye-glass. Pauline
felt flattered for a moment, and then became uneasy. The lady who
was looking at her said to a companion, in a tone of compassion:

"What a pity! She really would be lovely if it weren't for THAT!"

"For what?" returned her escort.

"Why, are you blind? It's so remarkable that you SURELY must see
it."

Pauline was beginning to lose her self-composure. She flushed and
looked wildly about, wondering what was meant. Then she heard Mme.
Coutades say:

"Why, her ears. If I had such ears as those I would cut them off!"

Pauline gave one great gasp and fainted dead away. As a matter of
fact, her ears were not so bad. They were simply very flat and
colorless, forming a contrast with the rosy tints of her face. But
from that moment no one could see anything but these ears; and
thereafter the princess wore her hair low enough to cover them.

This may be seen in the statue of her by Canova. It was considered
a very daring thing for her to pose for him in the nude, for only
a bit of drapery is thrown over her lower limbs. Yet it is true
that this statue is absolutely classical in its conception and
execution, and its interest is heightened by the fact that its
model was what she afterward styled herself, with true Napoleonic
pride--"a sister of Bonaparte."

Pauline detested Josephine and was pleased when Napoleon divorced
her; but she also disliked the Austrian archduchess, Marie Louise,
who was Josephine's successor. On one occasion, at a great court
function, she got behind the empress and ran out her tongue at
her, in full view of all the nobles and distinguished persons
present. Napoleon's eagle eye flashed upon Pauline and blazed like
fire upon ice. She actually took to her heels, rushed out of the
ball, and never visited the court again.

It would require much time to tell of her other eccentricities, of
her intrigues, which were innumerable, of her quarrel with her
husband, and of the minor breaches of decorum with which she
startled Paris. One of these was her choice of a huge negro to
bathe her every morning. When some one ventured to protest, she
answered, naively:

"What! Do you call that thing a MAN?"

And she compromised by compelling her black servitor to go out and
marry some one at once, so that he might continue his
ministrations with propriety!

To her Napoleon showed himself far more severe than with either
Caroline or Elise. He gave her a marriage dowry of half a million
francs when she became the Princess Borghese, but after that he
was continually checking her extravagances. Yet in 1814, when the
downfall came and Napoleon was sent into exile at Elba, Pauline
was the only one of all his relatives to visit him and spend her
time with him. His wife fell away and went back to her Austrian
relatives. Of all the Bonapartes only Pauline and Mme. Mere
remained faithful to the emperor.

Even then Napoleon refused to pay a bill of hers for sixty-two
francs, while he allowed her only two hundred and forty francs for
the maintenance of her horses. But she, with a generosity of which
one would have thought her quite incapable, gave to her brother a
great part of her fortune. When he escaped from Elba and began the
campaign of 1815 she presented him with all the Borghese diamonds.
In fact, he had them with him in his carriage at Waterloo, where
they were captured by the English. Contrast this with the meanness
and ingratitude of her sisters and her brothers, and one may well
believe that she was sincerely proud of what it meant to be la
soeur de Bonaparte.

When he was sent to St. Helena she was ill in bed and could not
accompany him. Nevertheless, she tried to sell all her trinkets,
of which she was so proud, in order that she might give him help.
When he died she received the news with bitter tears "on hearing
all the particulars of that long agony."

As for herself, she did not long survive. At the age of forty-four
her last moments came. Knowing that she was to die, she sent for
Prince Borghese and sought a reconciliation. But, after all, she
died as she had lived--"the queen of trinkets" (la reine des
colifichets). She asked the servant to bring a mirror. She gazed
into it with her dying eyes; and then, as she sank back, it was
with a smile of deep content.

"I am not afraid to die," she said. "I am still beautiful!"





THE STORY OF THE EMPRESS MARIE LOUISE AND COUNT NEIPPERG


There is one famous woman whom history condems while at the same
time it partly hides the facts which might mitigate the harshness
of the judgment that is passed upon her. This woman is Marie
Louise, Empress of France, consort of the great Napoleon, and
archduchess of imperial Austria. When the most brilliant figure in
all history, after his overthrow in 1814, was in tawdry exile on
the petty island of Elba, the empress was already about to become
a mother; and the father of her unborn child was not Napoleon, but
another man. This is almost all that is usually remembered of her
--that she was unfaithful to Napoleon, that she abandoned him in
the hour of his defeat, and that she gave herself with readiness
to one inferior in rank, yet with whom she lived for years, and to
whom she bore what a French writer styled "a brood of bastards."

Naturally enough, the Austrian and German historians do not have
much to say of Marie Louise, because in her own disgrace she also
brought disgrace upon the proudest reigning family in Europe.
Naturally, also, French writers, even those who are hostile to
Napoleon, do not care to dwell upon the story; since France itself
was humiliated when its greatest genius and most splendid soldier
was deceived by his Austrian wife. Therefore there are still many
who know little beyond the bare fact that the Empress Marie Louise
threw away her pride as a princess, her reputation as a wife, and
her honor as a woman. Her figure seems to crouch in a sort of
murky byway, and those who pass over the highroad of history
ignore it with averted eyes.

In reality the story of Napoleon and Marie Louise and of the Count
von Neipperg is one which, when you search it to the very core,
leads you straight to a sex problem of a very curious nature.
Nowhere else does it occur in the relations of the great
personages of history; but in literature Balzac, that master of
psychology, has touched upon the theme in the early chapters of
his famous novel called "A Woman of Thirty."

As to the Napoleonic story, let us first recall the facts of the
case, giving them in such order that their full significance may
be understood.

In 1809 Napoleon, then at the plenitude of his power, shook
himself free from the clinging clasp of Josephine and procured the
annulment of his marriage to her. He really owed her nothing.
Before he knew her she had been the mistress of another. In the
first years of their life together she had been notoriously
unfaithful to him. He had held to her from habit which was in part
a superstition; but the remembrance of the wrong which she had
done him made her faded charms at times almost repulsive. And then
Josephine had never borne him any children; and without a son to
perpetuate his dynasty, the gigantic achievements which he had
wrought seemed futile in his eyes, and likely to crumble into
nothingness when he should die.

No sooner had the marriage been annulled than his titanic ambition
leaped, as it always did, to a tremendous pinnacle. He would wed.
He would have children. But he would wed no petty princess. This
man who in his early youth had felt honored by a marriage with the
almost declassee widow of a creole planter now stretched out his
hand that he might take to himself a woman not merely royal but
imperial.

At first he sought the sister of the Czar of Russia; but Alexander
entertained a profound distrust of the French emperor, and managed
to evade the tentative demand. There was, however, a reigning
family far more ancient than the Romanoffs--a family which had
held the imperial dignity for nearly six centuries--the oldest and
the noblest blood in Europe. This was the Austrian house of
Hapsburg. Its head, the Emperor Francis, had thirteen children, of
whom the eldest, the Archduchess Marie Louise, was then in her
nineteenth year.

Napoleon had resented the rebuff which the Czar had given him. He
turned, therefore, the more eagerly to the other project. Yet
there were many reasons why an Austrian marriage might be
dangerous, or, at any rate, ill-omened. Only sixteen years before,
an Austrian arch-duchess, Marie Antionette, married to the ruler
of France, had met her death upon the scaffold, hated and cursed
by the French people, who had always blamed "the Austrian" for the
evil days which had ended in the flames of revolution. Again, the
father of the girl to whom Napoleon's fancy turned had been the
bitter enemy of the new regime in France. His troops had been
beaten by the French in five wars and had been crushed at
Austerlitz and at Wagram. Bonaparte had twice entered Vienna at
the head of a conquering army, and thrice he had slept in the
imperial palace at Schonbrunn, while Francis was fleeing through
the dark, a beaten fugitive pursued by the swift squadrons of
French cavalry.

The feeling of Francis of Austria was not merely that of the
vanquished toward the victor. It was a deep hatred almost
religious in its fervor. He was the head and front of the old-time
feudalism of birth and blood; Napoleon was the incarnation of the
modern spirit which demolished thrones and set an iron heel upon
crowned heads, giving the sacred titles of king and prince to
soldiers who, even in palaces, still showed the swaggering
brutality of the camp and the stable whence they sprang. Yet, just
because an alliance with the Austrian house seemed in so many ways
impossible, the thought of it inflamed the ardor of Napoleon all
the more.

"Impossible?" he had once said, contemptuously. "The word
'impossible' is not French."

The Austrian alliance, unnatural though it seemed, was certainly
quite possible. In the year 1809 Napoleon had finished his fifth
war with Austria by the terrific battle of Wagram, which brought
the empire of the Hapsburgs to the very dust. The conqueror's rude
hand had stripped from Francis province after province. He had
even let fall hints that the Hapsburgs might be dethroned and that
Austria might disappear from the map of Europe, to be divided
between himself and the Russian Czar, who was still his ally. It
was at this psychological moment that the Czar wounded Napoleon's
pride by refusing to give the hand of his sister Anne.

The subtle diplomats of Vienna immediately saw their chance.
Prince Metternich, with the caution of one who enters the cage of
a man-eating-tiger, suggested that the Austrian archduchess would
be a fitting bride for the French conqueror. The notion soothed
the wounded vanity of Napoleon. From that moment events moved
swiftly; and before long it was understood that there was to be a
new empress in France, and that she was to be none other than the
daughter of the man who had been Napoleon's most persistent foe
upon the Continent. The girl was to be given--sacrificed, if you
like--to appease an imperial adventurer. After such a marriage,
Austria would be safe from spoliation. The reigning dynasty would
remain firmly seated upon its historic throne.

But how about the girl herself? She had always heard Napoleon
spoken of as a sort of ogre--a man of low ancestry, a brutal and
faithless enemy of her people. She knew that this bold, rough-
spoken soldier less than a year before had added insult to the
injury which he had inflicted on her father. In public
proclamations he had called the Emperor Francis a coward and a
liar. Up to the latter part of the year Napoleon was to her
imagination a blood-stained, sordid, and yet all-powerful monster,
outside the pale of human liking and respect. What must have been
her thoughts when her father first told her with averted face that
she was to become the bride of such a being?

Marie Louise had been brought up, as all German girls of rank were
then brought up, in quiet simplicity and utter innocence. In
person she was a tall blonde, with a wealth of light brown hair
tumbling about a face which might be called attractive because it
was so youthful and so gentle, but in which only poets and
courtiers could see beauty. Her complexion was rosy, with that
peculiar tinge which means that in the course of time it will
become red and mottled. Her blue eyes were clear and childish. Her
figure was good, though already too full for a girl who was
younger than her years.

She had a large and generous mouth with full lips, the lower one
being the true "Hapsburg lip," slightly pendulous--a feature which
has remained for generation after generation as a sure sign of
Hapsburg blood. One sees it in the present emperor of Austria, in
the late Queen Regent of Spain, and in the present King of Spain,
Alfonso. All the artists who made miniatures or paintings of Marie
Louise softened down this racial mark so that no likeness of her
shows it as it really was. But take her all in all, she was a
simple, childlike, German madchen who knew nothing of the outside
world except what she had heard from her discreet and watchful
governess, and what had been told her of Napoleon by her uncles,
the archdukes whom he had beaten down in battle.

When she learned that she was to be given to the French emperor
her girlish soul experienced a shudder; but her father told her
how vital was this union to her country and to him. With a sort of
piteous dread she questioned the archdukes who had called Napoleon
an ogre.

"Oh, that was when Napoleon was an enemy," they replied. "Now he
is our friend."

Marie Louise listened to all this, and, like the obedient German
girl she was, yielded her own will.

Events moved with a rush, for Napoleon was not the man to dally.
Josephine had retired to her residence at Malmaison, and Paris was
already astir with preparations for the new empress who was to
assure the continuation of the Napoleonic glory by giving children
to her husband. Napoleon had said to his ambassador with his usual
bluntness:

"This is the first and most important thing--she must have
children."

To the girl whom he was to marry he sent the following letter--an
odd letter, combining the formality of a negotiator with the
veiled ardor of a lover:

MY COUSIN: The brilliant qualities which adorn your person have
inspired in me a desire to serve you and to pay you homage. In
making my request to the emperor, your father, and praying him to
intrust to me the happiness of your imperial highness, may I hope
that you will understand the sentiments which lead me to this act?
May I flatter myself that it will not be decided solely by the
duty of parental obedience? However slightly the feelings of your
imperial highness may incline to me, I wish to cultivate them with
so great care, and to endeavor so constantly to please you in
everything, that I flatter myself that some day I shall prove
attractive to you. This is the end at which I desire to arrive,
and for which I pray your highness to be favorable to me.

Immediately everything was done to dazzle the imagination of the
girl. She had dressed always in the simplicity of the school-room.
Her only ornaments had been a few colored stones which she
sometimes wore as a necklace or a bracelet. Now the resources of
all France were drawn upon. Precious laces foamed about her.
Cascades of diamonds flashed before her eyes. The costliest and
most exquisite creations of the Parisian shops were spread around
her to make up a trousseau fit for the princess who was soon to
become the bride of the man who had mastered continental Europe.

The archives of Vienna were ransacked for musty documents which
would show exactly what had been done for other Austrian
princesses who had married rulers of France. Everything was
duplicated down to the last detail. Ladies-in-waiting thronged
about the young archduchess; and presently there came to her Queen
Caroline of Naples, Napoleon's sister, of whom Napoleon himself
once said: "She is the only man among my sisters, as Joseph is the
only woman among my brothers." Caroline, by virtue of her rank as
queen, could have free access to her husband's future bride. Also,
there came presently Napoleon's famous marshal, Berthier, Prince
of Neuchatel, the chief of the Old Guard, who had just been
created Prince of Wagram--a title which, very naturally, he did
not use in Austria. He was to act as proxy for Napoleon in the
preliminary marriage service at Vienna.

All was excitement. Vienna had never been so gay. Money was
lavished under the direction of Caroline and Berthier. There were
illuminations and balls. The young girl found herself the center
of the world's interest; and the excitement made her dizzy. She
could not but be flattered, and yet there were many hours when her
heart misgave her. More than once she was found in tears. Her
father, an affectionate though narrow soul, spent an entire day
with her consoling and reassuring her. One thought she always kept
in mind--what she had said to Metternich at the very first: "I
want only what my duty bids me want." At last came the official
marriage, by proxy, in the presence of a splendid gathering. The
various documents were signed, the dowry was arranged for. Gifts
were scattered right and left. At the opera there were gala
performances. Then Marie Louise bade her father a sad farewell.
Almost suffocated by sobs and with her eyes streaming with tears,
she was led between two hedges of bayonets to her carriage, while
cannon thundered and all the church-bells of Vienna rang a joyful
peal.

She set out for France accompanied by a long train of carriages
filled with noblemen and noblewomen, with ladies-in-waiting and
scores of attendant menials. The young bride--the wife of a man
whom she had never seen--was almost dead with excitement and
fatigue. At a station in the outskirts of Vienna she scribbled a
few lines to her father, which are a commentary upon her state of
mind:

I think of you always, and I always shall. God has given me power
to endure this final shock, and in Him alone I have put all my
trust. He will help me and give me courage, and I shall find
support in doing my duty toward you, since it is all for you that
I have sacrificed myself.

There is something piteous in this little note of a frightened
girl going to encounter she knew not what, and clinging almost
frantically to the one thought--that whatever might befall her,
she was doing as her father wished.

One need not recount the long and tedious journey of many days
over wretched roads, in carriages that jolted and lurched and
swayed. She was surrounded by unfamiliar faces and was compelled
to meet at every town the chief men of the place, all of whom paid
her honor, but stared at her with irrepressible curiosity. Day
after day she went on and on. Each morning a courier on a foaming
horse presented her with a great cluster of fresh flowers and a
few lines scrawled by the unknown husband who was to meet her at
her journey's end.

There lay the point upon which her wandering thoughts were
focused--the journey's end! The man whose strange, mysterious
power had forced her from her school-room, had driven her through
a nightmare of strange happenings, and who was waiting for her
somewhere to take her to himself, to master her as he had mastered
generals and armies!

What was marriage? What did it mean? What experience still lay
before her! These were the questions which she must have asked
herself throughout that long, exhausting journey. When she thought
of the past she was homesick. When she thought of the immediate
future she was fearful with a shuddering fear.

At last she reached the frontier of France, and her carriage
passed into a sort of triple structure, the first pavilion of
which was Austrian, while the middle pavilion was neutral, and the
farther one was French. Here she was received by those who were
afterward to surround her--the representatives of the Napoleonic
court. They were not all plebeians and children of the Revolution,
ex-stable boys, ex-laundresses. By this time Napoleon had gathered
around himself some of the noblest families of France, who had
rallied to the empire. The assemblage was a brilliant one. There
were Montmorencys and Beaumonts and Audenardes in abundance. But
to Marie Louise, as to her Austrian attendants, they were all
alike. They were French, they were strangers, and she shrank from
them.

Yet here her Austrians must leave her. All who had accompanied her
thus far were now turned back. Napoleon had been insistent on this
point. Even her governess, who had been with her since her
childhood, was not allowed to cross the French frontier. So fixed
was Napoleon's purpose to have nothing Austrian about her, that
even her pet dog, to which she clung as a girl would cling, was
taken from her. Thereafter she was surrounded only by French
faces, by French guards, and was greeted only by salvos of French
artillery.

In the mean time what was Napoleon doing at Paris. Since the
annulment of his marriage with Josephine he had gone into a sort
of retirement. Matters of state, war, internal reforms, no longer
interested him; but that restless brain could not sink into
repose. Inflamed with the ardor of a new passion, that passion was
all the greater because he had never yet set eyes upon its object.
Marriage with an imperial princess flattered his ambition. The
youth and innocence of the bride stirred his whole being with a
thrill of novelty. The painted charms of Josephine, the mercenary
favors of actresses, the calculated ecstasies of the women of the
court who gave themselves to him from vanity, had long since
palled upon him. Therefore the impatience with which he awaited
the coming of Marie Louise became every day more tense.

For a time he amused himself with planning down to the very last
details the demonstrations that were to be given in her honor. He
organized them as minutely as he had ever organized a conquering
army. He showed himself as wonderful in these petty things as he
had in those great strategic combinations which had baffled the
ablest generals of Europe. But after all had been arranged--even
to the illuminations, the cheering, the salutes, and the etiquette
of the court--he fell into a fever of impatience which gave him
sleepless nights and frantic days. He paced up and down the
Tuileries, almost beside himself. He hurried off courier after
courier with orders that the postilions should lash their horses
to bring the hour of meeting nearer still. He scribbled love
letters. He gazed continually on the diamond-studded portrait of
the woman who was hurrying toward him.

At last as the time approached he entered a swift traveling-
carriage and hastened to Compiegne, about fifty miles from Paris,
where it had been arranged that he should meet his consort and
whence he was to escort her to the capital, so that they might be
married in the great gallery of the Louvre. At Compiegne the
chancellerie had been set apart for Napoleon's convenience, while
the chateau had been assigned to Marie Louise and her attendants.
When Napoleon's carriage dashed into the place, drawn by horses
that had traveled at a gallop, the emperor could not restrain
himself. It was raining torrents and night was coming on, yet,
none the less, he shouted for fresh horses and pushed on to
Soissons, where the new empress was to stop and dine. When he
reached there and she had not arrived, new relays of horses were
demanded, and he hurried off once more into the dark.

At the little village of Courcelles he met the courier who was
riding in advance of the empress's cortege.

"She will be here in a few moments!" cried Napoleon; and he leaped
from his carriage into the highway.

The rain descended harder than ever, and he took refuge in the
arched doorway of the village church, his boots already bemired,
his great coat reeking with the downpour. As he crouched before
the church he heard the sound of carriages; and before long there
came toiling through the mud the one in which was seated the girl
for whom he had so long been waiting. It was stopped at an order
given by an officer. Within it, half-fainting with fatigue and
fear, Marie Louise sat in the dark, alone.

Here, if ever, was the chance for Napoleon to win his bride. Could
he have restrained himself, could he have shown the delicate
consideration which was demanded of him, could he have remembered
at least that he was an emperor and that the girl--timid and
shuddering--was a princess, her future story might have been far
different. But long ago he had ceased to think of anything except
his own desires.

He approached the carriage. An obsequious chamberlain drew aside
the leathern covering and opened the door, exclaiming as he did
so, "The emperor!" And then there leaped in the rain-soaked, mud-
bespattered being whose excesses had always been as unbridled as
his genius. The door was closed, the leathern curtain again drawn,
and the horses set out at a gallop for Soissons. Within, the
shrinking bride was at the mercy of pure animal passion, feeling
upon her hot face a torrent of rough kisses, and yielding herself
in terror to the caresses of wanton hands.

At Soissons Napoleon allowed no halt, but the carriage plunged on,
still in the rain, to Compiegne. There all the arrangements made
with so much care were thrust aside. Though the actual marriage
had not yet taken place, Napoleon claimed all the rights which
afterward were given in the ceremonial at Paris. He took the girl
to the chancellerie, and not to the chateau. In an anteroom dinner
was served with haste to the imperial pair and Queen Caroline.
Then the latter was dismissed with little ceremony, the lights
were extinguished, and this daughter of a line of emperors was
left to the tender mercies of one who always had about him
something of the common soldier--the man who lives for loot and
lust. ... At eleven the next morning she was unable to rise and
was served in bed by the ladies of her household.

These facts, repellent as they are, must be remembered when we
call to mind what happened in the next five years. The horror of
that night could not be obliterated by splendid ceremonies, by
studious attention, or by all the pomp and gaiety of the court.
Napoleon was then forty-one--practically the same age as his new
wife's father, the Austrian emperor; Marie Louise was barely
nineteen and younger than her years. Her master must have seemed
to be the brutal ogre whom her uncles had described.

Installed in the Tuileries, she taught herself compliance. On
their marriage night Napoleon had asked her briefly: "What did
your parents tell you?" And she had answered, meekly: "To be yours
altogether and to obey you in everything." But, though she gave
compliance, and though her freshness seemed enchanting to
Napoleon, there was something concealed within her thoughts to
which he could not penetrate. He gaily said to a member of the
court:

"Marry a German, my dear fellow. They are the best women in the
world--gentle, good, artless, and as fresh as roses."

Yet, at the same time, Napoleon felt a deep anxiety lest in her
very heart of hearts this German girl might either fear or hate
him secretly. Somewhat later Prince Metternich came from the
Austrian court to Paris.

"I give you leave," said Napoleon, "to have a private interview
with the empress. Let her tell you what she likes, and I shall ask
no questions. Even should I do so, I now forbid your answering
me."

Metternich was closeted with the empress for a long while. When he
returned to the ante-room he found Napoleon fidgeting about, his
eyes a pair of interrogation-points.

"I am sure," he said, "that the empress told you that I was kind
to her?"

Metternich bowed and made no answer.

"Well," said Napoleon, somewhat impatiently, "at least I am sure
that she is happy. Tell me, did she not say so?"

The Austrian diplomat remained unsmiling.

"Your majesty himself has forbidden me to answer," he returned
with another bow.

We may fairly draw the inference that Marie Louise, though she
adapted herself to her surroundings, was never really happy.
Napoleon became infatuated with her. He surrounded her with every
possible mark of honor. He abandoned public business to walk or
drive with her. But the memory of his own brutality must have
vaguely haunted him throughout it all. He was jealous of her as he
had never been jealous of the fickle Josephine. Constant has
recorded that the greatest precautions were taken to prevent any
person whatsoever, and especially any man, from approaching the
empress save in the presence of witnesses.

Napoleon himself underwent a complete change of habits and
demeanor. Where he had been rough and coarse he became attentive
and refined. His shabby uniforms were all discarded, and he spent
hours in trying on new costumes. He even attempted to learn to
waltz, but this he gave up in despair. Whereas before he ate
hastily and at irregular intervals, he now sat at dinner with
unusual patience, and the court took on a character which it had
never had. Never before had he sacrificed either his public duty
or his private pleasure for any woman. Even in the first ardor of
his marriage with Josephine, when he used to pour out his heart to
her in letters from Italian battle-fields, he did so only after he
had made the disposition of his troops and had planned his
movements for the following day. Now, however, he was not merely
devoted, but uxorious; and in 1811, after the birth of the little
King of Rome, he ceased to be the earlier Napoleon altogether. He
had founded a dynasty. He was the head of a reigning house. He
forgot the principles of the Revolution, and he ruled, as he
thought, like other monarchs, by the grace of God.

As for Marie Louise, she played her part extremely well. Somewhat
haughty and unapproachable to others, she nevertheless studied
Napoleon's every wish. She seemed even to be loving; but one can
scarcely doubt that her obedience sprang ultimately from fear and
that her devotion was the devotion of a dog which has been beaten
into subjection.

Her vanity was flattered in many ways, and most of all by her
appointment as regent of the empire during Napoleon's absence in
the disastrous Russian campaign which began in 1812. It was in
June of that year that the French emperor held court at Dresden,
where he played, as was said, to "a parterre of kings." This was
the climax of his magnificence, for there were gathered all the
sovereigns and princes who were his allies and who furnished the
levies that swelled his Grand Army to six hundred thousand men.
Here Marie Louise, like her husband, felt to the full the
intoxication of supreme power. By a sinister coincidence it was
here that she first met the other man, then unnoticed and little
heeded, who was to cast upon her a fascination which in the end
proved irresistible.

This man was Adam Albrecht, Count von Neipperg. There is something
mysterious about his early years, and something baleful about his
silent warfare with Napoleon. As a very young soldier he had been
an Austrian officer in 1793. His command served in Belgium; and
there, in a skirmish, he was overpowered by the French in superior
numbers, but resisted desperately. In the melee a saber slashed
him across the right side of his face, and he was made prisoner.
The wound deprived him of his right eye, so that for the rest of
his life he was compelled to wear a black bandage to conceal the
mutilation.

From that moment he conceived an undying hatred of the French,
serving against them in the Tyrol and in Italy. He always claimed
that had the Archduke Charles followed his advice, the Austrians
would have forced Napoleon's army to capitulate at Marengo, thus
bringing early eclipse to the rising star of Bonaparte. However
this may be, Napoleon's success enraged Neipperg and made his
hatred almost the hatred of a fiend.

Hitherto he had detested the French as a nation. Afterward he
concentrated his malignity upon the person of Napoleon. In every
way he tried to cross the path of that great soldier, and, though
Neipperg was comparatively an unknown man, his indomitable purpose
and his continued intrigues at last attracted the notice of the
emperor; for in 1808 Napoleon wrote this significant sentence:

The Count von Neipperg is openly known to have been the enemy of
the French.

Little did the great conqueror dream how deadly was the blow which
this Austrian count was destined finally to deal him!

Neipperg, though his title was not a high one, belonged to the old
nobility of Austria. He had proved his bravery in war and as a
duelist, and he was a diplomat as well as a soldier. Despite his
mutilation, he was a handsome and accomplished courtier, a man of
wide experience, and one who bore himself in a manner which
suggested the spirit of romance. According to Masson, he was an
Austrian Don Juan, and had won the hearts of many women. At thirty
he had formed a connection with an Italian woman named Teresa
Pola, whom he had carried away from her husband. She had borne him
five children; and in 1813 he had married her in order that these
children might be made legitimate.

In his own sphere the activity of Neipperg was almost as
remarkable as Napoleon's in a greater one. Apart from his exploits
on the field of battle he had been attached to the Austrian
embassy in Paris, and, strangely enough, had been decorated by
Napoleon himself with, the golden eagle of the Legion of Honor.
Four months later we find him minister of Austria at the court of
Sweden, where he helped to lay the train of intrigue which was to
detach Bernadotte from Napoleon's cause. In 1812, as has just been
said, he was with Marie Louise for a short time at Dresden,
hovering about her, already forming schemes. Two years after this
he overthrew Murat at Naples; and then hurried on post-haste to
urge Prince Eugene to abandon Bonaparte.

When the great struggle of 1814 neared its close, and Napoleon,
fighting with his back to the wall, was about to succumb to the
united armies of Europe, it was evident that the Austrian emperor
would soon be able to separate his daughter from her husband. In
fact, when Napoleon was sent to Elba, Marie Louise returned to
Vienna. The cynical Austrian diplomats resolved that she should
never again meet her imperial husband. She was made Duchess of
Parma in Italy, and set out for her new possessions; and the man
with the black band across his sightless eye was chosen to be her
escort and companion.

When Neipperg received this commission he was with Teresa Pola at
Milan. A strange smile flitted across his face; and presently he
remarked, with cynical frankness:

"Before six months I shall be her lover, and, later on, her
husband."

He took up his post as chief escort of Marie Louise, and they
journeyed slowly to Munich and Baden and Geneva, loitering on the
way. Amid the great events which were shaking Europe this couple
attracted slight attention. Napoleon, in Elba, longed for his wife
and for his little son, the King of Rome. He sent countless
messages and many couriers; but every message was intercepted, and
no courier reached his destination. Meanwhile Marie Louise was
lingering agreeably in Switzerland. She was happy to have escaped
from the whirlpool of politics and war. Amid the romantic scenery
through which she passed Neipperg was always by her side,
attentive, devoted, trying in everything to please her. With him
she passed delightful evenings. He sang to her in his rich
barytone songs of love. He seemed romantic with a touch of
mystery, a gallant soldier whose soul was also touched by
sentiment.

One would have said that Marie Louise, the daughter of an imperial
line, would have been proof against the fascinations of a person
so far inferior to herself in rank, and who, beside the great
emperor, was less than nothing. Even granting that she had never
really loved Napoleon, she might still have preferred to maintain
her dignity, to share his fate, and to go down in history as the
empress of the greatest man whom modern times have known.

But Marie Louise was, after all, a woman, and she followed the
guidance of her heart. To her Napoleon was still the man who had
met her amid the rain-storm at Courcelles, and had from the first
moment when he touched her violated all the instincts of a virgin.
Later he had in his way tried to make amends; but the horror of
that first night had never wholly left her memory. Napoleon had
unrolled before her the drama of sensuality, but her heart had not
been given to him. She had been his empress. In a sense it might
be more true to say that she had been his mistress. But she had
never been duly wooed and won and made his wife--an experience
which is the right of every woman. And so this Neipperg, with his
deferential manners, his soothing voice, his magnetic touch, his
ardor, and his devotion, appeased that craving which the master of
a hundred legions could not satisfy.

In less than the six months of which Neipperg had spoken the
psychological moment had arrived. In the dim twilight she listened
to his words of love; and then, drawn by that irresistible power
which masters pride and woman's will, she sank into her lover's
arms, yielding to his caresses, and knowing that she would be
parted from him no more except by death.

From that moment he was bound to her by the closest ties and lived
with her at the petty court of Parma. His prediction came true to
the very letter. Teresa Pola died, and then Napoleon died, and
after this Marie Louise and Neipperg were united in a morganatic
marriage. Three children were born to them before his death in
1829.

It is interesting to note how much of an impression was made upon
her by the final exile of her imperial husband to St. Helena. When
the news was brought her she observed, casually:

"Thanks. By the way, I should like to ride this morning to
Markenstein. Do you think the weather is good enough to risk it?"

Napoleon, on his side, passed through agonies of doubt and longing
when no letters came to him from Marie Louise. She was constantly
in his thoughts during his exile at St. Helena. "When his faithful
friend and constant companion at St. Helena, the Count Las Casas,
was ordered by Sir Hudson Lowe to depart from St. Helena, Napoleon
wrote to him:

"Should you see, some day, my wife and son, embrace them. For two
years I have, neither directly nor indirectly, heard from them.
There has been on this island for six months a German botanist,
who has seen them in the garden of Schoenbrunn a few months before
his departure. The barbarians (meaning the English authorities at
St. Helena) have carefully prevented him from coming to give me
any news respecting them."

At last the truth was told him, and he received it with that high
magnanimity, or it may be fatalism, which at times he was capable
of showing. Never in all his days of exile did he say one word
against her. Possibly in searching his own soul he found excuses
such as we may find. In his will he spoke of her with great
affection, and shortly before his death he said to his physician,
Antommarchi:

"After my death, I desire that you will take my heart, put it in
the spirits of wine, and that you carry it to Parma to my dear
Marie Louise. You will please tell her that I tenderly loved her--
that I never ceased to love her. You will relate to her all that
you have seen, and every particular respecting my situation and
death."

The story of Marie Louise is pathetic, almost tragic. There is the
taint of grossness about it; and yet, after all, there is a lesson
in it--the lesson that true love cannot be forced or summoned at
command, that it is destroyed before its birth by outrage, and
that it goes out only when evoked by sympathy, by tenderness, and
by devotion.






FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY

THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION

BY LYNDON ORR

VOLUME III OF IV.





CONTENTS


THE WIVES OF GENERAL HOUSTON
LOLA MONTEZ AND KING LUDWIG OF BAVARIA
LEON GAMBETTA AND LEONIE LEON
LADY BLESSINGTON AND COUNT D'ORSAY
BYRON AND THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI
THE STORY OF MME. DE STAEL
THE STORY OF KARL MARX
FERDINAND LASSALLE AND HELENE VON DONNIGES
THE STORY OF RACHEL





THE WIVES OF GENERAL HOUSTON


Sixty or seventy years ago it was considered a great joke to chalk
up on any man's house-door, or on his trunk at a coaching-station,
the conspicuous letters "G. T. T." The laugh went round, and every
one who saw the inscription chuckled and said: "They've got it on
you, old hoss!" The three letters meant "gone to Texas"; and for
any man to go to Texas in those days meant his moral, mental, and
financial dilapidation. Either he had plunged into bankruptcy and
wished to begin life over again in a new world, or the sheriff had
a warrant for his arrest.

The very task of reaching Texas was a fearful one. Rivers that
overran their banks, fever-stricken lowlands where gaunt faces
peered out from moldering cabins, bottomless swamps where the mud
oozed greasily and where the alligator could be seen slowly moving
his repulsive form--all this stretched on for hundreds of miles to
horrify and sicken the emigrants who came toiling on foot or
struggling upon emaciated horses. Other daring pioneers came by
boat, running all manner of risks upon the swollen rivers. Still
others descended from the mountains of Tennessee and passed
through a more open country and with a greater certainty of self-
protection, because they were trained from childhood to wield the
rifle and the long sheath-knife.

It is odd enough to read, in the chronicles of those days, that
amid all this suffering and squalor there was drawn a strict line
between "the quality" and those who had no claim to be patricians.
"The quality" was made up of such emigrants as came from the more
civilized East, or who had slaves, or who dragged with them some
rickety vehicle with carriage-horses--however gaunt the animals
might be. All others--those who had no slaves or horses, and no
traditions of the older states--were classed as "poor whites"; and
they accepted their mediocrity without a murmur.

Because he was born in Lexington, Virginia, and moved thence with
his family to Tennessee, young Sam Houston--a truly eponymous
American hero--was numbered with "the quality" when, after long
wandering, he reached his boyhood home. His further claim to
distinction as a boy came from the fact that he could read and
write, and was even familiar with some of the classics in
translation.

When less than eighteen years of age he had reached a height of
more than six feet. He was skilful with the rifle, a remarkable
rough-and-tumble fighter, and as quick with his long knife as any
Indian. This made him a notable figure--the more so as he never
abused his strength and courage. He was never known as anything
but "Sam." In his own sphere he passed for a gentleman and a
scholar, thanks to his Virginian birth and to the fact that he
could repeat a great part of Pope's translation of the "Iliad."

His learning led him to teach school a few months in the year to
the children of the white settlers. Indeed, Houston was so much
taken with the pursuit of scholarship that he made up his mind to
learn Greek and Latin. Naturally, this seemed mere foolishness to
his mother, his six strapping brothers, and his three stalwart
sisters, who cared little for study. So sharp was the difference
between Sam and the rest of the family that he gave up his
yearning after the classics and went to the other extreme by
leaving home and plunging into the heart of the forest beyond
sight of any white man or woman or any thought of Hellas and
ancient Rome.

Here in the dimly lighted glades he was most happy. The Indians
admired him for his woodcraft and for the skill with which he
chased the wild game amid the forests. From his copy of the
"Iliad" he would read to them the thoughts of the world's greatest
poet.

It is told that nearly forty years after, when Houston had long
led a different life and had made his home in Washington, a
deputation of more than forty untamed Indians from Texas arrived
there under the charge of several army officers. They chanced to
meet Sam Houston.

One and all ran to him, clasped him in their brawny arms, hugged
him like bears to their naked breasts, and called him "father."
Beneath the copper skin and thick paint the blood rushed, and
their faces changed, and the lips of many a warrior trembled,
although the Indian may not weep.

In the gigantic form of Houston, on whose ample brow the
beneficent love of a father was struggling with the sternness of
the patriarch and warrior, we saw civilization awing the savage at
his feet. We needed no interpreter to tell us that this impressive
supremacy was gained in the forest.

His family had been at first alarmed by his stay among the
Indians; but when after a time he returned for a new outfit they
saw that he was entirely safe and left him to wander among the red
men. Later he came forth and resumed the pursuits of civilization.
He took up his studies; he learned the rudiments of law and
entered upon its active practice. When barely thirty-six he had
won every office that was open to him, ending with his election to
the Governorship of Tennessee in 1827.

Then came a strange episode which changed the whole course of his
life. Until then the love of woman had never stirred his veins.
His physical activities in the forests, his unique intimacy with
Indian life, had kept him away from the social intercourse of
towns and cities. In Nashville Houston came to know for the first
time the fascination of feminine society. As a lawyer, a
politician, and the holder of important offices he could not keep
aloof from that gentler and more winning influence which had
hitherto been unknown to him.

In 1828 Governor Houston was obliged to visit different portions
of the state, stopping, as was the custom, to visit at the homes
of "the quality," and to be introduced to wives and daughters as
well as to their sportsman sons. On one of his official journeys
he met Miss Eliza Allen, a daughter of one of the "influential
families" of Sumner County, on the northern border of Tennessee.
He found her responsive, charming, and greatly to be admired. She
was a slender type of Southern beauty, well calculated to gain the
affection of a lover, and especially of one whose associations had
been chiefly with the women of frontier communities.

To meet a girl who had refined tastes and wide reading, and who
was at the same time graceful and full of humor, must have come as
a pleasant experience to Houston. He and Miss Allen saw much of
each other, and few of their friends were surprised when the word
went forth that they were engaged to be married.

The marriage occurred in January, 1829. They were surrounded with
friends of all classes and ranks, for Houston was the associate of
Jackson and was immensely popular in his own state. He seemed to
have before him a brilliant career. He had won a lovely bride to
make a home for him; so that no man seemed to have more attractive
prospects. What was there which at this time interposed in some
malignant way to blight his future?

It was a little more than a month after his marriage when he met a
friend, and, taking him out into a strip of quiet woodland, said
to him:

"I have something to tell you, but you must not ask me anything
about it. My wife and I will separate before long. She will return
to her father's, while I must make my way alone."

Houston's friend seized him by the arm and gazed at him with
horror.

"Governor," said he, "you're going to ruin your whole life! What
reason have you for treating this young lady in such a way? What
has she done that you should leave her? Or what have you done that
she should leave you? Every one will fall away from you."

Houston grimly replied:

"I have no explanation to give you. My wife has none to give you.
She will not complain of me, nor shall I complain of her. It is no
one's business in the world except our own. Any interference will
be impertinent, and I shall punish it with my own hand."

"But," said his friend, "think of it. The people at large will not
allow such action. They will believe that you, who have been their
idol, have descended to insult a woman. Your political career is
ended. It will not be safe for you to walk the streets!"

"What difference does it make to me?" said Houston, gloomily.
"What must be, must be. I tell you, as a friend, in advance, so
that you may be prepared; but the parting will take place very
soon."

Little was heard for another month or two, and then came the
announcement that the Governor's wife had left him and had
returned to her parents' home. The news flew like wildfire, and
was the theme of every tongue. Friends of Mrs. Houston begged her
to tell them the meaning of the whole affair. Adherents of
Houston, on the other hand, set afloat stories of his wife's
coldness and of her peevishness. The state was divided into
factions; and what really concerned a very few was, as usual, made
everybody's business.

There were times when, if Houston had appeared near the dwelling
of his former wife, he would have been lynched or riddled with
bullets. Again, there were enemies and slanderers of his who, had
they shown themselves in Nashville, would have been torn to pieces
by men who hailed Houston as a hero and who believed that he could
not possibly have done wrong.

However his friends might rage, and however her people might
wonder and seek to pry into the secret, no satisfaction was given
on either side. The abandoned wife never uttered a word of
explanation. Houston was equally reticent and self-controlled. In
later years he sometimes drank deeply and was loose-tongued; but
never, even in his cups, could he be persuaded to say a single
word about his wife.

The whole thing is a mystery and cannot be solved by any evidence
that we have. Almost every one who has written of it seems to have
indulged in mere guesswork. One popular theory is that Miss Allen
was in love with some one else; that her parents forced her into a
brilliant marriage with Houston, which, however, she could not
afterward endure; and that Houston, learning the facts, left her
because he knew that her heart was not really his.

But the evidence is all against this. Had it been so she would
surely have secured a divorce and would then have married the man
whom she truly loved. As a matter of fact, although she did
divorce Houston, it was only after several years, and the man whom
she subsequently married was not acquainted with her at the time
of the separation.

Another theory suggests that Houston was harsh in his treatment of
his wife, and offended her by his untaught manners and extreme
self-conceit. But it is not likely that she objected to his
manners, since she had become familiar with them before she gave
him her hand; and as to his conceit, there is no evidence that it
was as yet unduly developed. After his Texan campaign he sometimes
showed a rather lofty idea of his own achievements; but he does
not seem to have done so in these early days.

Some have ascribed the separation to his passion for drink; but
here again we must discriminate. Later in life he became very fond
of spirits and drank whisky with the Indians, but during his
earlier years he was most abstemious. It scarcely seems possible
that his wife left him because he was intemperate.

If one wishes to construct a reasonable hypothesis on a subject
where the facts are either wanting or conflicting, it is not
impossible to suggest a solution of this puzzle about Houston.
Although his abandoned wife never spoke of him and shut her lips
tightly when she was questioned about him, Houston, on his part,
was not so taciturn. He never consciously gave any direct clue to
his matrimonial mystery; but he never forgot this girl who was his
bride and whom he seems always to have loved. In what he said he
never ceased to let a vein of self-reproach run through his words.

I should choose this one paragraph as the most significant. It was
written immediately after they had parted:

Eliza stands acquitted by me. I have received her as a virtuous,
chaste wife, and as such I pray God I may ever regard her, and I
trust I ever shall. She was cold to me, and I thought she did not
love me.

And again he said to an old and valued friend at about the same
time:

"I can make no explanation. I exonerate the lady fully and do not
justify myself."

Miss Allen seems to have been a woman of the sensitive American
type which was so common in the early and the middle part of the
last century. Mrs. Trollope has described it for us with very
little exaggeration. Dickens has drawn it with a touch of malice,
and yet not without truth. Miss Martineau described it during her
visit to this country, and her account quite coincides with those
of her two contemporaries.

Indeed, American women of that time unconsciously described
themselves in a thousand different ways. They were, after all,
only a less striking type of the sentimental Englishwomen who read
L. E. L. and the earlier novels of Bulwer-Lytton. On both sides of
the Atlantic there was a reign of sentiment and a prevalence of
what was then called "delicacy." It was a die-away, unwholesome
attitude toward life and was morbid to the last degree.

In circles where these ideas prevailed, to eat a hearty dinner was
considered unwomanly. To talk of anything except some gilded
"annual," or "book of beauty," or the gossip of the neighborhood
was wholly to be condemned. The typical girl of such a community
was thin and slender and given to a mild starvation, though she
might eat quantities of jam and pickles and saleratus biscuit. She
had the strangest views of life and an almost unnatural shrinking
from any usual converse with men.

Houston, on his side, was a thoroughly natural and healthful man,
having lived an outdoor life, hunting and camping in the forest
and displaying the unaffected manner of the pioneer. Having lived
the solitary life of the woods, it was a strange thing for him to
meet a girl who had been bred in an entirely different way, who
had learned a thousand little reservations and dainty graces, and
whose very breath was coyness and reserve. Their mating was the
mating of the man of the forest with the woman of the sheltered
life.

Houston assumed everything; his bride shrank from everything.
There was a mutual shock amounting almost to repulsion. She, on
her side, probably thought she had found in him only the brute
which lurks in man. He, on the other, repelled and checked, at
once grasped the belief that his wife cared nothing for him
because she would not meet his ardors with like ardors of her own.
It is the mistake that has been made by thousands of men and women
at the beginning of their married lives--the mistake on one side
of too great sensitiveness, and on the other side of too great
warmth of passion.

This episode may seem trivial, and yet it is one that explains
many things in human life. So far as concerns Houston it has a
direct bearing on the history of our country. A proud man, he
could not endure the slights and gossip of his associates. He
resigned the governorship of Tennessee, and left by night, in such
a way as to surround his departure with mystery.

There had come over him the old longing for Indian life; and when
he was next visible he was in the land of the Cherokees, who had
long before adopted him as a son. He was clad in buckskin and
armed with knife and rifle, and served under the old chief
Oolooteka. He was a gallant defender of the Indians.

When he found how some of the Indian agents had abused his adopted
brothers he went to Washington to protest, still wearing his
frontier garb. One William Stansberry, a Congressman from Ohio,
insulted Houston, who leaped upon him like a panther, dragged him
about the Hall of Representatives, and beat him within an inch of
his life. He was arrested, imprisoned, and fined; but his old
friend, President Jackson, remitted his imprisonment and gruffly
advised him not to pay the fine.

Returning to his Indians, he made his way to a new field which
promised much adventure. This was Texas, of whose condition in
those early days something has already been said. Houston found a
rough American settlement, composed of scattered villages
extending along the disputed frontier of Mexico. Already, in the
true Anglo-Saxon spirit, the settlers had formed a rudimentary
state, and as they increased and multiplied they framed a simple
code of laws.

Then, quite naturally, there came a clash between them and the
Mexicans. The Texans, headed by Moses Austin, had set up a
republic and asked for admission to the United States. Mexico
regarded them as rebels and despised them because they made no
military display and had no very accurate military drill. They
were dressed in buckskin and ragged clothing; but their knives
were very bright and their rifles carried surely. Furthermore,
they laughed at odds, and if only a dozen of them were gathered
together they would "take on" almost any number of Mexican
regulars.

In February, 1836, the acute and able Mexican, Santa Anna, led
across the Rio Grande a force of several thousand Mexicans showily
uniformed and completely armed. Every one remembers how they fell
upon the little garrison at the Alamo, now within the city limits
of San Antonio, but then an isolated mission building surrounded
by a thick adobe wall. The Americans numbered less than three
hundred men.

A sharp attack was made with these overwhelming odds. The
Americans drove the assailants back with their rifle fire, but
they had nothing to oppose to the Mexican artillery. The contest
continued for several days, and finally the Mexicans breached the
wall and fell upon the garrison, who were now reduced by more than
half. There was an hour of blood, and every one of the Alamo's
defenders, including the wounded, was put to death. The only
survivors of the slaughter were two negro slaves, a woman, and a
baby girl.

When the news of this bloody affair reached Houston he leaped
forth to the combat like a lion. He was made commander-in-chief of
the scanty Texan forces. He managed to rally about seven hundred
men, and set out against Santa Anna with little in the way of
equipment, and with nothing but the flame of frenzy to stimulate
his followers. By march and countermarch the hostile forces came
face to face near the shore of San Jacinto Bay, not far from the
present city of Houston. Slowly they moved upon each other, when
Houston halted, and his sharpshooters raked the Mexican battle-
line with terrible effect. Then Houston uttered the cry:

"Remember the Alamo!"

With deadly swiftness he led his men in a charge upon Santa Anna's
lines. The Mexicans were scattered as by a mighty wind, their
commander was taken prisoner, and Mexico was forced to give its
recognition to Texas as a free republic, of which General Houston
became the first president.

This was the climax of Houston's life, but the end of it leaves us
with something still to say. Long after his marriage with Miss
Allen he took an Indian girl to wife and lived with her quite
happily. She was a very beautiful woman, a half-breed, with the
English name of Tyania Rodgers. Very little, however, is known of
her life with Houston. Later still--in 1840--he married a lady
from Marion, Alabama, named Margaret Moffette Lea. He was then in
his forty-seventh year, while she was only twenty-one; but again,
as with his Indian wife, he knew nothing but domestic
tranquillity. These later experiences go far to prove the truth of
what has already been given as the probable cause of his first
mysterious failure to make a woman happy.

After Texas entered the Union, in 1845, Houston was elected to the
United States Senate, in which he served for thirteen years. In
1852, 1856, and 1860, as a Southerner who opposed any movement
looking toward secession, he was regarded as a possible
presidential candidate; but his career was now almost over, and in
1863, while the Civil War--which he had striven to prevent--was at
its height, he died.





LOLA MONTEZ AND KING LUDWIG OF BAVARIA


Lola Montez! The name suggests dark eyes and abundant hair, lithe
limbs and a sinuous body, with twining hands and great eyes that
gleam with a sort of ebon splendor. One thinks of Spanish beauty
as one hears the name; and in truth Lola Montez justified the
mental picture.

She was not altogether Spanish, yet the other elements that
entered into her mercurial nature heightened and vivified her
Castilian traits. Her mother was a Spaniard--partly Moorish,
however. Her father was an Irishman. There you have it--the dreamy
romance of Spain, the exotic touch of the Orient, and the daring,
unreasoning vivacity of the Celt.

This woman during the forty-three years of her life had adventures
innumerable, was widely known in Europe and America, and actually
lost one king his throne. Her maiden name was Marie Dolores Eliza
Rosanna Gilbert. Her father was a British officer, the son of an
Irish knight, Sir Edward Gilbert. Her mother had been a danseuse
named Lola Oliver. "Lola" is a diminutive of Dolores, and as
"Lola" she became known to the world.

She lived at one time or another in nearly all the countries of
Europe, and likewise in India, America, and Australia. It would be
impossible to set down here all the sensations that she achieved.
Let us select the climax of her career and show how she overturned
a kingdom, passing but lightly over her early and her later years.

She was born in Limerick in 1818, but her father's parents cast
off their son and his young wife, the Spanish dancer. They went to
India, and in 1825 the father died, leaving his young widow
without a rupee; but she was quickly married again, this time to
an officer of importance.

The former danseuse became a very conventional person, a fit match
for her highly conventional husband; but the small daughter did
not take kindly to the proprieties of life. The Hindu servants
taught her more things than she should have known; and at one time
her stepfather found her performing the danse du ventre. It was
the Moorish strain inherited from her mother.

She was sent back to Europe, however, and had a sort of education
in Scotland and England, and finally in Paris, where she was
detected in an incipient flirtation with her music-master. There
were other persons hanging about her from her fifteenth year, at
which time her stepfather, in India, had arranged a marriage
between her and a rich but uninteresting old judge. One of her
numerous admirers told her this.

"What on earth am I to do?" asked little Lola, most naively.

"Why, marry me," said the artful adviser, who was Captain Thomas
James; and so the very next day they fled to Dublin and were
speedily married at Meath.

Lola's husband was violently in love with her, but, unfortunately,
others were no less susceptible to her charms. She was presented
at the vice-regal court, and everybody there became her victim.
Even the viceroy, Lord Normanby, was greatly taken with her. This
nobleman's position was such that Captain James could not object
to his attentions, though they made the husband angry to a degree.
The viceroy would draw her into alcoves and engage her in
flattering conversation, while poor James could only gnaw his
nails and let green-eyed jealousy prey upon his heart. His only
recourse was to take her into the country, where she speedily
became bored; and boredom is the death of love.

Later she went with Captain James to India. She endured a campaign
in Afghanistan, in which she thoroughly enjoyed herself because of
the attentions of the officers. On her return to London in 1842,
one Captain Lennox was a fellow passenger; and their association
resulted in an action for divorce, by which she was freed from her
husband, and yet by a technicality was not able to marry Lennox,
whose family in any case would probably have prevented the
wedding.

Mrs. Mayne says, in writing on this point:

Even Lola never quite succeeded in being allowed to commit bigamy
unmolested, though in later years she did commit it and took
refuge in Spain to escape punishment.

The same writer has given a vivid picture of what happened soon
after the divorce. Lola tried to forget her past and to create a
new and brighter future. Here is the narrative:

Her Majesty's Theater was crowded on the night of June 10,1843. A
new Spanish dancer was announced--"Dona Lola Montez." It was her
debut, and Lumley, the manager, had been puffing her beforehand,
as he alone knew how. To Lord Ranelagh, the leader of the
dilettante group of fashionable young men, he had whispered,
mysteriously:

"I have a surprise in store. You shall see."

So Ranelagh and a party of his friends filled the omnibus boxes,
those tribunes at the side of the stage whence success or failure
was pronounced. Things had been done with Lumley's consummate art;
the packed house was murmurous with excitement. She was a raving
beauty, said report--and then, those intoxicating Spanish dances!
Taglioni, Cerito, Fanny Elssler, all were to be eclipsed.

Ranelagh's glasses were steadily leveled on the stage from the
moment her entrance was imminent. She came on. There was a murmur
of admiration--but Ranelagh made no sign. And then she began to
dance. A sense of disappointment, perhaps? But she was very
lovely, very graceful, "like a flower swept by the wind, she
floated round the stage"--not a dancer, but, by George, a beauty!
And still Ranelagh made no sign.

Yet, no. What low, sibilant sound is that? And then what confused,
angry words from the tribunal? He turns to his friends, his eyes
ablaze with anger, opera-glass in hand. And now again the terrible
"Hiss-s-s!" taken up by the other box, and the words repeated
loudly and more angrily even than before--the historic words which
sealed Lola's doom at Her Majesty's Theater: "WHY, IT'S BETTY
JAMES!"

She was, indeed, Betty James, and London would not accept her as
Lola Montez. She left England and appeared upon the Continent as a
beautiful virago, making a sensation--as the French would say, a
succes de scandale--by boxing the ears of people who offended her,
and even on one occasion horsewhipping a policeman who was in
attendance on the King of Prussia. In Paris she tried once more to
be a dancer, but Paris would not have her. She betook herself to
Dresden and Warsaw, where she sought to attract attention by her
eccentricities, making mouths at the spectators, flinging her
garters in their faces, and one time removing her skirts and still
more necessary garments, whereupon her manager broke off his
engagement with her.

An English writer who heard a great deal of her and who saw her
often about this time writes that there was nothing wonderful
about her except "her beauty and her impudence." She had no talent
nor any of the graces which make women attractive; yet many men of
talent raved about her. The clever young journalist, Dujarrier,
who assisted Emile Girardin, was her lover in Paris. He was killed
in a duel and left Lola twenty thousand francs and some
securities, so that she no longer had to sing in the streets as
she did in Warsaw.

She now betook herself to Munich, the capital of Bavaria. That
country was then governed by Ludwig I., a king as eccentric as
Lola herself. He was a curious compound of kindliness, ideality,
and peculiar ways. For instance, he would never use a carriage
even on state occasions. He prowled around the streets, knocking
off the hats of those whom he chanced to meet. Like his
unfortunate descendant, Ludwig II., he wrote poetry, and he had a
picture-gallery devoted to portraits of the beautiful women whom
he had met.

He dressed like an English fox-hunter, with a most extraordinary
hat, and what was odd and peculiar in others pleased him because
he was odd and peculiar himself. Therefore when Lola made her
first appearance at the Court Theater he was enchanted with her.
He summoned her at once to the palace, and within five days he
presented her to the court, saying as he did so:

"Meine Herren, I present you to my best friend."

In less than a month this curious monarch had given Lola the title
of Countess of Landsfeld. A handsome house was built for her, and
a pension of twenty thousand florins was granted her. This was in
1847. With the people of Munich she was unpopular. They did not
mind the eccentricities of the king, since these amused them and
did the country no perceptible harm; but they were enraged by this
beautiful woman, who had no softness such as a woman ought to
have. Her swearing, her readiness to box the ears of every one
whom she disliked, the huge bulldog which accompanied her
everywhere--all these things were beyond endurance.

She was discourteous to the queen, besides meddling with the
politics of the kingdom. Either of these things would have been
sufficient to make her hated. Together, they were more than the
city of Munich could endure. Finally the countess tried to
establish a new corps in the university. This was the last touch
of all. A student who ventured to wear her colors was beaten and
arrested. Lola came to his aid with all her wonted boldness; but
the city was in commotion.

Daggers were drawn; Lola was hustled and insulted. The foolish
king rushed out to protect her; and on his arm she was led in
safety to the palace. As she entered the gates she turned and
fired a pistol into the mob. No one was hurt, but a great rage
took possession of the people. The king issued a decree closing
the university for a year. By this time, however, Munich was in
possession of a mob, and the Bavarians demanded that she should
leave the country.

Ludwig faced the chamber of peers, where the demand of the
populace was placed before him.

"I would rather lose my crown!" he replied.

The lords of Bavaria regarded him with grim silence; and in their
eyes he read the determination of his people. On the following day
a royal decree revoked Lola's rights as a subject of Bavaria, and
still another decree ordered her to be expelled. The mob yelled
with joy and burned her house. Poor Ludwig watched the tumult by
the light of the leaping flames.

He was still in love with her and tried to keep her in the
kingdom; but the result was that Ludwig himself was forced to
abdicate. He had given his throne for the light love of this
beautiful but half-crazy woman. She would have no more to do with
him; and as for him, he had to give place to his son Maximilian.
Ludwig had lost a kingdom merely because this strange, outrageous
creature had piqued him and made him think that she was unique
among women.

The rest of her career was adventurous. In England she contracted
a bigamous marriage with a youthful officer, and within two weeks
they fled to Spain for safety from the law. Her husband was
drowned, and she made still another marriage. She visited
Australia, and at Melbourne she had a fight with a strapping
woman, who clawed her face until Lola fell fainting to the ground.
It is a squalid record of horse-whippings, face-scratchings--in
short, a rowdy life.

Her end was like that of Becky Sharp. In America she delivered
lectures which were written for her by a clergyman and which dealt
with the art of beauty. She had a temporary success; but soon she
became quite poor, and took to piety, professing to be a sort of
piteous, penitent Magdalen. In this role she made effective use of
her beautiful dark hair, her pallor, and her wonderful eyes. But
the violence of her disposition had wrecked her physically; and
she died of paralysis in Astoria, on Long Island, in 1861. Upon
her grave in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn, there is a tablet to
her memory, bearing the inscription: "Mrs. Eliza Gilbert, born
1818, died 1861."

What can one say of a woman such as this? She had no morals, and
her manners were outrageous. The love she felt was the love of a
she-wolf. Fourteen biographies of her have been written, besides
her own autobiography, which was called The Story of a Penitent,
and which tells less about her than any of the other books. Her
beauty was undeniable. Her courage was the blended courage of the
Celt, the Spaniard, and the Moor. Yet all that one can say of her
was said by the elder Dumas when he declared that she was born to
be the evil genius of every one who cared for her. Her greatest
fame comes from the fact that in less than three years she
overturned a kingdom and lost a king his throne.





LEON GAMBETTA AND LEONIE LEON


The present French Republic has endured for over forty years.
Within that time it has produced just one man of extraordinary
power and parts. This was Leon Gambetta. Other men as remarkable
as he were conspicuous in French political life during the first
few years of the republic; but they belonged to an earlier
generation, while Gambetta leaped into prominence only when the
empire fell, crashing down in ruin and disaster.

It is still too early to form an accurate estimate of him as a
statesman. His friends praise him extravagantly. His enemies still
revile him bitterly. The period of his political career lasted for
little more than a decade, yet in that time it may be said that he
lived almost a life of fifty years. Only a short time ago did the
French government cause his body to be placed within the great
Pantheon, which contains memorials of the heroes and heroines of
France. But, though we may not fairly judge of his political
motives, we can readily reconstruct a picture of him as a man, and
in doing so recall his one romance, which many will remember after
they have forgotten his oratorical triumphs and his statecraft.

Leon Gambetta was the true type of the southern Frenchman--what
his countrymen call a meridional. The Frenchman of the south is
different from the Frenchman of the north, for the latter has in
his veins a touch of the viking blood, so that he is very apt to
be fair-haired and blue-eyed, temperate in speech, and self-
controlled. He is different, again, from the Frenchman of central
France, who is almost purely Celtic. The meridional has a marked
vein of the Italian in him, derived from the conquerors of ancient
Gaul. He is impulsive, ardent, fiery in speech, hot-tempered, and
vivacious to an extraordinary degree.

Gambetta, who was born at Cahors, was French only on his mother's
side, since his father was of Italian birth. It is said also that
somewhere in his ancestry there was a touch of the Oriental. At
any rate, he was one of the most southern of the sons of southern
France, and he showed the precocious maturity which belongs to a
certain type of Italian. At twenty-one he had already been
admitted to the French bar, and had drifted to Paris, where his
audacity, his pushing nature, and his red-hot un-restraint of
speech gave him a certain notoriety from the very first.

It was toward the end of the reign of Napoleon III. that Gambetta
saw his opportunity. The emperor, weakened by disease and yielding
to a sort of feeble idealism, gave to France a greater freedom of
speech than it had enjoyed while he was more virile. This
relaxation of control merely gave to his opponents more courage to
attack him and his empire. Demagogues harangued the crowds in
words which would once have led to their imprisonment. In the
National Assembly the opposition did all within its power to
hamper and defeat the policy of the government.

In short, republicanism began to rise in an ominous and
threatening way; and at the head of republicanism in Paris stood
forth Gambetta, with his impassioned eloquence, his stinging
phrases, and his youthful boldness. He became the idol of that
part of Paris known as Belleville, where artisans and laborers
united with the rabble of the streets in hating the empire and in
crying out for a republic.

Gambetta was precisely the man to voice the feelings of these
people. Whatever polish he acquired in after years was then quite
lacking; and the crudity of his manners actually helped him with
the men whom he harangued. A recent book by M. Francis Laur, an
ardent admirer of Gambetta, gives a picture of the man which may
be nearly true of him in his later life, but which is certainly
too flattering when applied to Gambetta in 1868, at the age of
thirty.

How do we see Gambetta as he was at thirty? A man of powerful
frame and of intense vitality, with thick, clustering hair, which
he shook as a lion shakes its mane; olive-skinned, with eyes that
darted fire, a resonant, sonorous voice, and a personal magnetism
which was instantly felt by all who met him or who heard him
speak. His manners were not refined. He was fond of oil and
garlic. His gestures were often more frantic than impressive, so
that his enemies called him "the furious fool." He had a trick of
spitting while he spoke. He was by no means the sort of man whose
habits had been formed in drawing-rooms or among people of good
breeding. Yet his oratory was, of its kind, superb.

In 1869 Gambetta was elected by the Red Republicans to the Corps
Legislatif. From the very first his vehemence and fire gained him
a ready hearing. The chamber itself was arranged like a great
theater, the members occupying the floor and the public the
galleries. Each orator in addressing the house mounted a sort of
rostrum and from it faced the whole assemblage, not noticing, as
with us, the presiding officer at all. The very nature of this
arrangement stimulated parliamentary speaking into eloquence and
flamboyant oratory.

After Gambetta had spoken a few times he noticed in the gallery a
tall, graceful woman, dressed in some neutral color and wearing
long black gloves, which accentuated the beauty of her hands and
arms. No one in the whole assembly paid such close attention to
the orator as did this woman, whom he had never seen before and
who appeared to be entirely alone.

When it came to him to speak on another day he saw sitting in the
same place the same stately and yet lithe and sinuous figure. This
was repeated again and again, until at last whenever he came to a
peculiarly fervid burst of oratory he turned to this woman's face
and saw it lighted up by the same enthusiasm which was stirring
him.

Finally, in the early part of 1870, there came a day when Gambetta
surpassed himself in eloquence. His theme was the grandeur of
republican government. Never in his life had he spoken so boldly
as then, or with such fervor. The ministers of the emperor shrank
back in dismay as this big-voiced, strong-limbed man hurled forth
sentence after sentence like successive peals of irresistible
artillery.

As Gambetta rolled forth his sentences, superb in their rhetoric
and all ablaze with that sort of intense feeling which masters an
orator in the moment of his triumph, the face of the lady in the
gallery responded to him with wonderful appreciation. She was no
longer calm, unmoved, and almost severe. She flushed, and her eyes
as they met his seemed to sparkle with living fire. When he
finished and descended from the rostrum he looked at her, and
their eyes cried out as significantly as if the two had spoken to
each other.

Then Gambetta did what a person of finer breeding would not have
done. He hastily scribbled a note, sealed it, and called to his
side one of the official pages. In the presence of the great
assemblage, where he was for the moment the center of attention,
he pointed to the lady in the gallery and ordered the page to take
the note to her.

One may excuse this only on the ground that he was completely
carried away by his emotion, so that to him there was no one
present save this enigmatically fascinating woman and himself. But
the lady on her side was wiser; or perhaps a slight delay gave her
time to recover her discretion. When Gambetta's note was brought
to her she took it quietly and tore it into little pieces without
reading it; and then, rising, she glided through the crowd and
disappeared.

Gambetta in his excitement had acted as if she were a mere
adventuress. With perfect dignity she had shown him that she was a
woman who retained her self-respect.

Immediately upon the heels of this curious incident came the
outbreak of the war with Germany. In the war the empire was
shattered at Sedan. The republic was proclaimed in Paris. The
French capital was besieged by a vast German army. Gambetta was
made minister of the interior, and remained for a while in Paris
even after it had been blockaded. But his fiery spirit chafed
under such conditions. He longed to go forth into the south of
France and arouse his countrymen with a cry to arms against the
invaders.

Escaping in a balloon, he safely reached the city of Tours; and
there he established what was practically a dictatorship. He flung
himself with tremendous energy into the task of organizing armies,
of equipping them, and of directing their movements for the relief
of Paris. He did, in fact, accomplish wonders. He kept the spirit
of the nation still alive. Three new armies were launched against
the Germans. Gambetta was everywhere and took part in everything
that was done. His inexperience in military affairs, coupled with
his impatience of advice, led him to make serious mistakes.
Nevertheless, one of his armies practically defeated the Germans
at Orleans; and could he have had his own way, even the fall of
Paris would not have ended the war.

"Never," said Gambetta, "shall I consent to peace so long as
France still has two hundred thousand men under arms and more than
a thousand cannon to direct against the enemy!"

But he was overruled by other and less fiery statesmen. Peace was
made, and Gambetta retired for a moment into private life. If he
had not succeeded in expelling the German hosts he had, at any
rate, made Bismarck hate him, and he had saved the honor of
France.

It was while the National Assembly at Versailles was debating the
terms of peace with Germany that Gambetta once more delivered a
noble and patriotic speech. As he concluded he felt a strange
magnetic attraction; and, sweeping the audience with a glance, he
saw before him, not very far away, the same woman with the long
black gloves, having about her still an air of mystery, but again
meeting his eyes with her own, suffused with feeling.

Gambetta hurried to an anteroom and hastily scribbled the
following note:

At last I see you once more. Is it really you?

The scrawl was taken to her by a discreet official, and this time
she received the letter, pressed it to her heart, and then slipped
it into the bodice of her gown. But this time, as before, she left
without making a reply.

It was an encouragement, yet it gave no opening to Gambetta--for
she returned to the National Assembly no more. But now his heart
was full of hope, for he was convinced with a very deep conviction
that somewhere, soon, and in some way he would meet this woman,
who had become to him one of the intense realities of his life. He
did not know her name. They had never exchanged a word. Yet he was
sure that time would bring them close together.

His intuition was unerring. What we call chance often seems to
know what it is doing. Within a year after the occurrence that has
just been narrated an old friend of Gambetta's met with an
accident which confined him to his house. The statesman strolled
to his friend's residence. The accident was a trifling one, and
the mistress of the house was holding a sort of informal
reception, answering questions that were asked her by the numerous
acquaintances who called.

As Gambetta was speaking, of a sudden he saw before him, at the
extremity of the room, the lady of his dreams, the sphinx of his
waking hours, the woman who four years earlier had torn up the
note which he addressed to her, but who more recently had kept his
written words. Both of them were deeply agitated, yet both of them
carried off the situation without betraying themselves to others,
Gambetta approached, and they exchanged a few casual commonplaces.
But now, close together, eye and voice spoke of what was in their
hearts.

Presently the lady took her leave. Gambetta followed closely. In
the street he turned to her and said in pleading tones:

"Why did you destroy my letter? You knew I loved you, and yet all
these years you have kept away from me in silence."

Then the girl--for she was little more than a girl--hesitated for
a moment. As he looked upon her face he saw that her eyes were
full of tears. At last she spoke with emotion:

"You cannot love me, for I am unworthy of you. Do not urge me. Do
not make promises. Let us say good-by. At least I must first tell
you of my story, for I am one of those women whom no one ever
marries."

Gambetta brushed aside her pleadings. He begged that he might see
her soon. Little by little she consented; but she would not see
him at her house. She knew that his enemies were many and that
everything he did would be used against him. In the end she agreed
to meet him in the park at Versailles, near the Petit Trianon, at
eight o'clock in the morning.

When she had made this promise he left her. Already a new
inspiration had come to him, and he felt that with this woman by
his side he could accomplish anything.

At the appointed hour, in the silence of the park and amid the
sunshine of the beautiful morning, the two met once again.
Gambetta seized her hands with eagerness and cried out in an
exultant tone:

"At last! At last! At last!"

But the woman's eyes were heavy with sorrow, and upon her face
there was a settled melancholy. She trembled at his touch and
almost shrank from him. Here was seen the impetuosity of the
meridional. He had first spoken to this woman only two days
before. He knew nothing of her station, of her surroundings, of
her character. He did not even know her name. Yet one thing he
knew absolutely--that she was made for him and that he must have
her for his own. He spoke at once of marriage; but at this she
drew away from him still farther.

"No," she said. "I told you that you must not speak to me until
you have heard my story."

He led her to a great stone bench near by; and, passing his arm
about her waist, he drew her head down to his shoulder as he said:

"Well, tell me. I will listen."

Then this girl of twenty-four, with perfect frankness, because she
was absolutely loyal, told him why she felt that they must never
see each other any more-much less marry and be happy. She was the
daughter of a colonel in the French army. The sudden death of her
father had left her penniless and alone. Coming to Paris at the
age of eighteen, she had given lessons in the household of a high
officer of the empire. This man had been attracted by her beauty,
and had seduced her.

Later she had secured the means of living modestly, realizing more
deeply each month how dreadful had been her fate and how she had
been cut off from the lot of other girls. She felt that her life
must be a perpetual penance for what had befallen her through her
ignorance and inexperience. She told Gambetta that her name was
Leonie Leon. As is the custom of Frenchwomen who live alone, she
styled herself madame. It is doubtful whether the name by which
she passed was that which had been given to her at baptism; but,
if so, her true name has never been disclosed.

When she had told the whole of her sad story to Gambetta he made
nothing of it. She said to him again:

"You cannot love me. I should only dim your fame. You can have
nothing in common with a dishonored, ruined girl. That is what I
came here to explain to you. Let us part, and let us for all time
forget each other."

But Gambetta took no heed of what she said. Now that he had found
her, he would not consent to lose her. He seized her slender hands
and covered them with kisses. Again he urged that she should marry
him.

Her answer was a curious one. She was a devoted Catholic and would
not regard any marriage as valid save a religious marriage. On the
other hand, Gambetta, though not absolutely irreligious, was
leading the opposition to the Catholic party in France. The Church
to him was not so much a religious body as a political one, and to
it he was unalterably opposed. Personally, he would have no
objections to being married by a priest; but as a leader of the
anti-clerical party he felt that he must not recognize the
Church's claim in any way. A religious marriage would destroy his
influence with his followers and might even imperil the future of
the republic.

They pleaded long and earnestly both then and afterward. He urged
a civil marriage, but she declared that only a marriage according
to the rites of the Church could ever purify her past and give her
back her self-respect. In this she was absolutely stubborn, yet
she did not urge upon Gambetta that he should destroy his
influence by marrying her in church.

Through all this interplay of argument and pleading and emotion
the two grew every moment more hopelessly in love. Then the woman,
with a woman's curious subtlety and indirectness, reached a
somewhat singular conclusion. She would hear nothing of a civil
marriage, because a civil marriage was no marriage in the eyes of
Pope and prelate. On the other hand, she did not wish Gambetta to
mar his political career by going through a religious ceremony.
She had heard from a priest that the Church recognized two forms
of betrothal. The usual one looked to a marriage in the future and
gave no marriage privileges until after the formal ceremony. But
there was another kind of betrothal known to the theologians as
sponsalia de praesente. According to this, if there were an actual
betrothal, the pair might have the privileges and rights of
marriage immediately, if only they sincerely meant to be married
in the future.

The eager mind of Leonie Leon caught at this bit of ecclesiastical
law and used it with great ingenuity.

"Let us," she said, "be formally betrothed by the interchange of a
ring, and let us promise each other to marry in the future. After
such a betrothal as this we shall be the same as married; for we
shall be acting according to the laws of the Church."

Gambetta gladly gave his promise. A betrothal ring was purchased;
and then, her conscience being appeased, she gave herself
completely to her lover. Gambetta was sincere. He said to her:

"If the time should ever come when I shall lose my political
station, when I am beaten in the struggle, when I am deserted and
alone, will you not then marry me when I ask you?"

And Leonie, with her arms about his neck, promised that she would.
Yet neither of them specified what sort of marriage this should
be, nor did it seem at the moment as if the question could arise.

For Gambetta was very powerful. He led his party to success in the
election of 1877. Again and again his triumphant oratory mastered
the National Assembly of France. In 1879 he was chosen to be
president of the Chamber of Deputies. He towered far above the
president of the republic--Jules Grevy, that hard-headed, close-
fisted old peasant--and his star had reached its zenith.

All this time he and Leonie Leon maintained their intimacy, though
it was carefully concealed save from a very few. She lived in a
plain but pretty house on the Avenue Perrichont in the quiet
quarter of Auteuil; but Gambetta never came there. Where and when
they met was a secret guarded very carefully by the few who were
his close associates. But meet they did continually, and their
affection grew stronger every year. Leonie thrilled at the
victories of the man she loved; and he found joy in the hours that
he spent with her.

Gambetta's need of rest was very great, for he worked at the
highest tension, like an engine which is using every pound of
steam. Bismarck, whose spies kept him well informed of everything
that was happening in Paris, and who had no liking for Gambetta,
since the latter always spoke of him as "the Ogre," once said to a
Frenchman named Cheberry:

"He is the only one among you who thinks of revenge, and who is
any sort of a menace to Germany. But, fortunately, he won't last
much longer. I am not speaking thoughtlessly. I know from secret
reports what sort of a life your great man leads, and I know his
habits. Why, his life is a life of continual overwork. He rests
neither night nor day. All politicians who have led the same life
have died young. To he able to serve one's country for a long time
a statesman must marry an ugly woman, have children like the rest
of the world, and a country place or a house to one's self like
any common peasant, where he can go and rest."

The Iron Chancellor chuckled as he said this, and he was right.
And yet Gambetta's end came not so much through overwork as by an
accident.

It may be that the ambition of Mme. Leon stimulated him beyond his
powers. However this may be, early in 1882, when he was defeated
in Parliament on a question which he considered vital, he
immediately resigned and turned his back on public life. His
fickle friends soon deserted him. His enemies jeered and hooted
the mention of his name.

He had reached the time which with a sort of prophetic instinct he
had foreseen nearly ten years before. So he turned to the woman
who had been faithful and loving to him; and he turned to her with
a feeling of infinite peace.

"You promised me," he said, "that if ever I was defeated and alone
you would marry me. The time is now."

Then this man, who had exercised the powers of a dictator, who had
levied armies and shaken governments, and through whose hands
there had passed thousands of millions of francs, sought for a
country home. He found for sale a small estate which had once
belonged to Balzac, and which is known as Les Jardies. It was in
wretched repair; yet the small sum which it cost Gambetta--twelve
thousand francs--was practically all that he possessed. Worn and
weary as he was, it seemed to him a haven of delightful peace; for
here he might live in the quiet country with the still beautiful
woman who was soon to become his wife.

It is not known what form of marriage they at last agreed upon.
She may have consented to a civil ceremony; or he, being now out
of public life, may have felt that he could be married by the
Church. The day for their wedding had been set, and Gambetta was
already at Les Jardies. But there came a rumor that he had been
shot. Still further tidings bore the news that he was dying.
Paris, fond as it was of scandals, immediately spread the tale
that he had been shot by a jealous woman.

The truth is quite the contrary. Gambetta, in arranging his
effects in his new home, took it upon himself to clean a pair of
dueling-pistols; for every French politician of importance must
fight duels, and Gambetta had already done so. Unfortunately, one
cartridge remained unnoticed in the pistol which Gambetta cleaned.
As he held the pistol-barrel against the soft part of his hand the
cartridge exploded, and the ball passed through the base of the
thumb with a rending, spluttering noise.

The wound was not in itself serious, but now the prophecy of
Bismarck was fulfilled. Gambetta had exhausted his vitality; a
fever set in, and before long he died of internal ulceration.

This was the end of a great career and of a great romance of love.
Leonie Leon was half distraught at the death of the lover who was
so soon to be her husband. She wandered for hours in the forest
until she reached a convent, where she was received. Afterward she
came to Paris and hid herself away in a garret of the slums. All
the light of her life had gone out. She wished that she had died
with him whose glory had been her life. Friends of Gambetta,
however, discovered her and cared for her until her death, long
afterward, in 1906.

She lived upon the memories of the past, of the swift love that
had come at first sight, but which had lasted unbrokenly; which
had given her the pride of conquest, and which had brought her
lover both happiness and inspiration and a refining touch which
had smoothed away his roughness and made him fit to stand in
palaces with dignity and distinction.

As for him, he left a few lines which have been carefully
preserved, and which sum up his thought of her. They read:

To the light of my soul; to the star, of my life--Leonie Leon. For
ever! For ever!





LADY BLESSINGTON AND COUNT D'ORSAY


Often there has arisen some man who, either by his natural gifts
or by his impudence or by the combination of both, has made
himself a recognized leader in the English fashionable world. One
of the first of these men was Richard Nash, usually known as "Beau
Nash," who flourished in the eighteenth century. Nash was a man of
doubtful origin; nor was he attractive in his looks, for he was a
huge, clumsy creature with features that were both irregular and
harsh. Nevertheless, for nearly fifty years Beau Nash was an
arbiter of fashion. Goldsmith, who wrote his life, declared that
his supremacy was due to his pleasing manners, "his assiduity,
flattery, fine clothes, and as much wit as the ladies had whom he
addressed." He converted the town of Bath from a rude little
hamlet into an English Newport, of which he was the social
autocrat. He actually drew up a set of written rules which some of
the best-born and best-bred people follow slavishly.

Even better known to us is George Bryan Brummel, commonly called
"Beau Brummel," who by his friendship with George IV.--then Prince
Regent--was an oracle at court on everything that related to dress
and etiquette and the proper mode of living. His memory has been
kept alive most of all by Richard Mansfield's famous impersonation
of him. The play is based upon the actual facts; for after Brummel
had lost the royal favor he died an insane pauper in the French
town of Caen. He, too, had a distinguished biographer, since
Bulwer-Lytton's novel Pelham is really the narrative of Brummel's
curious career.

Long after Brummel, Lord Banelagh led the gilded youth of London,
and it was at this time that the notorious Lola Montez made her
first appearance in the British capital.

These three men--Nash, Brummel, and Ranelagh--had the advantage of
being Englishmen, and, therefore, of not incurring the old-time
English suspicion of foreigners. A much higher type of social
arbiter was a Frenchman who for twenty years during the early part
of Queen Victoria's reign gave law to the great world of fashion,
besides exercising a definite influence upon English art and
literature.

This was Count Albert Guillaume d'Orsay, the son of one of
Napoleon's generals, and descended by a morganatic marriage from
the King of Wurttemburg. The old general, his father, was a man of
high courage, impressive appearance, and keen intellect, all of
which qualities he transmitted to his son. The young Count
d'Orsay, when he came of age, found the Napoleonic era ended and
France governed by Louis XVIII. The king gave Count d'Orsay a
commission in the army in a regiment stationed at Valence in the
southeastern part of France. He had already visited England and
learned the English language, and he had made some distinguished
friends there, among whom were Lord Byron and Thomas Moore.

On his return to France he began his garrison life at Valence,
where he showed some of the finer qualities of his character. It
is not merely that he was handsome and accomplished and that he
had the gift of winning the affections of those about him. Unlike
Nash and Brummel, he was a gentleman in every sense, and his
courtesy was of the highest kind. At the balls given by his
regiment, although he was more courted than any other officer, he
always sought out the plainest girls and showed them the most
flattering attentions. No "wallflowers" were left neglected when
D'Orsay was present.

It is strange how completely human beings are in the hands of
fate. Here was a young French officer quartered in a provincial
town in the valley of the Rhone. Who would have supposed that he
was destined to become not only a Londoner, but a favorite at the
British court, a model of fashion, a dictator of etiquette, widely
known for his accomplishments, the patron of literary men and of
distinguished artists? But all these things were to come to pass
by a mere accident of fortune.

During his firsts visit to London, which has already been
mentioned, Count d'Orsay was invited once or twice to receptions
given by the Earl and Countess of Blessington, where he was well
received, though this was only an incident of his English sojourn.
Before the story proceeds any further it is necessary to give an
account of the Earl and of Lady Blessington, since both of their
careers had been, to say the least, unusual.

Lord Blessington was an Irish peer for whom an ancient title had
been revived. He was remotely descended from the Stuarts of
Scotland, and therefore had royal blood to boast of. He had been
well educated, and in many ways was a man of pleasing manner. On
the other hand, he had early inherited a very large property which
yielded him an income of about thirty thousand pounds a year. He
had estates in Ireland, and he owned nearly the whole of a
fashionable street in London, with the buildings erected on it.

This fortune and the absence of any one who could control him had
made him wilful and extravagant and had wrought in him a curious
love of personal display. Even as a child he would clamor to be
dressed in the most gorgeous uniforms; and when he got possession
of his property his love of display became almost a monomania. He
built a theater as an adjunct to his country house in Ireland and
imported players from London and elsewhere to act in it. He loved
to mingle with the mummers, to try on their various costumes, and
to parade up and down, now as an oriental prince and now as a
Roman emperor.

In London he hung about the green-rooms, and was a well-known
figure wherever actors or actresses were collected. Such was his
love of the stage that he sought to marry into the profession and
set his heart on a girl named Mary Campbell Browne, who was very
beautiful to look at, but who was not conspicuous either for her
mind or for her morals. When Lord Blessington proposed marriage to
her she was obliged to tell him that she already had one husband
still alive, but she was perfectly willing to live with him and
dispense with the marriage ceremony. So for several years she did
live with him and bore him two children.

It speaks well for the earl that when the inconvenient husband
died a marriage at once took place and Mrs. Browne became a
countess. Then, after other children had been born, the lady died,
leaving the earl a widower at about the age of forty. The only
legitimate son born of this marriage followed his mother to the
grave; and so for the third time the earldom of Blessington seemed
likely to become extinct. The death of his wife, however, gave the
earl a special opportunity to display his extravagant tastes. He
spent more than four thousand pounds on the funeral ceremonies,
importing from France a huge black velvet catafalque which had
shortly before been used at the public funeral of Napoleon's
marshal, Duroc, while the house blazed with enormous wax tapers
and glittered with cloth of gold.

Lord Blessington soon plunged again into the busy life of London.
Having now no heir, there was no restraint on his expenditures,
and he borrowed large sums of money in order to buy additional
estates and houses and to experience the exquisite joy of spending
lavishly. At this time he had his lands in Ireland, a town house
in St. James's Square, another in Seymour Place, and still another
which was afterward to become famous as Gore House, in Kensington.

Some years before he had met in Ireland a lady called Mrs. Maurice
Farmer; and it happened that she now came to London. The earlier
story of her still young life must here be told, because her name
afterward became famous, and because the tale illustrates
wonderfully well the raw, crude, lawless period of the Regency,
when England was fighting her long war with Napoleon, when the
Prince Regent was imitating all the vices of the old French kings,
when prize-fighting, deep drinking, dueling, and dicing were
practised without restraint in all the large cities and towns of
the United Kingdom. It was, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has said,
"an age of folly and of heroism"; for, while it produced some of
the greatest black-guards known to history, it produced also such
men as Wellington and Nelson, the two Pitts, Sheridan, Byron,
Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott.

Mrs. Maurice Farmer was the daughter of a small Irish landowner
named Robert Power--himself the incarnation of all the vices of
the time. There was little law in Ireland, not even that which
comes from public opinion; and Robert Power rode hard to hounds,
gambled recklessly, and assembled in his house all sorts of
reprobates, with whom he held frightful orgies that lasted from
sunset until dawn. His wife and his young daughters viewed him
with terror, and the life they led was a perpetual nightmare
because of the bestial carousings in which their father engaged,
wasting his money and mortgaging his estates until the end of his
wild career was in plain sight.

There happened to be stationed at Clonmel a regiment of infantry
in which there served a captain named Maurice St. Leger Farmer. He
was a man of some means, but eccentric to a degree. His temper was
so utterly uncontrolled that even his fellow officers could
scarcely live with him, and he was given to strange caprices. It
happened that at a ball in Clonmel he met the young daughter of
Robert Power, then a mere child of fourteen years. Captain Farmer
was seized with an infatuation for the girl, and he went almost at
once to her father, asking for her hand in marriage and proposing
to settle a sum of money upon her if she married him.

The hard-riding squireen jumped at the offer. His own estate was
being stripped bare. Here was a chance to provide for one of his
daughters, or, rather, to get rid of her, and he agreed that she
should be married out of hand. Going home, he roughly informed the
girl that she was to be the wife of Captain Farmer. He so bullied
his wife that she was compelled to join him in this command.

What was poor little Margaret Power to do? She was only a child.
She knew nothing of the world. She was accustomed to obey her
father as she would have obeyed some evil genius who had her in
his power. There were tears and lamentations. She was frightened
half to death; yet for her there was no help. Therefore, while not
yet fifteen her marriage took place, and she was the unhappy slave
of a half-crazy tyrant. She had then no beauty whatsoever. She was
wholly undeveloped--thin and pale, and with rough hair that fell
over her frightened eyes; yet Farmer wanted her, and he settled
his money on her, just as he would have spent the same amount to
gratify any other sudden whim.

The life she led with him for a few months showed him to be more
of a devil than a man. He took a peculiar delight in terrifying
her, in subjecting her to every sort of outrage; nor did he
refrain even from beating her with his fists. The girl could stand
a great deal, but this was too much. She returned to her father's
house, where she was received with the bitterest reproaches, but
where, at least, she was safe from harm, since her possession of a
dowry made her a person of some small importance.

Not long afterward Captain Farmer fell into a dispute with his
colonel, Lord Caledon, and in the course of it he drew his sword
on his commanding officer. The court-martial which was convened to
try him would probably have had him shot were it not for the very
general belief that he was insane. So he was simply cashiered and
obliged to leave the service and betake himself elsewhere. Thus
the girl whom, he had married was quite free--free to leave her
wretched home and even to leave Ireland.

She did leave Ireland and establish herself in London, where she
had some acquaintances, among them the Earl of Blessington. As
already said, he had met her in Ireland while she was living with
her husband; and now from time to time he saw her in a friendly
way. After the death of his wife he became infatuated with
Margaret Farmer. She was a good deal alone, and his attentions
gave her entertainment. Her past experience led her to have no
real belief in love. She had become, however, in a small way
interested in literature and art, with an eager ambition to be
known as a writer. As it happened, Captain Farmer, whose name she
bore, had died some months before Lord Blessington had decided to
make a new marriage. The earl proposed to Margaret Farmer, and the
two were married by special license.

The Countess of Blessington--to give the lady her new title--was
now twenty-eight years of age and had developed into a woman of
great beauty. She was noted for the peculiarly vivacious and
radiant expression which was always on her face. She had a kind of
vivid loveliness accompanied by grace, simplicity, and a form of
exquisite proportions. The ugly duckling had become a swan, for
now there was no trace of her former plainness to be seen.

Not yet in her life had love come to her. Her first husband had
been thrust upon her and had treated her outrageously. Her second
husband was much older than she; and, though she was not without a
certain kindly feeling for one who had been kind to her, she
married him, first of all, for his title and position.

Having been reared in poverty, she had no conception of the value
of money; and, though the earl was remarkably extravagant, the new
countess was even more so. One after another their London houses
were opened and decorated with the utmost lavishness. They gave
innumerable entertainments, not only to the nobility and to men of
rank, but--because this was Lady Blessington's peculiar fad--to
artists and actors and writers of all degrees. The American, N. P.
Willis, in his Pencilings by the Way, has given an interesting
sketch of the countess and her surroundings, while the younger
Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) has depicted D'Orsay as Count Mirabel
in Henrietta Temple. Willis says:

In a long library, lined alternately with splendidly bound books
and mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room
opening upon Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The
picture, to my eye, as the door opened, was a very lovely one--a
woman of remarkable beauty, half buried in a fauteuil of yellow
satin, reading by a magnificent lamp suspended from the center of
the arched ceiling. Sofas, couches, ottomans, and busts, arranged
in rather a crowded sumptuousness through the room; enameled
tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in every
corner, and a delicate white hand in relief on the back of a book,
to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of diamond rings.

All this "crowded sumptuousness" was due to the taste of Lady
Blessington. Amid it she received royal dukes, statesmen such as
Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Russell, and Brougham, actors
such as Kemble and Matthews, artists such as Lawrence and Wilkie,
and men of letters such as Moore, Bulwer-Lytton, and the two
Disraelis. To maintain this sort of life Lord Blessington raised
large amounts of money, totaling about half a million pounds
sterling, by mortgaging his different estates and giving his
promissory notes to money-lenders. Of course, he did not spend
this vast sum immediately. He might have lived in comparative
luxury upon his income; but he was a restless, eager, improvident
nobleman, and his extravagances were prompted by the urgings of
his wife.

In all this display, which Lady Blessington both stimulated and
shared, there is to be found a psychological basis. She was now
verging upon the thirties--a time which is a very critical period
in a woman's emotional life, if she has not already given herself
over to love and been loved in return. During Lady Blessington's
earlier years she had suffered in many ways, and it is probable
that no thought of love had entered her mind. She was only too
glad if she could escape from the harshness of her father and the
cruelty of her first husband. Then came her development into a
beautiful woman, content for the time to be languorously stagnant
and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come to her.

When she married Lord Blessington her love life had not yet
commenced; and, in fact, there could be no love life in such a
marriage--a marriage with a man much older than herself, scatter-
brained, showy, and having no intellectual gifts. So for a time
she sought satisfaction in social triumphs, in capturing political
and literary lions in order to exhibit them in her salon, and in
spending money right and left with a lavish hand. But, after all,
in a woman of her temperament none of these things could satisfy
her inner longings. Beautiful, full of Celtic vivacity,
imaginative and eager, such a nature as hers would in the end be
starved unless her heart should be deeply touched and unless all
her pent-up emotion could give itself up entirely in the great
surrender.

After a few years of London she grew restless and dissatisfied.
Her surroundings wearied her. There was a call within her for
something more than she had yet experienced. The earl, her
husband, was by nature no less restless; and so, without knowing
the reason--which, indeed, she herself did not understand--he
readily assented to a journey on the Continent.

As they traveled southward they reached at length the town of
Valence, where Count d'Orsay was still quartered with his
regiment. A vague, indefinable feeling of attraction swept over
this woman, who was now a woman of the world and yet quite
inexperienced in affairs relating to the heart. The mere sound of
the French officer's voice, the mere sight of his face, the mere
knowledge of his presence, stirred her as nothing had ever stirred
her until that time. Yet neither he nor she appears to have been
conscious at once of the secret of their liking. It was enough
that they were soothed and satisfied with each other's company.

Oddly enough, the Earl of Blessington became as devoted to D'Orsay
as did his wife. The two urged the count to secure a leave of
absence and to accompany them to Italy. This he was easily
persuaded to do; and the three passed weeks and months of a
languorous and alluring intercourse among the lakes and the
seductive influence of romantic Italy. Just what passed between
Count d'Orsay and Margaret Blessington at this time cannot be
known, for the secret of it has perished with them; but it is
certain that before very long they came to know that each was
indispensable to the other.

The situation was complicated by the Earl of Blessington, who,
entirely unsuspicious, proposed that the Count should marry Lady
Harriet Gardiner, his eldest legitimate daughter by his first
wife. He pressed the match upon the embarrassed D'Orsay, and
offered to settle the sum of forty thousand pounds upon the bride.
The girl was less than fifteen years of age. She had no gifts
either of beauty or of intelligence; and, in addition, D'Orsay was
now deeply in love with her stepmother.

On the other hand, his position with the Blessingtons was daily
growing more difficult. People had begun to talk of the almost
open relations between Count d'Orsay and Lady Blessington. Lord
Byron, in a letter written to the countess, spoke to her openly
and in a playful way of "YOUR D'Orsay." The manners and morals of
the time were decidedly irregular; yet sooner or later the earl
was sure to gain some hint of what every one was saying.
Therefore, much against his real desire, yet in order to shelter
his relations with Lady Blessington, D'Orsay agreed to the
marriage with Lady Harriet, who was only fifteen years of age.

This made the intimacy between D'Orsay and the Blessingtons appear
to be not unusual; but, as a matter of fact, the marriage was no
marriage. The unattractive girl who had become a bride merely to
hide the indiscretions of her stepmother was left entirely to
herself; while the whole family, returning to London, made their
home together in Seymour Place.

Could D'Orsay have foreseen the future he would never have done
what must always seem an act so utterly unworthy of him. For
within two years Lord Blessington fell ill and died. Had not
D'Orsay been married he would now have been free to marry Lady
Blessington. As it was, he was bound fast to her stepdaughter; and
since at that time there was no divorce court in England, and
since he had no reason for seeking a divorce, he was obliged to
live on through many years in a most ambiguous situation. He did,
however, separate himself from his childish bride; and, having
done so, he openly took up his residence with Lady Blessington at
Gore House. By this time, however, the companionship of the two
had received a sort of general sanction, and in that easy-going
age most people took it as a matter of course.

The two were now quite free to live precisely as they would. Lady
Blessington became extravagantly happy, and Count d'Orsay was
accepted in London as an oracle of fashion. Every one was eager to
visit Gore House, and there they received all the notable men of
the time. The improvidence of Lady Blessington, however, was in no
respect diminished. She lived upon her jointure, recklessly
spending capital as well as interest, and gathering under her roof
a rare museum of artistic works, from jewels and curios up to
magnificent pictures and beautiful statuary.

D'Orsay had sufficient self-respect not to live upon the money
that had come to Lady Blessington from her husband. He was a
skilful painter, and he practised his art in a professional way.
His portrait of the Duke of Wellington was preferred by that
famous soldier to any other that had been made of him. The Iron
Duke was, in fact, a frequent visitor at Gore House, and he had a
very high opinion of Count d'Orsay. Lady Blessington herself
engaged in writing novels of "high life," some of which were very
popular in their day. But of all that she wrote there remains only
one book which is of permanent value--her Conversations with Lord
Byron, a very valuable contribution to our knowledge of the
brilliant poet.

But a nemesis was destined to overtake the pair. Money flowed
through Lady Blessington's hands like water, and she could never
be brought to understand that what she had might not last for
ever. Finally, it was all gone, yet her extravagance continued.
Debts were heaped up mountain-high. She signed notes of hand
without even reading them. She incurred obligations of every sort
without a moment's hesitation.

For a long time her creditors held aloof, not believing that her
resources were in reality exhausted; but in the end there came a
crash as sudden as it was ruinous. As if moved by a single
impulse, those to whom she owed money took out judgments against
her and descended upon Gore House in a swarm. This was in the
spring of 1849, when Lady Blessington was in her sixtieth year and
D'Orsay fifty-one.

It is a curious coincidence that her earliest novel had portrayed
the wreck of a great establishment such as her own. Of the scene
in Gore House Mr. Madden, Lady Blessington's literary biographer,
has written:

Numerous creditors, bill-discounters, money-lenders, jewelers,
lace-venders, tax-collectors, gas-company agents, all persons
having claims to urge pressed them at this period simultaneously.
An execution for a debt of four thousand pounds was at length put
in by a house largely engaged in the silk, lace, India-shawl, and
fancy-jewelry business.

This sum of four thousand pounds was only a nominal claim, but it
opened the flood-gates for all of Lady Blessington's creditors.
Mr. Madden writes still further:

On the 10th of May, 1849, I visited Gore House for the last time.
The auction was going on. There was a large assemblage of people
of fashion. Every room was thronged; the well-known library-salon,
in which the conversaziones took place, was crowded, but not with
guests. The arm-chair in which the lady of the mansion was wont to
sit was occupied by a stout, coarse gentleman of the Jewish
persuasion, busily engaged in examining a marble hand extended on
a book, the fingers of which were modeled from a cast of those of
the absent mistress of the establishment. People, as they passed
through the room, poked the furniture, pulled about the precious
objects of art and ornaments of various kinds that lay on the
table; and some made jests and ribald jokes on the scene they
witnessed.

At this compulsory sale things went for less than half their
value. Pictures by Lawrence and Landseer, a library consisting of
thousands of volumes, vases of exquisite workmanship, chandeliers
of ormolu, and precious porcelains--all were knocked down
relentlessly at farcical prices. Lady Blessington reserved nothing
for herself. She knew that the hour had struck, and very soon she
was on her way to Paris, whither Count d'Orsay had already gone,
having been threatened with arrest by a boot-maker to whom he owed
five hundred pounds.

D'Orsay very naturally went to Paris, for, like his father, he had
always been an ardent Bonapartist, and now Prince Louis Bonaparte
had been chosen president of the Second French Republic. During
the prince's long period of exile he had been the guest of Count
d'Orsay, who had helped him both with money and with influence.
D'Orsay now expected some return for his former generosity. It
came, but it came too late. In 1852, shortly after Prince Louis
assumed the title of emperor, the count was appointed director of
fine arts; but when the news was brought to him he was already
dying. Lady Blessington died soon after coming to Paris, before
the end of the year 1849.

Comment upon this tangled story is scarcely needed. Yet one may
quote some sayings from a sort of diary which Lady Blessington
called her "Night Book." They seem to show that her supreme
happiness lasted only for a little while, and that deep down in
her heart she had condemned herself.

A woman's head is always influenced by her heart; but a man's
heart is always influenced by his head.

The separation of friends by death is less terrible than the
divorce of two hearts that have loved, but have ceased to
sympathize, while memory still recalls what they once were to each
other.

People are seldom tired of the world until the world is tired of
them.

A woman should not paint sentiment until she has ceased to inspire
it.

It is less difficult for a woman to obtain celebrity by her genius
than to be pardoned for it.

Memory seldom fails when its office is to show us the tombs of our
buried hopes.





BYRON AND THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI


In 1812, when he was in his twenty-fourth year, Lord Byron was
more talked of than any other man in London. He was in the first
flush of his brilliant career, having published the early cantos
of "Childe Harold." Moreover, he was a peer of the realm,
handsome, ardent, and possessing a personal fascination which few
men and still fewer women could resist.

Byron's childhood had been one to excite in him strong feelings of
revolt, and he had inherited a profligate and passionate nature.
His father was a gambler and a spendthrift. His mother was
eccentric to a degree. Byron himself, throughout his boyish years,
had been morbidly sensitive because of a physical deformity--a
lame, misshapen foot. This and the strange treatment which his
mother accorded him left him headstrong, wilful, almost from the
first an enemy to whatever was established and conventional.

As a boy, he was remarkable for the sentimental attachments which
he formed. At eight years of age he was violently in love with a
young girl named Mary Duff. At ten his cousin, Margaret Parker,
excited in him a strange, un-childish passion. At fifteen came one
of the greatest crises of his life, when he became enamored of
Mary Chaworth, whose grand-father had been killed in a duel by
Byron's great-uncle. Young as he was, he would have married her
immediately; but Miss Chaworth was two years older than he, and
absolutely refused to take seriously the devotion of a school-boy.

Byron felt the disappointment keenly; and after a short stay at
Cambridge, he left England, visited Portugal and Spain, and
traveled eastward as far as Greece and Turkey. At Athens he wrote
the pretty little poem to the "maid of Athens"--Miss Theresa
Macri, daughter of the British vice-consul. He returned to London
to become at one leap the most admired poet of the day and the
greatest social favorite. He was possessed of striking personal
beauty. Sir Walter Scott said of him: "His countenance was a thing
to dream of." His glorious eyes, his mobile, eloquent face,
fascinated all; and he was, besides, a genius of the first rank.

With these endowments, he plunged into the social whirlpool,
denying himself nothing, and receiving everything-adulation,
friendship, and unstinted love. Darkly mysterious stories of his
adventures in the East made many think that he was the hero of
some of his own poems, such as "The Giaour" and "The Corsair." A
German wrote of him that "he was positively besieged by women."
From the humblest maid-servants up to ladies of high rank, he had
only to throw his handkerchief to make a conquest. Some women did
not even wait for the handkerchief to be thrown. No wonder that he
was sated with so much adoration and that he wrote of women:

I regard them as very pretty but inferior creatures. I look on
them as grown-up children; but, like a foolish mother, I am
constantly the slave of one of them. Give a woman a looking-glass
and burnt almonds, and she will be content.

The liaison which attracted the most attention at this time was
that between Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb. Byron has been greatly
blamed for his share in it; but there is much to be said on the
other side. Lady Caroline was happily married to the Right Hon.
William Lamb, afterward Lord Melbourne, and destined to be the
first prime minister of Queen Victoria. He was an easy-going,
genial man of the world who placed too much confidence in the
honor of his wife. She, on the other hand, was a sentimental fool,
always restless, always in search of some new excitement. She
thought herself a poet, and scribbled verses, which her friends
politely admired, and from which they escaped as soon as possible.
When she first met Byron, she cried out: "That pale face is my
fate!" And she afterward added: "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know!"

It was not long before the intimacy of the two came very near the
point of open scandal; but Byron was the wooed and not the wooer.
This woman, older than he, flung herself directly at his head.
Naturally enough, it was not very long before she bored him
thoroughly. Her romantic impetuosity became tiresome, and very
soon she fell to talking always of herself, thrusting her poems
upon him, and growing vexed and peevish when he would not praise
them. As was well said, "he grew moody and she fretful when their
mutual egotisms jarred."

In a burst of resentment she left him, but when she returned, she
was worse than ever. She insisted on seeing him. On one occasion
she made her way into his rooms disguised as a boy. At another
time, when she thought he had slighted her, she tried to stab
herself with a pair of scissors. Still later, she offered her
favors to any one who would kill him. Byron himself wrote of her:

You can have no idea of the horrible and absurd things that she
has said and done.

Her story has been utilized by Mrs. Humphry Ward in her novel,
"The Marriage of William Ashe."

Perhaps this trying experience led Byron to end his life of
dissipation. At any rate, in 1813, he proposed marriage to Miss
Anne Millbanke, who at first refused him; but he persisted, and in
1815 the two were married. Byron seems to have had a premonition
that he was making a terrible mistake. During the wedding ceremony
he trembled like a leaf, and made the wrong responses to the
clergyman. After the wedding was over, in handing his bride into
the carriage which awaited them, he said to her:

"Miss Millbanke, are you ready?"

It was a strange blunder for a bridegroom, and one which many
regarded at the time as ominous for the future. In truth, no two
persons could have been more thoroughly mismated--Byron, the human
volcano, and his wife, a prim, narrow-minded, and peevish woman.
Their incompatibility was evident enough from the very first, so
that when they returned from their wedding-journey, and some one
asked Byron about his honeymoon, he answered:

"Call it rather a treacle moon!"

It is hardly necessary here to tell over the story of their
domestic troubles. Only five weeks after their daughter's birth,
they parted. Lady Byron declared that her husband was insane;
while after trying many times to win from her something more than
a tepid affection, he gave up the task in a sort of despairing
anger. It should be mentioned here, for the benefit of those who
recall the hideous charges made many decades afterward by Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe on the authority of Lady Byron, that the
latter remained on terms of friendly intimacy with Augusta Leigh,
Lord Byron's sister, and that even on her death-bed she sent an
amicable message to Mrs. Leigh.

Byron, however, stung by the bitter attacks that were made upon
him, left England, and after traveling down the Rhine through
Switzerland, he took up his abode in Venice. His joy at leaving
England and ridding himself of the annoyances which had clustered
thick about him, he expressed in these lines:

    Once more upon the waters! yet once more!
    And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
    That knows his rider. Welcome to the roar!

Meanwhile he enjoyed himself in reckless fashion. Money poured in
upon him from his English publisher. For two cantos of "Childe
Harold" and "Manfred," Murray paid him twenty thousand dollars.
For the fourth canto, Byron demanded and received more than twelve
thousand dollars. In Italy he lived on friendly terms with Shelley
and Thomas Moore; but eventually he parted from them both, for he
was about to enter upon a new phase of his curious career.

He was no longer the Byron of 1815. Four years of high living and
much brandy-and-water had robbed his features of their refinement.
His look was no longer spiritual. He was beginning to grow stout.
Yet the change had not been altogether unfortunate. He had lost
something of his wild impetuosity, and his sense of humor had
developed. In his thirtieth year, in fact, he had at last become a
man.

It was soon after this that he met a woman who was to be to him
for the rest of his life what a well-known writer has called "a
star on the stormy horizon of the poet." This woman was Teresa,
Countess Guiccioli, whom he first came to know in Venice. She was
then only nineteen years of age, and she was married to a man who
was more than forty years her senior. Unlike the typical Italian
woman, she was blonde, with dreamy eyes and an abundance of golden
hair, and her manner was at once modest and graceful. She had
known Byron but a very short time when she found herself thrilling
with a passion of which until then she had never dreamed. It was
written of her:

She had thought of love but as an amusement; yet she now became
its slave.

To this love Byron gave an immediate response, and from that time
until his death he cared for no other woman. The two were
absolutely mated. Nevertheless, there were difficulties which
might have been expected. Count Guiccioli, while he seemed to
admire Byron, watched him with Italian subtlety. The English poet
and the Italian countess met frequently. When Byron was prostrated
by an attack of fever, the countess remained beside him, and he
was just recovering when Count Guiccioli appeared upon the scene
and carried off his wife. Byron was in despair. He exchanged the
most ardent letters with the countess, yet he dreaded assassins
whom he believed to have been hired by her husband. Whenever he
rode out, he went armed with sword and pistols.

Amid all this storm and stress, Byron's literary activity was
remarkable. He wrote some of his most famous poems at this time,
and he hoped for the day when he and the woman whom he loved might
be united once for all. This came about in the end through the
persistence of the pair. The Countess Guiccioli openly took up her
abode with him, not to be separated until the poet sailed for
Greece to aid the Greeks in their struggle for independence. This
was in 1822, when Byron was in his thirty-fifth year. He never
returned to Italy, but died in the historic land for which he gave
his life as truly as if he had fallen upon the field of battle.

Teresa Guiccioli had been, in all but name, his wife for just
three years. Much, has been said in condemnation of this love-
affair; but in many ways it is less censurable than almost
anything in his career. It was an instance of genuine love, a love
which purified and exalted this man of dark and moody moments. It
saved him from those fitful passions and orgies of self-indulgence
which had exhausted him. It proved to be an inspiration which at
last led him to die for a cause approved by all the world.

As for the woman, what shall we say of her? She came to him
unspotted by the world. A demand for divorce which her husband
made was rejected. A pontifical brief pronounced a formal
separation between the two. The countess gladly left behind "her
palaces, her equipages, society, and riches, for the love of the
poet who had won her heart."

Unlike the other women who had cared for him, she was unselfish in
her devotion. She thought more of his fame than did he himself.
Emilio Castelar has written:

She restored him and elevated him. She drew him from the mire and
set the crown of purity upon his brow. Then, when she had
recovered this great heart, instead of keeping it as her own
possession, she gave it to humanity.

For twenty-seven years after Byron's death, she remained, as it
were, widowed and alone. Then, in her old age, she married the
Marquis de Boissy; but the marriage was purely one of convenience.
Her heart was always Byron's, whom she defended with vivacity. In
1868, she published her memoirs of the poet, filled with
interesting and affecting recollections. She died as late as 1873.

Some time between the year 1866 and that of her death, she is said
to have visited Newstead Abbey, which had once been Byron's home.
She was very old, a widow, and alone; but her affection for the
poet-lover of her youth was still as strong as ever.

Byron's life was short, if measured by years only. Measured by
achievement, it was filled to the very full. His genius blazes
like a meteor in the records of English poetry; and some of that
splendor gleams about the lovely woman who turned him away from
vice and folly and made him worthy of his historic ancestry, of
his country, and of himself.





THE STORY OF MME. DE STAEL


Each century, or sometimes each generation, is distinguished by
some especial interest among those who are given to fancies--not
to call them fads. Thus, at the present time, the cultivated few
are taken up with what they choose to term the "new thought," or
the "new criticism," or, on the other hand, with socialistic
theories and projects. Thirty years ago, when Oscar Wilde was
regarded seriously by some people, there were many who made a cult
of estheticism. It was just as interesting when their leader--

    Walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily
               In his medieval hand,

or when Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan guyed him as
Bunthorne in "Patience."

When Charles Kingsley was a great expounder of British common
sense, "muscular Christianity" was a phrase which was taken up by
many followers. A little earlier, Puseyism and a primitive form of
socialism were in vogue with the intellectuals. There are just as
many different fashions in thought as in garments, and they come
and go without any particular reason. To-day, they are discussed
and practised everywhere. To-morrow, they are almost forgotten in
the rapid pursuit of something new.

Forty years before the French Revolution burst forth with all its
thunderings, France and Germany were affected by what was
generally styled "sensibility." Sensibility was the sister of
sentimentality and the half-sister of sentiment. Sentiment is a
fine thing in itself. It is consistent with strength and humor and
manliness; but sentimentality and sensibility are poor cheeping
creatures that run scuttering along the ground, quivering and
whimpering and asking for perpetual sympathy, which they do not at
all deserve.

No one need be ashamed of sentiment. It simply gives temper to the
blade, and mellowness to the intellect. Sensibility, on the other
hand, is full of shivers and shakes and falsetto notes and
squeaks. It is, in fact, all humbug, just as sentiment is often
all truth.

Therefore, to find an interesting phase of human folly, we may
look back to the years which lie between 1756 and 1793 as the era
of sensibility. The great prophets of this false god, or goddess,
were Rousseau in France and Goethe with Schiller in Germany,
together with a host of midgets who shook and shivered in
imitation of their masters. It is not for us to catalogue these
persons. Some of them were great figures in literature and
philosophy, and strong enough to shake aside the silliness of
sensibility; but others, while they professed to be great as
writers or philosophers, are now remembered only because their
devotion to sensibility made them conspicuous in their own time.
They dabbled in one thing and another; they "cribbed" from every
popular writer of the day. The only thing that actually belonged
to them was a high degree of sensibility.

And what, one may ask, was this precious thing--this sensibility?

It was really a sort of St. Vitus's dance of the mind, and almost
of the body. When two persons, in any way interested in each
other, were brought into the same room, one of them appeared to be
seized with a rotary movement. The voice rose to a higher pitch
than usual, and assumed a tremolo. Then, if the other person was
also endowed with sensibility, he or she would rotate and quake in
somewhat the same manner. Their cups of tea would be considerably
agitated. They would move about in as unnatural a manner as
possible; and when they left the room, they would do so with
gaspings and much waste of breath.

This was not an exhibition of love--or, at least, not necessarily
so. You might exhibit sensibility before a famous poet, or a
gallant soldier, or a celebrated traveler--or, for that matter,
before a remarkable buffoon, like Cagliostro, or a freak, like
Kaspar Hauser.

It is plain enough that sensibility was entirely an abnormal
thing, and denoted an abnormal state of mind. Only among people
like the Germans and French of that period, who were forbidden to
take part in public affairs, could it have flourished so long, and
have put forth such rank and fetid outgrowths. From it sprang the
"elective affinities" of Goethe, and the loose morality of the
French royalists, which rushed on into the roaring sea of
infidelity, blasphemy, and anarchy of the Revolution.

Of all the historic figures of that time, there is just one which
to-day stands forth as representing sensibility. In her own time
she was thought to be something of a philosopher, and something
more of a novelist. She consorted with all the clever men and
women of her age. But now she holds a minute niche in history
because of the fact that Napoleon stooped to hate her, and because
she personifies sensibility.

Criticism has stripped from her the rags and tatters of the
philosophy which was not her own. It is seen that she was indebted
to the brains of others for such imaginative bits of fiction as
she put forth in Delphine and Corinne; but as the exponent of
sensibility she remains unique. This woman was Anne Louise
Germaine Necker, usually known as Mme. de Stael.

There was much about Mile. Necker's parentage that made her
interesting. Her father was the Genevese banker and minister of
Louis XVI, who failed wretchedly in his attempts to save the
finances of France. Her mother, Suzanne Curchod, as a young girl,
had won the love of the famous English historian, Edward Gibbon.
She had first refused him, and then almost frantically tried to
get him back; but by this time Gibbon was more comfortable in
single life and less infatuated with Mlle. Curchod, who presently
married Jacques Necker.

M. Necker's money made his daughter a very celebrated "catch." Her
mother brought her to Paris when the French capital was brilliant
beyond description, and yet was tottering to its fall. The
rumblings of the Revolution could be heard by almost every ear;
and yet society and the court, refusing to listen, plunged into
the wildest revelry under the leadership of the giddy Marie
Antoinette.

It was here that the young girl was initiated into the most
elegant forms of luxury, and met the cleverest men of that time--
Voltaire, Rousseau, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Volney. She set
herself to be the most accomplished woman of her day, not merely
in belles lettres, but in the natural and political sciences.
Thus, when her father was drawing up his monograph on the French
finances, Germaine labored hard over a supplementary report,
studying documents, records, and the most complicated statistics,
so that she might obtain a mastery of the subject.

"I mean to know everything that anybody knows," she said, with an
arrogance which was rather admired in so young a woman.

But, unfortunately, her mind was not great enough to fulfil her
aspiration. The most she ever achieved was a fair knowledge of
many things--a knowledge which seemed surprising to the average
man, but which was superficial enough to the accomplished
specialist.

In her twentieth year (1786) it was thought best that she should
marry. Her revels, as well as her hard studies, had told upon her
health, and her mother believed that she could not be at once a
blue-stocking and a woman of the world.

There was something very odd about the relation that existed
between the young girl and this mother of hers. In the Swiss
province where they had both been born, the mother had been
considered rather bold and forward. Her penchant for Gibbon was
only one of a number of adventures that have been told about her.
She was by no means coy with the gallants of Geneva. Yet, after
her marriage, and when she came to Paris, she seemed to be
transformed into a sort of Swiss Puritan.

As such, she undertook her daughter's bringing up, and was
extremely careful about everything that Germaine did and about the
company she kept. On the other hand, the daughter, who in the city
of Calvin had been rather dull and quiet in her ways, launched out
into a gaiety such as she had never known in Switzerland. Mother
and daughter, in fact, changed parts. The country beauty of Geneva
became the prude of Paris, while the quiet, unemotional young
Genevese became the light of all the Parisian salons, whether
social or intellectual.

The mother was a very beautiful woman. The daughter, who was to
become so famous, is best described by those two very
uncomplimentary English words, "dumpy" and "frumpy." She had
bulging eyes--which are not emphasized in the flattering portrait
by Gerard--and her hair was unbecomingly dressed. There are
reasons for thinking that Germaine bitterly hated her mother, and
was intensely jealous of her charm of person. It may be also that
Mme. Necker envied the daughter's cleverness, even though that
cleverness was little more, in the end, than the borrowing of
brilliant things from other persons. At any rate, the two never
cared for each other, and Germaine gave to her father the
affection which her mother neither received nor sought.

It was perhaps to tame the daughter's exuberance that a marriage
was arranged for Mlle. Necker with the Baron de Stael-Holstein,
who then represented the court of Sweden at Paris. Many eyebrows
were lifted when this match was announced. Baron de Stael had no
personal charm, nor any reputation for wit. His standing in the
diplomatic corps was not very high. His favorite occupations were
playing cards and drinking enormous quantities of punch. Could he
be considered a match for the extremely clever Mlle. Necker, whose
father had an enormous fortune, and who was herself considered a
gem of wit and mental power, ready to discuss political economy,
or the romantic movement of socialism, or platonic love?

Many differed about this. Mlle. Necker was, to be sure, rich and
clever; but the Baron de Stael was of an old family, and had a
title. Moreover, his easy-going ways--even his punch-drinking and
his card-playing--made him a desirable husband at that time of
French social history, when the aristocracy wished to act exactly
as it pleased, with wanton license, and when an embassy was a very
convenient place into which an indiscreet ambassadress might
retire when the mob grew dangerous. For Paris was now approaching
the time of revolution, and all "aristocrats" were more or less in
danger.

At first Mme. de Stael rather sympathized with the outbreak of the
people; but later their excesses drove her back into sympathy with
the royalists. It was then that she became indiscreet and abused
the privilege of the embassy in giving shelter to her friends. She
was obliged to make a sudden flight across the frontier, whence
she did not return until Napoleon loomed up, a political giant on
the horizon--victorious general, consul, and emperor.

Mme. de Stael's relations with Napoleon have, as I remarked above,
been among her few titles to serious remembrance. The Corsican
eagle and the dumpy little Genevese make, indeed, a peculiar pair;
and for this reason writers have enhanced the oddities of the
picture.

"Napoleon," says one, "did not wish any one to be near him who was
as clever as himself."

"No," adds another, "Mme. de Stael made a dead set at Napoleon,
because she wished to conquer and achieve the admiration of
everybody, even of the greatest man who ever lived."

"Napoleon found her to be a good deal of a nuisance," observes a
third. "She knew too much, and was always trying to force her
knowledge upon others."

The legend has sprung up that Mme. de Stael was too wise and witty
to be acceptable to Napoleon; and many women repeated with unction
that the conqueror of Europe was no match for this frowsy little
woman. It is, perhaps, worth while to look into the facts, and to
decide whether Napoleon was really of so petty a nature as to feel
himself inferior to this rather comic creature, even though at the
time many people thought her a remarkable genius.

In the first place, knowing Napoleon, as we have come to know him
through the pages of Mme. de Remusat, Frederic Masson, and others,
we can readily imagine the impatience with which the great soldier
would sit at dinner, hastening to finish his meal, crowding the
whole ceremony into twenty minutes, gulping a glass or two of wine
and a cup of coffee, and then being interrupted by a fussy little
female who wanted to talk about the ethics of history, or the
possibility of a new form of government. Napoleon, himself, was
making history, and writing it in fire and flame; and as for
governments, he invented governments all over Europe as suited his
imperial will. What patience could he have with one whom an
English writer has rather unkindly described as "an ugly coquette,
an old woman who made a ridiculous marriage, a blue-stocking, who
spent much of her time in pestering men of genius, and drawing
from them sarcastic comment behind their backs?"

Napoleon was not the sort of a man to be routed in discussion, but
he was most decidedly the sort of man to be bored and irritated by
pedantry. Consequently, he found Mme. de Stael a good deal of a
nuisance in the salons of Paris and its vicinity. He cared not the
least for her epigrams. She might go somewhere else and write all
the epigrams she pleased. When he banished her, in 1803, she
merely crossed the Rhine into Germany, and established herself at
Weimar.

The emperor received her son, Auguste de Stael-Holstein, with much
good humor, though he refused the boy's appeal on behalf of his
mother.

"My dear baron," said Napoleon, "if your mother were to be in
Paris for two months, I should really be obliged to lock her up in
one of the castles, which would be most unpleasant treatment for
me to show a lady. No, let her go anywhere else and we can get
along perfectly. All Europe is open to her--Rome, Vienna, St.
Petersburg; and if she wishes to write libels on me, England is a
convenient and inexpensive place. Only Paris is just a little too
near!"

Thus the emperor gibed the boy--he was only fifteen or sixteen--
and made fun of the exiled blue-stocking; but there was not a sign
of malice in what he said, nor, indeed, of any serious feeling at
all. The legend about Napoleon and Mme. de Stael must, therefore,
go into the waste-basket, except in so far as it is true that she
succeeded in boring him.

For the rest, she was an earlier George Sand--unattractive in
person, yet able to attract; loving love for love's sake, though
seldom receiving it in return; throwing herself at the head of
every distinguished man, and generally finding that he regarded
her overtures with mockery. To enumerate the men for whom she
professed to care would be tedious, since the record of her
passions has no reality about it, save, perhaps, with two
exceptions.

She did care deeply and sincerely for Henri Benjamin Constant, the
brilliant politician and novelist. He was one of her coterie in
Paris, and their common political sentiments formed a bond of
friendship between them. Constant was banished by Napoleon in
1802, and when Mme. de Stael followed him into exile a year later
he joined her in Germany.

The story of their relations was told by Constant in Adolphe,
while Mme. de Stael based Delphine on her experiences with him. It
seems that he was puzzled by her ardor; she was infatuated by his
genius. Together they went through all the phases of the tender
passion; and yet, at intervals, they would tire of each other and
separate for a while, and she would amuse herself with other men.
At last she really believed that her love for him was entirely
worn out.

"I always loved my lovers more than they loved me," she said once,
and it was true.

Yet, on the other hand, she was frankly false to all of them, and
hence arose these intervals. In one of them she fell in with a
young Italian named Rocca, and by way of a change she not only
amused herself with him, but even married him. At this time--1811
--she was forty-five, while Rocca was only twenty-three--a young
soldier who had fought in Spain, and who made eager love to the
she-philosopher when he was invalided at Geneva.

The marriage was made on terms imposed by the middle-aged woman
who became his bride. In the first place, it was to be kept
secret; and second, she would not take her husband's name, but he
must pass himself off as her lover, even though she bore him
children. The reason she gave for this extraordinary exhibition of
her vanity was that a change of name on her part would put
everybody out.

"In fact," she said, "if Mme. de Stael were to change her name, it
would unsettle the heads of all Europe!"

And so she married Rocca, who was faithful to her to the end,
though she grew extremely plain and querulous, while he became
deaf and soon lost his former charm. Her life was the life of a
woman who had, in her own phrase, "attempted everything"; and yet
she had accomplished nothing that would last. She was loved by a
man of genius, but he did not love her to the end. She was loved
by a man of action, and she tired of him very soon. She had a
wonderful reputation for her knowledge of history and philosophy,
and yet what she knew of those subjects is now seen to be merely
the scraps and borrowings of others.

Something she did when she introduced the romantic literature into
France; and there are passages from her writings which seem worthy
of preservation. For instance, we may quote her outburst with
regard to unhappy marriages. "It was the subject," says Mr.
Gribble, "on which she had begun to think before she was married,
and which continued to haunt her long after she was left a widow;
though one suspects that the word 'marriage' became a form of
speech employed to describe her relations, not with her husband,
but with her lovers." The passage to which I refer is as follows:

In an unhappy marriage, there is a violence of distress surpassing
all other sufferings in the world. A woman's whole soul depends
upon the conjugal tie. To struggle against fate alone, to journey
to the grave without a friend to support you or to regret you, is
an isolation of which the deserts of Arabia give but a faint and
feeble idea. When all the treasure of your youth has been given in
vain, when you can no longer hope that the reflection of these
first rays will shine upon the end of your life, when there is
nothing in the dusk to remind you of the dawn, and when the
twilight is pale and colorless as a livid specter that precedes
the night, your heart revolts, and you feel that you have been
robbed of the gifts of God upon earth.

Equally striking is another prose passage of hers, which seems
less the careful thought of a philosopher than the screeching of a
termagant. It is odd that the first two sentences recall two
famous lines of Byron:

    Man's love is of man's life a thing apart;
    'Tis woman's whole existence.

The passage by Mme. de Stael is longer and less piquant:

Love is woman's whole existence. It is only an episode in the
lives of men. Reputation, honor, esteem, everything depends upon
how a woman conducts herself in this regard; whereas, according to
the rules of an unjust world, the laws of morality itself are
suspended in men's relations with women. They may pass as good
men, though they have caused women the most terrible suffering
which it is in the power of one human being to inflict upon
another. They may be regarded as loyal, though they have betrayed
them. They may have received from a woman marks of a devotion
which would so link two friends, two fellow soldiers, that either
would feel dishonored if he forgot them, and they may consider
themselves free of all obligations by attributing the services to
love--as if this additional gift of love detracted from the value
of the rest!

One cannot help noticing how lacking in neatness of expression is
this woman who wrote so much. It is because she wrote so much that
she wrote in such a muffled manner. It is because she thought so
much that her reflections were either not her own, or were never
clear. It is because she loved so much, and had so many lovers--
Benjamin Constant; Vincenzo Monti, the Italian poet; M. de
Narbonne, and others, as well as young Rocca--that she found both
love and lovers tedious.

She talked so much that her conversation was almost always mere
personal opinion. Thus she told Goethe that he never was really
brilliant until after he had got through a bottle of champagne.
Schiller said that to talk with her was to have a "rough time,"
and that after she left him, he always felt like a man who was
just getting over a serious illness. She never had time to do
anything very well.

There is an interesting glimpse of her in the recollections of Dr.
Bollmann, at the period when Mme. de Stael was in her prime. The
worthy doctor set her down as a genius--an extraordinary,
eccentric woman in all that she did. She slept but a few hours out
of the twenty-four, and was uninterruptedly and fearfully busy all
the rest of the time. While her hair was being dressed, and even
while she breakfasted, she used to keep on writing, nor did she
ever rest sufficiently to examine what she had written.

Such then was Mme. de Stael, a type of the time in which she
lived, so far as concerns her worship of sensibility--of
sensibility, and not of love; for love is too great to be so
scattered and made a thing to prattle of, to cheapen, and thus
destroy. So we find at the last that Germaine de Stael, though she
was much read and much feted and much followed, came finally to
that last halting-place where confessedly she was merely an old
woman, eccentric, and unattractive. She sued her former lovers for
the money she had lent them, she scolded and found fault--as
perhaps befits her age.

But such is the natural end of sensibility, and of the woman who
typifies it for succeeding generations.





THE STORY OF KARL MARX


Some time ago I entered a fairly large library--one of more than
two hundred thousand volumes--to seek the little brochure on Karl
Marx written by his old friend and genial comrade Wilhelm
Liebknecht. It was in the card catalogue. As I made a note of its
number, my friend the librarian came up to me, and I asked him
whether it was not strange that a man like Marx should have so
many books devoted to him, for I had roughly reckoned the number
at several hundred.

"Not at all," said he; "and we have here only a feeble nucleus of
the Marx literature--just enough, in fact, to give you a glimpse
of what that literature really is. These are merely the books
written by Marx himself, and the translations of them, with a few
expository monographs. Anything like a real Marx collection would
take up a special room in this library, and would have to have its
own separate catalogue. You see that even these two or three
hundred books contain large volumes of small pamphlets in many
languages--German, English, French, Italian, Russian, Polish,
Yiddish, Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish; and here," he concluded,
pointing to a recently numbered card, "is one in Japanese."

My curiosity was sufficiently excited to look into the matter
somewhat further. I visited another library, which was appreciably
larger, and whose managers were evidently less guided by their
prejudices. Here were several thousand books on Marx, and I spent
the best part of the day in looking them over.

What struck me as most singular was the fact that there was
scarcely a volume about Marx himself. Practically all the books
dealt with his theory of capital and his other socialistic views.
The man himself, his personality, and the facts of his life were
dismissed in the most meager fashion, while his economic theories
were discussed with something that verged upon fury. Even such
standard works as those of Mehring and Spargo, which profess to be
partly biographical, sum up the personal side of Marx in a few
pages. In fact, in the latter's preface he seems conscious of this
defect, and says:

Whether socialism proves, in the long span of centuries, to be
good or evil, a blessing to men or a curse, Karl Marx must always
be an object of interest as one of the great world-figures of
immortal memory. As the years go by, thoughtful men and women will
find the same interest in studying the life and work of Marx that
they do in studying the life and work of Cromwell, of Wesley, or
of Darwin, to name three immortal world-figures of vastly
divergent types.

Singularly little is known of Karl Marx, even by his most ardent
followers. They know his work, having studied his Das Kapital with
the devotion and earnestness with which an older generation of
Christians studied the Bible, but they are very generally
unacquainted with the man himself. Although more than twenty-six
years have elapsed since the death of Marx, there is no adequate
biography of him in any language.

Doubtless some better-equipped German writer, such as Franz
Mehring or Eduard Bernstein, will some day give us the adequate
and full biography for which the world now waits.

Here is an admission that there exists no adequate biography of
Karl Marx, and here is also an intimation that simply as a man,
and not merely as a great firebrand of socialism, Marx is well
worth studying. And so it has occurred to me to give in these
pages one episode of his career that seems to me quite curious,
together with some significant touches concerning the man as apart
from the socialist. Let the thousands of volumes already in
existence suffice for the latter. The motto of this paper is not
the Vergilian "Arms and the man I sing," but simply "The man I
sing"--and the woman. Karl Marx was born nearly ninety-four years
ago--May 5, 1818--in the city which the French call Treves and the
Germans Trier, among the vine-clad hills of the Moselle. Today,
the town is commonplace enough when you pass through it, but when
you look into its history, and seek out that history's evidences,
you will find that it was not always a rather sleepy little place.
It was one of the chosen abodes of the Emperors of the West, after
Rome began to be governed by Gauls and Spaniards, rather than by
Romans and Italians. The traveler often pauses there to see the
Porta Nigra, that immense gate once strongly fortified, and he
will doubtless visit also what is left of the fine baths and
amphitheater.

Treves, therefore, has a right to be termed imperial, and it was
the birthplace of one whose sway over the minds of men has been
both imperial and imperious.

Karl Marx was one of those whose intellectual achievements were so
great as to dwarf his individuality and his private life. What he
taught with almost terrific vigor made his very presence in the
Continental monarchies a source of eminent danger. He was driven
from country to country. Kings and emperors were leagued together
against him. Soldiers were called forth, and blood was shed
because of him. But, little by little, his teaching seems to have
leavened the thought of the whole civilized world, so that to-day
thousands who barely know his name are deeply affected by his
ideas, and believe that the state should control and manage
everything for the good of all.

Marx seems to have inherited little from either of his parents.
His father, Heinrich Marx, was a provincial Jewish lawyer who had
adopted Christianity, probably because it was expedient, and
because it enabled him to hold local offices and gain some social
consequence. He had changed his name from Mordecai to Marx.

The elder Marx was very shrewd and tactful, and achieved a fair
position among the professional men and small officials in the
city of Treves. He had seen the horrors of the French Revolution,
and was philosopher enough to understand the meaning of that
mighty upheaval, and of the Napoleonic era which followed.

Napoleon, indeed, had done much to relieve his race from petty
oppression. France made the Jews in every respect the equals of
the Gentiles. One of its ablest marshals--Massena--was a Jew, and
therefore, when the imperial eagle was at the zenith of its
flight, the Jews in every city and town of Europe were
enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon, some even calling him the
Messiah.

Karl Marx's mother, it is certain, endowed him with none of his
gifts. She was a Netherlandish Jewess of the strictly domestic and
conservative type, fond of her children and her home, and
detesting any talk that looked to revolutionary ideas or to a
change in the social order. She became a Christian with her
husband, but the word meant little to her. It was sufficient that
she believed in God; and for this she was teased by some of her
skeptical friends. Replying to them, she uttered the only epigram
that has ever been ascribed to her.

"Yes," she said, "I believe in God, not for God's sake, but for my
own."

She was so little affected by change of scene that to the day of
her death she never mastered German, but spoke almost wholly in
her native Dutch. Had we time, we might dwell upon the unhappy
paradox of her life. In her son Karl she found an especial joy, as
did her husband. Had the father lived beyond Karl's early youth,
he would doubtless have been greatly pained by the radicalism of
his gifted son, as well as by his personal privations. But the
mother lived until 1863, while Karl was everywhere stirring the
fires of revolution, driven from land to land, both feared and
persecuted, and often half famished. As Mr. Spargo says:

It was the irony of life that the son, who kindled a mighty hope
in the hearts of unnumbered thousands of his fellow human beings,
a hope that is today inspiring millions of those who speak his
name with reverence and love, should be able to do that only by
destroying his mother's hope and happiness in her son, and that
every step he took should fill her heart with a great agony.

When young Marx grew out of boyhood into youth, he was attractive
to all those who met him. Tall, lithe, and graceful, he was so
extremely dark that his intimates called him "der neger"--"the
negro." His loosely tossing hair gave to him a still more exotic
appearance; but his eyes were true and frank, his nose denoted
strength and character, and his mouth was full of kindliness in
its expression. His lineaments were not those of the Jewish type.

Very late in life--he died in 1883--his hair and beard turned
white, but to the last his great mustache was drawn like a bar
across his face, remaining still as black as ink, and making his
appearance very striking. He was full of fun and gaiety. As was
only natural, there soon came into his life some one who learned
to love him, and to whom, in his turn, he gave a deep and unbroken
affection.

There had come to Treves--which passed from France to Prussia with
the downfall of Napoleon--a Prussian nobleman, the Baron Ludwig
von Westphalen, holding the official title of "national adviser."
The baron was of Scottish extraction on his mother's side, being
connected with the ducal family of Argyll. He was a man of genuine
rank, and might have shown all the arrogance and superciliousness
of the average Prussian official; but when he became associated
with Heinrich Marx he evinced none of that condescending manner.
The two men became firm friends, and the baron treated the
provincial lawyer as an equal.

The two families were on friendly terms. Von Westphalen's infant
daughter, who had the formidable name of Johanna Bertha Julie
Jenny von Westphalen, but who was usually spoken of as Jenny,
became, in time, an intimate of Sophie Marx. She was four years
older than Karl, but the two grew up together--he a high-spirited,
manly boy, and she a lovely and romantic girl.

The baron treated Karl as if the lad were a child of his own. He
influenced him to love romantic literature and poetry by
interpreting to him the great masterpieces, from Homer and
Shakespeare to Goethe and Lessing. He made a special study of
Dante, whose mysticism appealed to his somewhat dreamy nature, and
to the religious instinct that always lived in him, in spite of
his dislike for creeds and churches.

The lore that he imbibed in early childhood stood Karl in good
stead when he began his school life, and his preparation for the
university. He had an absolute genius for study, and was no less
fond of the sports and games of his companions, so that he seemed
to be marked out for success. At sixteen years of age he showed a
precocious ability for planning and carrying out his work with
thoroughness. His mind was evidently a creative mind, one that was
able to think out difficult problems without fatigue. His taste
was shown in his fondness for the classics, in studying which he
noted subtle distinctions of meaning that usually escape even the
mature scholar. Penetration, thoroughness, creativeness, and a
capacity for labor were the boy's chief characteristics.

With such gifts, and such a nature, he left home for the
university of Bonn. Here he disappointed all his friends. His
studies were neglected; he was morose, restless, and dissatisfied.
He fell into a number of scrapes, and ran into debt through sundry
small extravagances. All the reports that reached his home were
most unsatisfactory. What had come over the boy who had worked so
hard in the gymnasium at Treves?

The simple fact was that he had became love-sick. His separation
from Jenny von Westphalen had made him conscious of a feeling
which he had long entertained without knowing it. They had been
close companions. He had looked into her beautiful face and seen
the luminous response of her lovely eyes, but its meaning had not
flashed upon his mind. He was not old enough to have a great
consuming passion, he was merely conscious of her charm. As he
could see her every day, he did not realize how much he wanted
her, and how much a separation from her would mean.

As "absence makes the heart grow fonder," so it may suddenly draw
aside the veil behind which the truth is hidden. At Bonn young
Marx felt as if a blaze of light had flashed before him; and from
that moment his studies, his companions, and the ambitions that he
had hitherto cherished all seemed flat and stale. At night and in
the daytime there was just one thing which filled his mind and
heart--the beautiful vision of Jenny von Westphalen.

Meanwhile his family, and especially his father, had become
anxious at the reports which reached them. Karl was sent for, and
his stay at Bonn was ended.

Now that he was once more in the presence of the girl who charmed
him so, he recovered all his old-time spirits. He wooed her
ardently, and though she was more coy, now that she saw his
passion, she did not discourage him, but merely prolonged the
ecstasy of this wonderful love-making. As he pressed her more and
more, and no one guessed the story, there came a time when she was
urged to let herself become engaged to him.

Here was seen the difference in their ages--a difference that had
an effect upon their future. It means much that a girl should be
four years older than the man who seeks her hand. She is four
years wiser; and a girl of twenty is, in fact, a match for a youth
of twenty-five. Brought up as she had been, in an aristocratic
home, with the blood of two noble families in her veins, and being
wont to hear the easy and somewhat cynical talk of worldly people,
she knew better than poor Karl the un-wisdom of what she was about
to do.

She was noble, the daughter of one high official and the sister of
another. Those whom she knew were persons of rank and station. On
the other hand, young Marx, though he had accepted Christianity,
was the son of a provincial Jewish lawyer, with no fortune, and
with a bad record at the university. When she thought of all these
things, she may well have hesitated; but the earnest pleading and
intense ardor of Karl Marx broke down all barriers between them,
and they became engaged, without informing Jenny's father of their
compact. Then they parted for a while, and Karl returned to his
home, filled with romantic thoughts.

He was also full of ambition and of desire for achievement. He had
won the loveliest girl in Treves, and now he must go forth into
the world and conquer it for her sake. He begged his father to
send him to Berlin, and showed how much more advantageous was that
new and splendid university, where Hegel's fame was still in the
ascendent.

In answer to his father's questions, the younger Marx replied:

"I have something to tell you that will explain all; but first you
must give me your word that you will tell no one."

"I trust you wholly," said the father. "I will not reveal what you
may say to me."

"Well," returned the son, "I am engaged to marry Jenny von
Westphalen. She wishes it kept a secret from her father, but I am
at liberty to tell you of it."

The elder Marx was at once shocked and seriously disturbed. Baron
von Westphalen was his old and intimate friend. No thought of
romance between their children had ever come into his mind. It
seemed disloyal to keep the verlobung of Karl and Jenny a secret;
for should it be revealed, what would the baron think of Marx?
Their disparity of rank and fortune would make the whole affair
stand out as something wrong and underhand.

The father endeavored to make his son see all this. He begged him
to go and tell the baron, but young Marx was not to be persuaded.

"Send me to Berlin," he said, "and we shall again be separated;
but I shall work and make a name for myself, so that when I return
neither Jenny nor her father will have occasion to be disturbed by
our engagement."

With these words he half satisfied his father, and before long he
was sent to Berlin, where he fell manfully upon his studies. His
father had insisted that he should study law; but his own tastes
were for philosophy and history. He attended lectures in
jurisprudence "as a necessary evil," but he read omnivorously in
subjects that were nearer to his heart. The result was that his
official record was not much better than it had been at Bonn.

The same sort of restlessness, too, took possession of him when he
found that Jenny would not answer his letters. No matter how
eagerly and tenderly he wrote to her, there came no reply. Even
the most passionate pleadings left her silent and unresponsive.
Karl could not complain, for she had warned him that she would not
write to him. She felt that their engagement, being secret, was
anomalous, and that until her family knew of it she was not free
to act as she might wish.

Here again was seen the wisdom of her maturer years; but Karl
could not be equally reasonable. He showered her with letters,
which still she would not answer. He wrote to his father in words
of fire. At last, driven to despair, he said that he was going to
write to the Baron von Westphalen, reveal the secret, and ask for
the baron's fatherly consent.

It seemed a reckless thing to do, and yet it turned out to be the
wisest. The baron knew that such an engagement meant a social
sacrifice, and that, apart from the matter of rank, young Marx was
without any fortune to give the girl the luxuries to which she had
been accustomed. Other and more eligible suitors were always
within view. But here Jenny herself spoke out more strongly than
she had ever done to Karl. She was willing to accept him with what
he was able to give her. She cared nothing for any other man, and
she begged her father to make both of them completely happy.

Thus it seemed that all was well, yet for some reason or other
Jenny would not write to Karl, and once more he was almost driven
to distraction. He wrote bitter letters to his father, who tried
to comfort him. The baron himself sent messages of friendly
advice, but what young man in his teens was ever reasonable? So
violent was Karl that at last his father wrote to him:

I am disgusted with your letters. Their unreasonable tone is
loathsome to me. I should never had expected it of you. Haven't
you been lucky from your cradle up?

Finally Karl received one letter from his betrothed--a letter that
transfused him with ecstatic joy for about a day, and then sent
him back to his old unrest. This, however, may be taken as a part
of Marx's curious nature, which was never satisfied, but was
always reaching after something which could not be had.

He fell to writing poetry, of which he sent three volumes to
Jenny--which must have been rather trying to her, since the verse
was very poor. He studied the higher mathematics, English and
Italian, some Latin, and a miscellaneous collection of works on
history and literature. But poetry almost turned his mind. In
later years he wrote:

Everything was centered on poetry, as if I were bewitched by some
uncanny power.

Luckily, he was wise enough, after a time, to recognize how
halting were his poems when compared with those of the great
masters; and so he resumed his restless, desultory work. He still
sent his father letters that were like wild cries. They evoked, in
reply, a very natural burst of anger:

Complete disorder, silly wandering through all branches of
science, silly brooding at the burning oil-lamp! In your wildness
you see with four eyes--a horrible setback and disregard for
everything decent. And in the pursuit of this senseless and
purposeless learning you think to raise the fruits which are to
unite you with your beloved one! What harvest do you expect to
gather from them which will enable you to fulfil your duty toward
her?

Writing to him again, his father speaks of something that Karl had
written as "a mad composition, which denotes clearly how you waste
your ability and spend nights in order to create such
monstrosities." The young man was even forbidden to return home
for the Easter holidays. This meant giving up the sight of Jenny,
whom he had not seen for a whole year. But fortune arranged it
otherwise; for not many weeks later death removed the parent who
had loved him and whom he had loved, though neither of them could
understand the other. The father represented the old order of
things; the son was born to discontent and to look forward to a
new heaven and a new earth.

Returning to Berlin, Karl resumed his studies; but as before, they
were very desultory in their character, and began to run upon
social questions, which were indeed setting Germany into a
ferment. He took his degree, and thought of becoming an instructor
at the university of Jena; but his radicalism prevented this, and
he became the editor of a liberal newspaper, which soon, however,
became so very radical as to lead to his withdrawal.

It now seemed best that Marx should seek other fields of activity.
To remain in Germany was dangerous to himself and discreditable to
Jenny's relatives, with their status as Prussian officials. In the
summer of 1843, he went forth into the world--at last an
"international." Jenny, who had grown to believe in him as against
her own family, asked for nothing better than to wander with him,
if only they might be married. And they were married in this same
summer, and spent a short honeymoon at Bingen on the Rhine--made
famous by Mrs. Norton's poem. It was the brief glimpse of sunshine
that was to precede year after year of anxiety and want.

Leaving Germany, Marx and Jenny went to Paris, where he became
known to some of the intellectual lights of the French capital,
such as Bakunin, the great Russian anarchist, Proudhon, Cabet, and
Saint-Simon. Most important of all was his intimacy with the poet
Heine, that marvelous creature whose fascination took on a
thousand forms, and whom no one could approach without feeling his
strange allurement.

Since Goethe's death, down to the present time, there has been no
figure in German literature comparable to Heine. His prose was
exquisite. His poetry ran through the whole gamut of humanity and
of the sensations that come to us from the outer world. In his
poems are sweet melodies and passionate cries of revolt, stirring
ballads of the sea and tender love-songs--strange as these last
seem when coming from this cynic.

For cynic he was, deep down in his heart, though his face, when in
repose, was like the conventional pictures of Christ. His
fascinations destroyed the peace of many a woman; and it was only
after many years of self-indulgence that he married the faithful
Mathilde Mirat in what he termed a "conscience marriage." Soon
after he went to his "mattress-grave," as he called it, a hopeless
paralytic.

To Heine came Marx and his beautiful bride. One may speculate as
to Jenny's estimate of her husband. Since his boyhood, she had not
seen him very much. At that time he was a merry, light-hearted
youth, a jovial comrade, and one of whom any girl would be proud.
But since his long stay in Berlin, and his absorption in the
theories of men like Engels and Bauer, he had become a very
different sort of man, at least to her.

Groping, lost in brown studies, dreamy, at times morose, he was by
no means a sympathetic and congenial husband for a high-bred,
spirited girl, such as Jenny von Westphalen. His natural drift was
toward a beer-garden, a group of frowsy followers, the reek of
vile tobacco, and the smell of sour beer. One cannot but think
that his beautiful wife must have been repelled by this, though
with her constant nature she still loved him.

In Heinrich Heine she found a spirit that seemed akin to hers. Mr.
Spargo says--and in what he says one must read a great deal
between the lines:

The admiration of Jenny Marx for the poet was even more ardent
than that of her husband. He fascinated her because, as she said,
he was "so modern," while Heine was drawn to her because she was
"so sympathetic."

It must be that Heine held the heart of this beautiful woman in
his hand. He knew so well the art of fascination; he knew just how
to supply the void which Marx had left. The two were indeed
affinities in heart and soul; yet for once the cynical poet stayed
his hand, and said no word that would have been disloyal to his
friend. Jenny loved him with a love that might have blazed into a
lasting flame; but fortunately there appeared a special providence
to save her from herself. The French government, at the request of
the King of Prussia, banished Marx from its dominions; and from
that day until he had become an old man he was a wanderer and an
exile, with few friends and little money, sustained by nothing but
Jenny's fidelity and by his infinite faith in a cause that crushed
him to the earth.

There is a curious parallel between the life of Marx and that of
Richard Wagner down to the time when the latter discovered a royal
patron. Both of them were hounded from country to country; both of
them worked laboriously for so scanty a living as to verge, at
times, upon starvation. Both of them were victims to a cause in
which they earnestly believed--an economic cause in the one case,
an artistic cause in the other. Wagner's triumph came before his
death, and the world has accepted his theory of the music-drama.
The cause of Marx is far greater and more tremendous, because it
strikes at the base of human life and social well-being.

The clash between Wagner and his critics was a matter of poetry
and dramatic music. It was not vital to the human race. The cause
of Marx is one that is only now beginning to be understood and
recognized by millions of men and women in all the countries of
the earth. In his lifetime he issued a manifesto that has become a
classic among economists. He organized the great International
Association of Workmen, which set all Europe in a blaze and
extended even to America. His great book, "Capital"--Das Kapital--
which was not completed until the last years of his life, is read
to-day by thousands as an almost sacred work.

Like Wagner and his Minna, the wife of Marx's youth clung to him
through his utmost vicissitudes, denying herself the necessities
of life so that he might not starve. In London, where he spent his
latest days, he was secure from danger, yet still a sort of
persecution seemed to follow him. For some time, nothing that he
wrote could find a printer. Wherever he went, people looked at him
askance. He and his six children lived upon the sum of five
dollars a week, which was paid him by the New York Tribune,
through the influence of the late Charles A. Dana. When his last
child was born, and the mother's life was in serious danger, Marx
complained that there was no cradle for the baby, and a little
later that there was no coffin for its burial.

Marx had ceased to believe in marriage, despised the church, and
cared nothing for government. Yet, unlike Wagner, he was true to
the woman who had given up so much for him. He never sank to an
artistic degeneracy. Though he rejected creeds, he was
nevertheless a man of genuine religious feeling. Though he
believed all present government to be an evil, he hoped to make it
better, or rather he hoped to substitute for it a system by which
all men might get an equal share of what it is right and just for
them to have.

Such was Marx, and thus he lived and died. His wife, who had long
been cut off from her relatives, died about a year before him.
When she was buried, he stumbled and fell into her grave, and from
that time until his own death he had no further interest in life.

He had been faithful to a woman and to a cause. That cause was so
tremendous as to overwhelm him. In sixty years only the first
great stirrings of it could be felt. Its teachings may end in
nothing, but only a century or more of effort and of earnest
striving can make it plain whether Karl Marx was a world-mover or
a martyr to a cause that was destined to be lost.





FERDINAND LASSALLE AND HELENE VON DONNIGES


The middle part of the nineteenth century is a period which has
become more or less obscure to most Americans and Englishmen. At
one end the thunderous campaigns of Napoleon are dying away. In
the latter part of the century we remember the gorgeousness of the
Tuileries, the four years' strife of our own Civil War, and then
the golden drift of peace with which the century ended. Between
these two extremes there is a stretch of history which seems to
lack interest for the average student of to-day.

In America, that was a period when we took little interest in the
movement of affairs on the continent of Europe. It would not be
easy, for instance, to imagine an American of 1840 cogitating on
problems of socialism, or trying to invent some new form of
arbeiterverein. General Choke was still swindling English
emigrants. The Young Columbian was still darting out from behind a
table to declare how thoroughly he defied the British lion. But
neither of these patriots, any more than their English compeers,
was seriously disturbed about the interests of the rest of the
world. The Englishman was contentedly singing "God Save the
Queen!" The American, was apostrophizing the bird of freedom with
the floridity of rhetoric that reached its climax in the "Pogram
Defiance." What the Dutchies and Frenchies were doing was little
more to an Englishman than to an American.

Continental Europe was a mystery to English-speaking people. Those
who traveled abroad took their own servants with them, spoke only
English, and went through the whole European maze with absolute
indifference. To them the socialist, who had scarcely received a
name, was an imaginary being. If he existed, he was only a sort of
offspring of the Napoleonic wars--a creature who had not yet
fitted into the ordinary course of things. He was an anomaly, a
person who howled in beer-houses, and who would presently be
regulated, either by the statesmen or by the police.

When our old friend, Mark Tapley, was making with his master a
homeward voyage to Britain, what did he know or even care about
the politics of France, or Germany, or Austria, or Russia? Not the
slightest, you may he sure. Mark and his master represented the
complete indifference of the Englishman or American--not
necessarily a well-bred indifference, but an indifference that was
insular on the one hand and republican on the other. If either of
them had heard of a gentleman who pillaged an unmarried lady's
luggage in order to secure a valuable paper for another lady, who
was married, they would both have looked severely at this abnormal
person, and the American would doubtless have added a remark which
had something to do with the matchless purity of Columbia's
daughters.

If, again, they had been told that Ferdinand Lassalle had joined
in the great movement initiated by Karl Marx, it is absolutely
certain that neither the Englishman nor the American could have
given you the slightest notion as to who these individuals were.
Thrones might be tottering all over Europe; the red flag might
wave in a score of cities--what would all this signify, so long as
Britannia ruled the waves, while Columbia's feathered emblem
shrieked defiance three thousand miles away?

And yet few more momentous events have happened in a century than
the union which led one man to give his eloquence to the social
cause, and the other to suffer for that cause until his death.
Marx had the higher thought, but his disciple Lassalle had the
more attractive way of presenting it. It is odd that Marx, today,
should lie in a squalid cemetery, while the whole western world
echoes with his praises, and that Lassalle--brilliant, clear-
sighted, and remarkable for his penetrating genius--should have
lived in luxury, but should now know nothing but oblivion, even
among those who shouted at his eloquence and ran beside him in the
glory of his triumph.

Ferdinand Lassalle was a native of Breslau, the son of a wealthy
Jewish silk-merchant. Heymann Lassal--for thus the father spelled
his name--stroked his hands at young Ferdinand's cleverness, but
he meant it to be a commercial cleverness. He gave the boy a
thorough education at the University of Breslau, and later at
Berlin. He was an affectionate parent, and at the same time
tyrannical to a degree.

It was the old story where the father wishes to direct every step
that his son takes, and where the son, bursting out into youthful
manhood, feels that he has the right to freedom. The father thinks
how he has toiled for the son; the son thinks that if this toil
were given for love, it should not be turned into a fetter and
restraint. Young Lassalle, instead of becoming a clever silk-
merchant, insisted on a university career, where he studied
earnestly, and was admitted to the most cultured circles.

Though his birth was Jewish, he encountered little prejudice
against his race. Napoleon had changed the old anti-Semitic
feeling of fifty years before to a liberalism that was just
beginning to be strongly felt in Germany, as it had already been
in France. This was true in general, but especially true of
Lassalle, whose features were not of a Semitic type, who made
friends with every one, and who was a favorite in many salons. His
portraits make him seem a high-bred and high-spirited Prussian,
with an intellectual and clean-cut forehead; a face that has a
sense of humor, and yet one capable of swift and cogent thought.

No man of ordinary talents could have won the admiration of so
many compeers. It is not likely that such a keen and cynical
observer as Heinrich Heine would have written as he did concerning
Lassalle, had not the latter been a brilliant and magnetic youth.
Heine wrote to Varnhagen von Ense, the German historian:

My friend, Herr Lassalle, who brings you this letter, is a young
man of remarkable intellectual gifts. With the most thorough
erudition, with the widest learning, with the greatest penetration
that I have ever known, and with the richest gift of exposition,
he combines an energy of will and a capacity for action which
astonish me. In no one have I found united so much enthusiasm and
practical intelligence.

No better proof of Lassalle's enthusiasm can be found than a few
lines from his own writings:

I love Heine. He is my second self. What audacity! What
overpowering eloquence! He knows how to whisper like a zephyr when
it kisses rose-blooms, how to breathe like fire when it rages and
destroys; he calls forth all that is tenderest and softest, and
then all that is fiercest and most daring. He has the sweep of the
whole lyre!

Lassalle's sympathy with Heine was like his sympathy with every
one whom he knew. This was often misunderstood. It was
misunderstood in his relations with women, and especially in the
celebrated affair of the Countess von Hatzfeldt, which began in
the year 1846--that is to say, in the twenty-first year of
Lassalle's age.

In truth, there was no real scandal in the matter, for the
countess was twice the age of Lassalle. It was precisely because
he was so young that he let his eagerness to defend a woman in
distress make him forget the ordinary usage of society, and expose
himself to mean and unworthy criticism which lasted all his life.
It began by his introduction to the Countess von Hatzfeldt, a lady
who was grossly ill-treated by her husband. She had suffered
insult and imprisonment in the family castles; the count had
deprived her of medicine when she was ill, and had forcibly taken
away her children. Besides this, he was infatuated with another
woman, a baroness, and wasted his substance upon her even contrary
to the law which protected his children's rights.

The countess had a son named Paul, of whom Lassalle was extremely
fond. There came to the boy a letter from the Count von Hatzfeldt
ordering him to leave his mother. The countess at once sent for
Lassalle, who brought with him two wealthy and influential
friends--one of them a judge of a high Prussian court--and
together they read the letter which Paul had just received. They
were deeply moved by the despair of the countess, and by the
cruelty of her dissolute husband in seeking to separate the mother
from her son.

In his chivalrous ardor Lassalle swore to help the countess, and
promised that he would carry on the struggle with her husband to
the bitter end. He took his two friends with him to Berlin, and
then to Dusseldorf, for they discovered that the Count von
Hatzfeldt was not far away. He was, in fact, at Aix-la-Chapelle
with the baroness.

Lassalle, who had the scent of a greyhound, pried about until he
discovered that the count had given his mistress a legal document,
assigning to her a valuable piece of property which, in the
ordinary course of law, should be entailed on the boy, Paul. The
countess at once hastened to the place, broke into her husband's
room, and secured a promise that the deed would be destroyed.

No sooner, however, had she left him than he returned to the
baroness, and presently it was learned that the woman had set out
for Cologne.

Lassalle and his two friends followed, to ascertain whether the
document had really been destroyed. The three reached a hotel at
Cologne, where the baroness had just arrived. Her luggage, in
fact, was being carried upstairs. One of Lassalle's friends opened
a trunk, and, finding a casket there, slipped it out to his
companion, the judge.

Unfortunately, the latter had no means of hiding it, and when the
baroness's servant shouted for help, the casket was found in the
possession of the judge, who could give no plausible account of
it. He was, therefore, arrested, as were the other two. There was
no evidence against Lassalle; but his friends fared badly at the
trial, one of them being imprisoned for a year and the other for
five years.

From this time Lassalle, with an almost quixotic devotion, gave
himself up to fighting the Countess von Hatzfeldt's battle against
her husband in the law-courts. The ablest advocates were pitted
against him. The most eloquent legal orators thundered at him and
at his client, but he met them all with a skill, an audacity, and
a brilliant wit that won for him verdict after verdict. The case
went from the lower to the higher tribunals, until, after nine
years, it reached the last court of appeal, where Lassalle wrested
from his opponents a magnificently conclusive victory--one that
made the children of the countess absolutely safe. It was a battle
fought with the determination of a soldier, with the gallantry of
a knight errant, and the intellectual acumen of a learned lawyer.

It is not surprising that many refuse to believe that Lassalle's
feeling toward the Countess von Hatzfeldt was a disinterested one.
A scandalous pamphlet, which was published in French, German, and
Russian, and written by one who styled herself "Sophie Solutzeff,"
did much to spread the evil report concerning Lassalle. But the
very openness and frankness of the service which he did for the
countess ought to make it clear that his was the devotion of a
youth drawn by an impulse into a strife where there was nothing
for him to gain, but everything to lose. He denounced the
brutality of her husband, but her letters to him always addressed
him as "my dear child." In writing to her he confides small love-
secrets and ephemeral flirtations--which he would scarcely have
done, had the countess viewed him with the eye of passion.

Lassalle was undoubtedly a man of impressionable heart, and had
many affairs such as Heine had; but they were not deep or lasting.
That he should have made a favorable impression on the women whom
he met is not surprising, because of his social standing, his
chivalry, his fine manners, and his handsome face. Mr. Clement
Shorter has quoted an official document which describes him as he
was in his earlier years:

Ferdinand Lassalle, aged twenty-three, a civilian born at Breslau
and dwelling recently at Berlin. He stands five feet six inches in
height, has brown, curly hair, open forehead, brown eyebrows, dark
blue eyes, well proportioned nose and mouth, and rounded chin.

We ought not to be surprised, then, if he was a favorite in
drawing-rooms; if both men and women admired him; if Alexander von
Humboldt cried out with enthusiasm that he was a wunderkind, and
if there were more than Sophie Solutzeff to be jealous. But the
rather ungrateful remark of the Countess von Hatzfeldt certainly
does not represent him as he really was.

"You are without reason and judgment where women are concerned,"
she snarled at him; but the sneer only shows that the woman who
uttered it was neither in love with him nor grateful to him.

In this paper we are not discussing Lassalle as a public agitator
or as a Socialist, but simply in his relations with the two women
who most seriously affected his life. The first was the Countess
von Hatzfeldt, who, as we have seen, occupied--or rather wasted--
nine of the best years of his life. Then came that profound and
thrilling passion which ended the career of a man who at thirty-
nine had only just begun to be famous.

Lassalle had joined his intellectual forces with those of Heine
and Marx. He had obtained so great an influence over the masses of
the people as to alarm many a monarch, and at the same time to
attract many a statesman. Prince Bismarck, for example, cared
nothing for Lassalle's championship of popular rights, but sought
his aid on finding that he was an earnest advocate of German
unity.

Furthermore, he was very far from resembling what in those early
days was regarded as the typical picture of a Socialist. There was
nothing frowzy about him; in his appearance he was elegance
itself; his manners were those of a prince, and his clothing was
of the best. Seeing him in a drawing-room, no one would mistake
him for anything but a gentleman and a man of parts. Hence it is
not surprising that his second love was one of the nobility,
although her own people hated Lassalle as a bearer of the red
flag.

This girl was Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian
diplomat. As a child she had traveled much, especially in Italy
and in Switzerland. She was very precocious, and lived her own
life without asking the direction of any one. At twelve years of
age she had been betrothed to an Italian of forty; but this dark
and pedantic person always displeased her, and soon afterward,
when she met a young Wallachian nobleman, one Yanko Racowitza, she
was ready at once to dismiss her Italian lover. Racowitza--young,
a student, far from home, and lacking friends--appealed at once to
the girl's sympathy.

At that very time, in Berlin, where Helene was visiting her
grandmother, she was asked by a Prussian baron:

"Do you know Ferdinand Lassalle?"

The question came to her with a peculiar shock. She had never
heard the name, and yet the sound of it gave her a strange
emotion. Baron Korff, who perhaps took liberties because she was
so young, went on to say:

"My dear lady, have you really never seen Lassalle? Why, you and
he were meant for each other!"

She felt ashamed to ask about him, but shortly after a gentleman
who knew her said:

"It is evident that you have a surprising degree of intellectual
kinship with Ferdinand Lassalle."

This so excited her curiosity that she asked her grandmother:

"Who is this person of whom they talk so much--this Ferdinand
Lassalle?"

"Do not speak of him," replied her grandmother. "He is a shameless
demagogue!"

A little questioning brought to Helene all sorts of stories about
Lassalle--the Countess von Hatzfeldt, the stolen casket, the
mysterious pamphlet, the long battle in the courts--all of which
excited her still more. A friend offered to introduce her to the
"shameless demagogue." This introduction happened at a party, and
it must have been an extraordinary meeting. Seldom, it seemed, was
there a better instance of love at first sight, or of the true
affinity of which Baron Korff had spoken. In the midst of the
public gathering they almost rushed into each other's arms; they
talked the free talk of acknowledged lovers; and when she left, he
called her love-names as he offered her his arm.

"Somehow it did not appear at all remarkable," she afterward
declared. "We seemed to be perfectly fitted to each other."

Nevertheless, nine months passed before they met again at a
soiree. At this time Lassaller gazing upon her, said:

"What would you do if I were sentenced to death?"

"I should wait until your head was severed," was her answer, "in
order that you might look upon your beloved to the last, and then
--I should take poison!"

Her answer delighted him, but he said that there was no danger. He
was greeted on every hand with great consideration; and it seemed
not unlikely that, in recognition of his influence with the
people, he might rise to some high position. The King of Prussia
sympathized with him. Heine called him the Messiah of the
nineteenth century. When he passed from city to city, the whole
population turned out to do him honor. Houses were wreathed;
flowers were thrown in masses upon him, while the streets were
spanned with triumphal arches.

Worn out with the work and excitement attending the birth of the
Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or workmen's union, which he founded in
1863, Lassalle fled for a time to Switzerland for rest. Helene
heard of his whereabouts, and hurried to him, with several
friends. They met again on July 25,1864, and discussed long and
intensely the possibilities of their marriage and the opposition
of her parents, who would never permit her to marry a man who was
at once a Socialist and a Jew.

Then comes a pitiful story of the strife between Lassalle and the
Donniges family. Helene's father and mother indulged in vulgar
words; they spoke of Lassalle with contempt; they recalled all the
scandals that had been current ten years before, and forbade
Helene ever to mention the man's name again.

The next scene in the drama took place in Geneva, where the family
of Herr von Donniges had arrived, and where Helene's sister had
been betrothed to Count von Keyserling--a match which filled her
mother with intense joy. Her momentary friendliness tempted Helene
to speak of her unalterable love for Lassalle. Scarcely had the
words been spoken when her father and mother burst into abuse and
denounced Lassalle as well as herself.

She sent word of this to Lassalle, who was in a hotel near by.
Scarcely had he received her letter, when Helene herself appeared
upon the scene, and with all the intensity of which she was
possessed, she begged him to take her wherever he chose. She would
go with him to France, to Italy--to the ends of the earth!

What a situation, and yet how simple a one for a man of spirit! It
is strange to have to record that to Lassalle it seemed most
difficult. He felt that he or she, or both of them, had been
compromised. Had she a lady with her? Did she know any one in the
neighborhood?

What an extraordinary answer! If she were compromised, all the
more ought he to have taken her in his arms and married her at
once, instead of quibbling and showing himself a prig.

Presently, her maid came in to tell them that a carriage was ready
to take them to the station, whence a train would start for Paris
in a quarter of an hour. Helene begged him. with a feeling that
was beginning to be one of shame. Lassalle repelled her in words
that were to stamp him with a peculiar kind of cowardice.

Why should he have stopped to think of anything except the
beautiful woman who was at his feet, and to whom he had pledged
his love? What did he care for the petty diplomat who was her
father, or the vulgar-tongued woman who was her mother? He should
have hurried her and the maid into the train for Paris, and have
forgotten everything in the world but his Helene, glorious among
women, who had left everything for him.

What was the sudden failure, the curious weakness, the paltriness
of spirit that came at the supreme moment into the heart of this
hitherto strong man? Here was the girl whom he loved, driven from
her parents, putting aside all question of appearances, and
clinging to him with a wild and glorious desire to give herself to
him and to be all his own! That was a thing worthy of a true
woman. And he? He shrinks from her and cowers and acts like a
simpleton. His courage seems to have dribbled through his finger-
tips; he is no longer a man--he is a thing.

Out of all the multitude of Lassalle's former admirers, there is
scarcely one who has ventured to defend him, much less to laud
him; and when they have done so, their voices have had a sound of
mockery that dies away in their own throats.

Helene, on her side, had compromised herself, and even from the
view-point of her parents it was obvious that she ought to be
married immediately. Her father, however, confined her to her room
until it was understood that Lassalle had left Geneva. Then her
family's supplications, the statement that her sister's marriage
and even her father's position were in danger, led her to say that
she would give up Lassalle.

It mattered very little, in one way, for whatever he might have
done, Lassalle had killed, or at least had chilled, her love. His
failure at the moment of her great self-sacrifice had shown him to
her as he really was--no bold and gallant spirit, but a cringing,
spiritless self-seeker. She wrote him a formal letter to the
effect that she had become reconciled to her "betrothed
bridegroom"; and they never met again.

Too late, Lassalle gave himself up to a great regret. He went
about trying to explain his action to his friends, but he could
say nothing that would ease his feeling and reinstate him in the
eyes of the romantic girl. In a frenzy, he sought out the
Wallachian student, Yanko von Racowitza, and challenged him to a
mortal duel. He also challenged Helene's father. Years before, he
had on principle declined to fight a duel; but now he went raving
about as if he sought the death of every one who knew him.

The duel was fought on August 28, 1864. There was some trouble
about pistols, and also about seconds; but finally the combatants
left a small hotel in a village near Geneva, and reached the
dueling-grounds. Lassalle was almost joyous in his manner. His old
confidence had come back to him; he meant to kill his man.

They took their stations high up among the hills. A few spectators
saw their figures outlined against the sky. The command to fire
rang out, and from both pistols gushed the flame and smoke.

A moment later, Lassalle was seen to sway and fall. A chance shot,
glancing from a wall, had struck him to the ground. He suffered
terribly, and nothing but opium in great doses could relieve his
pain. His wound was mortal, and three days later he died.

Long after, Helene admitted that she still loved Lassalle, and
believed that he would win the duel; but after the tragedy, the
tenderness and patience of Racowitza won her heart. She married
him, but within a year he died of consumption. Helene, being
disowned by her relations, prepared herself for the stage. She
married a third husband named Shevitch, who was then living in the
United States, but who has since made his home in Russia.

Let us say nothing of Lassalle's political career. Except for his
work as one of the early leaders of the liberal movement in
Germany, it has perished, and his name has been almost forgotten.
As a lover, his story stands out forever as a warning to the timid
and the recreant. Let men do what they will; but there is just one
thing which no man is permitted to do with safety in the sight of
woman--and that is to play the craven.





THE STORY OF RACHEL


Outside of the English-speaking peoples the nineteenth century
witnessed the rise and triumphant progress of three great tragic
actresses. The first two of these--Rachel Felix and Sarah
Bernhardt--were of Jewish extraction; the third, Eleanor Duse, is
Italian. All of them made their way from pauperism to fame; but
perhaps the rise of Rachel was the most striking.

In the winter of 1821 a wretched peddler named Abraham--or Jacob--
Felix sought shelter at a dilapidated inn at Mumpf, a village in
Switzerland, not far from Basel. It was at the close of a stormy
day, and his small family had been toiling through the snow and
sleet. The inn was the lowest sort of hovel, and yet its
proprietor felt that it was too good for these vagabonds. He
consented to receive them only when he learned that the peddler's
wife was to be delivered of a child. That very night she became
the mother of a girl, who was at first called Elise. So
unimportant was the advent of this little waif into the world that
the burgomaster of Mumpf thought it necessary to make an entry
only of the fact that a peddler's wife had given birth to a female
child. There was no mention of family or religion, nor was the
record anything more than a memorandum.

Under such circumstances was born a child who was destined to
excite the wonder of European courts--to startle and thrill and
utterly amaze great audiences by her dramatic genius. But for ten
years the family--which grew until it consisted of one son and
five daughters--kept on its wanderings through Switzerland and
Germany. Finally, they settled down in Lyons, where the mother
opened a little shop for the sale of second-hand clothing. The
husband gave lessons in German whenever he could find a pupil. The
eldest daughter went about the cafes in the evening, singing the
songs that were then popular, while her small sister, Rachel,
collected coppers from those who had coppers to spare.

Although the family was barely able to sustain existence, the
father and mother were by no means as ignorant as their squalor
would imply. The peddler Felix had studied Hebrew theology in the
hope of becoming a rabbi. Failing this, he was always much
interested in declamation, public reading, and the recitation of
poetry. He was, in his way, no mean critic of actors and
actresses. Long before she was ten years of age little Rachel--who
had changed her name from Elise--could render with much feeling
and neatness of eloquence bits from the best-known French plays of
the classic stage.

The children's mother, on her side, was sharp and practical to a
high degree. She saved and scrimped all through her period of
adversity. Later she was the banker of her family, and would never
lend any of her children a sou except on excellent security.
However, this was all to happen in after years.

When the child who was destined to be famous had reached her tenth
year she and her sisters made their way to Paris. For four years
the second-hand clothing-shop was continued; the father still
taught German; and the elder sister, Sarah, who had a golden
voice, made the rounds of the cafes in the lowest quarters of the
capital, while Rachel passed the wooden plate for coppers.

One evening in the year 1834 a gentleman named Morin, having been
taken out of his usual course by a matter of business, entered a
BRASSERIE for a cup of coffee. There he noted two girls, one of
them singing with remarkable sweetness, and the other silently
following with the wooden plate. M. Morin called to him the girl
who sang and asked her why she did not make her voice more
profitable than by haunting the cafes at night, where she was sure
to meet with insults of the grossest kind.

"Why," said Sarah, "I haven't anybody to advise me what to do."

M. Morin gave her his address and said that he would arrange to
have her meet a friend who would be of great service to her. On
the following day he sent the two girls to a M. Choron, who was
the head of the Conservatory of Sacred Music. Choron had Sarah
sing, and instantly admitted her as a pupil, which meant that she
would soon be enrolled among the regular choristers. The beauty of
her voice made a deep impression on him.

Then he happened to notice the puny, meager child who was standing
near her sister. Turning to her, he said:

"And what can you do, little one?"

"I can recite poetry," was the reply.

"Oh, can you?" said he. "Please let me hear you."

Rachel readily consented. She had a peculiarly harsh, grating
voice, so that any but a very competent judge would have turned
her away. But M. Choron, whose experience was great, noted the
correctness of her accent and the feeling which made itself felt
in every line. He accepted her as well as her sister, but urged
her to study elocution rather than music.

She must, indeed, have had an extraordinary power even at the age
of fourteen, since not merely her voice but her whole appearance
was against her. She was dressed in a short calico frock of a
pattern in which red was spotted with white. Her shoes were of
coarse black leather. Her hair was parted at the back of her head
and hung down her shoulders in two braids, framing the long,
childish, and yet gnome-like face, which was unusual in its
gravity.

At first she was little thought of; but there came a time when she
astonished both her teachers and her companions by a recital which
she gave in public. The part was the narrative of Salema in the
"Abufar" of Ducis. It describes the agony of a mother who gives
birth to a child while dying of thirst amid the desert sands. Mme.
de Barviera has left a description of this recital, which it is
worth while to quote:

While uttering the thrilling tale the thin face seemed to lengthen
with horror, the small, deep-set black eyes dilated with a fixed
stare as though she witnessed the harrowing scene; and the deep,
guttural tones, despite a slight Jewish accent, awoke a nameless
terror in every one who listened, carrying him through the
imaginary woe with a strange feeling of reality, not to be shaken,
off as long as the sounds lasted.

Even yet, however, the time had not come for any conspicuous
success. The girl was still so puny in form, so monkey-like in
face, and so gratingly unpleasant in her tones that it needed time
for her to attain her full growth and to smooth away some of the
discords in her peculiar voice.

Three years later she appeared at the Gymnase in a regular debut;
yet even then only the experienced few appreciated her greatness.
Among these, however, were the well-known critic Jules Janin, the
poet and novelist Gauthier, and the actress Mlle. Mars. They saw
that this lean, raucous gutter-girl had within her gifts which
would increase until she would he first of all actresses on the
French stage. Janin wrote some lines which explain the secret of
her greatness:

All the talent in the world, especially when continually applied
to the same dramatic works, will not satisfy continually the
hearer. What pleases in a great actor, as in all arts that appeal
to the imagination, is the unforeseen. When I am utterly ignorant
of what is to happen, when I do not know, when you yourself do not
know what will be your next gesture, your next look, what passion
will possess your heart, what outcry will burst from your terror-
stricken soul, then, indeed, I am willing to see you daily, for
each day you will be new to me. To-day I may blame, to-morrow
praise. Yesterday you were all-powerful; to-morrow, perhaps, you
may hardly win from me a word of admiration. So much the better,
then, if you draw from me unexpected tears, if in my heart you
strike an unknown fiber; but tell me not of hearing night after
night great artists who every time present the exact counterpart
of what they were on the preceding one.

It was at the Theatre Francais that she won her final acceptance
as the greatest of all tragedians of her time. This was in her
appearance in Corneille's famous play of "Horace." She had now, in
1838, blazed forth with a power that shook her no, less than it
stirred the emotions and the passions of her hearers. The princes
of the royal blood came in succession to see her. King Louis
Philippe himself was at last tempted by curiosity to be present.
Gifts of money and jewels were showered on her, and through sheer
natural genius rather than through artifice she was able to master
a great audience and bend it to her will.

She had no easy life, this girl of eighteen years, for other
actresses carped at her, and she had had but little training. The
sordid ways of her old father excited a bitterness which was
vented on the daughter. She was still under age, and therefore was
treated as a gold-mine by her exacting parents. At the most she
could play but twice a week. Her form was frail and reed-like. She
was threatened with a complaint of the lungs; yet all this served
to excite rather than to diminish public interest in her. The
newspapers published daily bulletins of her health, and her door
was besieged by anxious callers who wished to know her condition.
As for the greed of her parents, every one said she was not to
blame for that. And so she passed from poverty to riches, from
squalor to something like splendor, and from obscurity to fame.

Much has been written about her that is quite incorrect. She has
been credited with virtues which she never possessed; and, indeed,
it may be said with only too much truth that she possessed no
virtues whatsoever. On the stage while the inspiration lasted she
was magnificent. Off the stage she was sly, treacherous,
capricious, greedy, ungrateful, ignorant, and unchaste. With such
an ancestry as she had, with such an early childhood as had been
hers, what else could one expect from her?

She and her old mother wrangled over money like two pickpockets.
Some of her best friends she treated shamefully. Her avarice was
without bounds. Some one said that it was not really avarice, but
only a reaction from generosity; but this seems an exceedingly
subtle theory. It is possible to give illustrations of it,
however. She did, indeed, make many presents with a lavish hand;
yet, having made a present, she could not rest until she got it
back. The fact was so well known that her associates took it for
granted. The younger Dumas once received a ring from her.
Immediately he bowed low and returned it to her finger, saying:

"Permit me, mademoiselle, to present it to you in my turn so as to
save you the embarrassment of asking for it."

Mr. Vandam relates among other anecdotes about her that one
evening she dined at the house of Comte Duchatel. The table was
loaded with the most magnificent flowers; but Rachel's keen eyes
presently spied out the great silver centerpiece. Immediately she
began to admire the latter; and the count, fascinated by her
manners, said that he would be glad to present it to her. She
accepted it at once, but was rather fearful lest he should change
his mind. She had come to dinner in a cab, and mentioned the fact.
The count offered to send her home in his carriage.

"Yes, that will do admirably," said she. "There will be no danger
of my being robbed of your present, which I had better take with
me."

"With pleasure, mademoiselle," replied the count. "But you will
send me back my carriage, won't you?"

Rachel had a curious way of asking every one she met for presents
and knickknacks, whether they were valuable or not. She knew how
to make them valuable.

Once in a studio she noticed a guitar hanging on the wall. She
begged for it very earnestly. As it was an old and almost
worthless instrument, it was given her. A little later it was
reported that the dilapidated guitar had been purchased by a well-
known gentleman for a thousand francs. The explanation soon
followed. Rachel had declared that it was the very guitar with
which she used to earn her living as a child in the streets of
Paris. As a memento its value sprang from twenty francs to a
thousand.

It has always been a mystery what Rachel did with the great sums
of money which she made in various ways. She never was well
dressed; and as for her costumes on the stage, they were furnished
by the theater. When her effects were sold at public auction after
her death her furniture was worse than commonplace, and her
pictures and ornaments were worthless, except such as had been
given her. She must have made millions of francs, and yet she had
very little to leave behind her.

Some say that her brother Raphael, who acted as her personal
manager, was a spendthrift; but if so, there are many reasons for
thinking that it was not his sister's money that he spent. Others
say that Rachel gambled in stocks, but there is no evidence of it.
The only thing that is certain is the fact that she was almost
always in want of money. Her mother, in all probability, managed
to get hold of most of her earnings.

Much may have been lost through her caprices. One instance may be
cited. She had received an offer of three hundred thousand francs
to act at St. Petersburg, and was on her way there when she passed
through Potsdam, near Berlin. The King of Prussia was entertaining
the Russian Czar. An invitation was sent to her in the shape of a
royal command to appear before these monarchs and their guests.
For some reason or other Rachel absolutely refused. She would
listen to no arguments. She would go on to St. Petersburg without
delay.

"But," it was said to her, "if you refuse to appear before the
Czar at Potsdam all the theaters in St. Petersburg will be closed
against you, because you will have insulted the emperor. In this
way you will be out the expenses of your journey and also the
three hundred thousand francs."

Rachel remained stubborn as before; but in about half an hour she
suddenly declared that she would recite before the two monarchs,
which she subsequently did, to the satisfaction of everybody. Some
one said to her not long after:

"I knew that you would do it. You weren't going to give up the
three hundred thousand francs and all your travelling expenses."

"You are quite wrong," returned Rachel, "though of course you will
not believe me. I did not care at all about the money and was
going back to France. It was something that I heard which made me
change my mind. Do you want to know what it was? Well, after all
the arguments were over some one informed me that the Czar
Nicholas was the handsomest man in Europe; and so I made up my
mind that I would stay in Potsdam long enough to see him."

This brings us to one phase of Rachel's nature which is rather
sinister. She was absolutely hard. She seemed to have no emotions
except those which she exhibited on the stage or the impish
perversity which irritated so many of those about her. She was in
reality a product of the gutter, able to assume a demure and
modest air, but within coarse, vulgar, and careless of decency.
Yet the words of Jules Janin, which have been quoted above,
explain how she could be personally very fascinating.

In all Rachel's career one can detect just a single strand of real
romance. It is one that makes us sorry for her, because it tells
us that her love was given where it never could be openly
requited.

During the reign of Louis Philippe the Comte Alexandre Walewski
held many posts in the government. He was a son of the great
Napoleon. His mother was that Polish countess who had accepted
Napoleon's love because she hoped that he might set Poland free at
her desire. But Napoleon was never swerved from his well-
calculated plans by the wish of any woman, and after a time the
Countess Walewska came to love him for himself. It was she to whom
he confided secrets which he would not reveal to his own brothers.
It was she who followed him to Elba in disguise. It was her son
who was Napoleon's son, and who afterward, under the Second
Empire, was made minister of fine arts, minister of foreign
affairs, and, finally, an imperial duke. Unlike the third
Napoleon's natural half-brother, the Duc de Moray, Walewski was a
gentleman of honor and fine feeling. He never used his
relationship to secure advantages for himself. He tried to live in
a manner worthy of the great warrior who was his father.

As minister of fine arts he had much to do with the subsidized
theaters; and in time he came to know Rachel. He was the son of
one of the greatest men who ever lived. She was the child of
roving peddlers whose early training had been in the slums of
cities and amid the smoke of bar-rooms and cafes. She was tainted
in a thousand ways, while he was a man of breeding and right
principle. She was a wandering actress; he was a great minister of
state. What could there be between these two?

George Sand gave the explanation in an epigram which, like most
epigrams, is only partly true. She said:

"The count's company must prove very restful to Rachel."

What she meant was, of course, that Walewski's breeding, his
dignity and uprightness, might be regarded only as a temporary
repose for the impish, harsh-voiced, infinitely clever actress. Of
course, it was all this, but we should not take it in a mocking
sense. Rachel looked up out of her depths and gave her heart to
this high-minded nobleman. He looked down and lifted her, as it
were, so that she could forget for the time all the baseness and
the brutality that she had known, that she might put aside her
forced vivacity and the self that was not in reality her own.

It is pitiful to think of these two, separated by a great abyss
which could not be passed except at times and hours when each was
free. But theirs was, none the less, a meeting of two souls,
strangely different in many ways, and yet appealing to each other
with a sincerity and truth which neither could show elsewhere.

The end of poor Rachel was one of disappointment. Tempted by the
fact that Jenny Lind had made nearly two million francs by her
visit to the United States, Rachel followed her, but with slight
success, as was to be expected. Music is enjoyed by human beings
everywhere, while French classical plays, even though acted by a
genius like Rachel, could be rightly understood only by a French-
speaking people. Thus it came about that her visit to America was
only moderately successful.

She returned to France, where the rising fame of Adelaide Ristori
was very bitter to Rachel, who had passed the zenith of her power.
She went to Egypt, but received no benefit, and in 1858 she died
near Cannes. The man who loved her, and whom she had loved in
turn, heard of her death with great emotion. He himself lived ten
years longer, and died a little while before the fall of the
Second Empire.






FAMOUS AFFINITIES OF HISTORY

THE ROMANCE OF DEVOTION

BY LYNDON ORR

VOLUME IV OF IV.

CONTENTS


DEAN SWIFT AND THE TWO ESTHERS
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
THE STORY OF THE CARLYLES
THE STORY OF THE HUGOS
THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND
THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS
HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA
CHARLES READE AND LAURA SEYMOUR





DEAN SWIFT AND THE TWO ESTHERS


The story of Jonathan Swift and of the two women who gave their
lives for love of him is familiar to every student of English
literature. Swift himself, both in letters and in politics, stands
out a conspicuous figure in the reigns of King William III and
Queen Anne. By writing Gulliver's Travels he made himself
immortal. The external facts of his singular relations with two
charming women are sufficiently well known; but a definite
explanation of these facts has never yet been given. Swift held
his tongue with a repellent taciturnity. No one ever dared to
question him. Whether the true solution belongs to the sphere of
psychology or of physiology is a question that remains unanswered.

But, as the case is one of the most puzzling in the annals of
love, it may be well to set forth the circumstances very briefly,
to weigh the theories that have already been advanced, and to
suggest another.

Jonathan Swift was of Yorkshire stock, though he happened to be
born in Dublin, and thus is often spoken of as "the great Irish
satirist," or "the Irish dean." It was, in truth, his fate to
spend much of his life in Ireland, and to die there, near the
cathedral where his remains now rest; but in truth he hated
Ireland and everything connected with it, just as he hated
Scotland and everything that was Scottish. He was an Englishman to
the core.

High-stomached, proud, obstinate, and over-mastering, independence
was the dream of his life. He would accept no favors, lest he
should put himself under obligation; and although he could give
generously, and even lavishly, he lived for the most part a
miser's life, hoarding every penny and halfpenny that he could.
Whatever one may think of him, there is no doubt that he was a
very manly man. Too many of his portraits give the impression of a
sour, supercilious pedant; but the finest of them all--that by
Jervas--shows him as he must have been at his very prime, with a
face that was almost handsome, and a look of attractive humor
which strengthens rather than lessens the power of his brows and
of the large, lambent eyes beneath them.

At fifteen he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, where he read
widely but studied little, so that his degree was finally granted
him only as a special favor. At twenty-one he first visited
England, and became secretary to Sir William Temple, at Moor Park.
Temple, after a distinguished career in diplomacy, had retired to
his fine country estate in Surrey. He is remembered now for
several things--for having entertained Peter the Great of Russia;
for having, while young, won the affections of Dorothy Osborne,
whose letters to him are charming in their grace and archness; for
having been the patron of Jonathan Swift; and for fathering the
young girl named Esther Johnson, a waif, born out of wedlock, to
whom Temple gave a place in his household.

When Swift first met her, Esther Johnson was only eight years old;
and part of his duties at Moor Park consisted in giving her what
was then an unusual education for a girl. She was, however, still
a child, and nothing serious could have passed between the raw
youth and this little girl who learned the lessons that he imposed
upon her.

Such acquaintance as they had was rudely broken off. Temple, a man
of high position, treated Swift with an urbane condescension which
drove the young man's independent soul into a frenzy. He returned
to Ireland, where he was ordained a clergyman, and received a
small parish at Kilroot, near Belfast.

It was here that the love-note was first seriously heard in the
discordant music of Swift's career. A college friend of his named
Waring had a sister who was about the age of Swift, and whom he
met quite frequently at Kilroot. Not very much is known of this
episode, but there is evidence that Swift fell in love with the
girl, whom he rather romantically called "Varina."

This cannot be called a serious love-affair. Swift was lonely, and
Jane Waring was probably the only girl of refinement who lived
near Kilroot. Furthermore, she had inherited a small fortune,
while Swift was miserably poor, and had nothing to offer except
the shadowy prospect of future advancement in England. He was
definitely refused by her; and it was this, perhaps, that led him
to resolve on going back to England and making his peace with Sir
William Temple.

On leaving, Swift wrote a passionate letter to Miss Waring--the
only true love-letter that remains to us of their correspondence.
He protests that he does not want Varina's fortune, and that he
will wait until he is in a position to marry her on equal terms.
There is a smoldering flame of jealousy running through the
letter. Swift charges her with being cold, affected, and willing
to flirt with persons who are quite beneath her.

Varina played no important part in Swift's larger life thereafter;
but something must be said of this affair in order to show, first
of all, that Swift's love for her was due only to proximity, and
that when he ceased to feel it he could be not only hard, but
harsh. His fiery spirit must have made a deep impression on Miss
Waring; for though she at the time refused him, she afterward
remembered him, and tried to renew their old relations. Indeed, no
sooner had Swift been made rector of a larger parish, than Varina
let him know that she had changed her mind, and was ready to marry
him; but by this time Swift had lost all interest in her. He wrote
an answer which even his truest admirers have called brutal.

"Yes," he said in substance, "I will marry you, though you have
treated me vilely, and though you are living in a sort of social
sink. I am still poor, though you probably think otherwise.
However, I will marry you on certain conditions. First, you must
be educated, so that you can entertain me. Next, you must put up
with all my whims and likes and dislikes. Then you must live
wherever I please. On these terms I will take you, without
reference to your looks or to your income. As to the first,
cleanliness is all that I require; as to the second, I only ask
that it be enough."

Such a letter as this was like a blow from a bludgeon. The
insolence, the contempt, and the hardness of it were such as no
self-respecting woman could endure. It put an end to their
acquaintance, as Swift undoubtedly intended it should do. He would
have been less censurable had he struck Varina with his fist or
kicked her.

The true reason for Swift's utter change of heart is found, no
doubt, in the beginning of what was destined to be his long
intimacy with Esther Johnson. When Swift left Sir William Temple's
in a huff, Esther had been a mere schoolgirl. Now, on his return,
she was fifteen years of age, and seemed older. She had blossomed
out into a very comely girl, vivacious, clever, and physically
well developed, with dark hair, sparkling eyes, and features that
were unusually regular and lovely.

For three years the two were close friends and intimate
associates, though it cannot he said that Swift ever made open
love to her. To the outward eye they were no more than fellow
workers. Yet love does not need the spoken word and the formal
declaration to give it life and make it deep and strong. Esther
Johnson, to whom Swift gave the pet name of "Stella," grew into
the existence of this fiery, hold, and independent genius. All
that he did she knew. She was his confidante. As to his writings,
his hopes, and his enmities, she was the mistress of all his
secrets. For her, at last, no other man existed.

On Sir William Temple's death, Esther John son came into a small
fortune, though she now lost her home at Moor Park. Swift returned
to Ireland, and soon afterward he invited Stella to join him
there.

Swift was now thirty-four years of age, and Stella a very
attractive girl of twenty. One might have expected that the two
would marry, and yet they did not do so. Every precaution was
taken to avoid anything like scandal. Stella was accompanied by a
friend--a widow named Mrs. Dingley--without whose presence, or
that of some third person, Swift never saw Esther Johnson. When
Swift was absent, how ever, the two ladies occupied his
apartments; and Stella became more than ever essential to his
happiness.

When they were separated for any length of time Swift wrote to
Stella in a sort of baby-talk, which they called "the little
language." It was made up of curious abbreviations and childish
words, growing more and more complicated as the years went on. It
is interesting to think of this stern and often savage genius, who
loved to hate, and whose hate was almost less terrible than his
love, babbling and prattling in little half caressing sentences,
as a mother might babble over her first child. Pedantic writers
have professed to find in Swift's use of this "little language"
the coming shadow of that insanity which struck him down in his
old age.

As it is, these letters are among the curiosities of amatory
correspondence. When Swift writes "oo" for "you," and "deelest"
for "dearest," and "vely" for "very," there is no need of an
interpreter; but "rettle" for "let ter," "dallars" for "girls,"
and "givar" for "devil," are at first rather difficult to guess.
Then there is a system of abbreviating. "Md" means "my dear,"
"Ppt" means "poppet," and "Pdfr," with which Swift sometimes
signed his epistles, "poor, dear, foolish rogue."

The letters reveal how very closely the two were bound together,
yet still there was no talk of marriage. On one occasion, after
they had been together for three years in Ireland, Stella might
have married another man. This was a friend of Swift's, one Dr.
Tisdall, who made energetic love to the sweet-faced English girl.
Tisdall accused Swift of poisoning Stella's mind against him.
Swift replied that such was not the case. He said that no feelings
of his own would ever lead him to influence the girl if she
preferred another.

It is quite sure, then, that Stella clung wholly to Swift, and
cared nothing for the proffered love of any other man. Thus
through the years the relations of the two remained unchanged,
until in 1710 Swift left Ireland and appeared as a very brilliant
figure in the London drawing-rooms of the great Tory leaders of
the day.

He was now a man of mark, because of his ability as a
controversialist. He had learned the manners of the world, and he
carried him self with an air of power which impressed all those
who met him. Among these persons was a Miss Hester--or Esther--
Vanhomrigh, the daughter of a rather wealthy widow who was living
in London at that time. Miss Vanhomrigh--a name which she and her
mother pronounced "Vanmeury"--was then seventeen years of age, or
twelve years younger than the patient Stella.

Esther Johnson, through her long acquaintance with Swift, and from
his confidence in her, had come to treat him almost as an
intellectual equal. She knew all his moods, some of which were
very difficult, and she bore them all; though when he was most
tyrannous she became only passive, waiting, with a woman's wisdom,
for the tempest to blow over.

Miss Vanhomrigh, on the other hand, was one of those girls who,
though they have high spirit, take an almost voluptuous delight in
yielding to a spirit that is stronger still. This beautiful
creature felt a positive fascination in Swift's presence and his
imperious manner. When his eyes flashed, and his voice thundered
out words of anger, she looked at him with adoration, and bowed in
a sort of ecstasy before him. If he chose to accost a great lady
with "Well, madam, are you as ill-natured and disagreeable as when
I met you last?" Esther Vanhomrigh thrilled at the insolent
audacity of the man. Her evident fondness for him exercised a
seductive influence over Swift.

As the two were thrown more and more together, the girl lost all
her self-control. Swift did not in any sense make love to her,
though he gave her the somewhat fanciful name of "Vanessa"; but
she, driven on by a high-strung, unbridled temperament, made open
love to him. When he was about to return to Ireland, there came
one startling moment when Vanessa flung herself into the arms of
Swift, and amazed him by pouring out a torrent of passionate
endearments.

Swift seems to have been surprised. He did what he could to quiet
her. He told her that they were too unequal in years and fortune
for anything but friendship, and he offered to give her as much
friendship as she desired.

Doubtless he thought that, after returning to Ireland, he would
not see Vanessa any more. In this, however, he was mistaken. An
ardent girl, with a fortune of her own, was not to be kept from
the man whom absence only made her love the more. In addition,
Swift carried on his correspondence with her, which served to fan
the flame and to increase the sway that Swift had already
acquired.

Vanessa wrote, and with every letter she burned and pined. Swift
replied, and each reply enhanced her yearning for him. Ere long,
Vanessa's mother died, and Vanessa herself hastened to Ireland and
took up her residence near Dublin. There, for years, was enacted
this tragic comedy--Esther Johnson was near Swift, and had all his
confidence; Esther Vanhomrigh was kept apart from him, while still
receiving missives from him, and, later, even visits.

It was at this time, after he had become dean of St. Patrick's
Cathedral, in Dublin, that Swift was married to Esther Johnson--
for it seems probable that the ceremony took place, though it was
nothing more than a form. They still saw each other only in the
presence of a third person. Nevertheless, some knowledge of their
close relationship leaked out. Stella had been jealous of her
rival during the years that Swift spent in London. Vanessa was now
told that Swift was married to the other woman, or that she was
his mistress. Writhing with jealousy, she wrote directly to
Stella, and asked whether she was Dean Swift's wife. In answer
Stella replied that she was, and then she sent Vanessa's letter to
Swift himself.

All the fury of his nature was roused in him; and he was a man who
could be very terrible when angry. He might have remembered the
intense love which Vanessa bore for him, the humility with which
she had accepted his conditions, and, finally, the loneliness of
this girl.

But Swift was utterly unsparing. No gleam of pity entered his
heart as he leaped upon a horse and galloped out to Marley Abbey,
where she was living--"his prominent eyes arched by jet-black
brows and glaring with the green fury of a cat's." Reaching the
house, he dashed into it, with something awful in his looks, made
his way to Vanessa, threw her letter down upon the table and,
after giving her one frightful glare, turned on his heel, and in a
moment more was galloping back to Dublin.

The girl fell to the floor in an agony of terror and remorse. She
was taken to her room, and only three weeks afterward was carried
forth, having died literally of a broken heart.

Five years later, Stella also died, withering away a sacrifice to
what the world has called Swift's cruel heartlessness and egotism.
His greatest public triumphs came to him in his final years of
melancholy isolation; but in spite of the applause that greeted
The Drapier Letters and Gulliver's Travels, he brooded morbidly
over his past life. At last his powerful mind gave way, so that he
died a victim to senile dementia. By his directions his body was
interred in the same coffin with Stella's, in the cathedral of
which he had been dean.

Such is the story of Dean Swift, and it has always suggested
several curious questions. Why, if he loved Stella, did he not
marry her long before? Why, when he married her, did he treat her
still as if she were not his wife? Why did he allow Vanessa's love
to run like a scarlet thread across the fabric of the other
affection, which must have been so strong?

Many answers have been given to these questions. That which was
formulated by Sir Walter Scott is a simple one, and has been
generally accepted. Scott believed that Swift was physically
incapacitated for marriage, and that he needed feminine sympathy,
which he took where he could get it, without feeling bound to give
anything in return.

If Scott's explanation be the true one, it still leaves Swift
exposed to ignominy as a monster of ingratitude. Therefore, many
of his biographers have sought other explanations. No one can
palliate his conduct toward Vanessa; but Sir Leslie Stephen makes
a plea for him with reference to Stella. Sir Leslie points out
that until Swift became dean of St. Patrick's his income was far
too small to marry on, and that after his brilliant but
disappointing three years in London, when his prospects of
advancement were ruined, he felt himself a broken man.

Furthermore, his health was always precarious, since he suffered
from a distressing illness which attacked him at intervals,
rendering him both deaf and giddy. The disease is now known as
Meniere's disease, from its classification by the French
physician, Meniere, in 1861. Swift felt that he lived in constant
danger of some sudden stroke that would deprive him either of life
or reason; and his ultimate insanity makes it appear that his
forebodings were not wholly futile. Therefore, though he married
Stella, he kept the marriage secret, thus leaving her free, in
case of his demise, to marry as a maiden, and not to be regarded
as a widow.

Sir Leslie offers the further plea that, after all, Stella's life
was what she chose to make it. She enjoyed Swift's friendship,
which she preferred to the love of any other man.

Another view is that of Dr. Richard Garnett, who has discussed the
question with some subtlety. "Swift," says Dr. Garnett, "was by
nature devoid of passion. He was fully capable of friendship, but
not of love. The spiritual realm, whether of divine or earthly
things, was a region closed to him, where he never set foot." On
the side of friendship he must greatly have preferred Stella to
Vanessa, and yet the latter assailed him on his weakest side--on
the side of his love of imperious domination.

Vanessa hugged the fetters to which Stella merely submitted.
Flattered to excess by her surrender, yet conscious of his
obligations and his real preference, he could neither discard the
one beauty nor desert the other.

Therefore, he temporized with both of them, and when the choice
was forced upon him he madly struck down the woman for whom he
cared the less.

One may accept Dr. Garnett's theory with a somewhat altered
conclusion. It is not true, as a matter of recorded fact, that
Swift was incapable of passion, for when a boy at college he was
sought out by various young women, and he sought them out in turn.
His fiery letter to Miss Waring points to the same conclusion.
When Esther Johnson began to love him he was heart-free, yet
unable, because of his straitened means, to marry. But Esther
Johnson always appealed more to his reason, his friendship, and
his comfort, than to his love, using the word in its material,
physical sense. This love was stirred in him by Vanessa. Yet when
he met Vanessa he had already gone too far with Esther Johnson to
break the bond which had so long united them, nor could he think
of a life without her, for she was to him his other self.

At the same time, his more romantic association with Vanessa
roused those instincts which he had scarcely known himself to be
possessed of. His position was, therefore, most embarrassing. He
hoped to end it when he left London and returned to Ireland; but
fate was unkind to him in this, because Vanessa followed him. He
lacked the will to be frank with her, and thus he stood a
wretched, halting victim of his own dual nature.

He was a clergyman, and at heart religious. He had also a sense of
honor, and both of these traits compelled him to remain true to
Esther Johnson. The terrible outbreak which brought about
Vanessa's death was probably the wild frenzy of a tortured soul.
It recalls the picture of some fierce animal brought at last to
bay, and venting its own anguish upon any object that is within
reach of its fangs and claws.

No matter how the story may be told, it makes one shiver, for it
is a tragedy in which the three participants all meet their doom--
one crushed by a lightning-bolt of unreasoning anger, the other
wasting away through hope deferred; while the man whom the world
will always hold responsible was himself destined to end his years
blind and sleepless, bequeathing his fortune to a madhouse, and
saying, with his last muttered breath:

"I am a fool!"





PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN


A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage;
and, in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing.
Young men and young women who have no special gift of imagination,
and who have practically reached their full mental development at
twenty-one or twenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may
marry safely; because they are already what they will be. They are
not going to experience any growth upward and outward. Passing
years simply bring them more closely together, until they have
settled down into a sort of domestic unity, by which they think
alike, act alike, and even gradually come to look alike.

But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of
genius. In their teens they have only begun to grow. What they
will be ten years hence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate
so early in life is to insure almost certain storm and stress,
and, in the end, domestic wreckage.

As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false
step; because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still
very young. If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and
unresponsive nature to match his own, it is he who is bound in the
course of time to learn his great mistake. When the splendid eagle
shall have got his growth, and shall begin to soar up into the
vault of heaven, the poor little barn-yard fowl that he once
believed to be his equal seems very far away in everything. He
discovers that she is quite unable to follow him in his towering
flights.

The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The
circumstances of his early marriage were strange. The breaking of
his marriage-bond was also strange. Shelley himself was an
extraordinary creature. He was blamed a great deal in his lifetime
for what he did, and since then some have echoed the reproach. Yet
it would seem as if, at the very beginning of his life, he was put
into a false position against his will. Because of this he was
misunderstood until the end of his brief and brilliant and erratic
career.

SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN

In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris
stormed the Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon
to await his execution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their
gauntlet of defiance into the face of Europe. In this tremendous
year was born young Shelley; and perhaps his nature represented
the spirit of the time.

Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he
derive that perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt
which blazed out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father,
Mr. Timothy Shelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic
English squire. His mother--a woman of much beauty, but of no
exceptional traits--was the daughter of another squire, and at the
time of her marriage was simply one of ten thousand fresh-faced,
pleasant-spoken English country girls. If we look for a strain of
the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, we shall have to find it in
the person of his grandfather, who was a very remarkable and
powerful character.

This person, Bysshe Shelley by name, had in his youth been
associated with some mystery. He was not born in England, but in
America--and in those days the name "America" meant almost
anything indefinite and peculiar. However this might be, Bysshe
Shelley, though a scion of a good old English family, had wandered
in strange lands, and it was whispered that he had seen strange
sights and done strange things. According to one legend, he had
been married in America, though no one knew whether his wife was
white or black, or how he had got rid of her.

He might have remained in America all his life, had not a small
inheritance fallen to his share. This brought him back to England,
and he soon found that England was in reality the place to make
his fortune. He was a man of magnificent physique. His rovings had
given him ease and grace, and the power which comes from a wide
experience of life. He could be extremely pleasing when he chose;
and he soon won his way into the good graces of a rich heiress,
whom he married.

With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted
with gentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself
particularly to the Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he
was made a baronet. When his rich wife died, Shelley married a
still richer bride; and so this man, who started out as a mere
adventurer without a shilling to his name, died in 1813, leaving
more than a million dollars in cash, with lands whose rent-roll
yielded a hundred thousand dollars every year.

If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter
of heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and
magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English
squire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native
sturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to
be English at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic
sports. He was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about
abstractions with which most schoolboys never concern themselves
at all.

Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he
became a sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-
system. He spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked
anything that he was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into
whatever was forbidden.

Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke
all bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality
on all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow
student, who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a
name that seems rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got
himself expelled from the university for publishing a little tract
of an infidel character called "A Defense of Atheism."

His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It
probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him
some satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He
went to London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He
read omnivorously--Hogg says as much as sixteen hours a day. He
would walk through the most crowded streets poring over a volume,
while holding another under one arm.

His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward
called "his passion for reforming everything." He despised most of
the laws of England. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He
hated its religion. He was particularly opposed to marriage. This
last fact gives some point to the circumstances which almost
immediately confronted him.

Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most
English boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still
in the hobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was
quite far from boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little
more than a mere child. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the
ways of men and women. He had no visible means of existence except
a small allowance from his father. His four sisters, who were at a
boarding-school on Clapham Common, used to save their pin-money
and send it to their gifted brother so that he might not actually
starve. These sisters he used to call upon from time to time, and
through them he made the acquaintance of a sixteen-year-old girl
named Harriet Westbrook.

Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a
coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly
because of his complexion, and partly because of his ability to
retain what he had made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had
sent his younger daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's
sisters studied.

Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any
girl of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature
than a youth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might
have been Shelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that
she fell in love with him; but, having done so, she by no means
acted in the shy and timid way that would have been most natural
to a very young girl in her first love-affair. Having decided that
she wanted him, she made up her mind to get Mm at any cost, and
her audacity was equaled only by his simplicity. She was rather
attractive in appearance, with abundant hair, a plump figure, and
a pink-and-white complexion. This description makes of her a
rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort to
attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that
beauty and charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and
infinitely superior to it.

In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious
manner and talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad
listener; and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his
rhapsodies about chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity,
the national debt, and human liberty, all of which he jumbled up
without much knowledge, but in a lyric strain of impassioned
eagerness which would probably have made the multiplication-table
thrilling.

For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination,
both then and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do
him justice, because they cannot convey that singular appeal which
the man himself made to almost every one who met him.

The eminent painter, Mulready, once said that Shelley was too
beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly
seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he
stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was
very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted
to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he
would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it
was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The
former were of a deep violet blue, and when Shelley felt deeply
moved they seemed luminous with a wonderful and almost unearthly
light. His mouth was finely chiseled, and might be regarded as
representing perfection.

One great defect he had, and this might well have overbalanced his
attractive face. The defect in question was his voice. One would
have expected to hear from him melodious sounds, and vocal tones
both rich and penetrating; but, as a matter of fact, his voice was
shrill at the very best, and became actually discordant and
peacock-like in moments of emotion.

Such, then, was Shelley, star-eyed, with the delicate complexion
of a girl, wonderfully mobile in his features, yet speaking in a
voice high pitched and almost raucous. For the rest, he arrayed
himself with care and in expensive clothing, even though he took
no thought of neatness, so that his garments were almost always
rumpled and wrinkled from his frequent writhings on couches and on
the floor. Shelley had a strange and almost primitive habit of
rolling on the earth, and another of thrusting his tousled head
close up to the hottest fire in the house, or of lying in the
glaring sun when out of doors. It is related that he composed one
of his finest poems--"The Cenci"--in Italy, while stretched out
with face upturned to an almost tropical sun.

But such as he was, and though he was not yet famous, Harriet
Westbrook, the rosy-faced schoolgirl, fell in love with him, and
rather plainly let him know that she had done so. There are a
thousand ways in which a woman can convey this information without
doing anything un-maidenly; and of all these little arts Miss
Westbrook was instinctively a mistress.

She played upon Shelley's feelings by telling him that her father
was cruel to her, and that he contemplated actions still more
cruel. There is something absurdly comical about the grievance
which she brought to Shelley; but it is much more comical to note
the tremendous seriousness with which he took it. He wrote to his
friend Hogg:

Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by
endeavoring to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice;
resistance was the answer. At the same time I essayed to mollify
Mr. Westbrook, in vain! I advised her to resist. She wrote to say
that resistance was useless, but that she would fly with me and
throw herself on my protection.

Some letters that have recently come to light show that there was
a dramatic scene between Harriet Westbrook and Shelley--a scene in
the course of which she threw her arms about his neck and wept
upon his shoulder. Here was a curious situation. Shelley was not
at all in love with her. He had explicitly declared this only a
short time before. Yet here was a pretty girl about to suffer the
"horrible persecution" of being sent to school, and finding no
alternative save to "throw herself on his protection"--in other
words, to let him treat her as he would, and to become his
mistress.

The absurdity of the situation makes one smile. Common sense
should have led some one to box Harriet's ears and send her off to
school without a moment's hesitation; while as for Shelley, he
should have been told how ludicrous was the whole affair. But he
was only nineteen, and she was only sixteen, and the crisis seemed
portentous. Nothing could be more flattering to a young man's
vanity than to have this girl cast herself upon him for
protection. It did not really matter that he had not loved her
hitherto, and that he was already half engaged to another Harriet
--his cousin, Miss Grove. He could not stop and reason with
himself. He must like a true knight rescue lovely girlhood from
the horrors of a school!

It is not unlikely that this whole affair was partly managed or
manipulated by the girl's father. Jew Westbrook knew that Shelley
was related to rich and titled people, and that he was certain, if
he lived, to become Sir Percy, and to be the heir of his
grandfather's estates. Hence it may be that Harriet's queer
conduct was not wholly of her own prompting.

In any case, however, it proved to be successful. Shelley's ardent
and impulsive nature could not bear to see a girl in tears and
appealing for his help. Hence, though in his heart she was very
little to him, his romantic nature gave up for her sake the
affection that he had felt for his cousin, his own disbelief in
marriage, and finally the common sense which ought to have told
him not to marry any one on two hundred pounds a year.

So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary
and most uncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish
capital, they were married by the Scottish law. Their money was
all gone; but their landlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance,
let them have a room, and treated them to a rather promiscuous
wedding-banquet, in which every one in the house participated.

Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen
with a girl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his
own better judgment and in the absence of any actual love.

The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little
thing. She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be
a real companion to him. But what could one expect from such a
union? Shelley's father withdrew the income which he had
previously given. Jew Westbrook refused to contribute anything,
hoping, probably, that this course would bring the Shelleys to the
rescue. But as it was, the young pair drifted about from place to
place, getting very precarious supplies, running deeper into debt
each day, and finding less and less to admire in each other.

Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies,
which she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only
puzzle her small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant
traits of the class to which she belonged. In this her sister
Eliza--a hard and grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She
set Harriet against her husband, and made life less endurable for
both. She was so much older than the pair that she came in and
ruled their household like a typical stepmother.

A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a
second form of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but
by this time there was little hope of righting things again.
Shelley was much offended because Harriet would not nurse the
child. He believed her hard because she saw without emotion an
operation performed upon the infant.

Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of
money, Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything
except the spending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and
display. In time--that is to say, in three years after their
marriage--Harriet left her husband and went to London and to Bath,
prompted by her elder sister.

This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was
brought to Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him.
He, on his side, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic
correspondence with a schoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But
until now his life had been one great mistake--a life of
restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of a desire that had no
name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting with the one whom
he should have met before.

Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer
and radical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one.
There was Fanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring
of Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant, and of Mary
Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin had subsequently married. There was
also a singularly striking girl who then styled herself Mary Jane
Clairmont, and who was afterward known as Claire Clairmont, she
and her brother being the early children of Godwin's second wife.

One day in 1814, Shelley called on Godwin, and found there a
beautiful young girl in her seventeenth year, "with shapely golden
head, a face very pale and pure, a great forehead, earnest hazel
eyes, and an expression at once of sensibility and firmness about
her delicately curved lips." This was Mary Godwin--one who had
inherited her mother's power of mind and likewise her grace and
sweetness.

From the very moment of their meeting Shelley and this girl were
fated to be joined together, and both of them were well aware of
it. Each felt the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each
listened eagerly to what the other said. Each thought of nothing,
and each cared for nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great
compelling elemental force which drove the two together and bound
them fast. Beside this marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful
and paltry seemed the affectations of Harriet Westbrook!

In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting,
Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin's house at
four o 'clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to
Calais. They wandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating
black bread and the coarsest fare, walking on the highways when
they could not afford to ride, and putting up with every possible
inconvenience. Yet it is worth noting that neither then nor at any
other time did either Shelley or Mary regret what they had done.
To the very end of the poet's brief career they were inseparable.

Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid
disposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said,
because of grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay,
Mary's sister, likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not
care for her, but this has also been disproved. There was really
nothing to mar the inner happiness of the poet and the woman who,
at the very end, became his wife. Living, as they did, in Italy
and Switzerland, they saw much of their own countrymen, such as
Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose fascinations poor Miss
Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the little girl
Allegra.

But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's
with the woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his
love-life, far more than in his poetry, that he attained
completeness. When he died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was
burned in the presence of Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the
one whom he had only lately made his wife. As a poet he never
reached the same perfection; for his genius was fitful and
uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with that which
disappoints.

As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to
wish. In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will
always be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings
against the void in vain."





THE STORY OF THE CARLYLES


To most persons, Tennyson was a remote and romantic figure. His
homes in the Isle of Wight and at Aldworth had a dignified
seclusion about them which was very appropriate to so great a
poet, and invested him with a certain awe through which the
multitude rarely penetrated. As a matter of fact, however, he was
an excellent companion, a ready talker, and gifted with so much
wit that it is a pity that more of his sayings have not been
preserved to us.

One of the best known is that which was drawn from him after he
and a number of friends had been spending an hour in company with
Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The two Carlyles were unfortunately at their
worst, and gave a superb specimen of domestic "nagging." Each
caught up whatever the other said, and either turned it into
ridicule, or tried to make the author of it an object of contempt.

This was, of course, exceedingly uncomfortable for such strangers
as were present, and it certainly gave no pleasure to their
friends. On leaving the house, some one said to Tennyson:

"Isn't it a pity that such a couple ever married?"

"No, no," said Tennyson, with a sort of smile under his rough
beard. "It's much better that two people should be made unhappy
than four."

The world has pretty nearly come around to the verdict of the poet
laureate. It is not probable that Thomas Carlyle would have made
any woman happy as his wife, or that Jane Baillie Welsh would have
made any man happy as her husband.

This sort of speculation would never have occurred had not Mr.
Froude, in the early eighties, given his story about the Carlyles
to the world. Carlyle went to his grave, an old man, highly
honored, and with no trail of gossip behind him. His wife had died
some sixteen years before, leaving a brilliant memory. The books
of Mr. Froude seemed for a moment to have desecrated the grave,
and to have shed a sudden and sinister light upon those who could
not make the least defense for themselves.

For a moment, Carlyle seemed to have been a monster of harshness,
cruelty, and almost brutish feeling. On the other side, his wife
took on the color of an evil-speaking, evil-thinking shrew, who
tormented the life of her husband, and allowed herself to be
possessed by some demon of unrest and discontent, such as few
women of her station are ever known to suffer from.

Nor was it merely that the two were apparently ill-mated and
unhappy with each other. There were hints and innuendos which
looked toward some hidden cause for this unhappiness, and which
aroused the curiosity of every one. That they might be clearer,
Froude afterward wrote a book, bringing out more plainly--indeed,
too plainly--his explanation of the Carlyle family skeleton. A
multitude of documents then came from every quarter, and from
almost every one who had known either of the Carlyles. Perhaps the
result to-day has been more injurious to Froude than to the two
Carlyles.

Many persons unjustly speak of Froude as having violated the
confidence of his friends in publishing the letters of Mr. and
Mrs. Carlyle. They take no heed of the fact that in doing this he
was obeying Carlyle's express wishes, left behind in writing, and
often urged on Froude while Carlyle was still alive. Whether or
not Froude ought to have accepted such a trust, one may perhaps
hesitate to decide. That he did so is probably because he felt
that if he refused, Carlyle might commit the same duty to another,
who would discharge it with less delicacy and less discretion.

As it is, the blame, if it rests upon any one, should rest upon
Carlyle. He collected the letters. He wrote the lines which burn
and scorch with self-reproach. It is he who pressed upon the
reluctant Froude the duty of printing and publishing a series of
documents which, for the most part, should never have been
published at all, and which have done equal harm to Carlyle, to
his wife, and to Froude himself.

Now that everything has been written that is likely to be written
by those claiming to possess personal knowledge of the subject,
let us take up the volumes, and likewise the scattered fragments,
and seek to penetrate the mystery of the most ill-assorted couple
known to modern literature.

It is not necessary to bring to light, and in regular order, the
external history of Thomas Carlyle, or of Jane Baillie Welsh, who
married him. There is an extraordinary amount of rather fanciful
gossip about this marriage, and about the three persons who had to
do with it.

Take first the principal figure, Thomas Carlyle. His life until
that time had been a good deal more than the life of an ordinary
country-man. Many persons represent him as a peasant; but he was
descended from the ancient lords of a Scottish manor. There was
something in his eye, and in the dominance of his nature, that
made his lordly nature felt. Mr. Froude notes that Carlyle's hand
was very small and unusually well shaped. Nor had his earliest
appearance as a young man been commonplace, in spite of the fact
that his parents were illiterate, so that his mother learned to
read only after her sons had gone away to Edinburgh, in order that
she might be able to enjoy their letters.

At that time in Scotland, as in Puritan New England, in each
family the son who had the most notable "pairts" was sent to the
university that he might become a clergyman. If there were a
second son, he became an advocate or a doctor of medicine, while
the sons of less distinction seldom went beyond the parish school,
but settled down as farmers, horse-dealers, or whatever might
happen to come their way.

In the case of Thomas Carlyle, nature marked him out for something
brilliant, whatever that might be. His quick sensibility, the way
in which he acquired every sort of learning, his command of logic,
and, withal, his swift, unerring gift of language, made it certain
from the very first that he must be sent to the university as soon
as he had finished school, and could afford to go.

At Edinburgh, where he matriculated in his fourteenth year, he
astonished every one by the enormous extent of his reading, and by
the firm hold he kept upon it. One hesitates to credit these so-
called reminiscences which tell how he absorbed mountains of Greek
and immense quantities of political economy and history and
sociology and various forms of metaphysics, as every Scotsman is
bound to do. That he read all night is a common story told of many
a Scottish lad at college. We may believe, however, that Carlyle
studied and read as most of his fellow students did, but far
beyond them, in extent.

When he had completed about half of his divinity course, he
assured himself that he was not intended for the life of a
clergyman. One who reads his mocking sayings, or what seemed to be
a clever string of jeers directed against religion, might well
think that Carlyle was throughout his life an atheist, or an
agnostic. He confessed to Irving that he did not believe in the
Christian religion, and it was vain to hope that he ever would so
believe.

Moreover, Carlyle had done something which was unusual at that
time. He had taught in several local schools; but presently he
came back to Edinburgh and openly made literature his profession.
It was a daring thing to do; but Carlyle had unbounded confidence
in himself--the confidence of a giant, striding forth into a
forest, certain that he can make his way by sheer strength through
the tangled meshes and the knotty branches that he knows will meet
him and try to beat him back. Furthermore, he knew how to live on
very little; he was unmarried; and he felt a certain ardor which
beseemed his age and gifts.

Through the kindness of friends, he received some commissions to
write in various books of reference; and in 1824, when he was
twenty-nine years of age, he published a translation of Legendre's
Geometry. In the same year he published, in the London Magazine,
his Life of Schiller, and also his translation of Goethe's Wilhelm
Meister. This successful attack upon the London periodicals and
reviews led to a certain complication with the other two
characters in this story. It takes us to Jane Welsh, and also to
Edward Irving.

Irving was three years older than Carlyle. The two men were
friends, and both of them had been teaching in country schools,
where both of them had come to know Miss Welsh. Irving's seniority
gave him a certain prestige with the younger men, and naturally
with Miss Welsh. He had won honors at the university, and now, as
assistant to the famous Dr. Chalmers, he carried his silk robes in
the jaunty fashion of one who has just ceased to be an
undergraduate. While studying, he met Miss Welsh at Haddington,
and there became her private instructor.

This girl was regarded in her native town as something of a
personage. To read what has been written of her, one might suppose
that she was almost a miracle of birth and breeding, and of
intellect as well. As a matter of fact, in the little town of
Haddington she was simply prima inter pares. Her father was the
local doctor, and while she had a comfortable home, and doubtless
a chaise at her disposal, she was very far from the "opulence"
which Carlyle, looking up at her from his lowlier surroundings,
was accustomed to ascribe to her. She was, no doubt, a very clever
girl; and, judging from the portraits taken of her at about this
time, she was an exceedingly pretty one, with beautiful eyes and
an abundance of dark glossy hair.

Even then, however, Miss Welsh had traits which might have made it
certain that she would be much more agreeable as a friend than as
a wife. She had become an intellectuelle quite prematurely--at an
age, in fact, when she might better have been thinking of other
things than the inwardness of her soul, or the folly of religious
belief.

Even as a young girl, she was beset by a desire to criticize and
to ridicule almost everything and every one that she encountered.
It was only when she met with something that she could not
understand, or some one who could do what she could not, that she
became comparatively humble. Unconsciously, her chief ambition was
to be herself distinguished, and to marry some one who could be
more distinguished still.

When she first met Edward Irving, she looked up to him as her
superior in many ways. He was a striking figure in her small
world. He was known in Edinburgh as likely to be a man of mark;
and, of course, he had had a careful training in many subjects of
which she, as yet, knew very little. Therefore, insensibly, she
fell into a sort of admiration for Irving--an admiration which
might have been transmuted into love. Irving, on his side, was
taken by the young girl's beauty, her vivacity, and the keenness
of her intellect. That he did not at once become her suitor is
probably due to the fact that he had already engaged himself to a
Miss Martin, of whom not much is known.

It was about this time, however, that Carlyle became acquainted
with Miss Welsh. His abundant knowledge, his original and striking
manner of commenting on it, his almost gigantic intellectual
power, came to her as a revelation. Her studies with Irving were
now interwoven with her admiration for Carlyle.

Since Irving was a clergyman, and Miss Welsh had not the slightest
belief in any form of theology, there was comparatively little
that they had in common. On the other hand, when she saw the
profundities of Carlyle, she at once half feared, and was half
fascinated. Let her speak to him on any subject, and he would at
once thunder forth some striking truth, or it might be some
puzzling paradox; but what he said could never fail to interest
her and to make her think. He had, too, an infinite sense of
humor, often whimsical and shot through with sarcasm.

It is no wonder that Miss Welsh was more and more infatuated with
the nature of Carlyle. If it was her conscious wish to marry a man
whom she could reverence as a master, where should she find him--
in Irving or in Carlyle?

Irving was a dreamer, a man who, she came to see, was thoroughly
one-sided, and whose interests lay in a different sphere from
hers. Carlyle, on the other hand, had already reached out beyond
the little Scottish capital, and had made his mark in the great
world of London, where men like De Quincey and Jeffrey thought it
worth their while to run a tilt with him. Then, too, there was the
fascination of his talk, in which Jane Welsh found a perpetual
source of interest:

The English have never had an artist, except in poetry; no
musician; no painter. Purcell and Hogarth are not exceptions, or
only such as confirm the rule.

Is the true Scotchman the peasant and yeoman--chiefly the former?

Every living man is a visible mystery; he walks between two
eternities and two infinitudes. Were we not blind as molea we
should value our humanity at infinity, and our rank, influence and
so forth--the trappings of our humanity--at nothing. Say I am a
man, and you say all. Whether king or tinker is a mere appendix.

Understanding is to reason as the talent of a beaver--which can
build houses, and uses its tail for a trowel--to the genius of a
prophet and poet. Reason is all but extinct in this age; it can
never be altogether extinguished.

The devil has his elect.

Is anything more wonderful than another, if you consider it
maturely? I have seen no men rise from the dead; I have seen some
thousands rise from nothing. I have not force to fly into the sun,
but I have force to lift my hand, which is equally strange.

Is not every thought properly an inspiration? Or how is one thing
more inspired than another?

Examine by logic the import of thy life, and of all lives. What is
it? A making of meal into manure, and of manure into meal. To the
cui bono there is no answer from logic.

In many ways Jane Welsh found the difference of range between
Carlyle and Irving. At one time, she asked Irving about some
German works, and he was obliged to send her to Carlyle to solve
her difficulties. Carlyle knew German almost as well as if he had
been born in Dresden; and the full and almost overflowing way in
which he answered her gave her another impression of his potency.
Thus she weighed the two men who might become her lovers, and
little by little she came to think of Irving as partly shallow and
partly narrow-minded, while Carlyle loomed up more of a giant than
before.

It is not probable that she was a woman who could love profoundly.
She thought too much about herself. She was too critical. She had
too intense an ambition for "showing off." I can imagine that in
the end she made her choice quite coolly. She was flattered by
Carlyle's strong preference for her. She was perhaps repelled by
Irving's engagement to another woman; yet at the time few persons
thought that she had chosen well.

Irving had now gone to London, and had become the pastor of the
Caledonian chapel in Hatton Garden. Within a year, by the
extraordinary power of his eloquence, which, was in a style
peculiar to himself, he had transformed an obscure little chapel
into one which was crowded by the rich and fashionable. His
congregation built for him a handsome edifice on Regent Square,
and he became the leader of a new cult, which looked to a second
personal advent of Christ. He cared nothing for the charges of
heresy which were brought against him; and when he was deposed his
congregation followed him, and developed a new Christian order,
known as Irvingism.

Jane Welsh, in her musings, might rightfully have compared the two
men and the future which each could give her. Did she marry
Irving, she was certain of a life of ease in London, and an
association with men and women of fashion and celebrity, among
whom she could show herself to be the gifted woman that she was.
Did she marry Carlyle, she must go with him to a desolate, wind-
beaten cottage, far away from any of the things she cared for,
working almost as a housemaid, having no company save that of her
husband, who was already a dyspeptic, and who was wont to speak of
feeling as if a rat were tearing out his stomach.

Who would have said that in going with Carlyle she had made the
better choice? Any one would have said it who knew the three--
Irving, Carlyle, and Jane Welsh.

She had the penetration to be certain that whatever Irving might
possess at present, it would be nothing in comparison to what
Carlyle would have in the coming future. She understood the
limitations of Irving, but to her keen mind the genius of Carlyle
was unlimited; and she foresaw that, after he had toiled and
striven, he would come into his great reward, which she would
share. Irving might be the leader of a petty sect, but Carlyle
would be a man whose name must become known throughout the world.

And so, in 1826, she had made her choice, and had become the bride
of the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the
world with nothing but his creative brain and his stubborn
independence. She had put aside all immediate thought of London
and its lures; she was going to cast in her lot with Carlyle's,
largely as a matter of calculation, and believing that she had
made the better choice.

She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief
residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock. Froude
has described this place as the dreariest spot in the British
dominions:

The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it; the elevation,
seven hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the
garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands,
with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass.
The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur--mere undulating
hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs in the hollows between
them.

Froude's grim description has been questioned by some; yet the
actual pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years
make it look bare, desolate, and uninviting. Mrs. Carlyle, who
owned it as an inheritance from her father, saw the place for the
first time in March, 1828. She settled there in May; but May, in
the Scottish hills, is almost as repellent as winter. She herself
shrank from the adventure which she had proposed. It was her
husband's notion, and her own, that they should live there in
practical solitude. He was to think and write, and make for
himself a beginning of real fame; while she was to hover over him
and watch his minor comforts.

It seemed to many of their friends that the project was quixotic
to a degree. Mrs. Carlyle delicate health, her weak chest, and the
beginning of a nervous disorder, made them think that she was
unfit to dwell in so wild and bleak a solitude. They felt, too,
that Carlyle was too much absorbed with his own thought to be
trusted with the charge of a high-spirited woman.

However, the decision had been made, and the newly married couple
went to Craigenputtock, with wagons that carried their household
goods and those of Carlyle's brother, Alexander, who lived in a
cottage near by. These were the two redeeming features of their
lonely home--the presence of Alexander Carlyle, and the fact that,
although they had no servants in the ordinary sense, there were
several farmhands and a dairy-maid.

Before long there came a period of trouble, which is easily
explained by what has been already said. Carlyle, thinking and
writing some of the most beautiful things that he ever thought or
wrote, could not make allowance for his wife's high spirit and
physical weakness. She, on her side--nervous, fitful, and hard to
please--thought herself a slave, the servant of a harsh and brutal
master. She screamed at him when her nerves were too unstrung; and
then, with a natural reaction, she called herself "a devil who
could never be good enough for him." But most of her letters were
harsh and filled with bitterness, and, no doubt, his conduct to
her was at times no better than her own.

But it was at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm
the road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his
own dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was
here that he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic
essays, which were published by the leading reviews of England and
Scotland. Here, too, he began to teach his countrymen the value of
German literature.

The most remarkable of his productions was that strange work
entitled Sartor Resartus (1834), an extraordinary mixture of the
sublime and the grotesque. The book quivers and shakes with tragic
pathos, with inward agonies, with solemn aspirations, and with
riotous humor.

In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to
London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from
fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could
be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote
what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History
of the French Revolution. For this he had read and thought for
many years; parts of it he had written in essays, and parts of it
he had jotted down in journals. But now it came forth, as some one
has said, "a truth clad in hell-fire," swirling amid clouds and
flames and mist, a most wonderful picture of the accumulated
social and political falsehoods which preceded the revolution, and
which were swept away by a nemesis that was the righteous judgment
of God.

Carlyle never wrote so great a book as this. He had reached his
middle style, having passed the clarity of his early writings, and
not having yet reached the thunderous, strange-mouthed German
expletives which marred his later work. In the French Revolution
he bursts forth, here and there, into furious Gallic oaths and
Gargantuan epithets; yet this apocalypse of France seems more true
than his hero-worshiping of old Frederick of Prussia, or even of
English Cromwell.

All these days Thomas Carlyle lived a life which was partly one of
seclusion and partly one of pleasure. At all times he and his
dark-haired wife had their own sets, and mingled with their own
friends. Jane had no means of discovering just whether she would
have been happier with Irving; for Irving died while she was still
digging potatoes and complaining of her lot at Craigenputtock.

However this may be, the Carlyles, man and wife, lived an
existence that was full of unhappiness and rancor. Jane Carlyle
became an invalid, and sought to allay her nervous sufferings with
strong tea and tobacco and morphin. When a nervous woman takes to
morphin, it almost always means that she becomes intensely
jealous; and so it was with Jane Carlyle.

A shivering, palpitating, fiercely loyal bit of humanity, she took
it into her head that her husband was infatuated with Lady
Ashburton, or that Lady Ashburton was infatuated with him. She
took to spying on them, and at times, when her nerves were all a
jangle, she would lie back in her armchair and yell with paroxysms
of anger. On the other hand, Carlyle, eager to enjoy the world,
sought relief from his household cares, and sometimes stole away
after a fashion that was hardly guileless. He would leave false
addresses at his house, and would dine at other places than he had
announced.

In 1866 Jane Carlyle suddenly died; and somehow, then, the
conscience of Thomas Carlyle became convinced that he had wronged
the woman whom he had really loved. His last fifteen years were
spent in wretchedness and despair. He felt that he had committed
the unpardonable sin. He recalled with anguish every moment of
their early life at Craigenputtock--how she had toiled for him,
and waited upon him, and made herself a slave; and how, later, she
had given herself up entirely to him, while he had thoughtlessly
received the sacrifice, and trampled on it as on a bed of flowers.

Of course, in all this he was intensely morbid, and the diary
which he wrote was no more sane and wholesome than the screamings
with which his wife had horrified her friends. But when he had
grown to be a very old man, he came to feel that this was all a
sort of penance, and that the selfishness of his past must be
expiated in the future. Therefore, he gave his diary to his
friend, the historian, Froude, and urged him to publish the
letters and memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Mr. Froude, with an
eye to the reading world, readily did so, furnishing them with
abundant footnotes, which made Carlyle appear to the world as
more or less of a monster.

First, there was set forth the almost continual unhappiness of the
pair. In the second place, by hint, by innuendo, and sometimes by
explicit statement, there were given reasons to show why Carlyle
made his wife unhappy. Of course, his gnawing dyspepsia, which she
strove with all her might to drive away, was one of the first and
greatest causes. But again another cause of discontent was stated
in the implication that Carlyle, in his bursts of temper, actually
abused his wife. In one passage there is a hint that certain blue
marks upon her arm were bruises, the result of blows.

Most remarkable of all these accusations is that which has to do
with the relations of Carlyle and Lady Ashburton. There is no
doubt that Jane Carlyle disliked this brilliant woman, and came to
have dark suspicions concerning her. At first, it was only a sort
of social jealousy. Lady Ashburton was quite as clever a talker as
Mrs. Carlyle, and she had a prestige which brought her more
admiration.

Then, by degrees, as Jane Carlyle's mind began to wane, she
transferred her jealousy to her husband himself. She hated to be
out-shone, and now, in some misguided fashion, it came into her
head that Carlyle had surrendered to Lady Ashburton his own
attention to his wife, and had fallen in love with her brilliant
rival.

On one occasion, she declared that Lady Ashburton had thrown
herself at Carlyle's feet, but that Carlyle had acted like a man
of honor, while Lord Ashburton, knowing all the facts, had passed
them over, and had retained his friendship with Carlyle.

Now, when Froude came to write My Relations with Carlyle, there
were those who were very eager to furnish him with every sort of
gossip. The greatest source of scandal upon which he drew was a
woman named Geraldine Jewsbury, a curious neurotic creature, who
had seen much of the late Mrs. Carlyle, but who had an almost
morbid love of offensive tattle. Froude describes himself as a
witness for six years, at Cheyne Row, "of the enactment of a
tragedy as stern and real as the story of Oedipus." According to
his own account:

I stood by, consenting to the slow martyrdom of a woman whom I
have described as bright and sparkling and tender, and I uttered
no word of remonstrance. I saw her involved in a perpetual
blizzard, and did nothing to shelter her.

But it is not upon his own observations that Froude relies for his
most sinister evidence against his friend. To him comes Miss
Jewsbury with a lengthy tale to tell. It is well to know what Mrs.
Carlyle thought of this lady. She wrote:

It is her besetting sin, and her trade of novelist has aggravated
it--the desire of feeling and producing violent emotions. ...
Geraldine has one besetting weakness; she is never happy unless
she has a grande passion on hand.

There were strange manifestations on the part of Miss Jewsbury
toward Mrs. Carlyle. At one time, when Mrs. Carlyle had shown some
preference for another woman, it led to a wild outburst of what
Miss Jewsbury herself called "tiger jealousy." There are many
other instances of violent emotions in her letters to Mrs.
Carlyle. They are often highly charged and erotic. It is unusual
for a woman of thirty-two to write to a woman friend, who is
forty-three years of age, in these words, which Miss Jewsbury used
in writing to Mrs. Carlyle:

You are never out of my thoughts one hour together. I think of you
much more than if you were my lover. I cannot express my feelings,
even to you--vague, undefined yearnings to be yours in some way.

Mrs. Carlyle was accustomed, in private, to speak of Miss Jewsbury
as "Miss Gooseberry," while Carlyle himself said that she was
simply "a flimsy tatter of a creature." But it is on the testimony
of this one woman, who was so morbid and excitable, that the most
serious accusations against Carlyle rest. She knew that Froude was
writing a volume about Mrs. Carlyle, and she rushed to him, eager
to furnish any narratives, however strange, improbable, or
salacious they might be.

Thus she is the sponsor of the Ashburton story, in which there is
nothing whatsoever. Some of the letters which Lady Ashburton wrote
Carlyle have been destroyed, but not before her husband had
perused them. Another set of letters had never been read by Lord
Ashburton at all, and they are still preserved--friendly,
harmless, usual letters. Lord Ashburton always invited Carlyle to
his house, and there is no reason to think that the Scottish
philosopher wronged him.

There is much more to be said about the charge that Mrs. Carlyle
suffered from personal abuse; yet when we examine the facts, the
evidence resolves itself into practically nothing. That, in his
self-absorption, he allowed her to Sending Completed Page, Please
Wait ... overflowed toward a man who must have been a manly,
loving lover. She calls him by the name by which he called her--a
homely Scottish name.

GOODY, GOODY, DEAR GOODY:

You said you would weary, and I do hope in my heart you are
wearying. It will be so sweet to make it all up to you in kisses
when I return. You will take me and hear all my bits of
experiences, and your heart will beat when you find how I have
longed to return to you. Darling, dearest, loveliest, the Lord
bless you! I think of you every hour, every moment. I love you and
admire you, like--like anything. Oh, if I was there, I could put
my arms so close about your neck, and hush you into the softest
sleep you have had since I went away. Good night. Dream of me. I
am ever YOUR OWN GOODY.

It seems most fitting to remember Thomas Carlyle as a man of
strength, of honor, and of intellect; and his wife as one who was
sorely tried, but who came out of her suffering into the arms of
death, purified and calm and worthy to be remembered by her
husband's side.





THE STORY OF THE HUGOS


Victor Hugo, after all criticisms have been made, stands as a
literary colossus. He had imaginative power which makes his finest
passages fairly crash upon the reader's brain like blasting
thunderbolts. His novels, even when translated, are read and
reread by people of every degree of education. There is something
vast, something almost Titanic, about the grandeur and
gorgeousness of his fancy. His prose resembles the sonorous blare
of an immense military band. Readers of English care less for his
poetry; yet in his verse one can find another phase of his
intellect. He could write charmingly, in exquisite cadences, poems
for lovers and for little children. His gifts were varied, and he
knew thoroughly the life and thought of his own countrymen; and,
therefore, in his later days he was almost deified by them.

At the same time, there were defects in his intellect and
character which are perceptible in what he wrote, as well as in
what he did. He had the Gallic wit in great measure, but he was
absolutely devoid of any sense of humor. This is why, in both his
prose and his poetry, his most tremendous pages often come
perilously near to bombast; and this is why, again, as a man, his
vanity was almost as great as his genius. He had good reason to be
vain, and yet, if he had possessed a gleam of humor, he would
never have allowed his egoism to make him arrogant. As it was, he
felt himself exalted above other mortals. Whatever he did or said
or wrote was right because he did it or said it or wrote it.

This often showed itself in rather whimsical ways. Thus, after he
had published the first edition of his novel, The Man Who Laughs,
an English gentleman called upon him, and, after some courteous
compliments, suggested that in subsequent editions the name of an
English peer who figures in the book should be changed from Tom
Jim-Jack.

"For," said the Englishman, "Tom Jim-Jack is a name that could not
possibly belong to an English noble, or, indeed, to any
Englishman. The presence of it in your powerful story makes it
seem to English readers a little grotesque."

Victor Hugo drew himself up with an air of high disdain.

"Who are you?" asked he.

"I am an Englishman," was the answer, "and naturally I know what
names are possible in English."

Hugo drew himself up still higher, and on his face there was a
smile of utter contempt.

"Yes," said he. "You are an Englishman; but I--I am Victor Hugo."

In another book Hugo had spoken of the Scottish bagpipes as
"bugpipes." This gave some offense to his Scottish admirers. A
great many persons told him that the word was "bagpipes," and not
"bugpipes." But he replied with irritable obstinacy:

"I am Victor Hugo; and if I choose to write it 'bugpipes,' it IS
'bugpipes.' It is anything that I prefer to make it. It is so,
because I call it so!"

So, Victor Hugo became a violent republican, because he did not
wish France to be an empire or a kingdom, in which an emperor or a
king would be his superior in rank. He always spoke of Napoleon
III as "M. Bonaparte." He refused to call upon the gentle-mannered
Emperor of Brazil, because he was an emperor; although Dom Pedro
expressed an earnest desire to meet the poet.

When the German army was besieging Paris, Hugo proposed to fight a
duel with the King of Prussia, and to have the result of it settle
the war; "for," said he, "the King of Prussia is a great king, but
I am Victor Hugo, the great poet. We are, therefore, equal."

In spite, however, of his ardent republicanism, he was very fond
of speaking of his own noble descent. Again and again he styled
himself "a peer of France;" and he and his family made frequent
allusions to the knights and bishops and counselors of state with
whom he claimed an ancestral relation. This was more than
inconsistent. It was somewhat ludicrous; because Victor Hugo's
ancestry was by no means noble. The Hugos of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries were not in any way related to the poet's
family, which was eminently honest and respectable, but by no
means one of distinction. His grandfather was a carpenter. One of
his aunts was the wife of a baker, another of a barber, while the
third earned her living as a provincial dressmaker.

If the poet had been less vain and more sincerely democratic, he
would have been proud to think that he sprang from good, sound,
sturdy stock, and would have laughed at titles. As it was, he
jeered at all pretensions of rank in other men, while he claimed
for himself distinctions that were not really his. His father was
a soldier who rose from the ranks until, under Napoleon, he
reached the grade of general. His mother was the daughter of a
ship owner in Nantes.

Victor Hugo was born in February, 1802, during the Napoleonic
wars, and his early years were spent among the camps and within
the sound of the cannon-thunder. It was fitting that he should
have been born and reared in an age of upheaval, revolt, and
battle. He was essentially the laureate of revolt; and in some of
his novels--as in Ninety-Three--the drum and the trumpet roll and
ring through every chapter.

The present paper has, of course, nothing to do with Hugo's public
life; yet it is necessary to remember the complicated nature of
the man--all his power, all his sweetness of disposition, and
likewise all his vanity and his eccentricities. We must remember,
also, that he was French, so that his story may be interpreted in
the light of the French character.

At the age of fifteen he was domiciled in Paris, and though still
a schoolboy and destined for the study of law, he dreamed only of
poetry and of literature. He received honorable mention from the
French Academy in 1817, and in the following year took prizes in a
poetical competition. At seventeen he began the publication of a
literary journal, which survived until 1821. His astonishing
energy became evident in the many publications which he put forth
in these boyish days. He began to become known. Although poetry,
then as now, was not very profitable even when it was admired, one
of his slender volumes brought him the sum of seven hundred
francs, which seemed to him not only a fortune in itself, but the
forerunner of still greater prosperity.

It was at this time, while still only twenty years of age, that he
met a young girl of eighteen with whom he fell rather
tempestuously in love. Her name was Adele Foucher, and she was the
daughter of a clerk in the War Office. When one is very young and
also a poet, it takes very little to feed the flame of passion.
Victor Hugo was often a guest at the apartments of M. Foucher,
where he was received by that gentleman and his family. French
etiquette, of course, forbade any direct communication between the
visitor and Adele. She was still a very young girl, and was
supposed to take no share in the conversation. Therefore, while
the others talked, she sat demurely by the fireside and sewed.

Her dark eyes and abundant hair, her grace of manner, and the
picture which she made as the firelight played about her, kindled
a flame in the susceptible heart of Victor Hugo. Though he could
not speak to her, he at least could look at her; and, before long,
his share in the conversation was very slight. This was set down,
at first, to his absent-mindedness; but looks can be as eloquent
as spoken words. Mme. Foucher, with a woman's keen intelligence,
noted the adoring gaze of Victor Hugo as he silently watched her
daughter. The young Adele herself was no less intuitive than her
mother. It was very well understood, in the course of a few
months, that Victor Hugo was in love with Adele Foucher.

Her father and mother took counsel about the matter, and Hugo
himself, in a burst of lyrical eloquence, confessed that he adored
Adele and wished to marry her. Her parents naturally objected. The
girl was but a child. She had no dowry, nor had Victor Hugo any
settled income. They were not to think of marriage. But when did a
common-sense decision, such as this, ever separate a man and a
woman who have felt the thrill of first love! Victor Hugo was
insistent. With his supreme self-confidence, he declared that he
was bound to be successful, and that in a very short time he would
be illustrious. Adele, on her side, created "an atmosphere" at
home by weeping frequently, and by going about with hollow eyes
and wistful looks.

The Foucher family removed from Paris to a country town. Victor
Hugo immediately followed them. Fortunately for him, his poems had
attracted the attention of Louis XVIII, who was flattered by some
of the verses. He sent Hugo five hundred francs for an ode, and
soon afterward settled upon him a pension of a thousand francs.
Here at least was an income--a very small one, to be sure, but
still an income. Perhaps Adele's father was impressed not so much
by the actual money as by the evidence of the royal favor. At any
rate, he withdrew his opposition, and the two young people were
married in October, 1822--both of them being under age, unformed,
and immature.

Their story is another warning against too early marriage. It is
true that they lived together until Mme. Hugo's death--a married
life of forty-six years--yet their story presents phases which
would have made this impossible had they not been French.

For a time, Hugo devoted all his energies to work. The record of
his steady upward progress is a part of the history of literature,
and need not be repeated here. The poet and his wife were soon
able to leave the latter's family abode, and to set up their own
household god in a home which was their own. Around them there
were gathered, in a sort of salon, all the best-known writers of
the day--dramatists, critics, poets, and romancers. The Hugos knew
everybody.

Unfortunately, one of their visitors cast into their new life a
drop of corroding bitterness. This intruder was Charles Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, a man two years younger than Victor Hugo, and one
who blended learning, imagination, and a gift of critical
analysis. Sainte-Beuve is to-day best remembered as a critic, and
he was perhaps the greatest critic ever known in France. But in
1830 he was a slender, insinuating youth who cultivated a gift for
sensuous and somewhat morbid poetry.

He had won Victor Hugo's friendship by writing an enthusiastic
notice of Hugo's dramatic works. Hugo, in turn, styled Sainte-
Beuve "an eagle," "a blazing star," and paid him other compliments
no less gorgeous and Hugoesque. But in truth, if Sainte-Beuve
frequented the Hugo salon, it was less because of his admiration
for the poet than from his desire to win the love of the poet's
wife.

It is quite impossible to say how far he attracted the serious
attention of Adele Hugo. Sainte-Beuve represents a curious type,
which is far more common in France and Italy than in the countries
of the north. Human nature is not very different in cultivated
circles anywhere. Man loves, and seeks to win the object of his
love; or, as the old English proverb has it:

    It's a man's part to try,
    And a woman's to deny.

But only in the Latin countries do men who have tried make their
attempts public, and seek to produce an impression that they have
been successful, and that the woman has not denied. This sort of
man, in English-speaking lands, is set down simply as a cad, and
is excluded from people's houses; but in some other countries the
thing is regarded with a certain amount of toleration. We see it
in the two books written respectively by Alfred de Musset and
George Sand. We have seen it still later in our own times, in that
strange and half-repulsive story in which the Italian novelist and
poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, under a very thin disguise, revealed
his relations with the famous actress, Eleanora Duse. Anglo-Saxons
thrust such books aside with a feeling of disgust for the man who
could so betray a sacred confidence and perhaps exaggerate a
simple indiscretion into actual guilt. But it is not so in France
and Italy. And this is precisely what Sainte-Beuve attempted.

Dr. George McLean Harper, in his lately published study of Sainte-
Beuve, has summed the matter up admirably, in speaking of The Book
of Love:

He had the vein of emotional self-disclosure, the vein of romantic
or sentimental confession. This last was not a rich lode, and so
he was at pains to charge it secretly with ore which he exhumed
gloatingly, but which was really base metal. The impulse that led
him along this false route was partly ambition, partly sensuality.
Many a worse man would have been restrained by self-respect and
good taste. And no man with a sense of honor would have permitted
The Book of Love to see the light--a small collection of verses
recording his passion for Mme. Hugo, and designed to implicate
her.

He left two hundred and five printed copies of this book to be
distributed after his death. A virulent enemy of Sainte-Beuve was
not too expressive when he declared that its purpose was "to leave
on the life of this woman the gleaming and slimy trace which the
passage of a snail leaves on a rose." Abominable in either case,
whether or not the implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's
numerous innuendoes in regard to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain
on his memory, and his infamy not only cost him his most precious
friendships, but crippled him in every high endeavor.

How monstrous was this violation of both friendship and love may
be seen in the following quotation from his writings:

In that inevitable hour, when the gloomy tempest and the jealous
gulf shall roll over our heads, a sealed bottle, belched forth
from the abyss, will render immortal our two names, their close
alliance, and our double memory aspiring after union.

Whether or not Mme. Hugo's relations with Sainte-Beuve justified
the latter even in thinking such thoughts as these, one need not
inquire too minutely. Evidently, though, Victor Hugo could no
longer be the friend of the man who almost openly boasted that he
had dishonored him. There exist some sharp letters which passed
between Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. Their intimacy was ended.

But there was something more serious than this. Sainte-Beuve had
in fact succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor
Hugo's wife. That Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain
that she was innocent; yet a high-spirited, sensitive soul like
Hugo's could never forget that in the world's eye she was
compromised. The two still lived together as before; but now the
poet felt himself released from the strict obligations of the
marriage-bond.

It may perhaps be doubted whether he would in any case have
remained faithful all his life. He was, as Mr. H.W. Wack well
says, "a man of powerful sensations, physically as well as
mentally. Hugo pursued every opportunity for new work, new
sensations, fresh emotion. He desired to absorb as much on life's
eager forward way as his great nature craved. His range in all
things--mental, physical, and spiritual--was so far beyond the
ordinary that the gage of average cannot be applied to him. The
cavil of the moralist did not disturb him."

Hence, it is not improbable that Victor Hugo might have broken
through the bonds of marital fidelity, even had Sainte-Beuve never
written his abnormal poems; but certainly these poems hastened a
result which may or may not have been otherwise inevitable. Hugo
no longer turned wholly to the dark-haired, dark-eyed Adele as
summing up for him the whole of womanhood. A veil was drawn, as it
were, from before his eyes, and he looked on other women and found
them beautiful.

It was in 1833, soon after Hugo's play "Lucrece Borgia" had been
accepted for production, that a lady called one morning at Hugo's
house in the Place Royale. She was then between twenty and thirty
years of age, slight of figure, winsome in her bearing, and one
who knew the arts which appeal to men. For she was no
inexperienced ingenue. The name upon her visiting-card was "Mme.
Drouet"; and by this name she had been known in Paris as a clever
and somewhat gifted actress. Theophile Gautier, whose cult was the
worship of physical beauty, wrote in almost lyric prose of her
seductive charm.

At nineteen, after she had been cast upon the world, dowered with
that terrible combination, poverty and beauty, she had lived
openly with a sculptor named Pradier. This has a certain
importance in the history of French art. Pradier had received a
commission to execute a statue representing Strasburg--the statue
which stands to-day in the Place de la Concorde, and which
patriotic Frenchmen and Frenchwomen drape in mourning and half
bury in immortelles, in memory of that city of Alsace which so
long was French, but which to-day is German--one of Germany's
great prizes taken in the war of 1870.

Five years before her meeting with Hugo, Pradier had rather
brutally severed his connection with her, and she had accepted the
protection of a Russian nobleman. At this time she was known by
her real name--Julienne Josephine Gauvin; but having gone upon the
stage, she assumed the appellation by which she was thereafter
known, that of Juliette Drouet.

Her visit to Hugo was for the purpose of asking him to secure for
her a part in his forth-coming play. The dramatist was willing,
but unfortunately all the major characters had been provided for,
and he was able to offer her only the minor one of the Princesse
Negroni. The charming deference with which she accepted the
offered part attracted Hugo's attention. Such amiability is very
rare in actresses who have had engagements at the best theaters.
He resolved to see her again; and he did so, time after time,
until he was thoroughly captivated by her.

She knew her value, and as yet was by no means infatuated with
him. At first he was to her simply a means of getting on in her
profession--simply another influential acquaintance. Yet she
brought to bear upon him the arts at her command, her beauty and
her sympathy, and, last of all, her passionate abandonment.

Hugo was overwhelmed by her. He found that she was in debt, and he
managed to see that her debts were paid. He secured her other
engagements at the theater, though she was less successful as an
actress after she knew him. There came, for a time, a short break
in their relations; for, partly out of need, she returned to her
Russian nobleman, or at least admitted him to a menage a trois.
Hugo underwent for a second time a great disillusionment.
Nevertheless, he was not too proud to return to her and to beg her
not to be unfaithful any more. Touched by his tears, and perhaps
foreseeing his future fame, she gave her promise, and she kept it
until her death, nearly half a century later.

Perhaps because she had deceived him once, Hugo never completely
lost his prudence in his association with her. He was by no means
lavish with money, and he installed her in a rather simple
apartment only a short distance from his own home. He gave her an
allowance that was relatively small, though later he provided for
her amply in his will. But it was to her that he brought all his
confidences, to her he entrusted all his interests. She became to
him, thenceforth, much more than she appeared to the world at
large; for she was his friend, and, as he said, his inspiration.

The fact of their intimate connection became gradually known
through Paris. It was known even to Mme. Hugo; but she,
remembering the affair of Sainte-Beuve, or knowing how difficult
it is to check the will of a man like Hugo, made no sign, and even
received Juliette Drouet in her own house and visited her in turn.
When the poet's sons grew up to manhood, they, too, spent many
hours with their father in the little salon of the former actress.
It was a strange and, to an Anglo-Saxon mind, an almost impossible
position; yet France forgives much to genius, and in time no one
thought of commenting on Hugo's manner of life.

In 1851, when Napoleon III seized upon the government, and when
Hugo was in danger of arrest, she assisted him to escape in
disguise, and with a forged passport, across the Belgian frontier.
During his long exile in Guernsey she lived in the same close
relationship to him and to his family. Mme. Hugo died in 1868,
having known for thirty-three years that she was only second in
her husband's thoughts. Was she doing penance, or was she merely
accepting the inevitable? In any case, her position was most
pathetic, though she uttered no complaint.

A very curious and poignant picture of her just before her death
has been given by the pen of a visitor in Guernsey. He had met
Hugo and his sons; he had seen the great novelist eating enormous
slices of roast beef and drinking great goblets of red wine at
dinner, and he had also watched him early each morning, divested
of all his clothing and splashing about in a bath-tub on the top
of his house, in view of all the town. One evening he called and
found only Mme. Hugo. She was reclining on a couch, and was
evidently suffering great pain. Surprised, he asked where were her
husband and her sons.

"Oh," she replied, "they've all gone to Mme. Drouet's to spend the
evening and enjoy themselves. Go also; you'll not find it amusing
here."

One ponders over this sad scene with conflicting thoughts. Was
there really any truth in the story at which Sainte-Beuve more
than hinted? If so, Adele Hugo was more than punished. The other
woman had sinned far more; and yet she had never been Hugo's wife;
and hence perhaps it was right that she should suffer less. Suffer
she did; for after her devotion to Hugo had become sincere and
deep, he betrayed her confidence by an intrigue with a girl who is
spoken of as "Claire." The knowledge of it caused her infinite
anguish, but it all came to an end; and she lived past her
eightieth year, long after the death of Mme. Hugo. She died only a
short time before the poet himself was laid to rest in Paris with
magnificent obsequies which an emperor might have envied. In her
old age, Juliette Drouet became very white and very wan; yet she
never quite lost the charm with which, as a girl, she had won the
heart of Hugo.

The story has many aspects. One may see in it a retribution, or
one may see in it only the cruelty of life. Perhaps it is best
regarded simply as a chapter in the strange life-histories of men
of genius.





THE STORY OF GEORGE SAND


To the student of feminine psychology there is no more curious and
complex problem than the one that meets us in the life of the
gifted French writer best known to the world as George Sand.

To analyze this woman simply as a writer would in itself be a
long, difficult task. She wrote voluminously, with a fluid rather
than a fluent pen. She scandalized her contemporaries by her
theories, and by the way in which she applied them in her novels.
Her fiction made her, in the history of French literature, second
only to Victor Hugo. She might even challenge Hugo, because where
he depicts strange and monstrous figures, exaggerated beyond the
limits of actual life, George Sand portrays living men and women,
whose instincts and desires she understands, and whom she makes us
see precisely as if we were admitted to their intimacy.

But George Sand puzzles us most by peculiarities which it is
difficult for us to reconcile. She seemed to have no sense of
chastity whatever; yet, on the other hand, she was not grossly
sensual. She possessed the maternal instinct to a high degree, and
liked better to be a mother than a mistress to the men whose love
she sought. For she did seek men's love, frankly and shamelessly,
only to tire of it. In many cases she seems to have been swayed by
vanity, and by a love of conquest, rather than by passion. She had
also a spiritual, imaginative side to her nature, and she could be
a far better comrade than anything more intimate.

The name given to this strange genius at birth was Amantine Lucile
Aurore Dupin. The circumstances of her ancestry and birth were
quite unusual. Her father was a lieutenant in the French army. His
grandmother had been the natural daughter of Marshal Saxe, who was
himself the illegitimate son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and
of the bewitching Countess of Konigsmarck. This was a curious
pedigree. It meant strength of character, eroticism, stubbornness,
imagination, courage, and recklessness.

Her father complicated the matter by marrying suddenly a Parisian
of the lower classes, a bird-fancier named Sophie Delaborde. His
daughter, who was born in 1804, used afterward to boast that on
one side she was sprung from kings and nobles, while on the other
she was a daughter of the people, able, therefore, to understand
the sentiments of the aristocracy and of the children of the soil,
or even of the gutter.

She was fond of telling, also, of the omen which attended on her
birth. Her father and mother were at a country dance in the house
of a fellow officer of Dupin's. Suddenly Mme. Dupin left the room.
Nothing was thought of this, and the dance went on. In less than
an hour, Dupin was called aside and told that his wife had just
given birth to a child. It was the child's aunt who brought the
news, with the joyous comment:

"She will be lucky, for she was born among the roses and to the
sound of music."

This was at the time of the Napoleonic wars. Lieutenant Dupin was
on the staff of Prince Murat, and little Aurore, as she was
called, at the age of three accompanied the army, as did her
mother. The child was adopted by one of those hard-fighting,
veteran regiments. The rough old sergeants nursed her and petted
her. Even the prince took notice of her; and to please him she
wore the green uniform of a hussar.

But all this soon passed, and she was presently sent to live with
her grandmother at the estate now intimately associated with her
name--Nohant, in the valley of the Indre, in the midst of a rich
country, a love for which she then drank in so deeply that nothing
in her later life could lessen it. She was always the friend of
the peasant and of the country-folk in general.

At Nohant she was given over to her grand-mother, to be reared in
a strangely desultory sort of fashion, doing and reading and
studying those things which could best develop her native gifts.
Her father had great influence over her, teaching her a thousand
things without seeming to teach her anything. Of him George Sand
herself has written:

Character is a matter of heredity. If any one desires to know me,
he must know my father.

Her father, however, was killed by a fall from a horse; and then
the child grew up almost without any formal education. A tutor,
who also managed the estate; believed with Rousseau that the young
should be reared according to their own preferences. Therefore,
Aurore read poems and childish stories; she gained a smattering of
Latin, and she was devoted to music and the elements of natural
science. For the rest of the time she rambled with the country
children, learned their games, and became a sort of leader in
everything they did.

Her only sorrow was the fact that her mother was excluded from
Nohant. The aristocratic old grandmother would not allow under her
roof her son's low-born wife; but she was devoted to her little
grandchild. The girl showed a wonderful degree of sensibility.

This life was adapted to her nature. She fed her imagination in a
perfectly healthy fashion; and, living so much out of doors, she
acquired that sound physique which she retained all through her
life.

When she was thirteen, her grandmother sent the girl to a convent
school in Paris. One might suppose that the sudden change from the
open woods and fields to the primness of a religious home would
have been a great shock to her, and that with her disposition she
might have broken out into wild ways that would have shocked the
nuns. But, here, as elsewhere, she showed her wonderful
adaptability. It even seemed as if she were likely to become what
the French call a devote. She gave herself up to mythical
thoughts, and expressed a desire of taking the veil. Her
confessor, however, was a keen student of human nature, and he
perceived that she was too young to decide upon the renunciation
of earthly things. Moreover, her grandmother, who had no intention
that Aurore should become a nun, hastened to Paris and carried her
back to Nohant.

The girl was now sixteen, and her complicated nature began to make
itself apparent. There was no one to control her, because her
grandmother was confined to her own room. And so Aurore Dupin, now
in superb health, rushed into every sort of diversion with all the
zest of youth. She read voraciously--religion, poetry, philosophy.
She was an excellent musician, playing the piano and the harp.
Once, in a spirit of unconscious egotism, she wrote to her
confessor:

Do you think that my philosophical studies are compatible with
Christian humility?

The shrewd ecclesiastic answered, with a touch of wholesome irony:

I doubt, my daughter, whether your philosophical studies are
profound enough to warrant intellectual pride.

This stung the girl, and led her to think a little less of her own
abilities; but perhaps it made her books distasteful to her. For a
while she seems to have almost forgotten her sex. She began to
dress as a boy, and took to smoking large quantities of tobacco.
Her natural brother, who was an officer in the army, came down to
Nohant and taught her to ride--to ride like a boy, seated astride.
She went about without any chaperon, and flirted with the young
men of the neighborhood. The prim manners of the place made her
subject to a certain amount of scandal, and the village priest
chided her in language that was far from tactful. In return she
refused any longer to attend his church.

Thus she was living when her grandmother died, in 1821, leaving to
Aurore her entire fortune of five hundred thousand francs. As the
girl was still but seventeen, she was placed under the
guardianship of the nearest relative on her father's side--a
gentleman of rank. When the will was read, Aurore's mother made a
violent protest, and caused a most unpleasant scene.

"I am the natural guardian of my child," she cried. "No one can
take away my rights!"

The young girl well understood that this was really the parting of
the ways. If she turned toward her uncle, she would be forever
classed among the aristocracy. If she chose her mother, who,
though married, was essentially a grisette, then she must live
with grisettes, and find her friends among the friends who visited
her mother. She could not belong to both worlds. She must decide
once for all whether she would be a woman of rank or a woman
entirely separated from the circle that had been her father's.

One must respect the girl for making the choice she did.
Understanding the situation absolutely, she chose her mother; and
perhaps one would not have had her do otherwise. Yet in the long
run it was bound to be a mistake. Aurore was clever, refined, well
read, and had had the training of a fashionable convent school.
The mother was ignorant and coarse, as was inevitable, with one
who before her marriage had been half shop-girl and half
courtesan. The two could not live long together, and hence it was
not unnatural that Aurore Dupin should marry, to enter upon a new
career.

Her fortune was a fairly large one for the times, and yet not
large enough to attract men who were quite her equals. Presently,
however, it brought to her a sort of country squire, named Casimir
Dudevant. He was the illegitimate son of the Baron Dudevant. He
had been in the army, and had studied law; but he possessed no
intellectual tastes. He was outwardly eligible; but he was of a
coarse type--a man who, with passing years, would be likely to
take to drink and vicious amusements, and in serious life cared
only for his cattle, his horses, and his hunting. He had, however,
a sort of jollity about him which appealed to this girl of
eighteen; and so a marriage was arranged. Aurore Dupin became his
wife in 1822, and he secured the control of her fortune.

The first few years after her marriage were not unhappy. She had a
son, Maurice Dudevant, and a daughter, Solange, and she loved them
both. But it was impossible that she should continue vegetating
mentally upon a farm with a husband who was a fool, a drunkard,
and a miser. He deteriorated; his wife grew more and more clever.
Dudevant resented this. It made him uncomfortable. Other persons
spoke of her talk as brilliant. He bluntly told her that it was
silly, and that she must stop it. When she did not stop it, he
boxed her ears. This caused a breach between the pair which was
never healed. Dudevant drank more and more heavily, and jeered at
his wife because she was "always looking for noon at fourteen
o'clock." He had always flirted with the country girls; but now he
openly consorted with his wife's chambermaid.

Mme. Dudevant, on her side, would have nothing more to do with
this rustic rake. She formed what she called a platonic
friendship--and it was really so--with a certain M. de Seze, who
was advocate-general at Bordeaux. With him this clever woman could
talk without being called silly, and he took sincere pleasure in
her company. He might, in fact, have gone much further, had not
both of them been in an impossible situation.

Aurore Dudevant really believed that she was swayed by a pure and
mystic passion. De Seze, on the other hand, believed this mystic
passion to be genuine love. Coming to visit her at Nohant, he was
revolted by the clownish husband with whom she lived. It gave him
an esthetic shock to see that she had borne children to this boor.
Therefore he shrank back from her, and in time their relation
faded into nothingness.

It happened, soon after, that she found a packet in her husband's
desk, marked "Not to be opened until after my death." She wrote of
this in her correspondence:

I had not the patience to wait till widowhood. No one can be sure
of surviving anybody. I assumed that my husband had died, and I
was very glad to learn what he thought of me while he was alive.
Since the package was addressed to me, it was not dishonorable for
me to open it.

And so she opened it. It proved to be his will, but containing, as
a preamble, his curses on her, expressions of contempt, and all
the vulgar outpouring of an evil temper and angry passion. She
went to her husband as he was opening a bottle, and flung the
document upon the table. He cowered at her glance, at her
firmness, and at her cold hatred. He grumbled and argued and
entreated; but all that his wife would say in answer was:

"I must have an allowance. I am going to Paris, and my children
are to remain here."

At last he yielded, and she went at once to Paris, taking her
daughter with her, and having the promise of fifteen hundred
francs a year out of the half-million that was hers by right.

In Paris she developed into a thorough-paced Bohemian. She tried
to make a living in sundry hopeless ways, and at last she took to
literature. She was living in a garret, with little to eat, and
sometimes without a fire in winter. She had some friends who
helped her as well as they could, but though she was attached to
the Figaro, her earnings for the first month amounted to only
fifteen francs.

Nevertheless, she would not despair. The editors and publishers
might turn the cold shoulder to her, but she would not give up her
ambitions. She went down into the Latin Quarter, and there shook
off the proprieties of life. She assumed the garb of a man, and
with her quick perception she came to know the left bank of the
Seine just as she had known the country-side at Nohant or the
little world at her convent school. She never expected again to
see any woman of her own rank in life. Her mother's influence
became strong in her. She wrote:

The proprieties are the guiding principle of people without soul
and virtue. The good opinion of the world is a prostitute who
gives herself to the highest bidder.

She still pursued her trade of journalism, calling herself a
"newspaper mechanic," sitting all day in the office of the Figaro
and writing whatever was demanded, while at night she would prowl
in the streets haunting the cafes, continuing to dress like a man,
drinking sour wine, and smoking cheap cigars.

One of her companions in this sort of hand-to-mouth journalism was
a young student and writer named Jules Sandeau, a man seven years
younger than his comrade. He was at that time as indigent as she,
and their hardships, shared in common, brought them very close
together. He was clever, boyish, and sensitive, and it was not
long before he had fallen at her feet and kissed her knees,
begging that she would requite the love he felt for her. According
to herself, she resisted him for six months, and then at last she
yielded. The two made their home together, and for a while were
wonderfully happy. Their work and their diversions they enjoyed in
common, and now for the first time she experienced emotions which
in all probability she had never known before.

Probably not very much importance is to be given to the earlier
flirtations of George Sand, though she herself never tried to stop
the mouth of scandal. Even before she left her husband, she was
credited with having four lovers; but all she said, when the
report was brought to her, was this: "Four lovers are none too
many for one with such lively passions as mine."

This very frankness makes it likely that she enjoyed shocking her
prim neighbors at Nohant. But if she only played at love-making
then, she now gave herself up to it with entire abandonment,
intoxicated, fascinated, satisfied. She herself wrote:

How I wish I could impart to you this sense of the intensity and
joyousness of life that I have in my veins. To live! How sweet it
is, and how good, in spite of annoyances, husbands, debts,
relations, scandal-mongers, sufferings, and irritations! To live!
It is intoxicating! To love, and to be loved! It is happiness! It
is heaven!

In collaboration with Jules Sandeau, she wrote a novel called Rose
et Blanche. The two lovers were uncertain what name to place upon
the title-page, but finally they hit upon the pseudonym of Jules
Sand. The book succeeded; but thereafter each of them wrote
separately, Jules Sandeau using his own name, and Mme. Dudevant
styling herself George Sand, a name by which she was to be
illustrious ever after.

As a novelist, she had found her real vocation. She was not yet
well known, but she was on the verge of fame. As soon as she had
written Indiana and Valentine, George Sand had secured a place in
the world of letters. The magazine which still exists as the Revue
des Deux Mondes gave her a retaining fee of four thousand francs a
year, and many other publications begged her to write serial
stories for them.

The vein which ran through all her stories was new and piquant. As
was said of her:

In George Sand, whenever a lady wishes to change her lover, God is
always there to make the transfer easy.

In other words, she preached free love in the name of religion.
This was not a new doctrine with her. After the first break with
her husband, she had made up her mind about certain matters, and
wrote:

One is no more justified in claiming the ownership of a soul than
in claiming the ownership of a slave.

According to her, the ties between a man and a woman are sacred
only when they are sanctified by love; and she distinguished
between love and passion in this epigram:

Love seeks to give, while passion seeks to take.

At this time, George Sand was in her twenty-seventh year. She was
not beautiful, though there was something about her which
attracted observation. Of middle height, she was fairly slender.
Her eyes were somewhat projecting, and her mouth was almost sullen
when in repose. Her manners were peculiar, combining boldness with
timidity. Her address was almost as familiar as a man's, so that
it was easy to be acquainted with her; yet a certain haughtiness
and a touch of aristocratic pride made it plain that she had drawn
a line which none must pass without her wish. When she was deeply
stirred, however, she burst forth into an extraordinary vivacity,
showing a nature richly endowed and eager to yield its treasures.

The existence which she now led was a curious one. She still
visited her husband at Nohant, so that she might see her son, and
sometimes, when M. Dudevant came to town, he called upon her in
the apartments which she shared with Jules Sandeau. He had
accepted the situation, and with his crudeness and lack of feeling
he seemed to think it, if not natural, at least diverting. At any
rate, so long as he could retain her half-million francs, he was
not the man to make trouble about his former wife's arrangements.

Meanwhile, there began to be perceptible the very slightest rift
within the lute of her romance. Was her love for Sandeau really
love, or was it only passion? In his absence, at any rate, the old
obsession still continued. Here we see, first of all, intense
pleasure shading off into a sort of maternal fondness. She sends
Sandeau adoring letters. She is afraid that his delicate appetite
is not properly satisfied.

Yet, again, there are times when she feels that he is irritating
and ill. Those who knew them said that her nature was too
passionate and her love was too exacting for him. One of her
letters seems to make this plain. She writes that she feels
uneasy, and even frightfully remorseful, at seeing Sandeau "pine
away." She knows, she avows, that she is killing him, that her
caresses are a poison, and her love a consuming fire.

It is an appalling thought, and Jules will not understand it. He
laughs at it; and when, in the midst of his transports of delight,
the idea comes to me and makes my blood run cold, he tells me that
here is the death that he would like to die. At such moments he
promises whatever I make him promise.

This letter throws a clear light upon the nature of George Sand's
temperament. It will be found all through her career, not only
that she sought to inspire passion, but that she strove to gratify
it after fashions of her own. One little passage from a
description of her written by the younger Dumas will perhaps make
this phase of her character more intelligible, without going
further than is strictly necessary:

Mme. Sand has little hands without any bones, soft and plump. She
is by destiny a woman of excessive curiosity, always disappointed,
always deceived in her incessant investigation, but she is not
fundamentally ardent. In vain would she like to be so, but she
does not find it possible. Her physical nature utterly refuses.

The reader will find in all that has now been said the true
explanation of George Sand. Abounding with life, but incapable of
long stretches of ardent love, she became a woman who sought
conquests everywhere without giving in return more than her
temperament made it possible for her to do. She loved Sandeau as
much as she ever loved any man; and yet she left him with a sense
that she had never become wholly his. Perhaps this is the reason
why their romance came to an end abruptly, and not altogether
fittingly.

She had been spending a short time at Nohant, and came to Paris
without announcement. She intended to surprise her lover, and she
surely did so. She found him in the apartment that had been
theirs, with his arms about an attractive laundry-girl. Thus
closed what was probably the only true romance in the life of
George Sand. Afterward she had many lovers, but to no one did she
so nearly become a true mate.

As it was, she ended her association with Sandeau, and each
pursued a separate path to fame. Sandeau afterward became a well-
known novelist and dramatist. He was, in fact, the first writer of
fiction who was admitted to the French Academy. The woman to whom
he had been unfaithful became greater still, because her fame was
not only national, but cosmopolitan.

For a time after her deception by Sandeau, she felt absolutely
devoid of all emotions. She shunned men, and sought the friendship
of Marie Dorval, a clever actress who was destined afterward to
break the heart of Alfred de Vigny. The two went down into the
country; and there George Sand wrote hour after hour, sitting by
her fireside, and showing herself a tender mother to her little
daughter Solange.

This life lasted for a while, but it was not the sort of life that
would now content her. She had many visitors from Paris, among
them Sainte-Beuve, the critic, who brought with him Prosper
Merimee, then unknown, but later famous as master of revels to the
third Napoleon and as the author of Carmen. Merimee had a certain
fascination of manner, and the predatory instincts of George Sand
were again aroused. One day, when she felt bored and desperate,
Merimee paid his court to her, and she listened to him. This is
one of the most remarkable of her intimacies, since it began,
continued, and ended all in the space of a single week. When
Merimee left Nohant, he was destined never again to see George
Sand, except long afterward at a dinner-party, where the two
stared at each other sharply, but did not speak. This affair,
however, made it plain that she could not long remain at Nohant,
and that she pined for Paris.

Returning thither, she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo,
who was, however, too much in love with himself to care for any
one, especially a woman who was his literary rival. She is said
for a time to have been allied with Gustave Planche, a dramatic
critic; but she always denied this, and her denial may be taken as
quite truthful. Soon, however, she was to begin an episode which
has been more famous than any other in her curious history, for
she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth of twenty-three, but
already well known for his poems and his plays.

Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for
a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the
degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem
on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young
Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is
certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had
affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an
exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather
than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half
opened." Such was he when George Sand, then seven years his
senior, met him.

There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more
absurd than pathetic about the events which presently took place.
A woman like George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age
of this nervous boy of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of
the world. At first she seemed to realize the fact herself; but
her vanity led her to begin an intrigue, which must have been
almost wholly without excitement on her part, but which to him,
for a time, was everything in the world.

Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she
went with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they
could not stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a
journey to Italy. Before they went, however, they thought it
necessary to get formal permission from Alfred's mother!

Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent. She had read
George Sand's romances, and had asked scornfully:

"Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?"

She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be
asked to sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even
for a French mother who has become accustomed to many strange
things. Then there was a curious happening. At nine o'clock at
night, George Sand took a cab and drove to the house of Mme. de
Musset, to whom she sent up a message that a lady wished to see
her. Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a woman alone in a
carriage, she entered it. Then George Sand burst forth in a
torrent of sentimental eloquence. She overpowered her lover's
mother, promised to take great care of the delicate youth, and
finally drove away to meet Alfred at the coach-yard.

They started off in the mist, their coach being the thirteenth to
leave the yard; but the two lovers were in a merry mood, and
enjoyed themselves all the way from Paris to Marseilles. By
steamer they went to Leghorn; and finally, in January, 1834, they
took an apartment in a hotel at Venice. What had happened that
their arrival in Venice should be the beginning of a quarrel, no
one knows. George Sand has told the story, and Paul de Musset--
Alfred's brother--has told the story, but each of them has
doubtless omitted a large part of the truth.

It is likely that on their long journey each had learned too much
of the other. Thus, Paul de Musset says that George Sand made
herself outrageous by her conversation, telling every one of her
mother's adventures in the army of Italy, including her relations
with the general-in-chief. She also declared that she herself was
born within a month of her parents' wedding-day. Very likely she
did say all these things, whether they were true or not. She had
set herself to wage war against conventional society, and she did
everything to shock it.

On the other hand, Alfred de Musset fell ill after having lost ten
thousand francs in a gambling-house. George Sand was not fond of
persons who were ill. She herself was working like a horse,
writing from eight to thirteen hours a day. When Musset collapsed
she sent for a handsome young Italian doctor named Pagello, with
whom she had struck up a casual acquaintance. He finally cured
Musset, but he also cured George Sand of any love for Musset.

Before long she and Pagello were on their way back to Paris,
leaving the poor, fevered, whimpering poet to bite his nails and
think unutterable things. But he ought to have known George Sand.
After that, everybody knew her. They knew just how much she cared
when she professed to care, and when she acted as she acted with
Pagello no earlier lover had any one but himself to blame.

Only sentimentalists can take this story seriously. To them it has
a sort of morbid interest. They like to picture Musset raving and
shouting in his delirium, and then, to read how George Sand sat on
Pagello's knees, kissing him and drinking out of the same cup. But
to the healthy mind the whole story is repulsive--from George
Sand's appeal to Mme. de Musset down to the very end, when Pagello
came to Paris, where his broken French excited a polite ridicule.

There was a touch of genuine sentiment about the affair with Jules
Sandeau; but after that, one can only see in George Sand a half-
libidinous grisette, such as her mother was before her, with a
perfect willingness to experiment in every form of lawless love.
As for Musset, whose heart she was supposed to have broken, within
a year he was dangling after the famous singer, Mme. Malibran, and
writing poems to her which advertised their intrigue.

After this episode with Pagello, it cannot be said that the life
of George Sand was edifying in any respect, because no one can
assume that she was sincere. She had loved Jules Sandeau as much
as she could love any one, but all the rest of her intrigues and
affinities were in the nature of experiments. She even took back
Alfred de Musset, although they could never again regard each
other without suspicion. George Sand cut off all her hair and gave
it to Musset, so eager was she to keep him as a matter of
conquest; but he was tired of her, and even this theatrical trick
was of no avail.

She proceeded to other less known and less humiliating adventures.
She tried to fascinate the artist Delacroix. She set her cap at
Franz Liszt, who rather astonished her by saying that only God was
worthy to be loved. She expressed a yearning for the affections of
the elder Dumas; but that good-natured giant laughed at her, and
in fact gave her some sound advice, and let her smoke
unsentimentally in his study. She was a good deal taken with a
noisy demagogue named Michel, a lawyer at Bourges, who on one
occasion shut her up in her room and harangued her on sociology
until she was as weary of his talk as of his wooden shoes, his
shapeless greatcoat, his spectacles, and his skull-cap, Balzac
felt her fascination, but cared nothing for her, since his love
was given to Mme. Hanska.

In the meanwhile, she was paying visits to her husband at Nohant,
where she wrangled with him over money matters, and where he would
once have shot her had the guests present not interfered. She
secured her dowry by litigation, so that she was well off, even
without her literary earnings. These were by no means so large as
one would think from her popularity and from the number of books
she wrote. It is estimated that her whole gains amounted to about
a million francs, extending over a period of forty-five years. It
is just half the amount that Trollope earned in about the same
period, and justifies his remark--"adequate, but not splendid."

One of those brief and strange intimacies that marked the career
of George Sand came about in a curious way. Octave Feuillet, a man
of aristocratic birth, had set himself to write novels which
portrayed the cynicism and hardness of the upper classes in
France. One of these novels, Sibylle, excited the anger of George
Sand. She had not known Feuillet before; yet now she sought him
out, at first in order to berate him for his book, but in the end
to add him to her variegated string of lovers.

It has been said of Feuillet that he was a sort of "domesticated
Musset." At any rate, he was far less sensitive than Musset, and
George Sand was about seventeen years his senior. They parted
after a short time, she going her way as a writer of novels that
were very different from her earlier ones, while Feuillet grew
more and more cynical and even stern, as he lashed the abnormal,
neuropathic men and women about him.

The last great emotional crisis in George Sand's life was that
which centers around her relations with Frederic Chopin. Chopin
was the greatest genius who ever loved her. It is rather odd that
he loved her. She had known him for two years, and had not
seriously thought of him, though there is a story that when she
first met him she kissed him before he had even been presented to
her. She waited two years, and in those two years she had three
lovers. Then at last she once more met Chopin, when he was in a
state of melancholy, because a Polish girl had proved unfaithful
to him.

It was the psychological moment; for this other woman, who was a
devourer of hearts, found him at a piano, improvising a
lamentation. George Sand stood beside him, listening. When he
finished and looked up at her, their eyes met. She bent down
without a word and kissed him on the lips.

What was she like when he saw her then? Grenier has described her
in these words:

She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention,
the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes--a little too close
together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very
black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished
marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even
cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these
great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which
was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was
rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather
coarse, and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and
her manners were very quiet.

Such as she was, she attached herself to Chopin for eight years.
At first they traveled together very quietly to Majorca; and
there, just as Musset had fallen ill at Venice, Chopin became
feverish and an invalid. "Chopin coughs most gracefully," George
Sand wrote of him, and again:

Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent
about him but his cough.

It is not surprising if her nerves sometimes gave way. Acting as
sick nurse, writing herself with rheumatic fingers, robbed by
every one about her, and viewed with suspicion by the peasants
because she did not go to church, she may be perhaps excused for
her sharp words when, in fact, her deeds were kind.

Afterward, with Chopin, she returned to Paris, and the two lived
openly together for seven years longer. An immense literature has
grown around the subject of their relations. To this literature
George Sand herself contributed very largely. Chopin never wrote a
word; but what he failed to do, his friends and pupils did
unsparingly.

Probably the truth is somewhat as one might expect. During the
first period of fascination, George Sand was to Chopin what she
had been to Sandeau and to Musset; and with her strange and subtle
ways, she had undermined his health. But afterward that sort of
love died out, and was succeeded by something like friendship. At
any rate, this woman showed, as she had shown to others, a vast
maternal kindness. She writes to him finally as "your old woman,"
and she does wonders in the way of nursing and care.

But in 1847 came a break between the two. Whatever the mystery of
it may be, it turns upon what Chopin said of Sand:

"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I
am near cursing her. Yet she suffers, too, and more, because she
grows older as she grows more wicked."

In 1848, Chopin gave his last concert in Paris, and in 1849 he
died. According to some, he was the victim of a Messalina.
According to others, it was only "Messalina" that had kept him
alive so long.

However, with his death came a change in the nature of George
Sand. Emotionally, she was an extinct volcano. Intellectually, she
was at her very best. She no longer tore passions into tatters,
but wrote naturally, simply, stories of country life and tales for
children. In one of her books she has given an enduring picture of
the Franco-Prussian War. There are many rather pleasant
descriptions of her then, living at Nohant, where she made a
curious figure, bustling about in ill-fitting costumes, and
smoking interminable cigarettes.

She had lived much, and she had drunk deep of life, when she died
in 1876. One might believe her to have been only a woman of
perpetual liaisons. Externally she was this, and yet what did
Balzac, that great master of human psychology, write of her in the
intimacy of a private correspondence?

She is a female bachelor. She is an artist. She is generous. She
is devoted. She is chaste. Her dominant characteristics are those
of a man, and therefore, she is not to be regarded as a woman. She
is an excellent mother, adored by her children. Morally, she is
like a lad of twenty; for in her heart of hearts, she is more than
chaste--she is a prude. It is only in externals that she comports
herself as a Bohemian. All her follies are titles to glory in the
eyes of those whose souls are noble.

A curious verdict this! Her love-life seems almost that of neither
man nor woman, but of an animal. Yet whether she was in reality
responsible for what she did, when we consider her strange
heredity, her wretched marriage, the disillusions of her early
life--who shall sit in judgment on her, since who knows all?





THE MYSTERY OF CHARLES DICKENS


Perhaps no public man in the English-speaking world, in the last
century, was so widely and intimately known as Charles Dickens.
From his eighteenth year, when he won his first success in
journalism, down through his series of brilliant triumphs in
fiction, he was more and more a conspicuous figure, living in the
blaze of an intense publicity. He met every one and knew every
one, and was the companion of every kind of man and woman. He
loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which Thackeray has
immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian clubs
of London. Actors, authors, good fellows generally, were his
intimate friends, and his acquaintance extended far beyond into
the homes of merchants and lawyers and the mansions of the
proudest nobles. Indeed, he seemed to be almost a universal
friend.

One remembers, for instance, how he was called in to arbitrate
between Thackeray and George Augustus Sala, who had quarreled. One
remembers how Lord Byron's daughter, Lady Lovelace, when upon her
sick-bed, used to send for Dickens because there was something in
his genial, sympathetic manner that soothed her. Crushing pieces
of ice between her teeth in agony, she would speak to him and he
would answer her in his rich, manly tones until she was comforted
and felt able to endure more hours of pain without complaint.

Dickens was a jovial soul. His books fairly steam with Christmas
cheer and hot punch and the savor of plum puddings, very much as
do his letters to his intimate friends. Everybody knew Dickens. He
could not dine in public without attracting attention. When he
left the dining-room, his admirers would descend upon his table
and carry off egg-shells, orange-peels, and other things that
remained behind, so that they might have memorials of this much-
loved writer. Those who knew him only by sight would often stop
him in the streets and ask the privilege of shaking hands with
him; so different was he from--let us say--Tennyson, who was as
great an Englishman in his way as Dickens, but who kept himself
aloof and saw few strangers.

It is hard to associate anything like mystery with Dickens, though
he was fond of mystery as an intellectual diversion, and his last
unfinished novel was The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Moreover, no one
admired more than he those complex plots which Wilkie Collins used
to weave under the influence of laudanum. But as for his own life,
it seemed so normal, so free from anything approaching mystery,
that we can scarcely believe it to have been tinged with darker
colors than those which appeared upon the surface.

A part of this mystery is plain enough. The other part is still
obscure--or of such a character that one does not care to bring it
wholly to the light. It had to do with his various relations with
women.

The world at large thinks that it knows this chapter in the life
of Dickens, and that it refers wholly to his unfortunate
disagreement with his wife. To be sure, this is a chapter that is
writ large in all of his biographies, and yet it is nowhere
correctly told. His chosen biographer was John Forster, whose Life
of Charles Dickens, in three volumes, must remain a standard work;
but even Forster--we may assume through tact--has not set down all
that he could, although he gives a clue.

As is well known, Dickens married Miss Catherine Hogarth when he
was only twenty-four. He had just published his Sketches by Boz,
the copyright of which he sold for one hundred pounds, and was
beginning the Pickwick Papers. About this time his publisher
brought N. P. Willis down to Furnival's Inn to see the man whom
Willis called "a young paragraphist for the Morning Chronicle."
Willis thus sketches Dickens and his surroundings:

In the most crowded part of Holborn, within a door or two of the
Bull and Mouth Inn, we pulled up at the entrance of a large
building used for lawyers' chambers. I followed by a long flight
of stairs to an upper story, and was ushered into an uncarpeted
and bleak-looking room, with a deal table, two or three chairs and
a few books, a small boy and Mr. Dickens for the contents.

I was only struck at first with one thing--and I made a memorandum
of it that evening as the strongest instance I had seen of English
obsequiousness to employers--the degree to which the poor author
was overpowered with the honor of his publisher's visit! I
remember saying to myself, as I sat down on a rickety chair:

"My good fellow, if you were in America with that fine face and
your ready quill, you would have no need to be condescended to by
a publisher."

Dickens was dressed very much as he has since described Dick
Swiveller, minus the swell look. His hair was cropped close to his
head, his clothes scant, though jauntily cut, and, after changing
a ragged office-coat for a shabby blue, he stood by the door,
collarless and buttoned up, the very personification of a close
sailer to the wind.

Before this interview with Willis, which Dickens always
repudiated, he had become something of a celebrity among the
newspaper men with whom he worked as a stenographer. As every one
knows, he had had a hard time in his early years, working in a
blacking-shop, and feeling too keenly the ignominious position of
which a less sensitive boy would probably have thought nothing.
Then he became a shorthand reporter, and was busy at his work, so
that he had little time for amusements.

It has been generally supposed that no love-affair entered his
life until he met Catherine Hogarth, whom he married soon after
making her acquaintance. People who are eager at ferreting out
unimportant facts about important men had unanimously come to the
conclusion that up to the age of twenty Dickens was entirely
fancy-free. It was left to an American to disclose the fact that
this was not the case, but that even in his teens he had been
captivated by a girl of about his own age.

Inasmuch as the only reproach that was ever made against Dickens
was based upon his love-affairs, let us go back and trace them
from this early one to the very last, which must yet for some
years, at least, remain a mystery.

Everything that is known about his first affair is contained in a
book very beautifully printed, but inaccessible to most readers.
Some years ago Mr. William K. Bixby, of St. Louis, found in London
a collector of curios. This man had in his stock a number of
letters which had passed between a Miss Maria Beadnell and Charles
Dickens when the two were about nineteen and a second package of
letters representing a later acquaintance, about 1855, at which
time Miss Beadnell had been married for a long time to a Mr. Henry
Louis Winter, of 12 Artillery Place, London.

The copyright laws of Great Britain would not allow Mr. Bixby to
publish the letters in that country, and he did not care to give
them to the public here. Therefore, he presented them to the
Bibliophile Society, with the understanding that four hundred and
ninety-three copies, with the Bibliophile book-plate, were to be
printed and distributed among the members of the society. A few
additional copies were struck off, but these did not bear the
Bibliophile book-plate. Only two copies are available for other
readers, and to peruse these it is necessary to visit the
Congressional Library in Washington, where they were placed on
July 24, 1908.

These letters form two series--the first written to Miss Beadnell
in or about 1829, and the second written to Mrs. Winter, formerly
Miss Beadnell, in 1855.

The book also contains an introduction by Henry H. Harper, who
sets forth some theories which the facts, in my opinion, do not
support; and there are a number of interesting portraits,
especially one of Miss Beadnell in 1829--a lovely girl with dark
curls. Another shows her in 1855, when she writes of herself as
"old and fat"--thereby doing herself a great deal of injustice;
for although she had lost her youthful beauty, she was a very
presentable woman of middle age, but one who would not be
particularly noticed in any company.

Summing up briefly these different letters, it may be said that in
the first set Dickens wrote to the lady ardently, but by no means
passionately. From what he says it is plain enough that she did
not respond to his feeling, and that presently she left London and
went to Paris, for her family was well-to-do, while Dickens was
living from hand to mouth.

In the second set of letters, written long afterward, Mrs. Winter
seems to have "set her cap" at the now famous author; but at that
time he was courted by every one, and had long ago forgotten the
lady who had so easily dismissed him in his younger days. In 1855,
Mrs. Winter seems to have reproached him for not having been more
constant in the past; but he replied:

You answered me coldly and reproachfully, and so I went my way.

Mr. Harper, in his introduction, tries very hard to prove that in
writing David Copperfield Dickens drew the character of Dora from
Miss Beadnell. It is a dangerous thing to say from whom any
character in a novel is drawn. An author takes whatever suits his
purpose in circumstance and fancy, and blends them all into one
consistent whole, which is not to be identified with any
individual. There is little reason to think that the most intimate
friends of Dickens and of his family were mistaken through all the
years when they were certain that the boy husband and the girl
wife of David Copperfield were suggested by any one save Dickens
himself and Catherine Hogarth.

Why should he have gone back to a mere passing fancy, to a girl
who did not care for him, and who had no influence on his life,
instead of picturing, as David's first wife, one whom he deeply
loved, whom he married, who was the mother of his children, and
who made a great part of his career, even that part which was
inwardly half tragic and wholly mournful?

Miss Beadnell may have been the original of Flora in Little
Dorrit, though even this is doubtful. The character was at the
time ascribed to a Miss Anna Maria Leigh, whom Dickens sometimes
flirted with and sometimes caricatured.

When Dickens came to know George Hogarth, who was one of his
colleagues on the staff of the Morning Chronicle, he met Hogarth's
daughters--Catherine, Georgina, and Mary--and at once fell
ardently in love with Catherine, the eldest and prettiest of the
three. He himself was almost girlish, with his fair complexion and
light, wavy hair, so that the famous sketch by Maclise has a
remarkable charm; yet nobody could really say with truth that any
one of the three girls was beautiful. Georgina Hogarth, however,
was sweet-tempered and of a motherly disposition. It may be that
in a fashion she loved Dickens all her life, as she remained with
him after he parted from her sister, taking the utmost care of his
children, and looking out with unselfish fidelity for his many
needs.

It was Mary, however, the youngest of the Hogarths, who lived with
the Dickenses during the first twelvemonth of their married life.
To Dickens she was like a favorite sister, and when she died very
suddenly, in her eighteenth year, her loss was a great shock to
him.

It was believed for a long time--in fact, until their separation--
that Dickens and his wife were extremely happy in their home life.
His writings glorified all that was domestic, and paid many tender
tributes to the joys of family affection. When the separation came
the whole world was shocked. And yet rather early in Dickens's
married life there was more or less infelicity. In his
Retrospections of an Active Life, Mr. John Bigelow writes a few
sentences which are interesting for their frankness, and which
give us certain hints:

Mrs. Dickens was not a handsome woman, though stout, hearty, and
matronly; there was something a little doubtful about her eye, and
I thought her endowed with a temper that might be very violent
when roused, though not easily rousable. Mrs. Caulfield told me
that a Miss Teman--I think that is the name--was the source of the
difficulty between Mrs. Dickens and her husband. She played in
private theatricals with Dickens, and he sent her a portrait in a
brooch, which met with an accident requiring it to be sent to the
jeweler's to be mended. The jeweler, noticing Mr. Dickens's
initials, sent it to his house. Mrs. Dickens's sister, who had
always been in love with him and was jealous of Miss Teman, told
Mrs. Dickens of the brooch, and she mounted her husband with comb
and brush. This, no doubt, was Mrs. Dickens's version, in the
main.

A few evenings later I saw Miss Teman at the Haymarket Theatre,
playing with Buckstone and Mr. and Mrs. Charles Mathews. She
seemed rather a small cause for such a serious result--passably
pretty, and not much of an actress.

Here in one passage we have an intimation that Mrs. Dickens had a
temper that was easily roused, that Dickens himself was interested
in an actress, and that Miss Hogarth "had always been in love with
him, and was jealous of Miss Teman."

Some years before this time, however, there had been growing in
the mind of Dickens a certain formless discontent--something to
which he could not give a name, yet which, cast over him the
shadow of disappointment. He expressed the same feeling in David
Copperfield, when he spoke of David's life with Dora. It seemed to
come from the fact that he had grown to be a man, while his wife
had still remained a child.

A passage or two may be quoted from the novel, so that we may set
them beside passages in Dickens's own life, which we know to have
referred to his own wife, and not to any such nebulous person as
Mrs. Winter.

The shadow I have mentioned that was not to be between us any
more, but was to rest wholly on my heart--how did that fall? The
old unhappy feeling pervaded my life. It was deepened, if it were
changed at all; but it was as undefined as ever, and addressed me
like a strain of sorrowful music faintly heard in the night. I
loved my wife dearly; but the happiness I had vaguely anticipated,
once, was not the happiness I enjoyed, AND THERE WAS ALWAYS
SOMETHING WANTING.

What I missed I still regarded as something that had been a dream
of my youthful fancy; that was incapable of realization; that I
was now discovering to be so, with some natural pain, as all men
did. But that it would have been better for me if my wife could
have helped me more, and shared the many thoughts in which I had
no partner, and that this might have been I knew.

What I am describing slumbered and half awoke and slept again in
the innermost recesses of my mind. There was no evidence of it to
me; I knew of no influence it had in anything I said or did. I
bore the weight of all our little cares and all my projects.

"There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind
and purpose." These words I remembered. I had endeavored to adapt
Dora to myself, and found it impracticable. It remained for me to
adapt myself to Dora; to share with her what I could, and be
happy; to bear on my own shoulders what I must, and be still
happy.

Thus wrote Dickens in his fictitious character, and of his
fictitious wife. Let us see how he wrote and how he acted in his
own person, and of his real wife.

As early as 1856, he showed a curious and restless activity, as of
one who was trying to rid himself of unpleasant thoughts. Mr.
Forster says that he began to feel a strain upon his invention, a
certain disquietude, and a necessity for jotting down memoranda in
note-books, so as to assist his memory and his imagination. He
began to long for solitude. He would take long, aimless rambles
into the country, returning at no particular time or season. He
once wrote to Forster:

I have had dreadful thoughts of getting away somewhere altogether
by myself. If I could have managed it, I think I might have gone
to the Pyrenees for six months. I have visions of living for half
a year or so in all sorts of inaccessible places, and of opening a
new book therein. A floating idea of going up above the snow-line,
and living in some astonishing convent, hovers over me.

What do these cryptic utterances mean? At first, both in his novel
and in his letters, they are obscure; but before long, in each,
they become very definite. In 1856, we find these sentences among
his letters:

The old days--the old days! Shall I ever, I wonder, get the frame
of mind back as it used to be then? Something of it, perhaps, but
never quite as it used to be.

I find that the skeleton in my domestic closet is becoming a
pretty big one.

His next letter draws the veil and shows plainly what he means:

Poor Catherine and I are not made for each other, and there is no
help for it. It is not only that she makes me uneasy and unhappy,
but that I make her so, too--and much more so. We are strangely
ill-assorted for the bond that exists between us.

Then he goes on to say that she would have been a thousand times
happier if she had been married to another man. He speaks of
"incompatibility," and a "difference of temperaments." In fact, it
is the same old story with which we have become so familiar, and
which is both as old as the hills and as new as this morning's
newspaper.

Naturally, also, things grow worse, rather than better. Dickens
comes to speak half jocularly of "the plunge," and calculates as
to what effect it will have on his public readings. He kept back
the announcement of "the plunge" until after he had given several
readings; then, on April 29, 1858, Mrs. Dickens left his home. His
eldest son went to live with the mother, but the rest of the
children remained with their father, while his daughter Mary
nominally presided over the house. In the background, however,
Georgina Hogarth, who seemed all through her life to have cared
for Dickens more than for her sister, remained as a sort of guide
and guardian for his children.

This arrangement was a private matter, and should not have been
brought to public attention; but it was impossible to suppress all
gossip about so prominent a man. Much of the gossip was
exaggerated; and when it came to the notice of Dickens it stung
him so severely as to lead him into issuing a public justification
of his course. He published a statement in Household Words, which
led to many other letters in other periodicals, and finally a long
one from him, which was printed in the New York Tribune, addressed
to his friend Mr. Arthur Smith.

Dickens afterward declared that he had written this letter as a
strictly personal and private one, in order to correct false
rumors and scandals. Mr. Smith naturally thought that the
statement was intended for publication, but Dickens always spoke
of it as "the violated letter."

By his allusions to a difference of temperament and to
incompatibility, Dickens no doubt meant that his wife had ceased
to be to him the same companion that she had been in days gone by.
As in so many cases, she had not changed, while he had. He had
grown out of the sphere in which he had been born, "associated
with blacking-boys and quilt-printers," and had become one of the
great men of his time, whose genius was universally admired.

Mr. Bigelow saw Mrs. Dickens as she really was--a commonplace
woman endowed with the temper of a vixen, and disposed to
outbursts of actual violence when her jealousy was roused.

It was impossible that the two could have remained together, when
in intellect and sympathy they were so far apart. There is nothing
strange about their separation, except the exceedingly bad taste
with which Dickens made it a public affair. It is safe to assume
that he felt the need of a different mate; and that he found one
is evident enough from the hints and bits of innuendo that are
found in the writings of his contemporaries.

He became a pleasure-lover; but more than that, he needed one who
could understand his moods and match them, one who could please
his tastes, and one who could give him that admiration which he
felt to be his due; for he was always anxious to be praised, and
his letters are full of anecdotes relating to his love of praise.

One does not wish to follow out these clues too closely. It is
certain that neither Miss Beadnell as a girl nor Mrs. Winter as a
matron made any serious appeal to him. The actresses who have been
often mentioned in connection with his name were, for the most
part, mere passing favorites. The woman who in life was Dora made
him feel the same incompleteness that he has described in his
best-known book. The companion to whom he clung in his later years
was neither a light-minded creature like Miss Beadnell, nor an
undeveloped, high-tempered woman like the one he married, nor a
mere domestic, friendly creature like Georgina Hogarth.

Ought we to venture upon a quest which shall solve this mystery in
the life of Charles Dickens! In his last will and testament, drawn
up and signed by him about a year before his death, the first
paragraph reads as follows:

I, Charles Dickens, of Gadshill Place, Higham, in the county of
Kent, hereby revoke all my former wills and codicils and declare
this to be my last will and testament. I give the sum of one
thousand pounds, free of legacy duty, to Miss Ellen Lawless
Ternan, late of Houghton Place, Ampthill Square, in the county of
Middlesex.

In connection with this, read Mr. John Bigelow's careless jottings
made some fifteen years before. Remember the Miss "Teman," about
whose name he was not quite certain; the Hogarth sisters' dislike
of her; and the mysterious figure in the background of the
novelist's later life. Then consider the first bequest in his
will, which leaves a substantial sum to one who was neither a
relative nor a subordinate, but--may we assume--more than an
ordinary friend?





HONORE DE BALZAC AND EVELINA HANSKA


I remember once, when editing an elaborate work on literature,
that the publisher called me into his private office. After the
door was closed, he spoke in tones of suppressed emotion.

"Why is it," said he, "that you have such a lack of proportion? In
the selection you have made I find that only two pages are given
to George P. Morris, while you haven't given E. P. Roe any space
at all! Yet, look here--you've blocked out fifty pages for Balzac,
who was nothing but an immoral Frenchman!"

I adjusted this difficulty, somehow or other--I do not just
remember how--and began to think that, after all, this publisher's
view of things was probably that of the English and American
public. It is strange that so many biographies and so many
appreciations of the greatest novelist who ever lived should still
have left him, in the eyes of the reading public, little more than
"an immoral Frenchman."

"In Balzac," said Taine, "there was a money-broker, an
archeologist, an architect, an upholsterer, a tailor, an old-
clothes dealer, a journeyman apprentice, a physician, and a
notary." Balzac was also a mystic, a supernaturalist, and, above
all, a consummate artist. No one who is all these things in high
measure, and who has raised himself by his genius above his
countrymen, deserves the censure of my former publisher.

Still less is Balzac to be dismissed as "immoral," for his life
was one of singular self-sacrifice in spite of much temptation.
His face was strongly sensual, his look and bearing denoted almost
savage power; he led a free life in a country which allowed much
freedom; and yet his story is almost mystic in its fineness of
thought, and in its detachment, which was often that of another
world.

Balzac was born in 1799, at Tours, with all the traits of the
people of his native province--fond of eating and drinking, and
with plenty of humor. His father was fairly well off. Of four
children, our Balzac was the eldest. The third was his sister
Laure, who throughout his life was the most intimate friend he
had, and to whom we owe his rescue from much scandalous and untrue
gossip. From her we learn that their father was a combination of
Montaigne, Rabelais, and "Uncle Toby."

Young Balzac went to a clerical school at seven, and stayed there
for seven years. Then he was brought home, apparently much
prostrated, although the good fathers could find nothing
physically amiss with him, and nothing in his studies to account
for his agitation. No one ever did discover just what was the
matter, for he seemed well enough in the next few years, basking
on the riverside, watching the activities of his native town, and
thoroughly studying the rustic types that he was afterward to make
familiar to the world. In fact, in Louis Lambert he has set before
us a picture of his own boyish life, very much as Dickens did of
his in David Copperfield.

For some reason, when these years were over, the boy began to have
what is so often known as "a call"--a sort of instinct that he was
to attain renown. Unfortunately it happened that about this time
(1814) he and his parents removed to Paris, which was his home by
choice, until his death in 1850. He studied here under famous
teachers, and gave three years to the pursuit of law, of which he
was very fond as literary material, though he refused to practise.

This was the more grievous, since a great part of the family
property had been lost. The Balzacs were afflicted by actual
poverty, and Honore endeavored, with his pen, to beat the wolf
back from the door. He earned a little money with pamphlets and
occasional stories, but his thirst for fame was far from
satisfied. He was sure that he was called to literature, and yet
he was not sure that he had the power to succeed. In one of his
letters to his sister, he wrote:

I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate. Oh,
Laure, Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones--to be
famous, and to be loved--they ever be satisfied?

For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic
use of the fiction writer's tools. What is more to the point, is
the fact that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which
should give a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human
life. This was the first intimation of his "Human Comedy," which
was so daringly undertaken and so nearly completed in his after
years. In his early days of obscurity, he said to his readers:

Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to
follow their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.

Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how
his prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and
evil fortune. Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a
feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very
slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had
loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat
only plunged him deeper in the mire. His thirty unsigned novels
began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in
promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into debt.

In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed
one of the best historic novels in French literature--The Chouans.
He speaks of his labor as "done with a tired brain and an anxious
mind," and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to
write each day before he could begin his literary work.

"Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow
myself," he writes. "I stay at home so as not to wear out my
clothes. Is that clear to you?"

At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a
novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at
the very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books,
and was in debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four
thousand francs. He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of
Mme. de Berny, a woman of high character, and one whose moral
influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death.

The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which
are seldom found. Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would
have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for
literature. But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and
Balzac regarded her with a noble love which he has expressed in
the character of Mme. Firmiani.

It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the
real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no
equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote.
What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a
brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of
Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful
study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in
dreadfulness almost anything in literature? Add to these A Passion
in the Desert, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories,
The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you have a cluster of
masterpieces not to be surpassed.

In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight
success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman's hand.
As he read it, there came to him something very like an
inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words, so
full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had
done. This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects
as are apt to become chronic with a young author. Balzac was
greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism. No one
before had read his soul so clearly. No one--not even his devoted
sister, Laure de Surville--had judged his work so wisely, had come
so closely to his deepest feeling.

He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full
of critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly
words of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters
that roused Balzac's full powers and made him sure of winning the
two great objects of his first ambition--love and fame--the ideals
of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar's time down to
the present day.

Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was
made known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a
young Polish lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish
count, whose health was feeble, and who spent much time in
Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him.

He met her first at Neuchatel, and found her all that he had
imagined. It is said that she had no sooner raised her face, and
looked him fully in the eyes, than she fell fainting to the floor,
overcome by her emotion. Balzac himself was deeply moved. From
that day until their final meeting he wrote to her daily.

The woman who had become his second soul was not beautiful.
Nevertheless, her face was intensely spiritual, and there was a
mystic quality about it which made a strong appeal to Balzac's
innermost nature. Those who saw him in Paris knocking about the
streets at night with his boon companions, hobnobbing with the
elder Dumas, or rejecting the frank advances of George Sand, would
never have dreamed of this mysticism.

Balzac was heavy and broad of figure. His face was suggestive only
of what was sensuous and sensual. At the same time, those few who
looked into his heart and mind found there many a sign of the fine
inner strain which purified the grosser elements of his nature. He
who wrote the roaring Rabelaisian Contes Drolatiques was likewise
the author of Seraphita.

This mysticism showed itself in many things that Balzac did. One
little incident will perhaps be sufficiently characteristic of
many others. He had a belief that names had a sort of esoteric
appropriateness. So, in selecting them for his novels, he gathered
them with infinite pains from many sources, and then weighed them
anxiously in the balance. A writer on the subject of names and
their significance has given the following account of this trait:

The great novelist once spent an entire day tramping about in the
remotest quarters of Paris in search of a fitting name for a
character just conceived by him. Every sign-board, every door-
plate, every affiche upon the walls, was scrutinized. Thousands of
names were considered and rejected, and it was only after his
companion, utterly worn out by fatigue, had flatly refused to drag
his weary limbs through more than one additional street, that
Balzac suddenly saw upon a sign the name "Marcas," and gave a
shout of joy at having finally secured what he was seeking.

Marcas it was, from that moment; and Balzac gradually evolved a
Christian name for him. First he considered what initial was most
appropriate; and then, having decided upon Z, he went on to expand
this into Zepherin, explaining minutely just why the whole name
Zepherin Marcas, was the only possible one for the character in
the novel.

In many ways Balzac and Evelina Hanska were mated by nature.
Whether they were fully mated the facts of their lives must
demonstrate. For the present, the novelist plunged into a whirl of
literary labor, toiling as few ever toiled--constructing several
novels at the same time, visiting all the haunts of the French
capital, so that he might observe and understand every type of
human being, and then hurling himself like a giant at his work.

He had a curious practise of reading proofs. These would come to
him in enormous sheets, printed on special paper, and with wide
margins for his corrections. An immense table stood in the midst
of his study, and upon the top he would spread out the proofs as
if they were vast maps. Then, removing most of his outer garments,
he would lie, face down, upon the proof-sheets, with a gigantic
pencil, such as Bismarck subsequently used to wield. Thus
disposed, he would go over the proofs.

Hardly anything that he had written seemed to suit him when he saw
it in print. He changed and kept changing, obliterating what he
disliked, writing in new sentences, revising others, and adding
whole pages in the margins, until perhaps he had practically made
a new book. This process was repeated several times; and how
expensive it was may be judged from the fact that his bill for
"author's proof corrections" was sometimes more than the
publishers had agreed to pay him for the completed volume.

Sometimes, again, he would begin writing in the afternoon, and
continue until dawn. Then, weary, aching in every bone, and with
throbbing head, he would rise and turn to fall upon his couch
after his eighteen hours of steady toil. But the memory of Evelina
Hanska always came to him; and with half-numbed fingers he would
seize his pen, and forget his weariness in the pleasure of writing
to the dark-eyed woman who drew him to her like a magnet.

These are very curious letters that Balzac wrote to Mme. Hanska.
He literally told her everything about himself. Not only were
there long passages instinct with tenderness, and with his love
for her; but he also gave her the most minute account of
everything that occurred, and that might interest her. Thus he
detailed at length his mode of living, the clothes he wore, the
people whom he met, his trouble with his creditors, the accounts
of his income and outgo. One might think that this was egotism on
his part; but it was more than that. It was a strong belief that
everything which concerned him must concern her; and he begged her
in turn to write as freely and as fully.

Mme. Hanska was not the only woman who became his friend and
comrade, and to whom he often wrote. He made many acquaintances in
the fashionable world through the good offices of the Duchesse de
Castries. By her favor, he studied with his microscopic gaze the
beau monde of Louis Philippe's rather unimpressive court.

In a dozen books he scourged the court of the citizen king--its
pretensions, its commonness, and its assemblage of nouveaux
riches. Yet in it he found many friends--Victor Hugo, the
Girardins--and among them women who were of the world. George Sand
he knew very well, and she made ardent love to him; but he laughed
her off very much as the elder Dumas did.

Then there was the pretty, dainty Mme. Carraud, who read and
revised his manuscripts, and who perhaps took a more intimate
interest in him than did the other ladies whom he came to know so
well. Besides Mme. Hanska, he had another correspondent who signed
herself "Louise," but who never let him know her name, though she
wrote him many piquant, sunny letters, which he so sadly needed.

For though Honore de Balzac was now one of the most famous writers
of his time, his home was still a den of suffering. His debts kept
pressing on him, loading him down, and almost quenching hope. He
acted toward his creditors like a man of honor, and his physical
strength was still that of a giant. To Mme. Carraud he once wrote
the half pathetic, half humorous plaint:

Poor pen! It must be diamond, not because one would wish to wear
it, but because it has had so much use!

And again:

Here I am, owing a hundred thousand francs. And I am forty!

Balzac and Mme. Hanska met many times after that first eventful
episode at Neuchatel. It was at this time that he gave utterance
to the poignant cry:

Love for me is life, and to-day I feel it more than ever!

In like manner he wrote, on leaving her, that famous epigram:

It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first
love of a man.

In 1842 Mme. Hanska's husband died. Balzac naturally expected that
an immediate marriage with the countess would take place; but the
woman who had loved him mystically for twelve years, and with a
touch of the physical for nine, suddenly draws back. She will not
promise anything. She talks of delays, owing to the legal
arrangements for her children. She seems almost a prude. An
American critic has contrasted her attitude with his:

Every one knows how utterly and absolutely Balzac devoted to this
one woman all his genius, his aspiration, the thought of his every
moment; how every day, after he had labored like a slave for
eighteen hours, he would take his pen and pour out to her the most
intimate details of his daily life; how at her call he would leave
everything and rush across the continent to Poland or to Italy,
being radiantly happy if he could but see her face and be for a
few days by her side. The very thought of meeting her thrilled him
to the very depths of his nature, and made him, for weeks and even
months beforehand, restless, uneasy, and agitated, with an almost
painful happiness.

It is the most startling proof of his immense vitality, both
physical and mental, that so tremendous an emotional strain could
be endured by him for years without exhausting his fecundity or
blighting his creativeness.

With Balzac, however, it was the period of his most brilliant
work; and this was true in spite of the anguish of long
separations, and the complaints excited by what appears to be
caprice or boldness or a faint indifference. Even in Balzac one
notices toward the last a certain sense of strain underlying what
he wrote, a certain lack of elasticity and facility, if of nothing
more; yet on the whole it is likely that without this friendship
Balzac would have been less great than he actually became, as it
is certain that had it been broken off he would have ceased to
write or to care for anything whatever in the world.

And yet, when they were free to marry, Mme. Hanska shrank away.
Not until 1846, four years after her husband's death, did she
finally give her promise to the eager Balzac. Then, in the
overflow of his happiness, his creative genius blazed up into a
most wonderful flame; but he soon discovered that the promise was
not to be at once fulfilled. The shock impaired that marvelous
vitality which had carried him through debt, and want, and endless
labor.

It was at this moment, by the irony of fate, that his country
hailed him as one of the greatest of its men of genius. A golden
stream poured into his lap. His debts were not all extinguished,
but his income was so large that they burdened him no longer.

But his one long dream was the only thing for which he cared; and
though in an exoteric sense this dream came true, its truth was
but a mockery. Evelina Hanska summoned him to Poland, and Balzac
went to her at once. There was another long delay, and for more
than a year he lived as a guest in the countess's mansion at
Wierzchownia; but finally, in March, 1850, the two were married. A
few weeks later they came back to France together, and occupied
the little country house, Les Jardies, in which, some decades
later, occurred Gambetta's mysterious death.

What is the secret of this strange love, which in the woman seems
to be not precisely love, but something else? Balzac was always
eager for her presence. She, on the other hand, seems to have been
mentally more at ease when he was absent. Perhaps the explanation,
if we may venture upon one, is based upon a well-known
physiological fact.

Love in its completeness is made up of two great elements--first,
the element that is wholly spiritual, that is capable of sympathy,
and tenderness, and deep emotion. The other element is the
physical, the source of passion, of creative energy, and of the
truly virile qualities, whether it be in man or woman. Now, let
either of these elements be lacking, and love itself cannot fully
and utterly exist. The spiritual nature in one may find its mate
in the spiritual nature of another; and the physical nature of one
may find its mate in the physical nature of another. But into
unions such as these, love does not enter in its completeness. If
there is any element lacking in either of those who think that
they can mate, their mating will be a sad and pitiful failure.

It is evident enough that Mme. Hanska was almost wholly spiritual,
and her long years of waiting had made her understand the
difference between Balzac and herself. Therefore, she shrank from
his proximity, and from his physical contact, and it was perhaps
better for them both that their union was so quickly broken off by
death; for the great novelist died of heart disease only five
months after the marriage.

If we wish to understand the mystery of Balzac's life--or, more
truly, the mystery of the life of the woman whom he married--take
up and read once more the pages of Seraphita, one of his poorest
novels and yet a singularly illuminating story, shedding light
upon a secret of the soul.





CHARLES READE AND LAURA SEYMOUR


The instances of distinguished men, or of notable women, who have
broken through convention in order to find a fitting mate, are
very numerous. A few of these instances may, perhaps, represent
what is usually called a Platonic union. But the evidence is
always doubtful. The world is not possessed of abundant charity,
nor does human experience lead one to believe that intimate
relations between a man and a woman are compatible with Platonic
friendship.

Perhaps no case is more puzzling than that which is found in the
life-history of Charles Reade and Laura Seymour.

Charles Reade belongs to that brilliant group of English writers
and artists which included Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Wilkie Collins,
Tom Taylor, George Eliot, Swinburne, Sir Walter Besant, Maclise,
and Goldwin Smith. In my opinion, he ranks next to Dickens in
originality and power. His books are little read to-day; yet he
gave to the English stage the comedy "Masks and Faces," which is
now as much a classic as Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer" or
Sheridan's "School for Scandal." His power as a novelist was
marvelous. Who can forget the madhouse episodes in Hard Cash, or
the great trial scene in Griffith Gaunt, or that wonderful
picture, in The Cloister and the Hearth, of Germany and Rome at
the end of the Middle Ages? Here genius has touched the dead past
and made it glow again with an intense reality.

He was the son of a country gentleman, the lord of a manor which
had been held by his family before the Wars of the Boses. His
ancestors had been noted for their services in warfare, in
Parliament, and upon the bench. Reade, therefore, was in feeling
very much of an aristocrat. Sometimes he pushed his ancestral
pride to a whimsical excess, very much as did his own creation,
Squire Raby, in Put Yourself in His Place.

At the same time he might very well have been called a Tory
democrat. His grandfather had married the daughter of a village
blacksmith, and Reade was quite as proud of this as he was of the
fact that another ancestor had been lord chief justice of England.
From the sturdy strain which came to him from the blacksmith he,
perhaps, derived that sledge-hammer power with which he wrote many
of his most famous chapters, and which he used in newspaper
controversies with his critics. From his legal ancestors there may
have come to him the love of litigation, which kept him often in
hot water. From those who had figured in the life of royal courts,
he inherited a romantic nature, a love of art, and a very delicate
perception of the niceties of cultivated usage. Such was Charles
Reade--keen observer, scholar, Bohemian--a man who could be both
rough and tender, and whose boisterous ways never concealed his
warm heart.

Reade's school-days were Spartan in their severity. A teacher with
the appropriate name of Slatter set him hard tasks and caned him
unmercifully for every shortcoming. A weaker nature would have
been crushed. Reade's was toughened, and he learned to resist pain
and to resent wrong, so that hatred of injustice has been called
his dominating trait.

In preparing himself for college he was singularly fortunate in
his tutors. One of them was Samuel Wilberforce, afterward Bishop
of Oxford, nicknamed, from his suavity of manner, "Soapy Sam"; and
afterward, when Reade was studying law, his instructor was Samuel
Warren, the author of that once famous novel, Ten Thousand a Year,
and the creator of "Tittlebat Titmouse."

For his college at Oxford, Reade selected one of the most
beautiful and ancient--Magdalen--which he entered, securing what
is known as a demyship. Reade won his demyship by an extraordinary
accident. Always an original youth, his reading was varied and
valuable; but in his studies he had never tried to be minutely
accurate in small matters. At that time every candidate was
supposed to be able to repeat, by heart, the "Thirty-Nine
Articles." Reade had no taste for memorizing; and out of the whole
thirty-nine he had learned but three. His general examination was
good, though not brilliant. When he came to be questioned orally,
the examiner, by a chance that would not occur once in a million
times, asked the candidate to repeat these very articles. Reade
rattled them off with the greatest glibness, and produced so
favorable an impression that he was let go without any further
questioning.

It must be added that his English essay was original, and this
also helped him; but had it not been for the other great piece of
luck he would, in Oxford phrase, have been "completely gulfed." As
it was, however, he was placed as highly as the young men who were
afterward known as Cardinal Newman and Sir Robert Lowe (Lord
Sherbrooke).

At the age of twenty-one, Reade obtained a fellowship, which
entitled him to an income so long as he remained unmarried. It is
necessary to consider the significance of this when we look at his
subsequent career. The fellowship at Magdalen was worth, at the
outset, about twelve hundred dollars annually, and it gave him
possession of a suite of rooms free of any charge. He likewise
secured a Vinerian fellowship in law, to which was attached an
income of four hundred dollars. As time went on, the value of the
first fellowship increased until it was worth twenty-five hundred
dollars. Therefore, as with many Oxford men of his time, Charles
Reade, who had no other fortune, was placed in this position--if he
refrained from marrying, he had a home and a moderate income for
life, without any duties whatsoever. If he married, he must give
up his income and his comfortable apartments, and go out into the
world and struggle for existence.

There was the further temptation that the possession of his
fellowship did not even necessitate his living at Oxford. He might
spend his time in London, or even outside of England, knowing that
his chambers at Magdalen were kept in order for him, as a resting-
place to which he might return whenever he chose.

Reade remained a while at Oxford, studying books and men--
especially the latter. He was a great favorite with the
undergraduates, though less so with the dons. He loved the boat-
races on the river; he was a prodigious cricket-player, and one of
the best bowlers of his time. He utterly refused to put on any of
the academic dignity which his associates affected. He wore loud
clothes. His flaring scarfs were viewed as being almost
scandalous, very much as Longfellow's parti-colored waistcoats
were regarded when he first came to Harvard as a professor.

Charles Reade pushed originality to eccentricity. He had a passion
for violins, and ran himself into debt because he bought so many
and such good ones. Once, when visiting his father's house at
Ipsden, he shocked the punctilious old gentleman by dancing on the
dining-table to the accompaniment of a fiddle, which he scraped
delightedly. Dancing, indeed, was another of his diversions, and,
in spite of the fact that he was a fellow of Magdalen and a D.C.L.
of Oxford, he was always ready to caper and to display the new
steps.

In the course of time, he went up to London; and at once plunged
into the seething tide of the metropolis. He made friends far and
wide, and in every class and station--among authors and
politicians, bishops and bargees, artists and musicians. Charles
Reade learned much from all of them, and all of them were fond of
him.

But it was the theater that interested him most. Nothing else
seemed to him quite so fine as to be a successful writer for the
stage. He viewed the drama with all the reverence of an ancient
Greek. On his tombstone he caused himself to be described as
"Dramatist, novelist, journalist."

"Dramatist" he put first of all, even after long experience had
shown him that his greatest power lay in writing novels. But in
this early period he still hoped for fame upon the stage.

It was not a fortunate moment for dramatic writers. Plays were
bought outright by the managers, who were afraid to risk any
considerable sum, and were very shy about risking anything at all.
The system had not yet been established according to which an
author receives a share of the money taken at the box-office.
Consequently, Reade had little or no financial success. He adapted
several pieces from the French, for which he was paid a few bank-
notes. "Masks and Faces" got a hearing, and drew large audiences,
but Reade had sold it for a paltry sum; and he shared the honors
of its authorship with Tom Taylor, who was then much better known.

Such was the situation. Reade was personally liked, but his plays
were almost all rejected. He lived somewhat extravagantly and ran
into debt, though not very deeply. He had a play entitled
"Christie Johnstone," which he believed to be a great one, though
no manager would venture to produce it. Reade, brooding, grew thin
and melancholy. Finally, he decided that he would go to a leading
actress at one of the principal theaters and try to interest her
in his rejected play. The actress he had in mind was Laura
Seymour, then appearing at the Haymarket under the management of
Buckstone; and this visit proved to be the turning-point in
Reade's whole life.

Laura Seymour was the daughter of a surgeon at Bath--a man in
large practise and with a good income, every penny of which he
spent. His family lived in lavish style; but one morning, after he
had sat up all night playing cards, his little daughter found him
in the dining-room, stone dead. After his funeral it appeared that
he had left no provision for his family. A friend of his--a Jewish
gentleman of Portuguese extraction--showed much kindness to the
children, settling their affairs and leaving them with some money
in the bank; but, of course, something must be done.

The two daughters removed to London, and at a very early age Laura
had made for herself a place in the dramatic world, taking small
parts at first, but rising so rapidly that in her fifteenth year
she was cast for the part of Juliet. As an actress she led a life
of strange vicissitudes. At one time she would be pinched by
poverty, and at another time she would be well supplied with
money, which slipped through her fingers like water. She was a
true Bohemian, a happy-go-lucky type of the actors of her time.

From all accounts, she was never very beautiful; but she had an
instinct for strange, yet effective, costumes, which attracted
much attention. She has been described as "a fluttering, buoyant,
gorgeous little butterfly." Many were drawn to her. She was
careless of what she did, and her name was not untouched with
scandal. But she lived through it all, and emerged a clever,
sympathetic woman of wide experience, both on the stage and off
it.

One of her admirers--an elderly gentleman named Seymour--came to
her one day when she was in much need of money, and told her that
he had just deposited a thousand pounds to her credit at the bank.
Having said this, he left the room precipitately. It was the
beginning of a sort of courtship; and after a while she married
him. Her feeling toward him was one of gratitude. There was no
sentiment about it; but she made him a good wife, and gave no
further cause for gossip.

Such was the woman whom Charles Reade now approached with the
request that she would let him read to her a portion of his play.
He had seen her act, and he honestly believed her to be a dramatic
genius of the first order. Few others shared this belief; but she
was generally thought of as a competent, though by no means
brilliant, actress. Reade admired her extremely, so that at the
very thought of speaking with her his emotions almost choked him.

In answer to a note, she sent word that he might call at her
house. He was at this time (1849) in his thirty-eighth year. The
lady was a little older, and had lost something of her youthful
charm; yet, when Reade was ushered into her drawing-room, she
seemed to him the most graceful and accomplished woman whom he had
ever met.

She took his measure, or she thought she took it, at a glance.
Here was one of those would-be playwrights who live only to
torment managers and actresses. His face was thin, from which she
inferred that he was probably half starved. His bashfulness led
her to suppose that he was an inexperienced youth. Little did she
imagine that he was the son of a landed proprietor, a fellow of
one of Oxford's noblest colleges, and one with friends far higher
in the world than herself. Though she thought so little of him,
and quite expected to be bored, she settled herself in a soft
armchair to listen. The unsuccessful playwright read to her a
scene or two from his still unfinished drama. She heard him
patiently, noting the cultivated accent of his voice, which proved
to her that he was at least a gentleman. When he had finished, she
said:

"Yes, that's good! The plot is excellent." Then she laughed a sort
of stage laugh, and remarked lightly: "Why don't you turn it into
a novel?"

Reade was stung to the quick. Nothing that she could have said
would have hurt him more. Novels he despised; and here was this
woman, the queen of the English stage, as he regarded her,
laughing at his drama and telling him to make a novel of it. He
rose and bowed.

"I am trespassing on your time," he said; and, after barely
touching the fingers of her outstretched hand, he left the room
abruptly.

The woman knew men very well, though she scarcely knew Charles
Reade. Something in his melancholy and something in his manner
stirred her heart. It was not a heart that responded to emotions
readily, but it was a very good-natured heart. Her explanation of
Reade's appearance led her to think that he was very poor. If she
had not much tact, she had an abundant store of sympathy; and so
she sat down and wrote a very blundering but kindly letter, in
which she enclosed a five-pound note.

Reade subsequently described his feelings on receiving this letter
with its bank-note. He said:

"I, who had been vice-president of Magdalen--I, who flattered
myself I was coming to the fore as a dramatist--to have a five-
pound note flung at my head, like a ticket for soup to a pauper,
or a bone to a dog, and by an actress, too! Yet she said my
reading was admirable; and, after all, there is much virtue in a
five-pound note. Anyhow, it showed the writer had a good heart."

The more he thought of her and of the incident, the more comforted
he was. He called on her the next day without making an
appointment; and when she received him, he had the five-pound note
fluttering in his hand.

She started to speak, but he interrupted her.

"No," he said, "that is not what I wanted from you. I wanted
sympathy, and you have unintentionally supplied it."

Then this man, whom she had regarded as half starved, presented
her with an enormous bunch of hothouse grapes, and the two sat
down and ate them together, thus beginning a friendship which
ended only with Laura Seymour's death.

Oddly enough, Mrs. Seymour's suggestion that Reade should make a
story of his play was a suggestion which he actually followed. It
was to her guidance and sympathy that the world owes the great
novels which he afterward composed. If he succeeded on the stage
at all, it was not merely in "Masks and Faces," but in his
powerful dramatization of Zola's novel, L'Assommoir, under the
title "Drink," in which the late Charles Warner thrilled and
horrified great audiences all over the English-speaking world. Had
Reade never known Laura Seymour, he might never have written so
strong a drama.

The mystery of Reade's relations with this woman can never be
definitely cleared up. Her husband, Mr. Seymour, died not long
after she and Reade became acquainted. Then Reade and several
friends, both men and women, took a house together; and Laura
Seymour, now a clever manager and amiable hostess, looked after
all the practical affairs of the establishment. One by one, the
others fell away, through death or by removal, until at last these
two were left alone. Then Reade, unable to give up the
companionship which meant so much to him, vowed that she must
still remain and care for him. He leased a house in Sloane Street,
which he has himself described in his novel A Terrible Temptation.
It is the chapter wherein Reade also draws his own portrait in the
character of Francis Bolfe:

The room was rather long, low, and nondescript; scarlet flock
paper; curtains and sofas, green Utrecht velvet; woodwork and
pillars, white and gold; two windows looking on the street; at the
other end folding-doors, with scarcely any woodwork, all plate
glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color and
material as the others.

At last a bell rang; the maid came in and invited Lady Bassett to
follow her. She opened the glass folding-doors and took them into
a small conservatory, walled like a grotto, with ferns sprouting
out of rocky fissures, and spars sparkling, water dripping. Then
she opened two more glass folding-doors, and ushered them into an
empty room, the like of which Lady Bassett had never seen; it was
large in itself, and multiplied tenfold by great mirrors from
floor to ceiling, with no frames but a narrow oak beading;
opposite her, on entering, was a bay window, all plate glass, the
central panes of which opened, like doors, upon a pretty little
garden that glowed with color, and was backed by fine trees
belonging to the nation; for this garden ran up to the wall of
Hyde Park.

The numerous and large mirrors all down to the ground laid hold of
the garden and the flowers, and by double and treble reflection
filled the room with delightful nooks of verdure and color.

Here are the words in which Reade describes himself as he looked
when between fifty and sixty years of age:

He looked neither like a poet nor a drudge, but a great fat
country farmer. He was rather tall, very portly, smallish head,
commonplace features, mild brown eye not very bright, short beard,
and wore a suit of tweed all one color.

Such was the house and such was the man over both of which Laura
Seymour held sway until her death in 1879. What must be thought of
their relations? She herself once said to Mr. John Coleman:

"As for our positions--his and mine--we are partners, nothing
more. He has his bank-account, and I have mine. He is master of
his fellowship and his rooms at Oxford, and I am mistress of this
house, but not his mistress! Oh, dear, no!"

At another time, long after Mr. Seymour's death, she said to an
intimate friend:

"I hope Mr. Reade will never ask me to marry him, for I should
certainly refuse the offer."

There was no reason why he should not have made this offer,
because his Oxford fellowship ceased to be important to him after
he had won fame as a novelist. Publishers paid him large sums for
everything he wrote. His debts were all paid off, and his income
was assured. Yet he never spoke of marriage, and he always
introduced his friend as "the lady who keeps my house for me."

As such, he invited his friends to meet her, and as such, she even
accompanied him to Oxford. There was no concealment, and
apparently there was nothing to conceal. Their manner toward each
other was that of congenial friends. Mrs. Seymour, in fact, might
well have been described as "a good fellow." Sometimes she
referred to him as "the doctor," and sometimes by the nickname
"Charlie." He, on his side, often spoke of her by her last name as
"Seymour," precisely as if she had been a man. One of his
relatives rather acutely remarked about her that she was not a
woman of sentiment at all, but had a genius for friendship; and
that she probably could not have really loved any man at all.

This is, perhaps, the explanation of their intimacy. If so, it is
a very remarkable instance of Platonic friendship. It is certain
that, after she met Reade, Mrs. Seymour never cared for any other
man. It is no less certain that he never cared for any other
woman. When she died, five years before his death, his life became
a burden to him. It was then that he used to speak of her as "my
lost darling" and "my dove." He directed that they should be
buried side by side in Willesden churchyard. Over the monument
which commemorates them both, he caused to be inscribed, in
addition to an epitaph for himself, the following tribute to his
friend. One should read it and accept the touching words as
answering every question that may be asked:

Here lies the great heart of Laura Seymour, a brilliant artist, a
humble Christian, a charitable woman, a loving daughter, sister,
and friend, who lived for others from her childhood. Tenderly
pitiful to all God's creatures--even to some that are frequently
destroyed or neglected--she wiped away the tears from many faces,
helping the poor with her savings and the sorrowful with her
earnest pity. When the eye saw her it blessed her, for her face
was sunshine, her voice was melody, and her heart was sympathy.

This grave was made for her and for himself by Charles Reade,
whose wise counselor, loyal ally, and bosom friend she was for
twenty-four years, and who mourns her all his days.

THE END






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