Chapter II: Part 2

"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 be 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.