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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Superwomen, by Albert Payson Terhune
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Superwomen
+
+Author: Albert Payson Terhune
+
+Release Date: April 1, 2012 [EBook #39339]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERWOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SUPERWOMEN
+
+
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL FICTION LIBRARY
+CLEVELAND, O.        NEW YORK, N.Y.
+
+Copyright, MCMXVI
+By Moffat Yard & Company
+
+_Printed in the United States of America by_
+THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO.
+CLEVELAND
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: The headings for Chapters 8, 11, and 12 have been
+retained as roman numerals, as printed. Words printed in bold type are
+indicated by a tilde: ~bold~.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+Find the Woman.
+
+You will discover her in almost every generation, in almost every
+country, in almost every big city--the Super-Woman. She is not the
+typical adventuress; she is not a genius. The reason for her strange
+power is occult. When psycho-vivisectionists have thought they had
+segregated the cause--the formula--what you will--in one particular
+Super-Woman or group of Super-Women, straightway some new member of
+the clan has arisen who wields equal power with her notable sisters,
+but who has none of the traits that made them irresistible. And the
+seekers of formulas are again at sea.
+
+What makes the Super-Woman? Is it beauty? Cleopatra and Rachel were
+homely. Is it daintiness? Marguerite de Valois washed her hands but
+twice a week. Is it wit? Pompadour and La Valliere were avowedly
+stupid in conversation. Is it youth? Diane de Poictiers and Ninon de
+l'Enclos were wildly adored at sixty. Is it the subtle quality of
+femininity? George Sand, who numbered her admirers by the score--poor
+Chopin in their foremost rank--was not only ugly, but disgustingly
+mannish. So was Semiramis.
+
+The nameless charm is found almost as often in the masculine,
+"advanced" woman as in the ultrafeminine damsel.
+
+Here are stories of Super-Women who conquered at will. Some of them
+smashed thrones; some were content with wholesale heart-smashing.
+Wherein lay their secret? Or, rather, their secrets? For seldom did
+two of them follow the same plan of campaign.
+
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+
+  "Sunnybank,"
+    Pompton Lakes,
+      New Jersey
+  1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+LOLA MONTEZ                   1
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS            19
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+PEG WOFFINGTON               41
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+HELEN OF TROY                62
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+MADAME JUMEL                 89
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR         115
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+CLEOPATRA                   135
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+GEORGE SAND                 156
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+MADAME DU BARRY             175
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+LADY BLESSINGTON            204
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+MADAME RECAMIER             230
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+LADY HAMILTON               250
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+LOLA MONTEZ
+
+THE DANCER WHO KICKED OVER A THRONE
+
+
+Her Majesty's Theatre in London, one night in 1843, was jammed from
+pit to roof. Lumley the astute manager, had whispered that he had a
+"find." His whisper had been judiciously pitched in a key that enabled
+it to penetrate St. James Street clubs, Park Lane boudoirs, even City
+counting-rooms.
+
+The managerial whisper had been augmented by a "private view," to
+which many journalists and a few influential men about town had been
+bidden. These lucky guests had shifted the pitch from whisper to pćan.
+By word of mouth and by ardent quill the song of praise had spread.
+One of the latter forms of tribute had run much in this
+rural-newspaper form:
+
+"A brilliant ~divertissement~ is promised by Mr. Lumley for the
+forthcoming performance of 'The Tarantula,' at Her Majesty's. Thursday
+evening will mark the British debut of the mysterious and bewitchingly
+beautiful Castilian dancer, Lola Montez.
+
+"Through the delicate veins of this lovely daughter of dreamy
+Andalusia sparkles the ~sang azur~ which is the birthright of the
+hidalgo families alone. In her is embodied not alone the haughty
+lineage of centuries of noble ancestry, but all the fire and mystic
+charm that are the precious heritage of the Southland.
+
+"At a private view, yesterday, at which your correspondent had the
+honor to be an invited guest, this peerless priestess of
+Terpsichore----"
+
+And so on for well-nigh a column of adjective-starred panegyric, which
+waxed more impassioned as the dictionary's supply of unrepeated
+superlatives waned. This was before the day of the recognized press
+agent. Folk had a way of believing what they read. Hence the
+gratifyingly packed theater to witness the mysterious Spaniard's
+debut.
+
+Royalty itself, surrounded by tired gentlemen in waiting who wanted to
+sit down and could not, occupied one stage box. In the front of
+another, lolled Lord Ranelagh, arbiter of London fashion and accepted
+authority on all matters of taste--whether in dress, dancers, or
+duels. Ranelagh, recently come back from a tour of the East, divided
+with royalty the reverent attention of the stalls.
+
+The pit whistled and clapped in merry impatience for the appearance of
+the danseuse. The West End section of the house waited in equal, if
+more subdued eagerness, and prepared to follow every possible
+expression of Ranelagh's large-toothed, side-whiskered visage as a
+signal for its own approval or censure of the much-advertised Lola's
+performance.
+
+The first scene of the opera passed almost unnoticed. Then the stage
+was cleared and a tense hush gripped the house. A fanfare of cornets;
+and from the wings a supple, dark girl bounded.
+
+A whirlwind of welcome from pit and gallery greeted her. She struck a
+sensuous pose in the stage's exact center. The cornetists laid aside
+their instruments.
+
+Guitars and mandolins set up a throbby string overture. Lola drew a
+deep breath, flashed a vivid Spanish smile on the audience at large,
+and took the first languid step of her dance.
+
+Then it was that the dutiful signal seekers cast covert looks once
+more at Lord Ranelagh. That ordinarily stolid nobleman was leaning far
+forward in his stage box, mouth and eyes wide, staring with
+incredulous amaze at the posturing Andalusian. Before her first step
+was complete, Ranelagh's astonishment burst the shackles of silence.
+
+"Gad!" he roared, his excited voice smashing through the soft music
+and penetrating to every cranny. "Gad! It's little Betty James!"
+
+He broke into a Homeric guffaw. A toady who sat beside him hissed
+sharply. The hiss and the guffaw were cues quite strong enough for the
+rest of the house. A sizzling, swishing chorus of hisses went up from
+the stalls, was caught by the pit, and tossed aloft in swelling
+crescendo to the gallery, where it was intensified to treble volume.
+
+Lola's artistically made-up face had gone white under its rouge and
+pearl powder at Ranelagh's shout. Now it flamed crimson. The girl
+danced on; she was gallant, a thoroughbred to the core--even though
+she chanced to be thoroughbred Irish instead of thoroughbred
+Spanish--and she would not be hissed from the stage.
+
+But now "boos" mingled with the hisses. And Ranelagh's immoderate
+laughter was caught up by scores of people who did not in the least
+know at what they were laughing.
+
+The storm was too heavy to weather. Lumley growled an order. Down
+swooped the curtain, leaving the crowd booing on one side of it, and
+Lola raging on the other.
+
+Which ended the one and only English theatrical experience of Lola
+Montez, the dreamy Andalusian dancer from County Limerick, Ireland.
+That night at Almack's, Lord Ranelagh told a somewhat lengthy story--a
+story whose details he had picked up in the East--which was repeated
+with interesting variations next day on Rotten Row, in a dozen clubs,
+in a hundred drawing rooms. There is the gist of the tale:
+
+Some quarter century before the night of Lola's London ~premiere~--and
+~derniere~--an Irish girl, Eliza Oliver by name, had caught the errant
+fancy of a great man. The man chanced to be Lord Byron, at that time
+loafing about the Continent and trying, outwardly at least, to live up
+to the mental image of himself that was just then enshrined in the
+hearts of several thousand demure English schoolmaids.
+
+Byron soon tired of Miss Oliver--it is doubtful whether he ever saw
+her daughter--and the Irish beauty soon afterward married a fellow
+countryman of her own--Sir Edward Gilbert, an army captain.
+
+The couple's acquaintances being overmuch given to prattling about
+things best forgotten, Gilbert exchanged to a regiment in India,
+taking along his wife and her little girl. The child had meantime been
+christened Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna; which, for practical purposes,
+was blue-penciled down to "Betty."
+
+Seven years afterward, Gilbert died. His widow promptly married
+Captain Craigie, a solid, worthy, Scotch comrade-at-arms of her
+late husband's. Craigie generously assumed all post-Byronic
+responsibilities, along with the marriage vows. And, at his expense,
+Betty was sent to Scotland--later to Paris--to be educated.
+
+At sixteen the girl was a beauty--and a witch as well. She and her
+mother spent a season at Bath, a resort that still retained in those
+days some shreds of its former glory. And there--among a score of
+younger and poorer admirers--two men sued for Betty's hand.
+
+One was Captain James, a likable, susceptible, not over-clever army
+officer, home on furlough from India. The other was a judge, very old,
+very gouty, very rich.
+
+And Betty's mother chose the judge, out of all the train of suitors,
+as her son-in-law-elect. Years had taught worldly wisdom to the
+once-gay Eliza.
+
+Betty listened in horror to the old man's mumbled vows. Then, at top
+speed, she fled to Captain James. She told James that her mother was
+seeking to sacrifice her on the altar of wealth. James, like a true
+early-Victorian hero, rose manfully to the occasion.
+
+He and Betty eloped, were married by a registrar, and took the next
+out-bound ship for India.
+
+It was a day of long and slow voyages. Betty beguiled the time on
+shipboard by a course of behavior such as would have prevented the
+most charitable fellow passenger from mistaking her for a returning
+missionary.
+
+There were many Anglo-Indians--officers and civilians--aboard. And
+Betty's flirtations, with all and sundry, speedily became the scandal
+of the ship. By the time the vessel docked in India, there were dozens
+of women ready to spread abroad the bride's fame in her new home land.
+
+English society in India was, and is, in many respects like that of a
+provincial town. In the official and army set, one member's business
+is everybody's business.
+
+Nor did Betty take any pains to erase the impressions made by her
+volunteer advance agents. Like a blazing star, she burst upon the
+horizon of India army life. Gloriously beautiful, willful, capricious,
+brilliant, she speedily had a horde of men at her feet--and a still
+larger number of women at her throat.
+
+Her flirtations were the talk of mess-room and bungalow. Heartlessly,
+she danced on hearts. There was some subtle quality about her that
+drove men mad with infatuation.
+
+And her husband? He looked on in horrified wonder. Then he argued and
+even threatened. At last he shut up and took to drink. Betty wrote
+contemptuously to a friend, concerning this last phase:
+
+"He spends his time in drinking, and then in sleeping like a gorged
+boa-constrictor."
+
+James was liked by the English out there, and his friends fiercely
+resented the domestic treatment that was turning a popular and
+promising officer into a sodden beast.
+
+One morning James rode away over the hills and neglected to come back.
+His wife never again heard of him. And at his exit from the scene, the
+storm broke; a storm of resentment that swept Betty James out beyond
+even the uttermost fringe of Anglo-Indian society.
+
+She hunted up her generous old step-father, Craigie, and induced him
+to give her a check for a thousand pounds, to get rid of her forever.
+She realized another thousand on her votive offerings of jewelry; and,
+with this capital, she took the dust of India from her pretty
+slippers.
+
+Here ends Lord Ranelagh's scurrilous narrative, told at Almack's.
+
+On her way back to England, Betty broke her journey at Spain,
+remaining there long enough to acquire three valuable assets--a
+Spanish accent, a semi-tolerable knowledge of Spanish dancing, and the
+ultra-Spanish name of Lola Montez, by which--through mere courtesy to
+her wishes--let us hereafter call her. Then she burst upon the British
+public--only to retire amid a salvo of hisses and catcalls.
+
+With the premature fall of the curtain at Her Majesty's Theater,
+begins the Odyssey of Lola Montez.
+
+She went from London to Germany, where she danced for a time, to but
+scant applause, at second-rate theaters, and at last could get no more
+engagements.
+
+Thence she drifted to Brussels, where, according to her own later
+statement, she was "reduced to singing in the streets to keep from
+starving." Contemporary malice gives a less creditable version of her
+means of livelihood in the Belgian capital. It was a period of her
+life--the black hour before the garish dawn--of which she never
+afterward would talk.
+
+But before long she was on the stage again; this time at Warsaw,
+during a revolution. She danced badly and was hissed. But the
+experience gave her an idea.
+
+She went straightway to Paris, where, by posing as an exiled Polish
+patriot, she secured an engagement at the Porte St. Martin Theater. It
+was her last hope.
+
+The "Polish patriot" story brought a goodly crowd to Lola's first
+performance in Paris. But, after a single dance, she heard the
+horribly familiar sound of hisses.
+
+And at the first hiss, her Irish spirit blazed into a crazy rage; a
+rage that was the turning point of her career.
+
+Glaring first at the spectators like an angry cat, Lola next glared
+around the stage for a weapon wherewith to wreak her fury upon them.
+But the stage was bare.
+
+Frantic, she kicked off her slippers, and then tore loose her
+heavy-buckled garters. With these intimate missiles she proceeded to
+pelt the grinning occupants of the front row, accompanying the volley
+with a high-pitched, venomous Billingsgate tirade in three languages.
+
+That was enough. On the instant the hisses were drowned in a salvo of
+applause that shook the rafters, Lola Montez had "arrived." Paris
+grabbed her to its big, childish, fickle heart.
+
+She was a spitfire and she couldn't dance. But she had given the
+Parisians a genuine thrill. She was a success. Two slippers and two
+garters, hurled with feminine rage and feminine inaccuracy into the
+faces of a line of bored theatergoers, had achieved more for the fair
+artillerist than the most exquisite dancing could have hoped to.
+
+Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not
+now have dimmed her fame.
+
+Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat
+shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity
+sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.
+
+But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French
+adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer,
+challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola,
+accepted the challenge--and was borne off the field of honor with a
+bullet through his brain.
+
+Lola sought to improve the occasion by swathing herself somberly and
+right becomingly in crape, and by vowing a vendetta against the
+slayer. But before she could profit by the excellent advertisement,
+Dumas chanced to say something to a friend--who repeated it to another
+friend, who repeated it to all Paris--that set the superstitious,
+mid-century Frenchmen to looking askance at Lola and to avoiding her
+gaze. Said Monte Cristo's creator:
+
+"She has the evil eye. She will bring a curse upon any man who loves
+her."
+
+And by that (perhaps) senseless speech, Dumas drove Lola Montez from
+Paris. But she took with her all her new-born prestige as a danseuse.
+She took it first to Berlin. There she was bidden to dance at a court
+reception tendered by King Frederick William, of Prussia.
+
+The rooms of the palace, on the night of the reception, were
+stiflingly hot. Lola asked for a glass of water. A much-belaced and
+bechained chamberlain--to whom the request was repeated by a
+footman--sent word to Lola that she was there to dance for the king
+and not to order her fellow-servants around.
+
+The net result of this answer was another Irish rage. Lola, regardless
+of her pompous surroundings, rushed up to the offending chamberlain
+and loudly made known her exact opinion of him. She added that she was
+tired of dealing with understrappers, and that, unless the king
+himself would bring her a glass of water, there would be no dreamy
+Spanish dance at the palace that night.
+
+The scandalized officials moved forward in a body to hustle the
+lesemajeste perpetrator out of the sacred precincts. But the rumpus
+had reached the ears of King Frederick William himself, at the far end
+of the big room. His majesty came forward in person to learn the cause
+of the disturbance. He saw a marvelously beautiful woman in a
+marvelously abusive rage.
+
+To the monarch's amused queries, the chamberlain bleated out the awful,
+sacrilegious, ~schrecklich~ tale of Lola's demand. The king did not
+order her loaded with chains and haled to the donjon keep. Instead, he
+gave a laughing order--this gracious and gentle sovereign who had so
+keen an eye for beauty.
+
+A moment later a lackey brought the king a glass of water. First
+gallantly touching the goblet to his own lips, his majesty handed it
+with a deep obeisance to Lola.
+
+Except for the advertisement it gave her, she could gain no real
+advantage from this odd introduction to a king. For, next day, she
+received a secret, but overwhelmingly official hint that an instant
+departure not only from Berlin, but from Prussia, too, would be one of
+the wisest moves in her whole career. She went.
+
+To Bavaria, and to greatness.
+
+Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer, was billed at a Munich theater. She
+danced there but three times. For, on the third evening, the royal box
+was occupied by a drowsy-eyed sexagenarian whose uniform coat was
+ablaze with decorations.
+
+The old gentleman was Ludwig I. ~Dei gratia~, King of Bavaria, a
+ruler who up to this time had been beloved of his subjects; and whose
+worst vice, in his people's eyes, was that he encouraged art rather
+than arms.
+
+Ludwig watched breathlessly while Lola danced. Afterward he sent for
+her to come to the royal box and be presented to him. She never danced
+again in Bavaria.
+
+For next day Ludwig introduced her at court as "my very good friend."
+Lola dazzled Munich with her jewels and her equipages. The king
+presented her with a huge and hideous mansion. He stretched the laws
+by having her declared a Bavarian subject. And, having done that, he
+bestowed upon her the titles of "Baroness von Rosenthal and Countess
+von Landfeld." Next, he granted her an annuity of twenty thousand
+florins. Things were coming Lola's way, and coming fast.
+
+The Bavarians did not dislike her--at first. When Ludwig forced his
+queen to receive her and to pin upon the dancer-emeritus' breast the
+Order of St. Theresa, there was, to be sure, a shocked murmur. But it
+soon died down. Had Lola been content with her luck, she might have
+continued indefinitely in her new and delightfully comfortable mode of
+life.
+
+But, according to Lola's theory, a mortal who is content with success
+would be content with failure. And she strove to play a greater role
+than the fat one assigned to her by the love-sick old king.
+
+She had read of Pompadour and other royal favorites whose vagrom whims
+swayed the destinies of Europe. She sought to be a world power; the
+power behind the throne; the woman who could mold the politics of a
+dynasty. And she laid her plans accordingly.
+
+It was not even a dream, this new ambition of Lola's. It was a
+comic-opera fantasy. Bavaria, at best, was only a little German state
+with no special voice in the congress of nations. And Lola herself had
+no more aptitude for politics than she had for dancing. Nor did she
+stop to consider that Germans in 1846 were much more likely to
+tolerate a fair foreigner's meddling with their puppet king's domestic
+affairs than with matters of public welfare.
+
+But Lola Montez ever did the bulk of her sane thinking when it was too
+late. So she proceeded to put her idiotic plans into operation.
+
+First, she cajoled King Ludwig into dismissing in a body his perfectly
+capable and well-liked ministry. As delighted with that success as is
+the village cut-up when he pulls a chair from under the portly
+constable--and with even less wholesome fear of the result to
+herself--Lola next persuaded the king to change his whole policy of
+state. Then things began to happen.
+
+One morning Lola awoke in her ugly and costly mansion to find the
+street in front of the door blocked by a highly unfriendly mob, whose
+immediate ambition seemed to be the destruction of the house and
+herself. This was the signal for one more Irish rage, the last on
+public record.
+
+Lola, throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, snatched up a loaded
+pistol, and, pushing aside her screaming servants, ran out on the
+front steps.
+
+At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the
+steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing
+mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was
+content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles.
+
+The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine
+for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling
+them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal
+bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd
+and rescued the angry woman.
+
+But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely
+unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the
+avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same
+avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to
+knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her
+twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian
+frontier with stern instructions never to return.
+
+Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on
+her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from
+power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a
+noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish
+girl with a variegated past.
+
+The Ludwig scandal preceded Lola wherever she tried to go. The
+divinity that hedges a king was everywhere on guard against her. The
+gate to practically every country in Europe was slammed in her face.
+Folk fell to repeating Dumas' "evil-eye" words, and to applying them
+to discrowned old Ludwig. Lola Montez was not wanted anywhere;
+certainly nowhere east of the Atlantic.
+
+So she came to New York. Here there were no kings, to bar her out lest
+they share Ludwig's fate. And Americans knew little and cared less
+about the evil eye. If Lola Montez could make good on the stage,
+America was willing to welcome her: If not, it had no further general
+interest in her.
+
+Moreover, she was well past thirty; at an age when the first glory of
+a woman's siren charms may reasonably be supposed to be slightly
+blurred. New Yorkers were curious to see her, on account of her
+history; but that was their only interest in her.
+
+She danced at the old Broadway Theater. People thronged the theater
+for the first few performances. Then, having gazed their fill on the
+Bavarian throne's wrecker and finding she could not dance, they stayed
+away; and Lola ended her engagement at the Broadway to the hackneyed
+"beggarly array of empty benches."
+
+An enterprising manager--P. T. Barnum, if I remember aright--raked up
+the Byron story and starred Lola in a dramatization of Lord Byron's
+poem "Mazeppa." But people here had already looked at her, and the
+production was a failure. Next she appeared in one or two miserably
+written plays, based on her own European adventures. These, too,
+failed. She then wrote a beauty book that had a small sale, and wrote
+also a drearily stupid volume of humor, designed as a mock "Guide to
+Courtship."
+
+On her way to America, Lola had stopped in England long enough to
+captivate and marry a British army officer, Heald by name. But she
+soon left him, and arrived in this country without visible matrimonial
+ties.
+
+New York having tired of her, Lola went West. She created a brief, but
+lively, furore among the gold-boom towns along the Pacific coast; not
+so much by reason of her story as for the wondrous charm that was
+still hers. She gave lectures in California, and then made an
+Australian tour.
+
+Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San
+Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One
+of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper
+owner, of San Francisco.
+
+But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands.
+Back she came to New York. And--to the wonder of all, and the
+incredulity of most--she there announced that, though she had been a
+great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to
+penance.
+
+Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday
+she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among
+women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had
+on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day
+in their behalf.
+
+Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces.
+She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty
+and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough
+money to bury her.
+
+Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez;
+Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and
+worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the
+great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.
+
+Her neglected grave--in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the
+way--bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired
+woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering
+reads:
+
+    ~Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.~
+
+One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have
+possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could
+have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS
+
+PREMIERE SIREN OF TWO CENTURIES
+
+
+This story opens with the account of a deathbed scene; somewhat
+different from any other you may have read. It is brought in to throw
+a light on what heredity and careful instruction can do in molding a
+young mind. But don't necessarily skip it for that reason.
+
+One day in 1630, the Sieur de L'Enclos lay dying in his great, dreary
+bedroom in his great, dreary Touraine castle. There was no especial
+tragedy about the closing of his life. He was elderly, very rich, and
+possessed of a record for having used, to the full, every minute of a
+long and exciting life.
+
+Beside his bed stood a fifteen-year-old girl, his only daughter, Anne;
+affectionately nicknamed by him--and later by all Europe and still
+later by all history--"Ninon." She was something below medium height,
+plump, with a peachblow complexion, huge dark eyes, and a crown of
+red-gold hair. Ninon and her father had been chums, kindred spirits,
+from the girl's babyhood.
+
+The dying noble opened his eyes. They rested lovingly on the daughter
+who had bent down to hear the whispered sounds his white lips were
+striving to frame. Then, with a mighty effort, De L'Enclos breathed
+his solemn last words of counsel to the girl--counsel intended to
+guide her through the future that he knew must lie before so rich and
+so beautiful a damsel. This was his message to her:
+
+"Ninon--little girl of mine--in dying I have but one single regret. I
+regret that I did not--get more fun out of life. I warn
+you--daughter--do not make the terrible mistake that I have made.
+Live--live so that at the last you will not have the same cause for
+sorrow!"
+
+So saying, the Sieur de L'Enclos bade an exemplary farewell to earth
+and to its lost opportunities of fun. To judge from his career as well
+as from his last words, one may venture the optimistic belief that he
+had not thrown away as many such priceless chances as he had led his
+daughter to believe.
+
+Ninon, then, at fifteen, was left alone in the world. And her actions
+in this sad state conformed to those of the customary helpless
+orphan--about as closely as had her father's death speech to the
+customary "last words." With a shrewdness miraculous in so young a
+girl, she juggled her Touraine property in a series of deals that
+resulted in its sale at a little more than double its actual value.
+Rich beyond all fear of want, she settled in Paris.
+
+It was not there or then that her love life set in. That had begun
+long before. As a mere child she had flashed upon her little world of
+Touraine as a wonder girl. The superwoman charm was hers from the
+first. And she retained it in all its mysterious power through the
+seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; men vying for her love
+when she was ninety.
+
+A full year before her father died, she had met the youthful Prince de
+Marsillac, and had, at a glance, wholly captivated his semi-royal
+fancy. It was Ninon's first love affair--with a prince. She was
+dazzled by it just a little, she whom monarchs later could not dazzle.
+She was only fourteen. And in Touraine a princely admirer was a
+novelty.
+
+At Marsillac's boyish supplication, Ninon consented to elope with him.
+Off they started. And back to their respective homes they were brought
+in dire disgrace. There was all sorts of a scandal in the
+neighborhood. The princeling was soundly spanked and packed off to
+school. The Sieur de L'Enclos came in for grave popular disapproval by
+laughingly refusing to mete out the same stern penalties to Ninon.
+
+To Paris, then, at sixteen, went the orphaned Ninon. Laughing at
+convention and at the threats of her shocked relatives, she set up
+housekeeping on her own account, managing the affairs of her Rive
+Gauche mansion with the ease of a fifty-year-old grande dame.
+
+On Paris burst the new star. In a month the city was crazy over her.
+Not her beauty alone, nor her wit, nor her peculiar elegance, nor her
+incredibly high spirits.--Not any or all of these, but an
+all-compelling magnetism drew men to her in shoals and swarms.
+
+By reason of her birth and breeding she took at once her place in the
+court society of the day. Before she was twenty, she was setting the
+fashions for feminine Paris, and was receiving in her salon the
+stateliest ladies of the court, in equal numbers with their far less
+stately husbands.
+
+Frankly, she declared herself a votary, not of love, but of loves. For
+constancy she had no use whatsoever. One admirer who had won a
+temporary lease of her gay heart swore he would kill himself unless
+Ninon would swear to love him to eternity.
+
+And as she loved him ardently, she made the rash vow. When at the end
+of ninety days she gave him his dismissal, he reproached her wildly
+and bitterly for her broken pledge.
+
+"You swore you would love me to eternity!" he raged. "And now----"
+
+"And now," she explained, as one might soothe a cranky child, "I have
+kept my vow. I have loved you for three endless months. That is an
+eternity--for love!"
+
+And three months remained, to the end, Ninon's record for fidelity to
+any one man; which was, perhaps, as well, for the waiting list was as
+long as that of a hyper-fashionable club.
+
+And now we come to a story that I do not ask you to believe, although
+all France unquestionably and unquestioningly believed it. Whether
+Ninon herself at first coined it as a joke, or whether it was a hoax
+that she herself credited, it is certain that she grew at last to have
+firm faith in it.
+
+One night--so Ninon always declared--when she was about twenty, she
+returned home late from a ball at the Hotel St. Evremond. As she stood
+before the mirror of her boudoir, after her maid had left her for the
+night, she became aware of a shadowy reflection behind her.
+
+Turning, she saw a man clad all in black, his face hidden by the low
+brim of his hat and by his cloak's folds. What little was visible of
+his countenance was ghastly pale. Ninon, ever fearless, did not cry
+out for help. Instead, she approached the black-shrouded stranger and
+demanded to know his business and how he had penetrated to her
+close-barred room.
+
+The man in black, by way of answer, drew one sable-gloved hand from
+beneath his cloak. In his fingers he grasped a large phial, wherein
+sparkled and glowed a strange, pinkish liquid.
+
+"Life is short," said the visitor, as Ninon still looked in amazed
+inquiry from his half-hidden face to the rose-colored phial he
+carried. "Life is short, but youth is far shorter. When youth is gone,
+love is gone. Love is the goal of life. Without youth, there is no
+love. Without love, life is a desert. The gifts of youth and beauty
+are yours. Would you make them long-lasting, instead of transient
+blessings that shall too soon become mere memories?"
+
+As Ninon, dumb with wonder, hesitated to reply, he continued:
+
+"The admiration of men melts like summer snow at the first touch of
+age in a woman. Their admiration is now yours. Would you hold it? One
+drop a day from this phial, in your bath, will keep you young, will
+keep you beautiful, will retain for you the love of men."
+
+He set the flask on her dressing table and turned to go.
+
+"You will see me again," he said very slowly and distinctly, "just
+three days before your death."
+
+And he vanished.
+
+To a generation that has substituted science for superstition, this
+tale of the Man in Black reads like stark nonsense. Perhaps it is. But
+no one in the seventeenth century thought so. It was an age rife with
+demon legends; legends of favors granted to mortals in return for a
+residuary mortgage on their souls; and all that sort of thing. The
+tale of Faust was still almost brand-new. Compared with many of the
+traditions that then passed for solid fact, the incident of Ninon and
+the Man in Black was almost commonplace.
+
+We laugh at such things; probably with due justification. Yet was
+Ninon's adventure more inexplicable than some of the absolutely
+authenticated cases of Cagliostro's magic? As, for a single example,
+when on a certain date Cagliostro announced in Paris: "The Empress
+Maria Theresa of Austria died this morning." This was long before the
+time of telegraphy or even of railroads. It was a journey of several
+days from Paris to Vienna. Dispatches, reaching the French court a
+week later, announced the unforeseen death of Maria Theresa at the
+very hour named by Cagliostro.
+
+Ninon may have invented the Man in Black. Or he may have been one of
+the many quacks who hung on the fringes of courts and made capital out
+of the superstitious folly of the rich. Or perhaps----
+
+At all events, seventy years later, Ninon had either a most remarkable
+encounter with the same man, or else, in her dying moments, she took
+odd trouble to substantiate a silly lie that was nearly three-quarters
+of a century old. Finish the story and then form your own theories.
+
+Paris was alive in those days with titled women whose antecedents were
+doubtful and about whose characters there could unluckily be no doubt.
+They moved in the best society--or, rather, in the highest. Most of
+them made a living by one form or another of graft. And always there
+was an exclusive class of women who would not receive them.
+
+Ninon quickly proved she had neither lot nor parcel with these titled
+adventuresses. From first to last she accepted not a sou, not a jewel,
+not a favor--political or otherwise--from the grands seigneurs who
+delighted to do her honor. From first to last, too, she accepted as
+her due the friendship of the most respectable and respected members
+of her own sex.
+
+She was never an adventuress, never a grafter, never a climber. She
+loved for love's own sake. And if the men to whom in lightning
+succession she gave her resilient heart chanced often to be among the
+foremost of the realm, it was only because the qualities that made
+them what they were made them also the type of man Ninon preferred.
+
+She never benefited in any material way from their adoration. The
+nearest approach was when Richelieu, the grim old iron cardinal, bent
+his ecclesiastical and consumptive body before her altar. She used her
+power over Richelieu freely, but never for herself; always to soften
+the punishment of some luckless man or woman who had fallen under the
+rod of his eminence's displeasure.
+
+Thereby, and through Richelieu's love for her, Ninon clashed with no
+less a personage than the Queen of France herself.
+
+When Anne of Austria came from Spain to be the bride of Louis XIII of
+France, Richelieu fell in love with the pretty young queen. Anne had
+not wit enough to appreciate the cardinal's genius or to fear his
+possible hate. So--seeing in him only a homely and emaciated little
+man, whose pretensions she considered laughable--the queen hit on a
+scheme of ridding herself forever of Richelieu's love sighs.
+
+She pretended to listen to his courtship, then told him coyly that his
+austerity and lack of human weakness and of humor made her afraid of
+him. The enamored Richelieu insisted that he could be as human and as
+fun loving as any other man. Anne bade him prove it by dressing as a
+circus clown and dancing a saraband for her. She said she would hide
+behind the curtains of a room in the palace and watch him do it. Then,
+were she convinced that he could really unbend and could she overcome
+her fear of his lofty dignity, she would come forth and tell him so.
+
+The all-powerful Richelieu--the man of blood, whom even the haughtiest
+nobles feared--so far lost every remnant of sanity as to do as the
+queen bade him. As a harlequin, he capered and leaped about the empty
+room, his eyes ever on the curtain at its far end.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of his idiotic performance, the curtain was
+dashed aside; a howl of laughter swept the room; and the queen stood
+revealed to his gaze. Clustered around her and reeling with mirth were
+a score of courtiers; men and women both.
+
+From that day Richelieu was Anne's sworn foe. He wrecked her repute
+with the king, and for a long time managed to have her kept a prisoner
+in the palace. In a thousand ways he made her life a torment.
+
+And now, through the grim cardinal's love for Ninon de L'Enclos, Anne
+thought she saw a way of striking back at her enemy. She sent for
+Ninon, chided her for her mode of living, and ended by ordering her
+sharply to retire at once to a convent. Ninon simply smiled at the
+command, curtsied to the queen, and said demurely:
+
+"I will gladly go to any convent your majesty may designate--just as
+soon as I become as unattractive to men as is the woman who wants to
+send me there."
+
+She left the royal presence. And so great was the power of the girl's
+beauty in the hearts of those in France's high places, Anne did not
+dare put her command into effect. The tale of the conversation spread
+like the prehistorically bromidic "wildfire," and Ninon won new
+laurels thereby.
+
+The Duke of St. Evremond, at that time one of the greatest men in
+Europe, offered her his heart and his princely fortune. She replied
+that his heart was a precious gift which she would prize forever--or
+for a month or two at the very least; but that she had no use whatever
+for his fortune, as she had all the money she needed and more would be
+only a burden.
+
+And the duke--veteran of many a love affair where fortunes had counted
+for far more than hearts--made the quaint, historic reply:
+
+    "~Mademoiselle, tu es un honnete homme!~" ("Mademoiselle, you are
+    an honest man!")
+
+Three generations of Sevignes--father, son, and grandson--in turn
+loved Ninon during her seventy-five years of heartbreaking. Love for
+her seemed a hereditary trait in the Sevigne family.
+
+But it was the old Duke of St. Evremond, of all her numberless wooers,
+for whom Ninon cared most. Though their love was soon dead, they
+remained loyal and devoted friends to the day of the duke's death.
+Their correspondence--prettily formal, yet with an undercurrent of
+true affection--is still extant. And through life Ninon ran always to
+the duke with every sorrow or perplexity; notably when, at the age of
+sixty, she discovered her first wrinkle, an all but invisible crease
+between her brows. In horror she related to St. Evremond the fearful
+tragedy. With a laugh he banished her dread.
+
+"That is no wrinkle, ma petite," he reassured her. "Love placed it
+there to nestle in."
+
+The mighty Prince de Conde, the left-handedly royal D'Estrees, La
+Rochefoucauld (the Machiavelli of France,) and many another of like
+rank and attainment were proud to count themselves Ninon's worshipers.
+To no one did she show more favor than to another. King of France or
+Scarron, the humpback poet--so long as they could amuse her, Ninon
+gave no thought to their titles or wealth or name. To her, one was as
+good as another. To none did she give fidelity. Nearly all of them she
+treated outrageously. Yet of them all, only one was ever driven away
+by her caprices before she was fully ready to dismiss him.
+
+That sole exception was the gallant Comte de Fiesque, who, for a brief
+space of time, held her wandering heart and thoughts. Ninon as a rule
+was not quarrelsome. But she and De Fiesque were as flint and steel.
+Their affair was one fierce series of spats and disputes that blazed
+out at last in a pyrotechnic row.
+
+As a result of this climax quarrel, De Fiesque scuttled away in red
+wrath, vowing that he was forever and ever done with so ill-tempered
+and cranky a woman as Ninon de L'Enclos.
+
+Ninon was aghast. Paris was aghast. France was aghast. The love world
+at large was aghast. For the first time in her whole hectic life,
+Ninon de L'Enclos had been deserted--actually deserted! And by a
+nobody like De Fiesque! She who had snubbed a king, had tired of
+Condez, had yawned daintily in the half-monarchical face of D'Estrees
+himself!
+
+It was unbelievable. For an instant her fame as a peerless and
+all-conquering Wonder Woman threatened to go into partial eclipse. But
+only for an instant.
+
+De Fiesque, placed during a little hour on a pinnacle of flaring
+originality, began to receive tenderly reproachful letters from Ninon,
+beseeching him to come back to her, saying she had been wrong in their
+dispute, begging his forgiveness--Ninon, to whom princes had knelt
+trembling!--promising all sorts of meek, womanly behavior if only he
+would cure her heartbreak by a word of love.
+
+These letters of hers to her deserter would have moved an equestrian
+statute to maudlin tears. But De Fiesque's pride had been too deeply
+cut by that last quarrel, to let him relent. Besides, he was vastly
+enjoying his novel position as the only man on earth to whom Ninon de
+L'Enclos had made such an appeal. So while his fellow courtiers
+alternately envied him and longed to kick him, they wondered what
+might be the secret of his fascination over Ninon.
+
+Thus, for a few days, matters stood. Then Ninon hit on a master
+stroke. The thing that had first attracted De Fiesque to her had been
+the glory of her red-gold hair. He had loved to bury his face in its
+shimmering, soft masses, to run its silk strands through his fingers.
+Incidentally, in the course of their epoch-marking quarrel, he had
+called Ninon supremely vain and selfish.
+
+Now she cut off all her wonderful hair; cut it off, wrapped it up, and
+sent it, without a word of explanation, to De Fiesque. He understood.
+She had made this supreme sacrifice for him--for the man who had
+deserted her. To him she was offering this chief beauty of hers.
+
+De Fiesque's pride vanished. Through the streets he ran, bareheaded,
+to Ninon's house. Into her presence he dashed and flung himself at her
+feet, imploring forgiveness for his brutality and vowing that he loved
+her alone in all the world.
+
+But the rest of the dialogue did not at all work out along any
+recognized lines of lovers' reconciliations. Ninon patiently heard to
+an end De Fiesque's blubbered protestations of devotion. Then, very
+calmly and triumphantly, she pointed to the door.
+
+The interview was over. So was the affair. Ninon de L'Enclos was
+vindicated. No lover had ever permanently deserted her. There was no
+man so stubborn that she could not lure him back to her. The De
+Fiesque incident was closed. All that remained for Ninon to do was to
+introduce among Paris women a temporary fashion of wearing the hair
+short. Which she promptly did. And thus she suffered not at all by her
+ruse.
+
+Some two centuries later, George Sand, who had read of the incident,
+tried the same trick to win back Alfred de Musset. In her case, it was
+a right dismal failure. De Musset, too, was entirely cognizant of the
+story of Ninon's shorn hair. And even without her hair, Ninon was
+lovely; while, even with hers, George Sand was hideous.
+
+Queen Christina of Sweden came to France. Ninon delighted the
+eccentric Swede. Christina made a confidante and familiar friend of
+her. She begged Ninon to return with her to Sweden, promising her a
+title and estates and a high place at court.
+
+Ninon called unexpectedly at Christina's Paris apartments one morning
+to talk over the plan. She entered the queen's drawing-room
+unannounced. There on the floor lay a man, one of the Swedish
+officials in Christina's suite. He was dead--murdered--and was lying
+as he had fallen when he had been stricken down.
+
+Above him stood Christina, at her side the assassin who had struck the
+blow. The queen turned to Ninon and explained. The official had
+displeased her majesty by some undiplomatic act; and taking justice
+into her own hands, Christina had ordered another member of her suite
+to murder the offender. She was as unconcerned over the killing as if
+she had ordered a rabid dog to be shot.
+
+Ninon fled in panic fear from the apartment. Nor ever again could she
+be induced to come into the presence of the royal murderess. Thus
+ended the Swedish project.
+
+Though the confidential friendship of one queen was thus taken
+forcibly from Ninon, she had later the satisfaction of helping on the
+cause of another and uncrowned queen. It is her one recorded
+experience in dabbling with politics, and the role she played therein
+is interesting.
+
+King Louis XIV.--son of that Anne of Austria who had hated Ninon--had
+reached the age when life began at times to drag. The "~Grand
+Monarque~" had still fewer reasons than those of Ninon's father to
+deplore the missing of any good times. But youth had fled from him at
+last. He found himself, in middle age, a sour-faced, undersized man,
+with a huge periwig, a huger outjutting beak of a nose, and wearing
+egregiously high boot heels to eke out his height. People--a very few
+of them and at a safe distance--were beginning to laugh at his
+pretensions as a lady-killer. Nature, too, was proving herself less a
+tender mother than a Gorgonlike stepmother, by racking him with
+dyspepsia, bad nerves, and gout.
+
+These causes led him to turn temporarily to what he termed "the higher
+life." In other words, by his whim, the court took to wearing somber
+garments, changing its scandalous conversation for pious reflections
+and its unprintable novels for works on philosophy. Whereat, yawns of
+boredom assailed high Heaven.
+
+In the course of his brief penitence, Louis frowned majestically upon
+his tempest-tempered favorite, Madame de Montespan. And she--tactless
+or over-sure of her position--scowled back, harshly derided the new
+order of affairs, and waxed more evil-tempered than ever.
+
+In Madame de Montespan's household was a certain Madame de Maintenon,
+widow of the humpbacked little Scarron, who had once sued for Ninon de
+L'Enclos' favor. Strangely enough, his widow and Ninon were close
+friends. And at this court crisis. Ninon made the term "friendship"
+mean something.
+
+She herself had plainly shown that she had no interest in the king.
+Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de
+Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always
+disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the
+king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage
+director coaches a promising but raw actor.
+
+As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery
+De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the
+presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and attitude of awed
+devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves.
+
+He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow--of his own accord,
+as he thought--and spending more and more time in her company. And De
+Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students,
+managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration
+that slowly warmed into love.
+
+At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under
+her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right
+sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a
+royal favorite.
+
+As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace
+chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband
+of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one
+of the ceremony's few witnesses.
+
+Ninon had "played politics" just once--and with far-reaching results
+to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to
+prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is
+laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and
+partly populated America.
+
+By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts
+and a setter of fashions. She found herself a social arbiter as well.
+Without an introduction to the illustrious Ninon de L'Enclos and a
+word of indorsement from her, no young man could hope to make his way
+in Paris society. Noblemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris
+for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of
+introduction to Ninon.
+
+Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired.
+With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at
+court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing
+amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power
+wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and
+her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one
+or other.
+
+For instance, in her old age--or rather in what would have passed for
+old age in any other woman--she took an interest in a wizened,
+monkey-like boy of the people. She set him on the path to advancement
+and supplied him with the money for his education. To his dying day,
+the little man remembered her with a veneration most people would have
+bestowed on a saint; even though he used the education she had given
+him to help in tearing down the monarchy whose nobles had been his
+benefactress' slaves. He is known to fame as Voltaire.
+
+Years came and went. They merged into decades and quarter centuries.
+The men who once had loved Ninon de L'Enclos grew old and died, and
+their places were taken by sons and then by grandsons. Dynasties
+changed. The world rolled on. New times brought new customs.
+
+But Ninon remained unchanged. Still beautiful, still vibrant with all
+her early gay charm, she remained to outward appearances what she had
+been for the past fifty years. The grandsons of her girlhood suitors
+were as madly in love with her as had been their grandsires. In love,
+in society, in fashion, she was still the unquestioned sovereign.
+
+Throughout Europe, there was now no one who doubted the unadorned
+truth of the story concerning the Man in Black; for it seemed that no
+mortal agency could have kept any woman so perennially young. As the
+years passed, folk fell to speculating on how many drops of the
+precious rose-colored liquid might still remain in the phial. And, in
+scared voices, they repeated the prophecy of the man in black:
+
+    "~You shall see me once again three days before your death.~"
+
+Perhaps, now that you know Ninon better, you may laugh less
+contemptuously at the tale of the Man in Black; or, at the least,
+credit her with believing it. Throughout her life, she never changed
+the story in any way; nor could the shrewdest cross-examining lead her
+to contradict herself about any of its most minute details. A haunting
+fear of the Man in Black's promised return was always in her mind,
+even during her gayest days and nights.
+
+As late as her ninetieth year men made vehement love to her. At an age
+when most women are withered crones, she still broke hearts. Men
+fought duels by the dozen for her favor. In her old age a youth blew
+out his brains on her account.
+
+During her later years a great sorrow came to her. Through no
+conscious fault of her own, she was enmeshed in what was probably the
+most horrible tragedy of its sort in history. This tragedy cannot even
+be touched on here. In no book written in the English language can you
+find its complete details. It is enough to say that the nameless
+horror of it wrecked Ninon's health and her mind, leaving her for the
+time a mental and physical wreck.
+
+Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable
+spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled
+as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature,
+becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated,
+lauded to the skies.
+
+Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author.
+Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank
+or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and
+pass them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was
+identical with her private letters.
+
+It is odd, and possibly--or possibly not--significant, that of the
+world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any
+other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one
+common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms.
+The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest
+itself by use of the pen.
+
+To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also
+authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one
+has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon
+de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame
+Roland, and Marie Stuart.
+
+By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered
+Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had
+worshiped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself
+was ninety.
+
+To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross
+exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black
+claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring
+and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women--women young
+enough to be her grandchildren--were neglected for her sake. It is
+said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration
+of love from a noble who had met her but a few days earlier.
+
+Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in
+blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to
+one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger.
+
+The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until
+nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon
+died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken
+hand, this sentence:
+
+    "~I have just seen the man in black again!~"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+PEG WOFFINGTON
+
+IRISH HEART CONJURER
+
+
+A throng of people--barefoot peasants, modish idlers, tradesfolk,
+riffraff--stood in a Dublin courtyard one day in 1727, providing the
+much-admired "sea of upturned faces." All eyes were raised, all necks
+were back bent. Every one was looking aloft to where a taut wire was
+stretched between two post tops.
+
+Along the wire walked a harlequin, taking mincing dance steps and
+balancing across his shoulders a pole from whose extremities dangled
+two huge baskets. To make the feat the more interesting by adding a
+spice of possible peril, announcement had been made that each basket
+contained a live child.
+
+The chance of a triple tragedy in the event of a misstep made the
+tight-wire walk a right diverting spectacle, and thrilling withal, to
+the good folk of Dublin. But half way between the two extremity posts,
+still a new element of interest was added.
+
+For, at that point, the top suddenly popped off one of the baskets,
+and a big-eyed, laughing face beamed down, over the edge, at the
+crowd. The face of a seven-year-old child--a girl. A roar of applause
+followed upon the youngster's unrehearsed appearance.
+
+Thus did Peg Woffington, a queen of her century's actresses and
+consummate heart conjurer, make her professional debut.
+
+Peg--her full first name, which nobody dreamed of using, was
+Margaret--was the daughter of an Irish bricklayer who had one point in
+common with certain modernists in that he was rabidly opposed to all
+doctors.
+
+And the medical guild had in due time its revenge on the sacrilegious
+brick artist. For once, when Woffington fell ill, he fiercely refused
+to have a physician summoned. And he rapidly grew better. As her
+husband was convalescing, Mrs. Woffington sought to make assurance
+doubly certain by calling in a doctor. The pill juggler looked at the
+invalid and pronounced him out of danger. Next day Woffington died.
+
+Peg was just learning to walk at the time of her lamented father's
+tilt with the cult of Ćsculapius. She and her baby sister, Mary, at
+once set about helping to earn their own living, by toddling on either
+side of their mother when the widow hawked watercress through the
+streets, and shrilly piping in duet the virtues of her wares.
+
+To Dublin, when Peg was seven, came one Madame Violante, with a troupe
+of tumblers and rope dancers. Peg was apprenticed to Madame Violante.
+But her term of service as a baby acrobat was short. Her employer had
+better use for her.
+
+It was Madame Violante who originated the ever-since-popular custom of
+producing famous plays and operas, with child actors filling all the
+roles. Her "Liliputian Troupe" scored a big success in Dublin and the
+provinces. Much of this success was due to Peg, who almost invariably
+was cast for old-woman parts, and who "doubled in the brass" by doing
+quaint little step dances between the acts.
+
+It was cruelly hard work for a growing child; nor was the early
+eighteenth-century theater the very best sort of nursery and moral
+training school for little girls. But apart from other and less
+creditable lessons acquired, she learned stage presence and
+practically every art and trick of the profession.
+
+From the "Liliputian Troupe," Peg graduated into the more lucrative
+and equally moral pursuit of theater orange vender. In slack seasons,
+when no cargo of oranges chanced to have landed recently from the
+Americas, she acted, off and on; playing, at twelve, mature roles in
+provincial theater comedies, and exhibiting a rollicking humor that
+carried her audiences by assaut. At seventeen, she was playing--at
+seven dollars and fifty cents a week--~Ophelia~ and other exacting
+parts.
+
+Incidentally, on both sides of the footlight candles--as actress and
+as orange girl in the pit--she had long since made herself the toast
+of the Dublin beaux. She was pretty--though not strikingly so. She had
+a ready, and occasionally flaying, Irish wit. She had, too, the magic,
+if still undeveloped, fascination of the super-woman. As to her
+morals--they were the morals of any and every other girl of her
+environment and upbringing. She was quite as good as she knew how to
+be. There was not a grain of real vice in her whole cosmos.
+
+But there was a blazing ambition; an ambition that was cramped and
+choked in the miserable, makeshift provincial playhouses. She burned
+to be a famous actress. There was no chance for her in Ireland. So she
+came to London.
+
+It was a case of burning her bridges behind her. For she carried a
+worn purse that held seventeen shillings. And the not-overnew dress
+she wore was her sole wardrobe. These were her tangible assets. On
+this capital and on genius and pluck and ambition and good looks and
+the charm that was daily growing more and more irresistible, Peg
+relied to keep her going.
+
+To manager after manager she trudged. Not one would find work for her.
+In all, she made nineteen applications. And she scored just precisely
+nineteen rank failures.
+
+Finally, half starved and wholly discouraged, she succeeded in
+interesting the manager of the Covent Garden Theater. And he gave her,
+or sold her, the chance she sought--the chance to appear before a
+London audience.
+
+Her first appearance on the metropolitan stage was all that was needed
+to prove her worth. At once she caught the public fancy. Soon she
+found herself the most popular actress in England.
+
+An air of mingled sadness and gayety in her stage work, an audacity
+and fresh youthfulness--and the mystic charm--carried her straight to
+the front. At this period she touched nothing but comedy--at which she
+had no peer--and preferably played male roles. Masculine attire set
+forth her stunning figure, and she played devil-may-care, boyish parts
+as could no other woman.
+
+One night, after the first act of "The Constant Couple," wherein, clad
+in small-clothes and hose, she was playing ~Sir Harry Wildair~, Peg ran
+laughing and triumphant into the greenroom. There she chanced to find
+her bitterest friend and rival, Mistress Kitty Clive, a clever but
+somewhat homely actress. Said Peg in delight:
+
+"They applauded me to the echoes! Faith, I believe half the men in the
+house thought I was really a boy."
+
+"Perhaps," sneered envious Kitty. "But it is certain that at least
+half of them knew you weren't."
+
+Peg stopped short in her gay laugh and eyed Kitty's plain visage
+quizzically.
+
+"Mistress Clive," observed Peg, in irrelevant reflection, "did you
+ever stop to consider how much utterly useless modesty an ugly woman
+is responsible for unloading upon this poor world of ours?"
+
+Kitty did not again cross swords with Peg. Indeed, after the first
+encounter, few people did.
+
+The fops, the wits, the macaronis, the bloods, the Corinthians--all
+had discovered Peg long before this time. She was their darling, their
+idol. As this poor article is too brief in scope to contain a
+transcript of London's Social and Club Register of the day, most of
+Peg's minor conquests must be passed over without a word. One or two
+alone stand out as worth a few sentences.
+
+Macklin, matinee favorite and really great actor, fell heels over head
+in love with her. So did Hallam, the doctor-author. Macklin, having no
+hope of winning Peg's favor, was content to watch over her and to
+guard her like a faithful bulldog. Hallam was not so humble.
+
+Peg did not inherit her father's hatred for doctors, for she flirted
+lazily with Hallam and amused herself with his admiration. In time she
+tired of him and frankly told him so.
+
+Hallam, lacking the game, sought the name. Furious at his dismissal,
+he was still eager to be considered a successful wooer of the famous
+actress. So he took to boasting loudly at White's and the Cocoa Tree
+that Peg cared for him alone, and that she had written him reams of
+burningly ardent love letters.
+
+Peg heard of the boast and was foolish enough to run to the devoted
+Macklin with the story, entreating him to punish the braggart.
+
+Macklin did not wait to write a challenge, or even go home for his
+sword, which he did not happen to be wearing that day. Snatching up
+his cane, he rushed to a near-by coffeehouse where he knew Hallam was
+likely to be found at that hour. There he discovered the author-doctor
+drinking with a circle of friends, to whom he was descanting upon
+Peg's worship of himself.
+
+Macklin sprang at Hallam, seized him by the throat, and caned him
+unmercifully. Hallam writhed free and whipped out his sword. Macklin,
+forgetting that he himself was wielding a cane and not a sword,
+parried Hallam's first thrust and lunged for the doctor's face.
+
+The ferrule of the cane pierced Hallam's left eyeball and penetrated
+to his brain, killing him instantly--an odd climax to one of history's
+oddest duels.
+
+Macklin was placed on trial for his life. But he was promptly
+acquitted. And Peg's renown glowed afresh, because, through her, a man
+had died.
+
+A pamphlet, written by still another vehement admirer, contains a
+description of Peg Woffington, written about the time of Hallam's
+taking off. Part of this word picture is worth repeating verbatim. You
+will note that, though contemporary, it is in the past tense. Here it
+is:
+
+    Her eyes were black as jet, and, while they beamed with ineffable
+    luster, at the same time revealed all the sentiments of fair
+    possessor. Her eyebrows were full and arched, and had a peculiar
+    property of inspiring love or striking terror. Her cheeks were
+    vermilioned with nature's best rouge, and outvied all the labored
+    works of art.
+
+    Her nose was somewhat of the aquiline, and gave her a look full of
+    majesty and dignity. Her lips were of the color of coral and the
+    softness of down and her mouth displayed such beauties as would
+    thaw the very bosom of an anchorite. Her teeth were white and
+    even. Her hair was of a bright auburn color. Her whole form was
+    beauteous to excess.
+
+In the heyday of her glory, Peg went "to drink a dish of tea" with a
+party of friends one afternoon. Among the guests was a slender little
+commercial man, a wine merchant, in fact; shrewd, stingy, and smug.
+How such a character as his could have awakened the very faintest
+response in impulsive, big-hearted Peg's is one of the innumerable
+mysteries of hearts.
+
+But at first glance she loved the little man; loved him as never
+before she had loved, and as she would never love again. She had met
+the love of her life.
+
+She asked to have him introduced. The little vintner, tickled that the
+great Mistress Woffington should have deigned to notice an unknown
+nonentity, was duly brought up and presented.
+
+Peg, her head swimming, did not at once catch his name and bade him
+repeat it. Obediently, the dapper youth replied:
+
+"David Garrick, madam."
+
+In the hour that ensued, Peg led Garrick to talk about himself--a
+never-difficult task. He told her that he hated his trade and that he
+was not making money thereby. Peg, appraising the man's appearance as
+well as a woman newly in love could hope to, saw that, though short,
+he was graceful and strikingly handsome. Also, that he had a marvelous
+voice.
+
+Abruptly, she broke in on his soliloquy by suggesting that he go on
+the stage. Garrick stared. She spoke of the glories of a star's life.
+Garrick yawned. She mentioned that successful actors drew large
+salaries. Garrick sat up and began to listen. When she went on to
+speak of the fabulous receipts that awaited a star, Garrick feverishly
+consented to her plan.
+
+Peg set to work, using to the straining point all her boundless
+theatrical influence. She got Garrick a chance. She coached him in the
+rudiments of acting. She found that the little wine seller had a
+Heaven-sent gift for the stage. So did the managers. So, in short
+order, did the public.
+
+Garrick's success was as instantaneous as had been Peg's own. Peg
+rejoiced unspeakably in his triumph. So did he. The lofty motives that
+actuated Garrick's stage work may be guessed at from this entry in his
+diary October 20, 1741:
+
+    Last night played Richard the Third to the surprise of all. I
+    shall make nearly three hundred pounds a year as an actor, and
+    that is what I really dote on.
+
+But he made infinitely more than the prophesied one thousand, five
+hundred dollars a year. For he speedily became an actor manager. His
+business training and his notorious stinginess were splendid assets.
+Money flowed in, beyond his wildest dreams of avarice. And he held on
+to it all.
+
+Peg was inordinately proud of his achievements. So was Garrick. Peg
+loved him to distraction. He graciously consented to be loved. Indeed,
+it is probable that he cared for Peg as much as he could care for
+anybody except David Garrick. A swarm of women fell in love with him
+when he made his stage success. In spite of this, he still loved Peg.
+Even if not exclusively.
+
+Then Peg and Garrick appeared for the time as co-stars. And, with him,
+she returned to the scene of her early struggles at Dublin. At the
+Smock Alley Theater there, the two acted in repertoire.
+
+The pair were an enormous hit. So much so that they were forced, by
+popular clamor, to play straight through the summer. It was one of the
+hottest summers on record, but great crowds jammed the theater at each
+performance. An epidemic swept Dublin. A good many of the playgoers
+caught the infection at the playhouse and died; which caused the
+epidemic to receive the sinister nickname, "the Garrick fever."
+
+Peg was no less popular than was her colleague. Together they toured
+Ireland, then came back to London, as openly avowed lovers. They were
+engaged to be married; but the marriage was from time to time
+postponed. Always at Garrick's suggestion.
+
+Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a suitor for Peg's favor at this time,
+was the author--among half a bookful of odes, sonnets, and so forth,
+to her charms--of "Lovely Peggy," a popular song "hit" of the day, a
+stanza of which runs:
+
+    Once more I'll tune the vocal shell,
+    To hills and dales my passion tell,
+    A flame which time can never quell,
+          That burns for lovely Peggy.
+    Ye greater bards the lyre should hit,
+    To say what subject is more fit,
+    Than to record the sparkling wit
+         And bloom of lovely Peggy.
+
+But Sir Charles wooed her in vain. She had thoughts for no one else
+but Garrick. One day, reproached by the poet with her greater regard
+for his rival, and not wishing to cause needless pain to the loser,
+Peg sought to evade the charge by saying that she had not seen Garrick
+for an age.
+
+"Nay," contradicted the luckless Sir Charles, "I know you saw him only
+yesterday."
+
+"Well," she retorted, "and is not that an age?"
+
+She and Garrick had a singular rule for maintaining their antemarital
+establishment. It was arranged--by Garrick--that each should bear the
+monthly expenses alternately. When it was Peg's turn, it was
+noticeable that much better food was provided and that many more
+dinner guests were invited to the house than during the alternate
+months when Garrick was running the place.
+
+Once, during a Garrick month, a crowd of people dropped in
+unexpectedly to tea. Garrick eyed them with scarce-disguised
+hostility. Peg was delighted to see them. But no more so than if their
+call had come on her month for paying the bills, for she was lavishly
+hospitable, and was always generous--even prodigal to a fault; traits
+that caused her thrifty lover much pain.
+
+To-day, as usual, Peg brewed the tea. Glancing at his own new-filled
+cup, as Macbeth might have glared at the imaginary Banquo, Garrick
+groaned aloud:
+
+"Peg, you've made this tea so strong it's as red as blood. Zounds,
+ma'am, d'ye think 'tis to be bought at a penny the pound that you
+squander it so?"
+
+It has ever been the fashion of romantic chroniclers, in writing of
+this strange union, to paint Peg as a suffering saint and Garrick as a
+crank. The latter picture is flawless. The former, unluckily, is not.
+
+For, though Peg loved the actor manager and--temporarily--loved no one
+else, yet it was not in her superwoman nature to rest meekly content
+with the attentions of one man. Even though that man chanced to be the
+celebrated Davy Garrick. Running through the warp of her love was a
+woof of flirtations.
+
+For one instance, Lord Darnley, a rich and notorious Piccadilly
+gallant, proclaimed himself her adorer. Flattered at so famous a
+nobleman's love, Peg flirted outrageously with Darnley. She even
+denied to him that she cared for Garrick.
+
+Once Darnley found Garrick's wig in Peg's boudoir and railed at her
+infidelity to himself. Peg explained that she had borrowed the actor's
+wig and had brought it home in order to practice in it a masculine
+role she was soon to play at the Drury Lane.
+
+Garrick, in jealous wrath, protested against her affair with Darnley.
+So she swore to Garrick that she had dismissed his rival--and gayly
+continued to meet Darnley on the sly. In time, Garrick found her out
+and the discovery led to their separation. Afterward, in remorse, Peg
+is said to have dropped Darnley. But then, as usual, it was too late
+for her renunciation to do any good except to punish herself.
+
+Time after time Garrick had set back the date of the wedding. When at
+last the Darnley crisis came, Peg asked him frankly if he meant to
+keep his pledge or not. He replied gloomily that he did. And he went
+out and bought a wedding ring. He sighed in utter misery as he slipped
+the gold loop on her finger. Out flashed Peg's Irish temper.
+
+"If you had ten times the wealth and repute and ability that the world
+credits you with," she declared, "I would not become your wife after
+this silent confession."
+
+Almost at once she repented her rash words of release. But Garrick
+held her to them. He considered himself freed. And they parted. Peg
+sent back all Garrick's presents. He refused to return hers--they
+included a pair of diamond shoe buckles she had given him--on the
+tender plea that they would serve him as reminders of her.
+
+Peg wrote an angry letter, pointing out very clearly the wide gulf
+between sentiment and graft, and telling Garrick on exactly which side
+of that gulf his action in regard to the presents placed him. Garrick
+retaliated by blackening her name on every occasion. She made no reply
+to any of his dirty slurs; nor spoke of him save in praise.
+
+Thus ended the great love of Peg's life. But there were a host of
+minor loves to help take its place. Next came Spanger Berry, a fiery
+Irish actor who, to revenge Peg's supposed wrongs, did his level best
+on the stage to crowd Garrick out of several of the latter's favorite
+roles. He did not wholly succeed in this loverly attempt, but he
+caused Garrick many an hour of uneasiness, and wounded him severely by
+causing a drop in the actor manager's box-office receipts.
+
+Then came a succession. To quote a biographer who wrote while Peg's
+name was yet fresh:
+
+    An infatuated swain swore that if she did not return his love,
+    he would hang, drown, or shoot himself; and in order not to be
+    responsible for his suicide, she consented to listen to his
+    sighs. Then there came along a gentleman with money who won her
+    affection. Another next presented and outbid the former. Another
+    offered, and she received him in her train.
+
+    A fifth appeared, and was well received. A sixth declared his
+    suit, and his suit was not rejected. In a word, a multitude of
+    love's votaries paid their adorations to the shrine of their fair
+    saint, and their fair saint was not cruel.
+
+Then, according to the same chronicler and another, came into Peg's
+life "a personage." There is no hint as to his identity. Whether she
+was true to him or not is debatable. But she soon discovered that he
+had grown tired of her. It was borne to her ears that he was paying
+court to an heiress; intending to break with Peg, by degrees, if his
+suit were successful.
+
+The heiress gave a masked ball in honor of her birthday. Peg gained
+admittance, in male costume, to the affair, and contrived to become
+her rival's partner in a minuet.
+
+    "When she straightway poured so many and such vile stories anent
+    the gentleman's character into the lady's ears that the latter
+    fainted and the ball broke up in confusion."
+
+But Peg had gained her aim, by hopelessly discrediting with the
+heiress the recreant lover. The match was broken off. Peg felt herself
+right cozily revenged.
+
+The next wooer was a "person." Not a "personage." He was Owen
+McSwinney, a buffoon. He was the premier clown of his day and a local
+celebrity.
+
+McSwinny was fairly well to do. And, when he died soon afterward, it
+was found that he had left his whole estate--some two hundred pounds a
+year--to Peg.
+
+It was not long after this that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in his
+early prime, engaged Peg at four hundred pounds a season, to play at
+his theater. Sheridan was fervid in his admiration of the Irish
+beauty. Perhaps this fact, as well as the marked success she scored in
+his plays, led "The Rivals'" author to double her salary after the
+first season.
+
+Yearly she grew more popular with her audiences. Having won a
+matchless reputation as a comedian, she turned for a time to tragic
+characters, and won thereby a wholly new renown as one of England's
+foremost tragedians. But comedy was her forte. And to it she returned.
+
+Peg always vowed she hated the society of her own sex; a lucky thing
+for her, since she was not received by ladies of quality, as were many
+of her fellow actresses, and since her sharp tongue and the fact that
+men went wild over her made her hated by these fellow actresses. But
+her popularity with men endured, and she wasted few tears over women's
+dislikes. Few superwomen have been popular with their own sex.
+
+Peg was elected president of the famed Beefsteak Club, and she always
+presided at the board in man's attire.
+
+All this time she had been supporting her mother in a luxury undreamed
+of in the days of the medicophobic bricklayer. And she had educated
+and jealously safeguarded her younger sister, Mary.
+
+Mary became engaged to Captain George Cholmondeley, son of the Earl of
+Cholmondeley; a glittering match for a bricklayer's daughter. The earl
+was justly indignant and posted away to Peg to break off the affair,
+if need be, by bribing her and the entire tribe of Woffington.
+
+Peg met the irate old fellow with the full battery of her charm. In a
+trice she had him bewildered, then half relenting. Feebly he tried to
+bluster. Peg cut him short with:
+
+"My lord, I'm the one to complain; not you. For now I'll have two
+beggars, instead of one, to feed."
+
+It was a true forecast, for the earl, despite Peg's blandishments,
+withheld for a time his check book. And in the interim she gave the
+new-wed pair a house to live in and the money to run it.
+
+And now for the last "big scene" of Peg's stage career: For some time
+she had been ailing. But she kept on with her acting.
+
+On the evening of May 17, 1757, when she was at the very acme of her
+career, she played Rosalind at Covent Garden. Throughout the comedy
+she was at her scintillant best. The house was hers. Wave after wave
+of frantic applause greeted her, as, still in Rosalind's male
+habiliments, she stepped before the curtain, flushed and smiling, to
+deliver the epilogue.
+
+Gayly stretching out her arms to pit and stalls, she began the
+familiar lines. With a gesture of infinite coquetry she continued:
+
+    "I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me;
+    complexions that liked me--that liked me----"
+
+She faltered, whitened under her make-up, skipped three full lines,
+and came to the "tag:"
+
+    "----when I make curtsy--bid me--bid me--farewell!"
+
+The last line haltingly spoken, she threw her hands high in air and
+screamed in a voice of abject terror:
+
+"Oh, God! Oh, God!"
+
+It was a prayer, not an oath. Reeling, the actress staggered to the
+wings, and there fell, swooning, leaving the packed house behind her
+in an uproar of confusion.
+
+Kindly arms bore her from the stage she was never more to tread. Next
+day, all London knew that Mistress Peg Woffington had been stricken
+with paralysis and that from the neck down she was dead. Only the
+keen-witted brain lived, to realize the wreck of the beautiful body.
+
+Sorrowing crowds blocked the street in front of her house for days,
+momentarily expecting news of her death. But Peg did not die. She did
+not die until three tedious years had passed.
+
+Little by little she partly regained the use of her body. But she was
+feeble. Her rich beauty was wiped out as an acid-soaked sponge might
+efface a portrait.
+
+Out of the gay life that had been the breath of her nostrils, feeble
+as an old woman, plain of face and halting of speech--she nevertheless
+retained enough of the wondrous ancient charm to enslave another
+adorer.
+
+The newest--and last--wooer was Colonel Cćsar, of the Guards. On
+learning that Peg in her stricken state had infatuated the gallant
+colonel, a coffeehouse wit sized up the situation by cruelly quoting:
+
+    "Aut Cćsar, aut nullus."
+
+It was a vile thing to say. And Cćsar hunted up the humorist, so runs
+the story, and thrashed him within an inch of his life.
+
+Some time later, Tate Wilkinson, an "impersonator" of that era--yes,
+there were pests on the earth, even in those days--was scheduled to
+give a series of humorous impersonations of famous actors and
+actresses at the Drury Lane; then managed and partly owned by David
+Garrick.
+
+Peg feared she might be held up to ridicule by the mimicry. The fear
+preyed on her mind, to a pathetic extent. Colonel Cćsar went to the
+theater and there informed Garrick that if he permitted Wilkinson to
+impersonate Mistress Woffington, the colonel would first give him a
+public caning and would then call him out.
+
+The impersonation of Peg had been mysteriously lost from the
+imitator's repertoire when the performance was given.
+
+Peg died in 1760, at the age of forty. She left more than five
+thousand pounds. She left it to charity. And, as a testimonial to her,
+a range of low-roofed, wistaria-covered cottages was built for the
+exclusive use of the poor. The dwellings were known as "The Margaret
+Woffington Cottages."
+
+Samson's costume would start a panic on modern Broadway, yet it was
+doubtless deemed correct in his time. Queen Elizabeth's table manners
+would cause her speedy ejectment from any civilized restaurant, yet
+she was sixteenth century's model for etiquette. George Washington's
+spelling would not pass muster in a primary school, though in 1776 he
+was regarded as a man of high education. While as for Lady Godiva--
+
+New times, new ways. Won't you remember that, in dealing with Peg
+Woffington? She was a product--and a fine product--of her generation
+and surroundings. Think of her only as an unfortunate, warm-hearted,
+beautiful girl, whom men adored almost as much for her lovable
+qualities as for her siren fascinations.
+
+She merits a pedestal in the temple of superwomen. If I have failed to
+establish her right to it, the fault is mine, not hers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+HELEN OF TROY
+
+MODEL FOR ALL THE SIRENS OF THE CENTURIES
+
+
+Some wise folk say she never existed. But, for that matter, some wise
+folk also say that her press agent, Homer, never existed, and that his
+"Iliad" and "Odyssey" were compilations of lesser men's writings. As
+well say that Napoleon was a "compilation" of his marshals.
+
+Some aver that she indeed walked the earth, a Wonder Woman, and that
+her charm perhaps stirred up strife among nations, but that her fame
+kept on growing after she was dead, until--even as hundreds of jokes
+were attributed to Joe Miller that Joe never perpetrated or even
+heard--people got to making her the heroine of a myriad impossible
+deeds and adventures that no one woman or no ten women could have
+achieved.
+
+Still others declare that she and her story were allegorical, standing
+for feminine charm and for its fatal power; that she embodied the
+Greek idea of superwoman perfection. The same sort of people gravely
+tell us that Hercules and Croesus and William Tell were "solar
+myths"--whatever that may mean--and their descendants will put the
+myth brand, ten thousand years hence, on Napoleon, Roosevelt, John L.
+Sullivan, and Lydia Pinkham.
+
+While common sense may balk at the tale of Helen of Troy, common sense
+would as readily balk at a narrative of the high cost of living or of
+the All-Europe War. And what is common sense among friends? I am going
+to tell Helen's story as if it were gospel truth. For all I know, it
+may be. I am not going to draw on a dull imagination for any of it,
+but to take it entirely from a dozen of the olden authorities, from
+Homer down. After all, since we believe in Santa Claus, why not in
+Helen of Troy?
+
+(I cannot help feeling a little thrill of pride in this preamble. In
+spots, it is almost scholarly. And so to the story.)
+
+She was the daughter of Tyndareus of Argos, one of the horde of
+kinglets who split up the Greek archipelago among them. She lived
+three thousand years ago. And so adorable was she that some one
+started a rumor that she was not the daughter of Tyndareus, but of
+great Jove himself. This kind of talk passed as complimentary in those
+benighted days. Wherefore, Helen's parents did not start a suit for
+criminal libel against the flatterer, but heaped honors on him.
+
+By the time Helen reached young womanhood, she was the wonder of all
+Greece. She was tall, slender, and red-haired. In a day of almost
+universal dowdiness, she knew how to wear her clothes--although she
+did not use that knowledge to any prodigal extent; clothes, in balmy
+prehistoric Greece, being used for adornment rather than as coverings.
+
+Her wit and her subtle magnetism vied with her good looks. Suitors
+came from one end of the archipelago to the other to visit the palace
+of Tyndareus and to pay court to the Wonder Girl. They were a goodly
+throng, these suitors; kings one and all, even though most of their
+kingdoms were smaller than Delaware. Here are a few names culled from
+the endless list:
+
+Ulysses, craftiest of Greeks, a short-legged man, with the upper body
+of a giant; Agamemnon, overlord of all Greece, titular King of Mycenć,
+a hot-tempered, long-winded potentate; Menelaus of Sparta, Agamemnon's
+brother, an honest, not overbright, kind-hearted chap, who loved sport
+better than statesmanship; Nestor, the wisest of men, (yet old enough
+to have known better than to come a-courting, for already his hair and
+beard were white); the two Ajaxes, thickheads both, one of whom was
+later to crown a silly life by defying Jove's lightning to mortal
+combat; Diomed, champion heavyweight battler of his century; Achilles,
+fiery demigod and prehistoric matinee hero; these and many another.
+
+Now, in that benighted age, kings had a way of gratifying personal
+grudges by declaring war on their fellow sovereigns. Tyndareus was a
+shrewd old fellow. Also, he was fond of his glorious daughter, and he
+wanted to save her and her future husband from possible misfortune.
+So, before he allowed Helen to make her choice he bound each and all
+of the suitors to the following solemn oath: That they would not only
+abide peacefully by Helen's decision, but would pledge themselves to
+fight to the death in behalf of the contest's winner if, at any future
+time, his domestic peace should be threatened, or his wife stolen from
+him.
+
+This pledge was not as fanciful as it may seem. For, cave-man tactics
+of "wooing by capture" were still more or less in vogue. A man who
+fell in love with another's wife was wont to kidnap her and to defy
+her bereft spouse to get her back.
+
+Thus, Tyndareus was not only preventing civil war in Greece, but he
+was making it prohibitively perilous for any outsider to try to win
+Helen. Such a wooer would find himself at odds with practically every
+country in the whole archipelago. Yes, decidedly Tyndareus knew what
+he was about. He was assuring his daughter--as far as was humanly
+possible--a safe married life.
+
+All the royal suitors--being very much in love--were in a condition to
+promise anything. They bound themselves, right willingly, to the oath
+Tyndareus exacted; even Nestor, who, as I think I said, was old and
+wise enough to have known better. It is a supreme tribute to Helen's
+glory that the wisest man alive should have behaved just as foolishly
+over her as did the osseous-brained Ajax Telemon.
+
+The oath being taken, Helen's choice was made known. And, out of the
+ruck of greater and richer and handsomer men, she chose the plodding
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+
+There were black looks, there were highly unstoical gusts of
+anger--but the disappointed suitors made the best of their bad luck.
+After consoling themselves by getting gloriously drunk at the marriage
+feast, they called it a day, and went home; not one of them realizing
+how fearfully his lovelorn oath was one day to bind him. And the
+golden Helen departed for the prim little, grim little kingdom of
+Sparta with her liege lord, Menelaus.
+
+The years drifted on, lazily, happily, in humdrum fashion. If Menelaus
+were not inspiring as a husband, he was at least pleasanter to live
+with than a cleverer man might have been. He and Helen had one child,
+a daughter, Hermione.
+
+Placid years make sweet living, but poor telling. So let us get along
+to the day when heralds from the port of Pylos brought news of a
+strange prince's arrival on the Spartan shores. The messengers knew
+not who the stranger might be, nor whence he came. But, from his
+retinue and dress and bearing, they judged him worthy to be a guest of
+honor. So a gorgeous guard was sent to escort him to the palace, and
+great preparations were made there to receive him.
+
+The event seems to warrant a more Homeric wealth of language than I
+can compass, but it would be hard not to drop into semi-stately--not
+to say semi-Homeric and wholly plagiaristic--diction over it. So bear
+with me. It won't last long.
+
+Adown the dry white road that ran to Pylos through the plain, a dust
+cloud was advancing; shields of bronze and weapons gleaming through
+it, here and there, with glimpses of purple robes. In the palace,
+tables were set out, with fair linen on them. Meats were brought
+forth, with rare wine from the Ismarian vineyards to the north. A
+votive heifer was driven in, lowing, from the fields, for the guest
+sacrifice. Her horns were soon sheathed with gold; then the ax-man
+felled and killed her with a single blow. She was quartered, and her
+fat was laid on the fire, along with barley grain. And the savor of
+the sacrifice rose, grateful, to high Olympus.
+
+Now, through the yellow dust cloud, chariots were to be seen. A hardy
+band of mariners plodded beside the wheels and behind. They were
+bronzed and clear-eyed, these sea rovers, beguiling the journey with
+gay speech and with deep, mighty laughs. And they shouted, instead of
+speaking as do landfolk.
+
+In the foremost chariot rode two men. One was King Diocles of Pherae.
+The other was the goodliest man mortal eye ever looked upon. A mane of
+fine-spun golden hair fell over the shoulders of his Sidonian robe;
+his face was like the sunshine, and his eyes were filled with the
+gladness of living. He was Paris, son of King Priam, and a prince of
+Troy. And his right hand gripped a shadow-casting spear.
+
+In the banquet hall, when the visitors and their host were seated,
+appeared Helen, the wife of Menelaus, with her little daughter,
+Hermione. When the cries of hunger and of thirst had died down, Helen
+addressed the strangers, asking no direct question--since to question
+a guest were discourteous--but saying that mayhap they would deign to
+explain who they were, and why they had come hither.
+
+Then arose Paris, standing by the board, facing the golden Helen. And
+he spoke winged words:
+
+It was prophesied at his birth, he began, that he would one day be the
+ruin of Troy. To prevent his living to fulfill his ordained fate, his
+father, King Priam--weeping at the deed's black necessity--had him
+borne to the lonely top of Mount Ida, there to die of exposure, or at
+the fangs of wild beasts. But a great she-bear, roaming the mountain
+crest, found the babe and brought him down to her cave, and there laid
+him among her own soft-coated young. Here he was found one day by
+herdsmen, among whom he grew up.
+
+In time he owned a herd. The best-loved of his cattle was a white
+bull, called The Star. Now it came to pass that King Priam, urged on
+by a dream, sent his slaves to Mount Ida's slopes to secure the finest
+bull that grazed there, for a sacrifice to Neptune. The slaves came
+upon The Star and drove him away with them. Paris gave chase, but in
+vain. Then he hastened to the city of Troy to beg redress from the
+king. And as he entered the outer gates of Priam's palace, his own
+sister, Cassandra, recognized him.
+
+Cassandra was a prophetess. Apollo had loved her, and, as a love gift,
+had endowed her with a gift of foretelling all things. But when she
+rejected his suit, he willed that while she might still retain the
+gift of prophecy, her forecasts should never be believed. So now her
+words were laughed to scorn.
+
+But Priam questioned the mountaineer. And, by the resemblance the
+youth bore to his father, and the ring that he still wore around his
+neck, where it had been placed when he had been taken up into the
+mountain as an infant, the king at last knew him. Great was his joy.
+
+And so, elevated to his rightful princely station, Paris passed the
+next few years, no longer in the harsh toil and on the poor fare of a
+herder, but as a king's son; wholly forgetting OEnone, the forest
+girl of Mount Ida whom he had wooed and won and deserted, and whom he
+to-day mentioned merely in the pride of a past conquest.
+
+Now, breaking in upon Paris' somewhat long-winded story of his life,
+let us come to the real reason of his presence in Sparta. The Goddess
+of Strife had tried to enliven things in peaceful Olympus by tossing
+down in front of Venus and Juno and Minerva a golden apple. On the
+apple's rind was graven the inscription:
+
+    "~For the most beautiful.~"
+
+Straightway, the three goddesses, who had been tolerably good friends,
+fell to quarreling as to which should have the apple of gold. And they
+compromised by leaving the decision to Paris. Every member of the trio
+tried secretly to bribe him; Juno offering him power, Minerva offering
+him wisdom, Venus promising him love--the love of the fairest woman on
+earth. Being very young and very human, Paris chose Love; casting
+aside all hope of power and of wisdom to gain it. And Venus bade him
+sail forth in search of the Wonder Woman she had promised him. He had
+departed on this Quest of the Golden Girl, and fate had led him to
+Helen.
+
+I am not going to touch on the mythological part of Helen's career,
+more than I can help. But I protest most solemnly that the foregoing
+tale of Paris and the three goddesses is not mythology, but absolute
+truth. It may never have happened; indeed, it could not have happened,
+but it is truth, none the less. If you doubt that a silly apple could
+cause such strife among three erstwhile friendly deities and stir up
+unending enmity and discord and hatred, just remember that the apple
+was of ~gold~. Wait until the family estate is divided among the
+heirs--the heirs who have hitherto been such good friends--and watch
+what the Golden Apple of Discord can do to breed hate and dissensions.
+
+Those old Greeks were wise, even in their myths. They knew human
+nature. And human nature's sole change since their day is the
+substitution of conventionality for simplicity. At heart, there is no
+difference.
+
+Take, too, Paris' choice of love, rather than of wisdom or of power.
+When we read about that, as children, we said smugly: "What a fool
+Paris was!" Then, as we grew older--Well, if Paris was a fool, just
+note in what goodly company he stands. His compeers in the same divine
+idiocy are such immortals as Mark Antony, Marie Stuart, Francis I.,
+almost the whole Bourbon dynasty, Sappho, Cleopatra, Solomon, and a
+sheaf of other shimmeringly splendid sinners. They were monomaniacs,
+all of them, and they sold their birthright of decency for a mess of
+ambrosia; too blinded to know or care how much they were losing, and
+for how barren a price. Wherein, their particular brand of insanity
+gives them full right and privilege to claim, kinship with the
+Gadarene swine of Holy Writ.
+
+Well, then, Paris had quested forth to find and win the most beautiful
+of women. And he found her--at the banquet board of her spouse,
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+
+Long he abode, an honored and trusted guest in his host's palace. And
+Menelaus suspected nothing, not even that a man of godlike beauty and
+comfortable dearth of morals was a dangerous visitor in the home of a
+plodding, middle-aged husband.
+
+One night--while Menelaus snored peacefully in preparation for a boar
+hunt he had planned for the next day--Paris and Helen stole forth
+together in the darkness and sped, hand in hand, to Pylos, where the
+lover's ship was in waiting. In his own arms, Paris bore his inamorata
+from shore to deck. Away across the wine-hued Ćgean fled the lovers,
+to Troy. There they were wed; regardless of the fact that Helen had
+left a perfectly good husband alive in Greece. The laws against
+bigamy--if there were any at that day--do not seem to have been very
+rigidly enforced; nor do those laws' fracturers appear to have lost
+caste thereby.
+
+Mind you, Helen was no love-sick girl to be swept off her feet by an
+impetuous wooer with spun-gold hair and a Romeo manner. When Paris
+stole her from Menelaus and married her, she was forty years old. But,
+like Ninon de Lenclos and Diane de Poictiers and other of the world's
+true super-women, age had no power to mar her. Father Time could not
+pass a face like hers without pausing to kiss it; but the kiss was
+very tender and loving, and it left in its wake no wrinkles or
+telltale lines. Helen was ageless.
+
+Ilium worshipped beauty, even as did Greece. And the Trojans, from old
+Priam down, hailed their new princess with rapture; all save
+Cassandra, that daughter of Priam who was blest by the gift of
+prophecy and cursed by the incredulity of all who heard her. At sight
+of Helen, Cassandra shrieked aloud:
+
+"Trojans, you nurse to your hearts a snake that shall sting you to
+death! You cherish a firebrand that shall burn our city to the dust!"
+
+And she fell, writhing and foaming, at Helen's feet. But folk laughed
+at the forecast, and the cheers of welcome drowned the wail of the
+seeress.
+
+So did Argive Helen come to her husband's people. And thus did her
+beauty win all hearts. Paris adored her wildly, uncontrollably, to the
+hour of his death. Her passing infatuation for him soon cooled into
+contemptuous toleration. And for the second time in her life she
+learned that a husband is merely what is left of a lover after the
+nerve has been extracted.
+
+Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus
+learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went,
+heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his
+wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise
+to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but
+volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.
+
+Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to
+make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite
+another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. The swain who
+at twenty declares to a girl: "If ever you want me, say the word, and
+I swear I will come to you, from the ends of the earth!" would be
+horribly embarrassed if, as a sedate husband and father at forty, that
+same half-forgotten sweetheart should hold him to his calf-love oath.
+
+So it was with Helen's suitors-emeritus. Long ago they had loved her.
+She had married some one else. And, during the past twenty years,
+other interests in their lives had crowded out her memory. If they
+thought of her at all, it was, now and then, to court domestic
+tempests by mentally or verbally comparing her golden loveliness and
+eternal youth with their own wives' dumpy, or slatlike, matronly
+aspect.
+
+For they had wives, most of them, by this time, wives and children.
+Just stop for an instant, husbands all, and figure to yourselves what
+would happen if you should come home to-morrow night and break to your
+wives the tidings that you were about to go to war--for the sake of
+another woman! A woman, moreover, whom you had once adored, and whose
+memory had ever stood, wistful, winsome, wraithlike, between your
+wives and you.
+
+So, when Agamemnon's fiat went forth that those long-dead promises
+were to be redeemed at once, there were home scenes throughout Greece
+whose bare recital would forever have crushed the spirit of Mormonism.
+War must have seemed almost a relief to some of those luckless
+husbands after they had finished listening to their wives' remarks on
+the subject. For, of all overdue debts in this world of varied
+indebtedness, the hardest by a million-fold to pay are the sight
+drafts of defunct sentiment.
+
+These olden heroes were not especially heroic in the crisis that
+threatened them, and none but a single man will be unduly harsh with
+them for their reluctance. One after another, they sought to dodge the
+fulfillment of their pledges.
+
+Ulysses, for example, after an interview with his embarrassingly
+faithful wife, Penelope--she has always reminded me of Mrs.
+Micawber--harnessed oxen to a plow and proceeded to give the
+impression that he had suddenly gone crazy, by plowing furrows in the
+salt sands of the seashore. Those whose minds had fled were supposed
+to be directly under divine protection, and naturally such people were
+never called upon to fight or to meet any other obligation.
+
+Truly, Ulysses was living up to his reputation as the craftiest of the
+Greeks. Yet his craft was put to naught by the wisdom of old
+Nestor--one of the few suitors who had not tried to crawl out of his
+agreement. Nestor placed Ulysses' baby son, Telemachus, on the
+seashore, in the path of the advancing oxen. Ulysses turned the beasts
+aside to keep them from trampling the child to death. Whereat, it was
+decided that Ulysses was not insane--at least, not too insane to do
+his share of fighting--and he was enrolled as one of the chiefs of the
+Grecian host.
+
+Having been caught, Ulysses set out, morbidly, to get even with
+Destiny by catching others. And he, as well as Nestor, began to strip
+away the subterfuges of the reluctant kings. Achilles, for instance,
+tried to escape military service by dressing as a girl and hiding
+among the women of his household. Ulysses, disguised as a peddler,
+visited these women, carrying a basket full of feminine gewgaws. At
+the bottom of the basket lay a magnificent sword. While the women were
+examining the jewelry and clothing in the peddler's stock, Achilles
+caught sight of the sword. For the first time, he showed interest in
+the intruder's visit. Paying no heed to the rest of the wares, he
+picked up the sword and fell to examining it with a professional
+interest. At once, Ulysses recognized him not only as a man, but as a
+warrior; and the sulky Achilles was forced to join the expedition.
+
+Day and night, throughout Greece, the smiths' hammers clinked, and the
+smithy fires roared. Weapons were forged; armor was repaired; army
+equipments were set to rights. The woods and hilltops reechoed to ax
+blows, as great trees were felled for ship timber. At last, twelve
+hundred ships lay at anchor, waiting to bear the avenging host to
+Troy.
+
+All this preparation was a matter of many months, and for a long time
+no hint of it reached Troy. Then--first in vague rumor, and soon in
+form not to be doubted--came news of the Greeks' preparation for war.
+
+By this time, Helen had ceased to be a novelty in Troy. And now men
+cursed her, beneath their breath, as a sorceress who was to bring war
+and destruction upon them. Women hated her as the cause of their men's
+possible death in battle. But Priam, and the noblest blest of his
+sons--Hector--were still her stanch champions. And, with such backing,
+her position in the city was at least outwardly assured.
+
+Then came a minor tragedy, a foreshadowing of the wholesale misfortunes
+that were to follow. I have said that when Paris was still a herdsman
+on Mount Ida, he had met and loved a forest maid, OEnone, and, on
+learning that he was a prince, he had promptly deserted her, leaving
+her to grief and loneliness. OEnone had borne Paris a son--although
+this was unknown to him. In the years since she had last seen the
+fickle prince, this son had grown up. He was known as "Corythus."
+When word reached OEnone of Helen's arrival in Troy, she sent her
+unfortunate rival a message. She wrote the message on birch bark and
+dispatched it, by Corythus, to the city.
+
+Corythus arrived at the palace, and was led to Helen's bower, where he
+begged the princess to dismiss her maids, as he was the bearer of a
+word for her ears alone. Helen, obeying, received from him the folded
+birch bark and opened it. She read:
+
+    O thou that dost scan these lines, hast thou forgotten quite thine
+    ancient sin, thy palace, thy husband and child--even as Paris hath
+    forgotten me? Thou shalt not forget. For I send thee my curse,
+    with which I shall scourge thee till I die. Soon Paris must look
+    into the eyes of death. And little in that hour will he care for
+    thy sweet lips, thy singing voice, thine arms of ivory, thy
+    gold-red hair. Nay, remembering that thou hast cost his life, he
+    will bid the folk that hate thee have their joy, and give thee to
+    the mountain beasts to tear, or burn thy body on a tower of Troy!
+    My son--and his--beareth this word to thee.
+
+As she finished reading, Helen fell, in a swoon, at Corythus' feet.
+The youth was alarmed, and dropped on his knees beside her, lifting
+her head. And at that moment Paris entered the room.
+
+Seeing a stranger kneeling beside Helen, he went wild with jealous
+rage. Whipping out his sword, he sprang upon Corythus, and buried the
+blade in the lad's neck. Then he turned, to plunge the weapon into
+Helen's breast. But, as he turned, he saw the birch-bark message on
+the floor and stooped to pick it up. Reading it, he realized what he
+had done, and whom, in his jealous frenzy, he had killed. He flung
+himself, wailing, forth from the palace and into the night.
+
+Three days later, Corythus was laid on his funeral pyre in the market
+place of Troy. As Paris was advancing with the lighted torch, OEnone
+appeared. She leaped upon the pyre and shrieked down at her recreant
+lover:
+
+"I hear the prayer that thou some day shall make in vain! Thou shalt
+die, and leave thy love behind thee, for another. And little shall she
+love thy memory! But"--turning upon the onlookers--"O ye foolish
+people--see! What death is coming on you from across the waters?"
+
+At the shrieked words, all turned and looked seaward. Bearing down on
+the coast, in a driving rain, oar blades flashing, sails straining at
+their rigging, came the long-dreaded Greek fleet.
+
+The Trojan war had begun.
+
+For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of
+that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of
+Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.
+
+For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and
+again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen
+stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men
+who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her
+worthless sake.
+
+Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men
+who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and
+long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they
+hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought
+upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the
+ramparts to berate her with her sin.
+
+Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her
+white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair.
+And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come
+hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious
+a woman were well worth the loss of Troy--aye, of all the world.
+
+A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards
+is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.
+
+Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted
+the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged.
+Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on
+the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow
+at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal
+wound.
+
+The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where
+the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in
+fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for
+him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the
+sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the
+pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that,
+even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his
+eyes glazing, he said:
+
+"Long ago, dear, we were glad--we who never more shall be together.
+Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on
+me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"
+
+Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed
+him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.
+
+The torch was set to the unlucky prince's pyre. From the crowd around
+it sprang OEnone. She mounted the blazing pile of wood, and her body
+was consumed with that of the man who was not worth dying for.
+
+Helen, almost at once, married Paris' younger brother Deiphobus.
+
+One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed
+away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were
+nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city,
+the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous
+wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it
+there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to
+their native chores.
+
+The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a
+memento of the great war.
+
+Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the
+clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of
+some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a
+concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a
+score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the
+horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest
+massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept,
+women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were
+slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was
+burned to ashes.
+
+Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and
+demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had
+at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the
+wooden horse.
+
+There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against
+the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes,
+forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who
+had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant
+men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed
+her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph
+as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride.
+Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who
+cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her
+as she passed them on the way to the palace.
+
+But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting
+words--spoken in her presence--to the Greek army on the shores of
+Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not.
+And to the assembled host he had shouted:
+
+"O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very
+fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago,
+but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye
+shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may
+find--ye that the winds waft and the waters bear--that you are quite
+gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there;
+your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you;
+on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you
+wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.
+
+"These sorrows hath Helen brought on you. So fall upon her
+straightway, that she die, and clothe her beauty in a cloak of stone!"
+
+The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak.
+But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And
+from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her
+too beautiful for death.
+
+Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
+
+"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none
+to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the
+wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is
+one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
+
+But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him
+in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
+
+For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at
+Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are
+silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly
+enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too,
+was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed
+decade--"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."
+
+The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through
+the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the
+populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even
+as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's
+home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
+
+Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the
+situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the
+breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence
+gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the
+merciless.
+
+The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence,
+advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the
+daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on
+the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in
+the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the
+militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One
+or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out
+through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seashore.
+There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of
+his crew.
+
+And once more across the "wine-hued Ćgean" fared the golden Helen, not
+this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in
+guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who
+had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home
+she knew.
+
+Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ashore on the island of
+Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just
+as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen
+of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other
+woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So,
+the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian
+queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that
+fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being
+blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's
+loveliest creation.
+
+So perished the golden Helen. For her sin, she is known to fame as
+"Helen of Troy," not "Helen of Sparta," or even "Helen of Argos."
+Posterity has branded her, thus, with the name of the land she
+destroyed, instead of the land of her birth.
+
+Poets and dreamers of dreams, even in her own century, have said that
+Helen did not die; that loveliness such as hers could not be destroyed,
+any more than can the smile of the springtide or the laughter of the
+sea. They say she escaped the Rhodians and set sail once more upon
+her wanderings. From shore to shore she voyaged,--ageless, divine,
+immortal, as eternal as Love itself. Ever, where she went, men adored
+her and besought her to remain among them to bless or curse their
+lives. But, ever, women banded together to drive her forth again upon
+her endless wanderings.
+
+One legend tells of her sojourn in Egypt, and of her meeting, there,
+Ulysses, "sacker of cities." Penelope was dead, and Ulysses had
+recommenced his voyaging. He and Helen met, and the old, old love of
+nearly a half century earlier flared into new flame. And, as ever,
+Helen's love brought death in its wake. For the Sacker of Cities fell
+in battle within a few weeks after their reunion.
+
+Another and more popular legend is that Helen, in return for
+everlasting youth, formed a highly discreditable business partnership
+with Satan, whereby she was to serve as his lure for the damning of
+men's souls. Do you recall, in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," it was by
+promise of Helen's love that the devil won Faustus over to his
+bargain? There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry,
+as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:
+
+    "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
+    And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
+    Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"
+
+She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was
+damnation, like that of her million other swains.
+
+Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's
+successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified
+the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls
+from them.
+
+And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden
+Helen--typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at
+reason and at destruction--lives and shall live while men are men. She
+lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She
+lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch
+and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk
+robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her
+mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she
+passes, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them
+damn themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band
+together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness.
+
+Poor Helen! Or--is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to
+be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to
+herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very
+women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to
+new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable
+hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their
+placid lives.
+
+The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+MADAME JUMEL
+
+NEW YORK'S FIRST OFFICIAL HEART BREAKER
+
+
+Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side--on One Hundred and
+Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue--stands almost the sole
+American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial
+dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed
+gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the
+architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced.
+
+It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it
+originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful
+man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but
+futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman
+whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as
+Mrs. Burr.
+
+The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin,
+throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day
+the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and
+top-heavy flat houses--happy hunting ground for none-too-rich
+homeseekers--and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central
+trains.
+
+Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine,
+from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd
+at the Grand Central!
+
+So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts
+walk--the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who
+made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats
+were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such
+things.
+
+In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or
+indelicate for discussion--and a few things still were, in that
+ante-white-slave era--people were prone to refer to such doubtful
+topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was
+more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that
+called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence
+will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events.
+I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has
+used it to account for hiati--(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds
+more cultured, somehow--) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all,
+if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by
+well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for
+complete comfort.
+
+And so to the story.
+
+Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a
+woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was
+not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger
+before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's
+father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly
+diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the
+Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see
+the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the
+biography.
+
+In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode
+Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the
+solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the
+rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No
+one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling
+one at that.
+
+In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And
+at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but
+one of the cleverest and--so declared the pious--one of the very
+worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to
+acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to
+all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty
+Bowen--her commonly used name--the benefit of the doubt?
+
+We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an
+exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the
+nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless,
+high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen
+over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural
+admirers.
+
+Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her
+life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New
+York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century
+later, would have been called a "rounder."
+
+How this middle-aged Lothario chanced to meet the Rhode Island belle,
+no one knows. But meet her he did. He was the first man of the world
+who had come into Betty's rustic life. By contrast with the local
+swains, he was irresistible. Or so she found him. At all events, she
+did not resist. She eloped with him, and Rhode Island knew her no
+more. Her real career as a heart breaker had set in.
+
+To New York, Colonel Croix brought his inamorata. There he installed
+her in a stately country house at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth
+Avenue, on the spot where, afterward, A. T. Stewart's white marble
+domicile used to excite the out-of-towners' awe, and where now a trust
+company's building stands.
+
+Betty wore amazingly costly clothes, paying for a single dress far
+more than for her year's wardrobe in Rhode Island. Croix festooned
+jewelry, Christmas-tree-like, over her neck, hair, and hands. She
+blossomed like the rose. Croix, inordinately proud of his conquest,
+also brought shoals of his friends to call, which was a mistake; for
+Betty had no leanings toward monopolies.
+
+Like the hackneyed, but ever-useful, meteor, Betty flashed upon stark
+young eighteenth-century New York. The city--so far as its male
+population was concerned--threw up both hands in blissful surrender.
+
+Croix's friends--some of them rounders like himself, some of them fat,
+solid, but beauty-loving financiers--formed a court of beauty around
+the fair newcomer. Betty's consummate charm drew to this court other
+and loftier men, too.
+
+For example, one of her foremost adorers was a brilliant, magnetic
+young statesman whose birth was perhaps as unblest as her own, but
+whose self-made name was already beginning to ring through America. He
+was Alexander Hamilton. He had a high-born and attractive wife of his
+own, and an adoring nestful of children. But Hamilton believed in
+monopolies no more than did Betty, and he became her adorer.
+
+Another of the higher type of men who came a-courting Betty was a
+statesman of almost equal fame--a little fellow, scarce five feet four
+inches tall and slight of build, whose strikingly handsome face was
+lighted by enormous black eyes almost snake-like in their mesmeric
+power--particularly over women. He was Aaron Burr.
+
+Burr was a lady-killer of the first order. He was not a man of bad
+morals. He was simply a man of no morals at all. But he was also a man
+of no fear, and a genius withal. He knelt, not in submission, but in
+ironic admiration before Betty. And she, like fifty other women, was
+swayed by his hypnotic eyes and his wondrous love eloquence.
+
+At the house of which Croix had made Betty the chatelaine, Burr and
+Hamilton often met, but never at the wish of either. For they hated
+every bone in each other's bodies.
+
+They had been at loggerheads as mere lads, when together they had
+served on General Washington's staff during the Revolutionary War.
+Afterward, in social and political life, they had clashed, and clashed
+fiercely. Now, as rivals for the interest of the volatile Betty, their
+smoldering hate flamed forth lurid and deathless.
+
+And thenceforth, fanned by new political and other causes, that death
+hate grew. It came to a head seven years later, when, in the gray of a
+chilly morning, the lifelong rivals faced each other, pistol in hand,
+in the fields beyond Weehawken Heights; and when, at the first volley,
+Hamilton sprang high in air, then crashed to the earth, mortally
+wounded.
+
+Yes, in her time Betty had--directly or indirectly--much to answer
+for.
+
+George Washington Bowen, in after years, swore that he was the son of
+Betty and of the Father of his Country. This the Jumels have fiercely
+denied.
+
+Among the business-men guests Croix brought to see Betty was an
+enormously rich old French wine merchant, Stephen Jumel by name. This
+was in 1804--the year of Hamilton's death. Jumel was fifty; Betty was
+thirty-five. Jumel was passing rich; Betty had shrewdness enough to
+realize that her own fortunes, under her present circumstances,
+depended solely on her looks and her charm. As beauty is not eternal
+and as charm sometimes fails to outlive it, the super-woman deemed it
+wise to accept the infatuated wine merchant's offer of marriage.
+
+Indeed, she is said to have angled with Napoleonic strategy for that
+same offer, and to have won it only after a sharp struggle of wits.
+Jumel was no fit opponent for her, then or ever after. From the first,
+they appear to have had but a single will between them--and that was
+hers.
+
+On April 17, 1804, Betty and Jumel were married in St. Peter's Church
+in Barclay Street. The wedding's record still stands in the parish
+archives. So does the statement made on that occasion by Betty--a
+statement charmingly at variance with all other records of her origin.
+For in the church register she wrote that she was born in 1777 and was
+the daughter of Phoebe and John Bowen--the latter a drowned sea
+captain.
+
+New York, having a somewhat tenacious memory, eyed the bride
+askance--or so she fancied. And, like many a later American, she
+sought to cover any possible reputation scars by a European veneer.
+She persuaded her husband to sell out some of his New York interest
+and to take her to Paris to live. Which, ever obedient, he did.
+
+Napoleon I. was at the heyday of his glory. About him was a court
+circle that did not look overclosely into peoples' antecedents.
+Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, had started life as a tavern waiter;
+Napoleon himself was the son of a poor Corsican lawyer and had never
+been able to learn to speak French without a barbarous accent. As for
+his sister, Pauline, if "a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,"
+Pauline's spouse, Prince Borghese, had not a ghost of a chance of
+skipping into the king row. Nor was Napoleon's first wife, Josephine,
+of flawless repute. Altogether, it was a coterie unlikely to ask many
+questions about Betty's early history.
+
+The fascinations of Madame Jumel and the vast wealth of Monsieur Jumel
+were not to be withstood. Speedily the husband and wife were in the
+turgid center of things; part and parcel of imperial court life.
+
+As Betty had charmed level-headed New York, there is no need to
+describe in windy detail what she did to Paris. Her conquests
+there--like the stars of the Milky Way--shine indistinct and blurred
+because of their sheer numbers. But through the silvery blur gleams
+forth the name of Lafayette. The old marquis was delighted, at sight,
+with the lovely young American; and he eagerly offered to act as her
+sponsor at court. Which he did, to the amusement of many and to the
+indefinite advancement of Betty's social hopes.
+
+The great Napoleon glanced in no slightest disfavor on Lafayette's
+social protegee. He willingly set the seal of imperial approval on the
+court's verdict. The emperor was Stephen Jumel's idol. Himself a
+self-made man, the old merchant worshiped this self-made demigod, the
+model and unattainable example of every self-making man since his day.
+
+Jumel's hero-worship took a practical form. He placed his resources at
+the emperor's service, and once tactlessly, but generously, offered
+his own wealth and his New York home as solace and refuge in the
+increasingly probable event of the emperor's mislaying his crown. To
+which Napoleon replied--speaking, as ever, to the gallery:
+
+"Whatever reverses Fortune may inflict on me, Duty will chain me to
+France. It would be unworthy my greatness and an insult to my empire
+for me to seek asylum across the seas."
+
+Yet, when the inevitable Day dawned, the fugitive emperor made plans
+to do that very thing. And Jumel met him more than halfway by crossing
+from New York to Havre on his own yacht--the Elizabeth, named for his
+wife--and seeking to bear away his fallen idol to safety. The plan, of
+course, fell through, and Napoleon in consequence was almost the only
+Bonaparte who did not sooner or later come to New York.
+
+Imperial friendship and a gloriously extravagant--and extravagantly
+glorious--wife are things to brag of. They are splendid
+advertisements. But they are not on the free list. In fact, they rip
+hideous breaches in the solidest wall of wealth. They played havoc
+with Papa Jumel's supposedly boundless fortune. One morning in Paris,
+the Jumels awoke to find themselves nastily close to bankruptcy.
+
+The French court was emphatically no fitting place wherein to go
+bankrupt. The scared Jumels realized this. Back they scurried to New
+York; in that bourne of fast-made and faster-lost fortunes to face
+what the future might bring.
+
+And now, all praise to Betty Jumel, erstwhile queen of money wasters!
+Instead of repining, or blaming her husband for letting her break him,
+or flitting to some wooer whose wealth was still intact, she did the
+very last thing her past would have led any one to expect.
+
+She became, in effect, her husband's business partner. She displayed a
+genius for finance. It must have been stark genius, for her personal
+experience in the credit side of the money ledger was nil. More
+through his wife's aid than through his own sound business acumen,
+Papa Jumel began to win back the ground Betty had so industriously
+helped him to lose.
+
+One daring and lucky venture followed another. In an incredibly short
+time the Jumels were again numbered among the very richest people in
+America. Once more Betty launched on a career of luxury; but now and
+ever after she kept just within her abundant resources. Bankruptcy was
+a peril forever banished.
+
+Betty, you see, did not belong to the type of fool who runs his head
+twice into the same hornet's nest. There really was no need for such
+monotony. There were plenty of hornets' nests.
+
+The first expenditure, to celebrate the new fortune, was the buying of
+the big white house far away on the hillock above the Harlem River; a
+long, long coach drive, up the Broad Way, from the city's fashionable
+residence district to the south of Duane Street. Remember, this was a
+full twenty years before the Southern merchant made his historic
+speech: "When I come to New York on business, I never think of
+stopping at the Astor House. It's much too far uptown for a busy man."
+
+The house Betty made her husband buy had been built years earlier by
+Colonel Roger Morris, after he married Mary Phillipse, the colonial
+belle, whose father owned most of Westchester County and lived in a
+manor house there among his vassals like a feudal lord.
+
+To this abode moved the Jumels. Thither they brought a retinue of
+servants whose numbers amazed the thrifty New Yorkers. Here, too, were
+deposited such furniture as New York had seldom seen--a marvelously
+hideous marble-top table given to Papa Jumel by the Sultan of Turkey;
+a set of chairs that had been Napoleon's; a truly gaudy and cumbrous
+gold clock, which had been one of the emperor's gifts to Betty;
+tapestry and pictures that had once belonged to the Empress Josephine;
+dining-room furniture that had graced the ~salle a manger~ of King
+Charles X. of France; a massive, glittering chandelier, the gift of
+General Moreau, who had vied with the emperor for Betty's smiles.
+
+Above all these and the rest of her home's rich furnishings, Betty
+treasured two other gifts from Napoleon--odd ~gages d'amour~ for
+such a man to have given such a woman. They were the battered army
+chest and army cot used by him throughout the wonderful Italian
+campaign that had first established his fame.
+
+The world was scoured by Jumel's merchant ships to secure rare plants
+and trees for the hundred-and-fifty-acre park surrounding the mansion.
+Cedars from Mount Lebanon, cypresses from Greece, exotic flowers from
+South America, roses from Provence--these were but a few of the
+innumerable exotics that filled the grounds. (The "park," to-day, is a
+wilderness of dingy, apartment-lined streets).
+
+Once established in their new home, the Jumels began to entertain on a
+scale that dwarfed even the much-vaunted hospitality of the
+ante-bellum South. And the people who, of yore, had looked obliquely
+and frostily on Betty Bowen, now clamored and schemed and besought for
+invitations to her dinners. Well they might; for not only America's
+great folk delighted to honor the mansion by their presence, but every
+titled foreigner who touched our shores became a guest there.
+
+Hither came Joseph Bonaparte--kicked off the ready-made throne to
+which his emperor brother had vainly sought to fit the incompetent
+meager form and more meager intellect--and here he was entertained
+with royal honor, as if he had been still a sovereign instead of
+merely a crownless puppet no longer upheld by the mightiest of human
+hands. Here he was "Your Majesty," and people backed out of the room
+in which he chanced to be, stood until he gave them gracious leave to
+sit, and otherwise showered upon him the adoring servility that the
+freeborn are prone to lavish upon the representatives of monarchy.
+
+Bonaparte after Bonaparte visited the Jumels. The name, "Bonaparte,"
+was still one wherewith to conjure, and that fact by itself made its
+thick-headed and impecunious bearers welcome in almost every land they
+might choose to visit. They graciously accepted the Jumel house's
+hospitality and the veneration of their fellow guests; still more
+graciously they borrowed money--which they never returned--of Papa
+Jumel; and most graciously of all they made ardent and heavy love to
+Betty.
+
+To the Jumel mansion came finally the last and least esteemed of the
+Bonaparte visitors; a squat, puffy-eyed princeling--pallid, crafty
+shadow of the Austerlitz Man--who had left France and jail one jump
+ahead of the police, had served as special constable in London to pick
+up enough money for food, and now for similar reason was teaching
+school in Bordentown, New Jersey.
+
+He was Louis Napoleon, alleged nephew of Napoleon I. I say "alleged"
+on the authority of Victor Hugo's famous sneer that Louis was "neither
+the nephew of his uncle, the son of his father, nor the father of his
+son." It was Hugo, too, who, when Louis became emperor of the French,
+under the title of Napoleon III., dubbed him "Napoleon the Little."
+For which witticism, Monsieur Hugo was promptly banished from France.
+
+Louis was the son of Napoleon's younger brother of the same name and
+of his wife--and step-niece--Hortense Beauharnais. The son had not a
+single Bonapartist feature nor trait. He strongly resembled, however,
+a certain dashing Dutch admiral, one Flahaut, on whom Hortense had
+been credited with bestowing a more than neighborly interest. It is
+not libelous, in view of many proven facts--indeed, it is scarce
+gossip--to say that Hortense, like her mother, the Empress Josephine,
+had had the foible of loving not wisely, but too often.
+
+In any event, whoever may have been his father, Louis Napoleon was
+kindly received by the Jumels; not as a prince, but as a guest of
+honor. And Papa Jumel lent him much hard-earned American money. Among
+all the Bonapartes, Louis was the least promising of the Jumels'
+beneficiaries. And of them all, he alone was to make any return for
+their goodness to him.
+
+The Prince de Joinville--here to investigate, and if necessary buy
+off, Eleazer Williams' claim to be the "lost Dauphin"--stayed at the
+mansion and paid charming attentions to Betty. So did the polished old
+scoundrel, Talleyrand, whom Napoleon had daintily described as "a silk
+stocking filled with muck."
+
+Less lofty of birth, but worth all the Bonapartes put together in
+point of genius, was a young American poet who vastly admired Betty,
+and who, on her invitation, spent weeks at a time at the mansion. He
+was Fitz-Greene Halleck; and, seated on the porch of the Jumel house,
+he wrote a poem that a million schoolboys were soon to spout--"Marco
+Bozzaris."
+
+One morning in 1830, Papa Jumel set out for New York on a business
+call to his bankers. He rode forth from the long, winding
+driveway--several flat houses and stores and streets cut across that
+driveway's course to-day--in the lumbering and costly family coach.
+
+An hour later he was brought home dying. The coach had upset on the
+frost-rutted road a few miles to the south. Jumel had fallen out--on
+his head.
+
+Papa Jumel was in the late seventies at the time of his death. His
+widow was either fifty-three or sixty-one--all depending on whether
+you believe her own statement or the homely Rhode Island facts. What
+does it matter? She was one of the super-women who do not grow old.
+
+Scarce was her worthy spouse stretched comfortably in his last sleep,
+when suitors thronged the house. And it was not alone because the
+Widow Jumel was one of the richest women in America. She still held
+her ancient sway over men's hearts; still made sentimental mush of
+men's brains.
+
+Gossip, silenced of late years, sprang eagerly and happily to life.
+Once more did New York ring with Betty's daring flirtations. But she
+cared little for people's talk. She was rich enough, famous enough,
+clever enough, still beautiful enough to be a law unto herself. The
+very folk who gossiped so scandalously about her were most eager to
+catch her eye in public or to secure an invitation to the great
+mansion on the Harlem.
+
+As to men, she had never yet in all her fifty-three--or was it
+sixty-one?--years, met her match at heart smashing. But she was to
+meet him. And soon.
+
+Will you let me go back for a space and sketch, in a mere mouthful of
+words, the haps and mishaps of one of Betty's earlier admirers?
+
+Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States when he shot
+Hamilton. The bullet that killed Hamilton rebounded and killed Burr's
+political future; for Hamilton was a national favorite and Burr was
+not.
+
+Burr served out his term as vice president amid a whirlwind of
+national hatred. Then he went West, a bitterly disappointed and
+vengeful man, and embarked on an incredibly audacious scheme whereby
+he was to wrench free the great West and Southwest from the rest of
+the Union and install himself as emperor of that vast region, under
+the title of "Aaron I."
+
+The scheme failed, and Burr was hauled before the bar of justice on
+charges of high treason. Through some lucky fate or other, he was
+acquitted, but he was secretly advised to leave America. He followed
+the advice. And when he wanted to come back to the United States, he
+found every port closed against him. So he starved for a time in
+obscure European lodging.
+
+His heart had been broken, years earlier, by the death of the only
+woman he ever truly loved. She was not one of the hundreds who made
+fools of themselves over him. She was not his wife, who had died so
+long before. She was his only daughter, Theodosia; the only holy
+influence in his tempestuous life.
+
+And Theodosia had been lost at sea. No authentic word of her, or of
+the ship that carried her, has ever been received. Burr had spent
+every day for months pacing the Battery sea wall, straining those
+uncanny black eyes of his for glimpses of her ship. He had spent every
+dollar he could lay hands on in sending for news of her. And then he
+had given up hope. This had been long before.
+
+His daughter dead, his political hopes blasted, his country's gates
+barred against him, he dragged out a miserable life in Europe. Then,
+after years of absence, he slipped into the United States in disguise.
+
+The first news of his return came in a New York newspaper announcement
+that "Colonel Aaron Burr has opened law offices on the second floor of
+23 Nassau Street." The government made no move to deport him. Clients
+by the dozen flocked to take advantage of his brilliant legal
+intellect. Poverty, in a breath, gave place to prosperity.
+
+This was in the spring of 1833, a scant three years after Papa Jumel's
+sudden demise. Tidings came to Betty that her old adorer, after so
+long a lapse of time, was back in New York. And across the gap of
+years came memories of his mesmeric eyes, his wonderful voice--the
+eyes and voice no woman could resist--the inspired manner of his
+love-making. And Betty went to him.
+
+Throughout his love-starred life it was Burr's solemn declaration that
+never once did he take a single step out of his path to win any woman;
+that all his myriad conquests came to him unsought. Probably this was
+true. There are worse ways of bagging any form of game than by "still
+hunting." Perhaps there are few better.
+
+At all events, down Broadway in her France-built coach rolled Betty
+Jumel--tall, blond, statuesque as in the Betty Bowen days when Peter
+Croix had "bought a book for his friends to read." She called on Burr,
+ostensibly to consult him about a legal matter involving a real-estate
+deal. But Burr understood. Burr always understood.
+
+He saw, too, that Betty was still fair to look upon and that she had
+lost little of her charm. By common report he knew she was egregiously
+rich. He himself was wizened, white of hair, and seventy-eight years
+old. Poverty, griefs, bitter disappointments had sadly broken him.
+Save for his eyes and voice and brain, there was little about him to
+remind Betty of the all-conquering and dapper little Lothario of forty
+years back. Yet, as he listened and looked, she loved him. Yes, there
+is a goodly assortment of hornets' nests wherein a fool may run his
+head without visiting the same nest twice.
+
+A few days after her call at his office, Betty gave one of her
+renowned dinner parties. It was "in honor of Colonel Burr." The guest
+of honor carried all before him that evening. The people who had come
+to stare at him as an escaped arch-criminal went home wholly enslaved
+by his magnetic charm. Aaron Burr had come to his own again.
+
+In saying good night to his hostess, Burr lingered after the other
+guests had trundled off cityward in their carriages. Then, taking his
+leave with bared head, there in the moonlight on the steps of the
+Jumel mansion, he dropped lightly to one knee and raised Betty's hand
+to his lips.
+
+"Madam," he breathed, the merciful moonlight making him for the moment
+his young and irresistible self again, "madam, I give you my hand. My
+heart has long been yours."
+
+It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought--or affected to
+think--it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift
+campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing
+law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he
+drew the siege lines closer to the citadel.
+
+At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common
+sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back.
+But he did. He came back the very next day--July 1, 1833. And with him
+in the carriage was another old man--the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who
+had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first
+wife.
+
+To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame
+Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room.
+Wondering, she obeyed.
+
+"Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to
+marry you. Pray get ready at once!"
+
+Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the
+clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate
+eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love
+pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill
+at argument that had made him master of men and women alike--all were
+brought into play.
+
+An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful
+and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts.
+But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality.
+Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was
+won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all
+Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well.
+
+At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and
+let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was
+won. He knew it.
+
+A little later Betty reappeared at the head of the stairs. She was
+resplendent in a gown of thick, stiff, dove-colored satin, and she
+glittered with a thousand jewels. Burr, lightly as a boy, ran up the
+stairs to meet her. Without a word she took his proffered arm.
+Together they walked to where the clergyman, stationed by Burr,
+awaited them. And they were married--super-woman and super-man. I know
+of no other instance in the History of Love where two such consummate
+heart breakers became man and wife.
+
+It would be pleasant to record that the magnetic old couple walked
+hand and hand into the sunset; that their last years were spent
+together in the light of the afterglow. Here was a husband after
+Betty's own heart. Here was a wife to excite the envy of all Burr's
+friends, to rehabilitate him socially and financially. It seemed an
+ideal union.
+
+But the new-wed pair did none of the things that any optimist would
+predict, that any astute student of human nature would set down in a
+novel about them. Before the honeymoon was over, they were quarreling
+like cat and dog. About money, of course. Burr sold some stock for his
+wife, and neglected to turn over the proceeds to her. She asked for
+the money. He curtly replied:
+
+"Madam, this time you are married to a ~man~. A man who will henceforth
+take charge of all your business affairs."
+
+Betty's temper had never, at best, threatened to rob the patient
+Griselda of her laurels. Men had been her slaves, not her masters. She
+had no fancy for changing the lifelong conditions. So, in a blaze of
+anger, she not only demanded her money, but hinted very strongly that
+Colonel Burr was little better than a common fortune hunter.
+
+Burr ordered her to go to her room and stay there until she could
+remember the respect due from a wife to her husband. She made a hot
+retort to the effect that the house was hers, and that, but for her
+wealth, Burr was a mere outcast and beggar.
+
+Burr, without a word, turned and left the house. This was just ten
+days after the wedding. He went to New York and took up his abode in
+his former Duane Street lodgings. Betty, scared and penitent, went
+after him. There was a reconciliation, and he came back.
+
+But soon there was another squabble about money. And Betty, in another
+tantrum, went to a lawyer and brought suit to take the control of her
+fortune out of her husband's hands. Again Burr left his new home,
+vowing he would never return.
+
+The poor old fellow, once more cast upon his own resources, and
+self-deprived of the luxuries his wife's money had brought him, fell
+ill. When Betty, in another contrite fit, went to plead with him to
+come back, she found him delirious. She had him carried out to the
+mansion, and for weeks nursed him right tenderly.
+
+But when he came again to his senses, Burr would not speak to his
+wife. The moment he was able to get out of bed, he left the house.
+Betty never saw him again. Not very long afterward he died, in a
+Staten Island hotel--alone, unmourned, he who had been the darling of
+women.
+
+Did Betty mourn her husband emeritus? Not noticeably. She was not of
+the type that mourns. Before Burr was fairly under the sod, she was
+flirting gayly and was demanding and receiving the same admiration
+that had always been hers. She sought to make people forget that she
+had ever been Mrs. Burr, and she asked them to call her, once more,
+"Madame Jumel." She dazzled New York with a mammoth flower fete in the
+summer of 1837; and once more, heedless of people's opinions, ruled as
+queen of New York's little social realm.
+
+And so the years sped on, until the super-woman of other days could no
+longer fight off that incurable disease, old age. American men no
+longer vied for her favors. She decided that American men's taste for
+beauty had been swallowed up by commercialism. And she went again to
+Paris, where, she remembered, men had never ceased to sue for her
+love.
+
+This was in 1853. Louis Napoleon had just made himself "Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French." He had a way, in the days of his power, of
+forgetting those who had befriended him when he was down-at-the-heel
+exile, and of snubbing former friends who were so foolish as to claim
+present notice on the ground of past favors.
+
+But he made a notable exception in the case of Madame Jumel. He
+received her with open arms, gave a court ball in honor of her return
+to Paris, and in every way treated her almost as if she had been a
+visiting sovereign. One likes to think his overworked recording angel
+put all this down in large letters on the credit side of Napoleon the
+Little's celestial ledger page. Heaven knows there was plenty of blank
+space on that side of the page for any such entries.
+
+But on Betty herself the effect of all this adoration was decidedly
+startling. Treated like a queen, she grew to believe she was a queen.
+The razor-keen wits that had stood by her so gallantly for
+three-quarters of a century or more were dulling. Her mind began
+wandering helplessly in the realms of fancy. An odd phase of her
+mental decay was that she took to babbling incessantly of Aaron
+Burr--whose name she had not spoken in years--and she seemed to forget
+that she had ever met a man named Jumel.
+
+She came back to the old house on the hill, overlooking the Harlem.
+The stream was no longer as pastoral and deserted as in earlier days,
+and houses and cottages had begun to spring up all around the confines
+of the mansion's grounds. New York was slowly creeping northward.
+
+But it is to be doubted that Betty realized the change. She was a
+queen; no less a queen because she ruled an imaginary kingdom.
+
+She declared that her position as a sovereign demanded a body of
+household troops. So she hired a bodyguard of twenty soldiers, dressed
+them in gay uniforms, and placed them on duty around the house. She
+increased her staff of servants to an amazing degree. She assumed
+regal airs. Every visitor was announced as if entering the presence of
+royalty. Betty no longer "received callers." Instead, she "held
+audiences." Yearly she journeyed in state to Saratoga, with a retinue
+of fifty servants and "officers of the household."
+
+Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The
+once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to amass began to
+shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than
+a million dollars of it was left after she died.
+
+New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied
+because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her
+dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship.
+
+And in the mansion on the hill, on July 16, 1865, she fell asleep. A
+score of New York's foremost men were her honorary pallbearers. And
+all society made, for the last time, the long journey to Harlem to
+honor her memory.
+
+So died Betty Bowen--Betty Jumel--Betty Burr--whatever you prefer to
+call her. She was New York's first and greatest official heart
+breaker. She was doubly fortunate, too, in missing the average
+old-super-woman's realization of having outgrown her wonder-charm. For
+when her life book of beauty and power and magnetism closed, Delusion
+tenderly took up the tale. And through a fairyland of imagined
+admiration and regal rank, Betty tottered happily to the very end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR
+
+THE "ACTRESS HEART QUEEN"
+
+
+She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.
+
+He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all
+spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the
+strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.
+
+(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand--a
+four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)
+
+Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's
+attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling
+interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.
+
+She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's
+super-women, she sprang from the masses. Her childhood was spent in
+beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At
+fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was
+acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.
+
+As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared
+to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was
+one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had
+divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.
+
+It was at Lille, while she was still in her apprenticeship as an
+actress, that Adrienne met a young baron; a captain in the local
+garrison. He loved her, and he was her first love. It was not the
+custom of the early eighteenth century for a French noble to propose
+marriage to a former laundress who was playing utility parts in a
+third-rate road show. Probably there was no precedent for it. And such
+a proposal would have been a waste of windy words, at best. For
+neither the king nor the man's parents would have allowed it to lead
+to marriage.
+
+Yet--or perhaps because of it--the baron asked Adrienne Lecouvreur to
+be his wife. She was in the seventh paradise of first love. It was all
+turning out the way it did in plays. And plays were, thus far,
+Adrienne's chief guidebook of life. So the prettily staged engagement
+began; with roseate light effects.
+
+Before Adrienne had time for disillusionment, the baron died. In the
+first grief--she was at an age when every tragedy is absolutely
+permanent and irrevocable--the luckless girl tried to kill herself.
+Her kindly fellow actors took turns in watching her and in abstracting
+unobtrusively any lethal weapons that might chance to be within her
+reach. And at last Youth came to the rescue; permanent heartbreak
+being too mighty a feat for sixteen.
+
+Adrienne fell to referring to the baron's death as her life tragedy,
+not yet realizing that the affair was but an insignificant curtain
+raiser.
+
+By and by another nobleman crossed her horizon. He was Philippe le
+Ray. And for the moment he fascinated Adrienne. Once more there was a
+hope--or she thought there was--of a marriage into the aristocracy.
+Then, just as everything seemed to be along smoothly, she threw away
+her possible chances with both hands.
+
+Into the road company came a new recruit, Clavel by name. You will not
+find him in the shining records of the French stage, nor under the
+"Cs" in any encyclopedia. His name has been picked in history's museum
+solely from the fact that he jilted Adrienne Lecouvreur.
+
+Philippe le Ray was promptly shelved for the new love. And with him
+Adrienne sacrificed all her supposed chances of wealth, rank, and
+ease; for the sake of a penniless actor, and for love.
+
+She became engaged to Clavel. They planned to marry as soon as their
+joint earnings would permit, and to tour France as co-stars. Or, if
+the public preferred, with Clavel as star, and with Adrienne as an
+adoringly humble member of the cast.
+
+Early in the affair, Clavel found a better-paying position in another
+company. Adrienne urged him to accept it, for the temporary parting
+promised to bring nearer the day of their marriage. And Clavel, to
+please her, took the offer.
+
+So, again, Adrienne found herself alone. But it was a loneliness that
+vibrated with hope. It was at this time that she chose for herself a
+motto, which thereafter emblazoned her letters and lingerie.
+
+It was, "~Que Faire Au Monde Sans Aimer?~" ("What is living without
+loving?") She was soon to learn the grim answer to the challenge-query
+she so gayly hurled at fate.
+
+Clavel's letters grew few. They waned in warmth. Odd rumors with which
+the theater world has ever been rife began to reach Adrienne. And at
+last she wrote her absent lover a missive that has been numbered by
+~cognoscenti~ among the great love letters of the ages. Here it is,
+in part--a halting translation:
+
+    I scarce know what to believe, from your neglect. But be certain
+    always that I love you for yourself a hundred times more dearly
+    than on my own account. Oh, love me, dear, as I shall forever love
+    you! That is all I ask from life.
+
+    But don't promise to, unless you can keep your word. Your welfare
+    is far more precious to me than my own. So always follow the
+    course that seems most pleasant to you. If ever I lose you and you
+    are still happy, I shall have the joy of knowing I have not been a
+    bar to your happiness.
+
+The worthy Clavel took Adrienne at her word. He proceeded to "follow
+the course that seemed most pleasant to him"--by breaking the
+engagement and marrying a lesser woman who had a dot of several
+thousand francs. He explained his action by saying that he must look
+out for his own future, and that Adrienne had no prospects of success
+on the stage.
+
+And thus the thrifty actor passes out of history. Thus, too, he lost a
+future chance to handle the funds of Europe's richest actress, and of
+starring as her husband. Peace to his puny soul!
+
+Adrienne Lecouvreur no longer clamored to die. She was older
+now--nearly twenty. And the latest blow hardened instead of crushing
+her. By this time the girlish chrysalis had been shed and a gloriously
+beautiful woman had emerged. Already she was hailed as the "Actress
+Heart Queen." Men were straining the vocabulary of imbecility to coin
+phrases for her.
+
+And for the first and last time in her career, Adrienne resolved to
+capitalize her charms. It was the one adventuress-moment in all her
+story. And the Hand that ever guided her course picked her up and set
+her back, very hard and very promptly, in the destined path of tragedy
+from which she had tried to stray.
+
+Stinging and heart-dead from Clavel's desertion, she listened to the
+vows of the Comte de Klinglin. He was rich; he was a soldier of note;
+and Adrienne was no longer the world-innocent child of her first
+engagement days. She played her cards with the skill of a perfect
+actress. From mere flirtation, the count advanced to the point of
+worshiping her.
+
+De Klinglin besought her to marry him. And with seeming reluctance,
+she yielded. She even pointed out a way by which they might evade
+royal and family law by emigrating for a time to some other country,
+and then, by judicious bribery, arranging a return and a
+reinstatement. De Klinglin entered eagerly into the plan.
+
+Then, on the very eve of their proposed wedding, the count deserted
+her and married an heiress. Decidedly, the Hand was guiding Adrienne
+against every effort or desire of her own.
+
+This latest blow to pride and to new-born ambition was the turning
+point in Adrienne Lecouvreur's road. It changed her from a
+professional beauty into an inspired actress.
+
+She threw herself into her work with a tragic intensity bred of her
+own sorrows. She turned her back on social distractions, and on
+everything that came between her and success. Her acting as well as
+her beauty became the talk of the provinces. Word of her prowess
+drifted to Paris, the Mecca of eighteenth-century actor-folk. A Paris
+manager came to see her act, and he at once engaged her.
+
+In 1717, when she was twenty-three, she burst unheralded upon the
+French metropolis. In a night, Paris was at her feet. Almost at once,
+she was made a leading woman of the ~Comedie Francaise~; where, for
+thirteen years, she reigned, undisputed sovereign of the French stage.
+
+Never before had such acting been witnessed or even imagined. It was a
+revelation. Up to this time French actors had mouthed their words
+noisily and grandiloquently, reciting the Alexandrine or otherwise
+metrical lines--wherein practically all the classic plays of the
+period, except some of Moliere's, were written--in a singsong chant
+that played sad havoc with the sense.
+
+Incidentally, the costuming--as you may see from contemporary
+cuts--was a nightmare. And when a character on the stage was not
+declaiming or dramatically listening, he usually stood stock-still in
+a statuesque attitude, staring into blank space, with the look of an
+automaton.
+
+All this seems ridiculous to us; but it had come straight down as an
+almost inviolable "classic tradition" from the ancient Greek drama,
+which had been more a series of declamations than a vital play.
+
+Yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a revelation to Paris. On the stage her
+voice was as soft and musical as it was penetrating. Instead of
+intoning a pompous monologue, she spoke her lines as people in real
+life spoke. Her emotions were keenly human. Every syllable and every
+shade of voice meant something.
+
+Without sacrificing the poetry of the rhymed couplets, she put the
+breath of life and of conversational meaning into them. She dressed
+the characters she played in the way such persons might reasonably
+have been supposed to dress. She made them a joy to the eye instead of
+an insult to the intelligence. And when she was not speaking, she was
+forever acting; introducing a million bits of byplay to replace the
+old statuesque poses.
+
+She had lived. And she put the breath of that life into her work. This
+seems simple enough to us in these days of stage realism. But it was a
+wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting,
+diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused
+term was for once well applied.
+
+Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and
+sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them
+all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic
+through many firm repetitions:
+
+"Love is a folly which I detest!"
+
+Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?"
+throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment.
+
+Not only did she revolutionize the stage, but she was the first
+actress to be taken up by society. Not only the foremost men in
+France, but their wives as well, threw open to her the magic doors of
+the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
+
+Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say
+that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The
+unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like
+the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this
+loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A
+hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had
+so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the
+~Mercure~, of 1719:
+
+    Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of
+    distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as
+    eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words.
+    In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head
+    is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire;
+    her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is
+    wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear,
+    sorrow.
+
+And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one
+sentence from a letter she wrote:
+
+    I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me.
+
+Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even
+then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake
+France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall.
+
+He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself,
+he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"--a name to which he had
+no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire
+was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a
+dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on
+government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one
+of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de
+Rohan--bearer of the proudest name in all Europe--sauntered in. He
+eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no
+one in particular:
+
+"Who is this young man who talks so loud?"
+
+"A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger
+along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure
+respect for the name he has."
+
+De Rohan's tasseled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its
+fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close
+there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and
+beaten half to death.
+
+The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in
+France at that time, against a member of the ~haute noblesse~. So
+Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing
+for a year or more in the use of the small-sword.
+
+At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan
+professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and,
+through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by ~lettre de cachet~, to
+the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release,
+Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.
+
+At the perihelion of Adrienne's Dianalike sway over French hearts, a
+new social lion arrived in Paris. He was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, born
+of a morganatic union between a German countess and Augustus the
+Strong, King of Poland. (Augustus, by the way, was the parent of no
+less than one hundred and sixty-three children--an interesting record
+even in those days of large families, and one that should have gone
+far toward earning for him the title of "Father of his Country.")
+
+Saxe came to Paris crowned with laurels won as a dashing military
+leader, as a fearless duelist, and as an irresistible heart breaker.
+He had won, by sheer bravery and strategic skill, the rank of Marshal.
+He was of the "man on horseback" type over whom crowds go wild.
+
+The new hero was a giant in stature, strikingly handsome, and so
+strong that in one hand he could crush a horseshoe into a shapeless
+lump. He was a paladin--Ajax, Don Juan, Tamerlane, Mark Antony,
+Baldur, all rolled into one. He was a glorious animal, high of spirits
+and of hopes, devoid of fear and of the finer feelings. A Greek
+god--or whatever you will. And about him hung the glamour of countless
+conquests on the battlefield and in love.
+
+That such a man should have turned Paris' head was inevitable. Equally
+natural was it that Paris women should make fools of themselves over
+him. But why so gross and unintellectual a wooer should have made the
+very slightest impression on a character like Adrienne Lecouvreur's
+must be relegated to the "mystery of choice" collection of riddles.
+
+Yet, at sight, she, who for years had scoffed at passion, and who had
+so often declared her heart was dead, felt that she had met the love
+of her life.
+
+She gave her revivified heart and her whole soul into Maurice de
+Saxe's keeping, forever and ever. There were no reservations. Hers was
+a love that could die only with her life. The former affairs were to
+her as half-forgotten dreams. Saxe, and Saxe alone, held her love;
+held it as no other man had been able to.
+
+Adrienne at first dazzled Saxe--as a tropic butterfly might dazzle a
+champion bulldog. The dazzle soon wore off; but it left behind a
+comfortable feeling of affection, of admiration, of gratified vanity
+that he alone had been chosen by her, out of all the world of suitors.
+
+With the deft hands of a sculptor, Adrienne Lecouvreur molded Saxe's
+rough nature. She refined him; taught him to replace the ways of the
+camp by those of civilization; made him less of a beast and more of a
+man; showed him how to think.
+
+All of which added to the man's popularity with other women; which was
+the sole reward Adrienne reaped for her educative efforts.
+
+Saxe was notoriously untrue to her. In his rages he berated her as a
+cabby might have scolded his drunken wife. He used his power over her
+to raise himself in others' esteem. In short, he was wholly selfish
+throughout, and he gruffly consented to accept Adrienne's worship as
+his just due.
+
+But Adrienne's love merely waxed stronger and brighter under such
+abominable treatment. She lived for Saxe alone.
+
+The Duchy of Courland lost its duke. His place was to be filled by
+election. And with the dukedom went the hand of a Russian princess,
+whose face Saxe unchivalrously compared to a Westphalia ham.
+
+Saxe's ambition awoke. In his veins ran royal blood. He wanted to be a
+duke and the husband of a princess. He entered as candidate in the
+contest. Lack of money, for judicious bribes to the free and
+incorruptible electors, stood in his way. He went, as ever in trouble,
+to Adrienne. And, as ever, she rose to the occasion.
+
+She knew that, as Duke of Courland, he could not see her again, or be
+within several hundred miles of her. She knew, too, that, by helping
+him with the dukedom, she was helping to give him to another woman. A
+lesser love than hers would have rebelled at either possibility.
+
+But Adrienne's love for Saxe was that which not only casts out fear,
+but casts out self along with it. She sold every piece of jewelry and
+every costly dress and stick of furniture in her possession, borrowed
+money right and left, and mortgaged her salary at the ~Comedie
+Francaise~.
+
+The net result was fifteen thousand dollars, which she gladly handed
+over to Saxe for the expenses of his campaign. With these sinews of
+war, Saxe hastened to Courland. There he remained for a year; working
+hard for his election; making love to the ham-faced princess; fighting
+like a Norse berserker in battle after battle.
+
+He was elected duke. But Russia refused to sanction the election. At
+the head of a handful of fellow adventurers, Saxe went on fighting;
+performing prodigies of personal valor and strength in conflicts
+against overwhelming odds. But at last he was hopelessly beaten in
+battle, and still more hopelessly outpointed in the game of politics.
+And back he came to Paris--a failure.
+
+Adrienne used every art and charm to make him forget his misfortunes
+and find happiness once more in her love. He treated her overtures as
+a surly schoolboy might treat those of an over-affectionate little
+sweetheart.
+
+He consented to be petted and comforted by the woman who adored him.
+But he wreaked in her the ill-temper bred of his defeat. For example,
+he professed to believe her untrue to him. He was furiously
+jealous--or pretended to be. And he accused her of the infidelity he
+had himself a thousand times practiced.
+
+Poor Adrienne, aghast at such insane charges, vainly protested her
+innocence and her utter love for him. One of her letters to Saxe,
+during this dark hour, has been preserved. It begins:
+
+    I am worn out with grief. I have wept this livelong night. It is
+    foolish of me; since I have nothing wherewith to reproach myself.
+    But I cannot endure severity from you. I am suspected, accused by
+    you. Oh, how can I convince you--you who alone can wound my heart?
+
+In the midst of this wretched misunderstanding came a crumb of comfort
+to the luckless woman--albeit the incident that caused it led also,
+indirectly, to her death.
+
+Francoise de Lorraine, Duchesse de Bouillon, fell violently in love
+with Saxe, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Saxe laughed in her
+face, and hinted that he cared too much for Adrienne Lecouvreur just
+then to be interested in any one else. It was not the truth, for his
+love for Adrienne had never served as an obstacle to any other of his
+myriad amours. But it served to rebuff the duchesse, who did not
+interest him, and to make Adrienne very, very happy when he repeated
+to her the conversation. As a by-product, it threw the duchesse into a
+frame of mind described by Congreve in his line about the Gehenna-like
+fury of a woman scorned.
+
+A few days after this--in July, 1729--Adrienne received an anonymous
+note asking her to be at a certain corner of the Luxembourg Gardens at
+eleven o'clock the following morning. Being quite without fear, and
+not at all without curiosity, she went.
+
+No, she was not set upon by masked assassins. She found awaiting her
+nothing more formidable than a pale and badly scared young man in
+clerical garb.
+
+The clerical youth introduced himself as the Abbe Bouret, a hanger-on
+of the Bouillon household. Bouret told Adrienne that the duchesse had
+bribed him heavily to send her rival a box of poisoned bonbons, with a
+note saying the candies were the gift of an unknown and humble
+admirer.
+
+The abbe had seen Adrienne a few nights earlier at the theater. So
+struck had he been by the gentleness and beauty of her face that he
+could not carry out his murderous commission. Hence the warning.
+
+Adrienne took the abbe, and the candy, too, straight to the police. A
+bonbon was fed to a street dog. The animal, screaming and writhing in
+agony, died within fifteen minutes. This seemed, even to the
+eighteenth-century Paris police, a fairly good proof of the duchesse's
+guilt.
+
+Naturally, they did not arrest her grace. But they put certain
+respectful queries to her. Strangely enough, the duchesse indignantly
+denied that she had tried to poison Adrienne.
+
+Bouret, cross-examined, stuck determinedly to his story. So, through
+the Bouillon influence, he was thrown into prison and was kept there
+in solitary confinement, in a damp and unlighted dungeon, with
+occasional torture, until he saw the error of his ways, and confessed
+that his charge had been a lie. Thus was the faultless Duchesse de
+Bouillon triumphantly cleared of an unjust accusation.
+
+The duchesse celebrated her vindication by attending the theater, one
+night when Adrienne Lecouvreur was playing in "Phedre." The duchesse
+sat in a stage box and mockingly applauded her rival.
+
+Adrienne paid no overt heed at first to her presence. But when she
+came to the scene in which ~Phedre~ expresses to ~OEnone~ her contempt
+for a certain class of women, Adrienne turned her back on the
+wondering ~OEnone~, strode to the footlights, and, her blazing eyes
+seizing and gripping the duchesse's, declaimed directly to her
+~Phedre's~ lines:
+
+    "I know my own faults; but I am not one of those brazen women who,
+    calm even in the exposure of their crimes, can face the world
+    without a blush."
+
+The duchesse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face.
+Shielding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the
+theater.
+
+Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same title,
+make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk
+openly declared that the Duchesse de Bouillon would not long rest
+impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.
+
+Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers
+declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by
+mortal illness.
+
+Less than half a century had passed since the dying King Charles had
+"lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the
+science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the
+past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the
+best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.
+
+Doctors great and doctors greater--the quacks of the Rive Gauche
+and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg--all stood in
+turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin;
+while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn
+nincompoops--which they were.
+
+After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and
+potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so
+much as name the ailment. At least, they did not--aloud. For the
+memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still
+fresh in men's minds.
+
+And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by
+the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber
+door.
+
+The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the
+victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature
+who had defied God's laws by going on the stage.
+
+Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings
+of the Church.
+
+Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly
+heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs
+outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be
+wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his
+knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as
+did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At
+all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.
+
+If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all
+earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of
+Extreme Unction.
+
+"Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned.
+
+Slowly the great dark eyes--already wide with the Eternal
+Mystery--turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the
+opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms
+toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her
+weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:
+
+"~There~ is my Universe, my Hope, my ~God~!"
+
+The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur
+sank back upon the pillows, dead--and unabsolved.
+
+That night--acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had
+heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy--the police carried
+Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.
+
+For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at
+another woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CLEOPATRA
+
+"THE SERPENT OF OLD NILE"
+
+
+Some thirty-five years ago, in the north Jersey village of Pompton,
+the township undertaker's barn burned down. It was a spectacular
+midnight fire. All the natives turned out to view it. Dominie Jansen
+even hinted, I remember, that it was a visitation on the community for
+some of his neighbors' sins. Whereat, Lem Saulsbury took the
+pledge--for the eighth time that year.
+
+Well, the next week, when the Pompton ~Clarion~ appeared, no mention
+was made of the fire--the only event of intense human interest, by the
+way, since Joel Binswanger, the official local sot, six months earlier
+had, at the village tavern, swallowed a half-pint flask of carbolic
+acid--set aside for cleaning the brasses--under the conviction that it
+was applejack. Joel had complained of a rough throat and an unwonted
+taste in his mouth for days afterward. The Clarion editor, taken to
+task for printing nothing about the fire, excused the omission by
+saying;
+
+"What'd 'a been the use of writing the story? Everybody knows about
+it."
+
+That's all there is to the anecdote. Yes, I've heard better, myself.
+I've even heard the same one better told. It serves, though, as a
+fitting preamble to my story about Cleopatra.
+
+"Everybody knows about it."
+
+Who can say anything about her that you have not heard? Perhaps I can.
+Probably not. Will you be patient with me, and, even as tourists visit
+European shrines to verify their Baedekers, read this story to verify
+what you have always known? Cleopatra cannot be omitted from any
+super-woman series. And I will make her as interesting as I know how.
+
+Personally, I believe the Pomptonians would far rather have read about
+that barn blaze, which they had seen, than about the conflagration of
+a whole foreign metropolis.
+
+At sixteen--in 52 B.C.--Cleopatra's known career as a heartbreaker
+began; although there are rumors of more than one still earlier
+affair, with Egyptian nobles as their heroes.
+
+She was the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes--Ptolemy the Piper--cordially
+hated ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra and her baby brother, young Ptolemy,
+nominally shared the throne for a time. They were both children. They
+ruled much as the baby "drives" when he holds the reins of the horse
+at whose head is the hostler's guiding hand. All manner of
+adventurers--both native and Greek--were the real rulers.
+
+One of these factions drove Cleopatra from the throne and from her
+capital at Alexandria, leaving the "triple Urćus crown," with its
+mystic lotus adornments, on the head of baby Ptolemy alone.
+
+The crown was the only fragment of actual kingship the child
+possessed. The power and the graft lay in the hands of a trio of
+industriously grasping Greek adventurers.
+
+Cleopatra, meantime, out in the cold, schemed to regain her place on
+the double throne, and, even at that early age, amused herself in the
+interim by planning the tortures she would wreak on little Ptolemy
+when her turn should come.
+
+While she was casting about for means to outwit the Greeks, and
+seeking means to buy up a mercenary army of invasion, she learned that
+Julius Cćsar, an elderly Roman of vast repute as a conqueror, had come
+to Alexandria at the head of a few legions, on a mission of diplomacy.
+
+Cleopatra may have known little of men's strength, but already she was
+a profound student of their weaknesses.
+
+She began to ask questions about Cćsar. Brushing away (as immaterial
+if true), her scared native attendants' statements that he had the
+body of an elephant, the head of a tiger, and the claws of a dragon,
+and that he fed on prisoners served raw, she pumped one or two exiled
+Romans and gleaned an inkling of the conqueror's history.
+
+With the details of Cćsar's Gallic invasion, his crushing of Pompey,
+and his bullying of semihostile fellow Romans, she did not in the
+least concern herself. What most interested Cleopatra were the
+following domestic revelations:
+
+He had been married at least four times, and three of his wives were
+still living. Cossutia, the wife of his youth, he had divorced by law
+because he had been captivated by the charms of one Cornelia, whom he
+had forthwith married, and who had died before he had had time to name
+her successor.
+
+Next in order he had wed Pompeia; and, on the barest rumor of
+indiscretion on her part, had announced dramatically: "Cćsar's wife
+must be above suspicion!" and had divorced her to marry his present
+spouse, Calpurnia.
+
+The interstices between these unions had been garnished with many a
+love episode. Adamant as he was toward men, Cćsar was far from being
+an anchorite where women were concerned; and he had the repute of
+being unswervingly loyal to the woman whom he, at the time, chanced to
+love.
+
+This scurrilous information was quite enough for Cleopatra. She had
+her plans accordingly. She would see Cćsar. More to the point, she
+would be seen by Cćsar. But how? Cćsar was in Alexandria, the
+stronghold of her enemies. It would mean capture and subsequent death
+for Cleopatra to be found in the city. Yet she planned not only to
+enter Alexandria, but to make her first appearance before Cćsar in a
+way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest
+from the very start.
+
+Julius Cćsar sat in the great audience hall of the Alexandria palace,
+whose use he had commandeered as his temporary headquarters. Behind
+him stood his guards; heavy armored, tanned of face; short, thick
+swords at hip. Before his dais trailed a procession of folk who hated
+him as starkly as they feared him.
+
+They were Egyptians with favors to ask, and they bore gifts to indorse
+their pleas. They were Greeks who sought to outwit the barbarian
+victor, or to trick him into the granting of concessions. One by one
+the suppliants crawled past, each crying out an appeal or a grievance.
+Nearly every one made a peace offering, until the mass of gifts was
+stacked high on the stone floor of the audience hall.
+
+Presently entered two black porters, (strapping Nubian giants), who
+bore lightly between them a roll of rare Persian carpet. They halted,
+laid down their burden on the floor at Cćsar's feet, fell on their
+knees in obeisance, and--waited. On the floor lay the roll of
+priceless weave, no one coming forward to make the rich gift an excuse
+for the urging of some boon.
+
+Cćsar grew inquisitive. He leaned forward to examine the tight-folded,
+shimmering rug more carefully. As he did so, the folds were suddenly
+flung aside, and a girl leaped to her feet from among them. Thus had
+Cleopatra entered Alexandria. Thus had she penetrated to Cćsar's
+presence. Thus, too, by her craft and daring, had she won the
+attention of the man whose daring and craft had conquered the world.
+
+Cćsar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully--and
+wholly undraped--before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed
+and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw
+everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination--a
+magnetism--that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had
+known in all his fifty-eight years.
+
+It was Julius Cćsar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the
+super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain
+face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties
+who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.
+
+Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an
+elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man,
+nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin
+gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of
+laurel leaves.
+
+This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused
+sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican
+Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was
+an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded
+to play.
+
+Yet she speedily found that Cćsar's was but a surface weakness, and
+that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her
+foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as
+were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of
+Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of
+her ancestors, at Rome's expense--he had not the remotest idea of
+doing that.
+
+Nor could all her most bewildering blandishments wring such a foolish
+concession from him. He made love to her--ardent love; but he did not
+let love interfere in any way with politics.
+
+Instead of carrying her to the throne, through seas of her enemies'
+blood, he carried Cleopatra back to Rome with him and, to the scandal
+of the whole city, installed her in a huge marble villa there.
+
+And there, no secret being made of Cćsar's infatuation for her,
+Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until Cćsar's
+death. There, too, Cćsar's son, Cćsarion, was born; and with the boy's
+birth came to Cleopatra the hope that Cćsar would will to him all his
+vast estates and other wealth; which would have been some slight
+compensation for the nonrestoring of her throne.
+
+While Cleopatra abode in Rome, more than one man of world-fame bowed
+in homage before her. For example, Lepidus--fat, stupid, inordinately
+rich, fit dupe for cleverer politicians. Marcus Antonius, too,
+--Cćsar's protege, and at this time a swaggering, lovable, dissolute
+soldier-demagogue, whose fortunes were so undissolubly fastened to
+Cćsar's that he, the winner of a horde of women, dared not lift his
+eyes to the woman Cćsar loved.
+
+Among the rest--Marcus Brutus, snarling Casca, and the others--came
+one more guest to the villa--a hard-faced, cold-eyed youth whom
+Cleopatra hated. For he was Caius Octavius, Cćsar's nephew and
+presumptive heir; the man who was, years hence, to be the Emperor
+Augustus.
+
+At length, one day, Rome's streets surged with hysterical mobs and
+factions. And news came to the villa that Cćsar had been assassinated
+at the Forum. Speedily an angry crowd besieged Cleopatra's house.
+
+Now that the all-feared Cćsar no longer lived to protect her, the
+people were keen to wreak punishment on this foreign sorceress who had
+enmeshed the murdered man's brain, and had made him squander upon her
+so much of the public wealth that might better have gone into Roman
+pockets. Rome's new government, too, at once ordered her expulsion
+from the city.
+
+Cleopatra, avoiding the mob and dodging arrest, fled from Rome with
+her son, her fortune, and her few faithful serfs. One more hope was
+gone. For, instead of leaving his money to Cćsarion, Cćsar, in his
+will, had made the cold-eyed youth, Caius Octavius, his heir.
+
+Back to the East went Cleopatra, her sun of success temporarily in
+shadow. In semi-empty, if regal, state, she queened it for a time, her
+title barren, her real power in Egypt practically confined to her
+brain and to her charm. Nominal Queen of Egypt, she was still merely
+holding the reins, while iron-handed Rome strode at the horse's head.
+
+From afar, she heard from time to time the tidings from Rome. The men
+who had slain Cćsar had themselves been overthrown. In their place
+Rome--and all the world--was ruled by a triumvirate made up of three
+men she well remembered--Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.
+
+The next news was that Antony and Octavius had painlessly extracted
+Lepidus from the combination, and were about to divide the government
+of the whole known world between themselves. Antony, to whom first
+choice was given, selected the eastern half for his share, leaving the
+west to Octavius.
+
+Then came word that Antony was on his way toward Egypt; thither bound
+in order to investigate certain grave charges made by her subjects
+against Cleopatra herself.
+
+Once more were the queen's throne and her life itself in peril. And
+once more she called upon her matchless power over men to meet and
+overcome the new menace. When Antony drew near to the capital,
+Cleopatra set forth to meet him; not with such an army as she might
+perchance have scraped together to oppose the invader, but relying
+solely on her own charms.
+
+Antony by this time was well past his first youth. Here is Plutarch's
+word picture of him:
+
+    He was of a noble presence. He had a goodly, thick beard, a broad
+    forehead, and a crooked nose. And there appeared such a manly look
+    in his countenance as is seen in the statues of Hercules.... And
+    it is incredible what marvelous love he won.
+
+Yes, and it is incredible into what messes that same "marvelous love,"
+first and last, dragged him. He had a wondrous genius for war and for
+statesmanship; but ever, just as those qualities lifted him to
+eminence, some woman would drag him down. For instance, as a young
+man, his budding political hopes were wrecked by Flavia, a charmer who
+enslaved him. Later, Rome turned a deaf ear to the tales of his
+military glory because he chose to escort openly along the Appian Way
+a frail beauty named Cytheria, in a chariot drawn by four lions. In
+rapid succession he--like his idol, Cćsar--married four wives.
+
+Flavia was the first--she who blasted his early statesmanship
+ambitions; next Antonia, from whom he soon separated; third, Fulvia, a
+shrew who made his home life a burden, and whose temper drove him far
+from her--not that he really needed such incentive.
+
+But Fulvia loved him, as did all women. For when Cicero lay dead, she
+went to the orator's bier and thrust a bodkin through the once magic
+tongue; thus punishing the tongue, she explained, for its calumnies
+against her beloved husband.
+
+Fulvia was not exactly a cozy-corner wife, as you, perhaps, have
+observed; yet, when she died, Antony was heartily sorry. He said so.
+At the time, he was far away from Rome and home--he had not taken
+Fulvia to Egypt with him--and was basking in Cleopatra's wiles. On a
+visit to Rome he next married Octavia, sister of Octavius. It was a
+state match. He speedily deserted her and hurried back to Egypt.
+
+Antony--true lover and false husband, hero and fool, rake and
+statesman--had fifty sides to his character--and a woman was on every
+side. In times of peace he wallowed in the wildest dissipation, and
+spent vast fortunes without a second thought. In war, he was the idol
+of his men, carousing with them, sharing their hard fare and harder
+life, never losing their adoring respect, always the hero for whom
+they would blithely die.
+
+And so back to the story.
+
+Up the River Cydnus sailed Antony, bent on restoring order to Egypt
+and punishing the cruel Cleopatra. And down the River Cydnus to meet
+him came Cleopatra.
+
+The barge, wherein lay the queen, had sails of purple and gold. It was
+propelled by oars of pure silver. Around the recumbent Cleopatra were
+beautiful attendants, clad--or unclad--as Nymphs, Graces, Cupids. She
+herself wore, on her left ankle, a jeweled band in which was set a
+sacred scarab. That was the full extent of her costume.
+
+At a single look, Antony forgot forever the punitive object of his
+journey to Egypt; forgot that he was ruler of half the world, and that
+he had the cleverness and power to oust Octavius from the other half,
+and to rule it all. He forgot everything, except that he loved her,
+and was content to be her helpless and happy slave; that she was the
+supreme love of his thousand loves; that the world was well lost for
+such love as hers.
+
+From that moment the old-time magnetic statesman and general, Marcus
+Antonius--with his shrewd plans for world conquest--was dead. In his
+place lived Mark Antony, prince of lovers; a man whose sole thought
+and aim in life consisted in worshipping at the bare feet of a
+red-haired, snub-nosed Egyptian woman.
+
+Cćsar had loved Cleopatra--and won. Mark Antony loved her--and lost;
+lost everything--except perfect happiness. But for her, Antony might
+have striven night and day, with brain, will, and body, using his
+friends as sacrifices, employing a statesmanship that was black
+treachery, drenching all Europe in blood. But for Cleopatra, he might
+have done all this. He might, as a result, have ousted Octavius and
+made himself, for the minute, master of all the world--as a price for
+his years of racking toil--before some patriotic assassin got a chance
+to kill him.
+
+Thanks to Cleopatra's malign influence, the old warrior spent his last
+years, instead, in a golden Fool's Paradise, whose joys have become
+historic. Wherefore, the schoolbooks hold up Antony as a horrible
+example of what a man may throw away, through folly.
+
+I have tried, in the preceding few paragraphs, to reenforce the
+school-books' teachings; to show that it is better to toil than to
+trifle, to sweat and suffer than to saunter through Arcady, to die
+dead-tired than to die divinely happy. I am sure I make the point
+clear. If I do not, the fault is not mine; and the sad, sad example of
+Antony has gone for naught.
+
+They had a wonderful time there, in the Lotus Land, these two
+super-lovers. Each had had a host of earlier "affairs." But these now
+served merely as do the many rough "detail sketches" that work up at
+last into the perfected picture.
+
+It was no heavy-tragedy romance. The two mature lovers had a saving
+sense of fun that sent them on larks worthy of high-school revelers.
+By night, they would go in disguise through the city, to revel
+unrecognized at some peasant wedding or orgy.
+
+Once, the incognito Antony, on such an expedition, got a sound
+thrashing and a broken head from taking too prominent a part on a slum
+festivity. And Cleopatra never let him hear the last of it. That the
+all-conquering Marcus Antonius should have been beaten up by a crowd
+of Egyptian ~fellaheen~, who trembled at the very mention of his
+name, struck her as the joke of the century.
+
+She had a right lively sense of humor, had this "Serpent of Old Nile,"
+as Antony playfully nicknamed her. And probably this sense of humor
+was one of the strongest fetters that bound to her the love veteran,
+who was sick of a succession of statelily humorless Roman beauties.
+
+Cleopatra was forever playing practical jokes on her lover. Once, for
+example, as she and Antony sat fishing off their anchored barge in the
+Alexandria harbor, Antony wagered that he would make the first catch.
+Cleopatra took the bet. A moment afterward Antony felt a mighty tug at
+his line. With the zest of a born fisherman, he "drew in."
+
+He brought to the surface, suspended from his hook, an enormous
+fish--dried, boned, and salted! Cleopatra had privily sent one of her
+divers over the far side of the barge to swim down and fasten the
+salted fish to her sweetheart's line.
+
+Again, the talk ran to the unbelievable cost of some of the feasts the
+ancient Persian monarchs had been wont to give, and the wholesale
+quantity of priceless wines drunk at those banquets. Whereat,
+Cleopatra offered to wager that she could drink ten million sesterces
+($450,000) worth of wine at a single sitting.
+
+Antony loudly assured her that the thing was impossible. Even so
+redoubtable a tankard man as himself could not hope to drink
+one-hundredth that value of wine in the most protracted debauch. She
+insisted. The wager was made.
+
+Calling for a goblet of "slaves' wine"--a species of vinegar--the
+queen dropped into it the largest pearl of Egypt's royal treasury, a
+gem appraised at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The treasure
+dissolved under the vinegar's sharp acid; and Cleopatra--to a gasp of
+horror from the more frugal onlookers--drained the goblet.
+
+Such banquets staggered Egypt's resources. So did other jolly
+extravagances. Rumors of Antony's strange infatuation reached Rome.
+Rome was used to Antony's love affairs, and Rome knew Cleopatra of
+old.
+
+So Rome merely grinned and shrugged its shoulders. But when the big
+revenues that Antony had promised to wring from the conquered country
+failed to arrive, Rome--sorely wounded in the pocketbook--began to
+protest.
+
+Antony's friends at home pointed out to him what capital the crafty
+Octavius would try to make of this new-born dissatisfaction against
+his colleague. In a momentary gleam of sanity, Antony left the weeping
+Cleopatra and hastened back to Rome to face his enemies.
+
+There, all too briefly, the man's old genius flamed up. He appeased
+the populace, won his former ascendency over the disapproving Senate,
+blocked Octavius' plot to hurl him from power, and sealed his campaign
+of inspired diplomacy by marrying his rival's sister, Octavia.
+
+At a stroke, Antony had won back all he had lost Octavius was
+checkmated, the people were enthusiastic, and once more Antony had
+world rulership within his easy reach.
+
+But in busy, iron-hard Rome, he fell to remembering the lazy sunshine
+of Egypt. The primly gentle Octavia was hopelessly insipid by contrast
+with the glowing super-woman. Memory tugged, ever harder and harder.
+
+Even if this story were fiction, instead of prosy fact, you would
+foresee just what was bound to happen. Back to Egypt, on some flimsy
+pretext, fled Antony. He turned his back on Rome, on his wife, on
+Octavius, on friend, on foe, on future. He was to see none of them
+again. Nor was there to be a second outflash of his old genius. The
+rest was--Cleopatra.
+
+The reunited lovers flew from bliss to bliss, from one mad
+extravagance to another. Statecraft, regal dignity--common sense--all
+went by the board.
+
+At Rome, the effect of Antony's whirlwind reinstatement campaign
+gradually wore off. Revenues did not flow in from Egypt. But all sorts
+of wild stories did. And the wilder they were, the truer they were.
+Rome at large did not bother its brutal head over Antony's morals. But
+all Rome stormed and howled over the fact that the boundlessly rich
+kingdom of Egypt was bringing in practically no more money to the
+coffers of Rome. It was as if men who had invested a fortune in a
+thirty-story office building should find that the superintendent was
+holding back all the rents and losing tenants every day.
+
+Octavius was quick to take advantage of all this. Personally, he hated
+Antony, and he was bitterly resentful of his sister's desertion.
+Politically, he wanted to be lord of the world--as later he was--under
+the title of "Emperor Augustus;" and poor, enfeebled Antony alone
+stood in his way.
+
+On the plea that a new money-getter was needed for Rome in Antony's
+place, Octavius easily roused public feeling into a clamor that Egypt
+be invaded, Antony overthrown, and Cleopatra put to death. Octavius,
+as master of Rome, headed the punitive army of invasion.
+
+Again, on news of his foes' approach, Antony's spirit--but this time
+not his genius--flickered back to a ghost of its old flame. By
+messenger, he sent Octavius a very sporting offer: namely, that waste
+of lives be avoided by Octavius and Antony meeting in single combat,
+to the death; "winner take all."
+
+But Octavius was a politician, not a d'Artagnan; which is why he at
+last became Emperor of Rome and ruler of the known earth. He had not
+those cold, light eyes and thin lips for nothing. He was a strategist
+rather than a gladiator. Back to the challenger came this terse reply:
+
+"Can Antony find no readier mode of death than at the sword of
+Octavius?"
+
+On moved the invaders. And Antony took enough time from Cleopatra's
+side to make halfhearted preparations to resist. The first clash of
+any importance was the sea fight off Actium. There Fortune was
+inclined for the time to smile once again on her old prime favorite.
+All along the line, Antony's warships were driving back and breaking
+the formation of Octavius'. Then, at the crucial moment of the fight,
+Cleopatra, who, in a royal galley, was watching the conflict, ordered
+her galley put about and headed for the distant shore. To this day no
+one knows whether her fatal order was the result of a whim or of
+sudden cowardice or of both.
+
+Her galley swept away from the battle. Antony, seeing it depart,
+feared Cleopatra might have been wounded by a stray arrow. At once he
+forgot that the issue of the day depended solely on him. He realized
+only that the woman he worshipped might be injured. And he ordered his
+own galley to put off in pursuit of Cleopatra's.
+
+The captains of Antony's other ships, seeing their leader apparently
+running away, were seized with panic terror, and followed. The fight
+became a rout. Antony's fleet was annihilated.
+
+With that strangely won battle, the last real obstacle between
+Octavius and complete victory was down. Steadily the conqueror
+advanced on Alexandria. Cleopatra saw how things were going. She knew
+that Antony was forever broken, and that, as a protector against the
+oncoming Romans, he was helpless. So she thriftily shifted her
+allegiance to Octavius; sending him word that she was his admiring
+slave, and that she craved a personal interview.
+
+It was the same old siren trick. At sight, when she was sixteen, she
+had won Cćsar's heart; at sight, when she was twenty-eight, she had
+won Antony's heart and soul. On sight, now, at thirty-eight, she hoped
+to make of Octavius a second Antony. But Cćsar had had black eyes, and
+Antony's eyes were a soft brown; whereas the eyes of Octavius were
+pale gray and fire-less. Had Cleopatra bothered to study physiognomy,
+she might have sought some more hopeful plan than to enslave such a
+man as this new invader.
+
+Octavius, cold and heartless as he was, would not trust himself to
+meet the super-woman; which was, perhaps, the highest of the billion
+tributes that were, soon or late, paid to Cleopatra's charms.
+
+Instead, Octavius sent her a courteous message, assuring her of his
+respect and infinite admiration, and saying that he would see that she
+was treated with every consideration due her rank. To his friends,
+however, he loudly boasted that she should walk barefoot through Rome,
+bound by gold chains to his chariot axle. And word of this boast came
+to Cleopatra. The game was up.
+
+She walled herself into the huge Royal Mausoleum and had word sent
+forth that she was dead. Antony, himself in hiding from the advancing
+Romans, heard and believed. Nothing was left. He had blithely thrown
+away the world for love. And now, after ten years of glorious
+happiness, the woman for whom he had been so glad to sacrifice
+everything, was dead.
+
+His foes were hastening to seize him. There was but one course for a
+true Roman in such a plight to follow. The example of Brutus, of Cato,
+of a hundred other iron patriots, rose before him. And their example
+Antony followed.
+
+He drove his sword through his body and fell dying, just as news came
+to him that Cleopatra lived. With almost his last breath, Antony
+ordered his slaves to carry him to the queen. The doors and lower
+windows of the mausoleum were bricked up. There was no time to send
+for masons to break an opening in them, if the dying man would reach
+Cleopatra alive. So he was lifted by ropes to an upper window of the
+tomb, and was then swung into the room where Cleopatra awaited him.
+
+And in the arms of the woman who had wrecked him, and who at the
+last--though, mercifully, he never knew it--had sought to betray him,
+Mark Antony died. Perhaps it was an ignoble death, and an anticlimax.
+Perhaps it was a fit end for the life of this man, who had ever been
+the adored of women; and the death he himself would have chosen. Fate
+seldom makes a blunder in setting her scenes.
+
+So perished Mark Antony; to whose life and death, before you judge
+him, I beg you to apply the words of a country preacher I once heard.
+The preacher was discanting on the Biblical personage "out of whom
+were cast seven devils."
+
+"Brethren," said the exhorter, "a man must be far above the ordinary,
+to contain seven devils. In the average man's petty nature there isn't
+room even for a single half-size devil, to say nothing of seven
+full-grown ones."
+
+Cleopatra had long since made up her mind to die sooner than walk in
+chains through the streets where once she had swept as Cćsar's
+peerless sweetheart. But she was part Greek and part Egyptian--both
+soft nations, lacking in the stern qualities of Rome. She had no taste
+for naked steel. She was content to die, but she wanted to die without
+pain.
+
+On certain of her slaves she practiced the effects of various Oriental
+poisons. Some of these slaves died in agony, some in mere discomfort.
+One of them died with a smile on his lips--a slave on whom had been
+inflicted the bite of the tiny gray Nile-mud asp.
+
+Cleopatra's question was answered. She put an asp to her breast. The
+serpent fixed its fangs in her white flesh.
+
+And Cleopatra--model and synonym for a worldful of super-women--was
+very comfortably spared the shame of walking chained and barefoot in a
+Roman Triumph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+THE HOPELESSLY UGLY SIREN
+
+
+A very famous woman discovered once that men are not paragons of
+fidelity. Or, finding that one man was not, she decided that all men
+were alike. And to Jules Sandeau, who had deceived her, she exclaimed,
+in fine, melodrama frenzy:
+
+"My heart is a grave!"
+
+"From the number of its occupants," drawled Sandeau, "I should rather
+call it a cemetery."
+
+The woman, too angry to grasp the meaning of the ungallant speech,
+raged on:
+
+"But I will be avenged. I shall write the tragedy of my love--in
+romance form--and--"
+
+"Why not in city-directory form?" suggested the man.
+
+And the loverly conversation ended in hysterics.
+
+The woman was Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin Dudevant. History,
+literature, and the annals of superwomen know her as George Sand.
+
+As one may glean from her verbal tilt with Sandeau, she was not a
+recluse or a misanthropist. In fact, she numbered her ardent wooers by
+the dozen. Her love life began at a convent school when she was little
+more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list
+of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a
+city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a
+cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it
+embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin,
+Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many
+demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote:
+
+    I am sick of great men. I would far rather see them in Plutarch
+    than in real life. In Plutarch or in marble or in bronze, their
+    human side would not disgust me so.
+
+And the personality, the appearance, the Venusberg charm of this heart
+monopolist? One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that
+launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic
+paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental
+vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts. Here is Balzac's
+description of her. It is found in a letter written to Madame Hanska
+in 1838, when George Sand was at the acme of her super-woman career:
+
+    I found her in her dressing gown, smoking an after-dinner cigar,
+    beside the fire in an immense room. She wore very pretty yellow
+    slippers with fringes, coquettish stockings, and red trousers.
+    Physically, she has acquired a double chin, like a well-fed
+    priest. She has not a single white hair, in spite of her terrible
+    misfortunes. Her beautiful eyes are as sparkling as ever.
+
+    When she is sunk in thought, she looks just as stupid as
+    formerly--as I told her--for her expression lies wholly in her
+    eyes. She goes to bed at six in the morning and rises at noon. (I
+    go to bed at six in the evening and rise at midnight; but, of
+    course, I am conforming myself to her habits.) She smokes to
+    excess and plays, perhaps, too much the grande dame.
+
+Carlyle, still less merciful, snarls forth the following wholly
+Carlylean epitome of George Sand's looks:
+
+"She has the face of a horse!"
+
+Another contemporary writer declares:
+
+"Her hair is as black and shiny as ebony; her swarthy face is red and
+heavy; her expression fierce and defiant, yet dull."
+
+So much for the verity of traditional siren dreams I So much, too, for
+the theory that beauty or daintiness or feminity has anything to do
+with the nameless charm of the world's super-women.
+
+George Sand came, honestly, if left-handedly, by her cardiac prowess.
+For she was a great-great-granddaughter of Adrienne Lecouvreur and
+Marshal Saxe; two of history's stellar heart breakers--a fact of which
+she made much.
+
+Her father was a French army officer--Lieutenant Dupin--and as a mere
+baby his only daughter, Aurore, was acclaimed "daughter of the
+regiment." Decked out in a tiny uniform, the ugly duckling ran wild in
+the army posts where her father was stationed, and joined right
+boisterously in the soldiers' rough sports.
+
+Later, she was sent to a convent. From her own description of this
+particular retreat, it was a place that crushed out all normal and
+childish ideas and filled the growing mind with a morbid melancholy.
+Yet it was there that love first found the girl.
+
+The victim--or victor--was one Stephane de Grandsaigne, professor of
+physiology. Under his tuition she developed a queer craving for
+dissection--a fad she followed, in psychic form, through life. The
+love scenes between herself and her adored professor were usually
+enacted while they were together dissecting a leg or an arm or probing
+the mysteries of retina and cornea.
+
+It was a semigruesome, unromantic episode, and it ended with
+suddenness when the pupil was sent out into the world. There a husband
+was found for her. He was Casimir Dudevant, a man she liked well
+enough and who was mildly fond of her. They lived together for a time
+in modified content. Two children were born to them.
+
+By and by, Casimir took to drink. Many people refused to blame him.
+Indeed, there are present-day students of George Sand's life who can
+find a host of excuses for his bibulous failings. But once, coming
+home from a spree, Casimir forgot to take his wife's lofty reproaches
+with his wonted good nature.
+
+In a flash of drunken anger, he struck her. And she left him.
+
+The high spirit of her act of independence is marred just a little by
+the fact that she chanced to be in love with another man. This other
+man was Aurelian de Seze, a ponderous country magistrate. The affair
+was brief. Presently the two had parted. And George Sand, penniless,
+went to Paris to make a living by literature.
+
+She obtained hack work of a sort, lived in the typical drafty garret
+so dear to unrecognized genius, and earned for a time only fifteen
+francs--three dollars--a month. It was the customary nadir, wherein
+one gathers equipment for success.
+
+Then she met Jules Sandeau. He was a lawyer who dabbled in literature.
+He fell in love with the lonely woman and she with him. They formed a
+literary partnership. Together they wrote novels and began to achieve
+a certain measure of good luck. Their novels were signed "George
+Sand." Why, no one knows. It was a pen name devised by the feminine
+member of the novelistic firm.
+
+But before long Sandeau was left far behind in the race for fame. His
+more or less fair partner wrote a novel on her own account. It was
+"Indiana." Like Byron, she woke one morning to find herself famous.
+The book had lifted her forever out of obscurity and need.
+
+At about the same period, she entered Sandeau's study one day just in
+time to see him kiss another woman. The other woman chanced to be
+their laundress, who, presumably, was more kissable, if less
+inspiring, than was the newly acclaimed celebrity on whom Sandeau had
+been lavishing his fickle affections.
+
+There was a scene, unequaled for violence in any of their joint
+novels. And in the course of it occurred the repartee recorded at the
+beginning of this story. As an upshot, Sandeau followed Dudevant, de
+Seze, Grandsaigne, and the rest into the limbo of George Sand's
+discarded lovers; where he was soon to be joined by many another and
+far greater man.
+
+Her faith in men shattered for at lest the fourth time, George Sand
+forswore fidelity and resolved to make others suffer; even as she
+liked to imagine she herself had suffered. The literary world was by
+this time cheering itself hoarse over her. And literary giants were
+vying for her love.
+
+Out of the swarm, she selected Prosper Merimee. The author of "Carmen"
+was then in his prime as a lion of the salons. To him George Sand gave
+her heart irrevocably and forever. Through youth and maturity they
+worshiped each other--for eight consecutive days. On the ninth day,
+George Sand informed "Carmen's" creator that he was far too cynical to
+be her ideal any longer. Merimee retorted that her "pose of divine
+exaltation" was better suited to an angel than to an ugly woman who
+continually smoked cigars and who swore as pyrotechnically as one of
+her father's most loquacious troopers. So the romance ended.
+
+Followed a bevy of loves well-nigh as brief, most of whose heroes'
+names are emblazoned on the book backs of the world's libraries. And
+after this populous interregnum, came Alfred de Musset.
+
+De Musset was a mere boy. But his wonderful poetry had already
+awakened Europe to ecstacy. He was the beau-ideal of a million
+youthful lovers and their sweethearts; even as, a generation earlier,
+Byron had been.
+
+It was in 1833 that he and George Sand met. De Musset had seen her
+from afar and had begged for an introduction. She was six years older
+than he, and the prettiest girls in France were pleading wistfully for
+his smile. But, at sight, he loved the horse-faced, almost middle-aged
+swearer of strange oaths and smoker of strong cigars. Hence his plea
+to be introduced.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, to whom he made the request, wrote, asking leave to
+bring him to one of George Sand's "at homes." The same day she
+returned a most positive refusal, writing:
+
+    I do not want you to introduce De Musset to me. He is a fop, and
+    we would not suit each other. Instead, bring Dumas; in whose art I
+    have found a soul, if only the soul of a commercial traveler.
+
+But de Musset, unrebuffed, succeeded in his ambition. He managed to
+secure an introduction to her at a banquet given by the ~Revue des
+Deux Mondes~ editors. And almost at once his love was reciprocated.
+Then began a union that was alternately the interest, the scandal, and
+the laughing-stock of a continent.
+
+Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the
+world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the
+heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such
+immortals might reasonably be expected--was expected--to be akin to
+the noble romances of poetry.
+
+As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of
+babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the
+inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two
+master intellects.
+
+George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless
+idealism. When he did so, she berated him as heartless. When he failed
+to, she denounced him as an animal. She was never content with
+whatever course he might follow. Yet she was madly in love with him.
+
+During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some
+furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily
+commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of
+her warmer moods:
+
+    It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I,
+    and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing
+    to you that I am dying of love?--torment of my life that you are!
+
+    He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless
+    hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate
+    from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as
+    from one key to its remote neighbor.
+
+Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the
+composer's meeting with George Sand:
+
+    One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception
+    was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented
+    phantom. In superstitious fear, he would have left the house at
+    once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and
+    described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain.
+
+    He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the
+    guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman--the premiere
+    novelist, Madame Dudevant--George Sand.
+
+In his diary that same night Chopin wrote of his new acquaintance:
+
+    I do not like her face. There is something in it that repels me.
+
+Yet within a day or so he was her adorer.
+
+For a time all went as well as any love story could with such a
+heroine. She gloried in her power to build up for the moment her
+lover's waning strength. Her friends' praise of the feat was as music
+to her. But she was not the type of woman who can forever wait
+patiently upon a fretful convalescent's whims. Her self-sacrifice was
+a flash, not a steady flame.
+
+And in time she girded at the restraints of playing nurse and vitality
+giver. Then, instead of boasting as before, she waxed complaining. She
+told the world at large how exacting and cross and tiresome Chopin
+was.
+
+She once referred to him publicly as "that detestable invalid." She
+announced that she was his ever-patient comrade and nurse. There is no
+authority but hers to bear out the claim of patience. And so the
+once-beautiful relationship dragged out its weary length until George
+Sand could endure the strain no longer.
+
+She deserted Chopin.
+
+Not content with this final blow to the invalid who had loved her for
+years, she continued to vilify him. Among her complaints was one that
+has since passed, in slightly altered form, into a good old reliable
+vaudeville wheeze. She wrote:
+
+    We never addressed a single reproach to each other except once.
+    And that was from the first to the last time we met.
+
+George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from
+it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and
+appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him--not
+only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former
+divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such
+lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room.
+A historian describes the encounter:
+
+    Thinking herself unobserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and
+    held out her hand.
+
+    "Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone.
+
+    He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant,
+    subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly
+    pale, and without a word he left the room.
+
+The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down.
+Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached
+her; perhaps she thought it a trick--she had tried something of the
+sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so
+short.
+
+At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at
+once to the dying composer.
+
+Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the
+sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would
+not obey the summons, that he would never again see her.
+
+As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously.
+
+"She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and
+over.
+
+And that night he died--no less than seven different women claiming
+later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed.
+
+George Sand was conscience-stricken. She wrote and proclaimed long and
+more or less plausible reasons to account for her failure to go to
+Chopin. But no one who really knew her was convinced of her excuses'
+truth. And so ended one more of her heart stories.
+
+De Musset, by the way refused to admit her to his rooms when he
+himself lay dying--a grisly joke that Paris appreciated.
+
+Back to her work, as once before, George Sand fled for forgetfulness.
+And her fame grew. She was the most prolific woman writer, by the way,
+in literature's history; writing, in all, twenty plays and more than
+one hundred novels.
+
+An Englishman (name buried) courted her at about this time. Still
+miserable over Chopin's death--and far more so over the way people
+were talking about her treatment of him--she was decidedly waspish to
+the trans-Channel admirer. Seeking to win her interest, in a literary
+discussion, he opened one conversation by inquiring:
+
+"Madame Dudevant, what is your favorite novel?"
+
+"'Olympia,'" she answered, without a second of hesitance.
+
+"'Olympia?'" the Englishman repeated, vainly ransacking his memory. "I
+don't think I recall any book of that name."
+
+"Of course you don't," she snapped. "I haven't written it yet."
+
+And perhaps--or perhaps not--his British brain some day unraveled the
+meaning of cryptic retort.
+
+For her infidelities George Sand felt no compunction. She wrote
+frankly concerning them:
+
+    I have never imposed constancy upon myself. When I have felt that
+    love is dead, I have said so without shame or remorse, and have
+    obeyed Providence that was leading me elsewhere.
+
+By her marriage with Dudevant, she had had a son and a daughter. The
+daughter, Solange, inherited much of her mother's lawlessness, with
+none of the latter's inspiration. And now George Sand was to see how
+her own nature worked in another of the same blood.
+
+She arranged a splendid marriage for Solange, a marriage with a man of
+rank and money. And on the very eve of the wedding Solange proceeded
+to elope with a poor sculptor, Clesinger by name.
+
+The mother was equal to the emergency. She ran after the fugitives,
+caught them, bullied Clesinger into marrying Solange, hushed all
+scandal, and installed the young couple in a Paris flat, settling on
+them the bulk of her property. In revenge, Clesinger permanently
+estranged Solange from her mother.
+
+Soon afterward George Sand's sway over men's hearts ceased. Whether
+she was weary of love, or whether love was weary of her, the old
+fascination deserted her. No more as lovers, but as profound admirers
+of her intellect, great men still flocked about her--Matthew Arnold,
+Flaubert, Feuillet, and a host of others. But it was now her brain
+alone they worshiped.
+
+By many years George Sand outlived her charm, dying in 1876 at the age
+of seventy-two, her grandchildren about her--a smugly proper, if sadly
+anticlimactic, ending to a career in which anticlimax had been almost
+as infrequent as propriety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+MADAME DU BARRY
+
+THE SEVEN-MILLION-DOLLAR SIREN.
+
+
+She came from the same neighborhood that had produced Joan of Arc. She
+even claimed relationship to the long-dead Maid. But at that point all
+likeness between the two comes to a very abrupt end.
+
+She is known to history as "Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier,
+Comtesse du Barry." The parish register of her birthplace describes
+her, less flamboyantly, as "Marie Jeanne, natural daughter of Anne
+Becu, known as Quantigny; born Aug., A.D. 1746."
+
+There are many details in Marie Jeanne du Barry's story that I am
+going to omit--at my own request; not only because they are
+unwriteable, but because their sordid vulgarity is also drearily
+stupid. I apologize in advance for the omissions. But even after the
+process of weeding out, I think there will be quite enough left to
+hold the interest.
+
+When Marie was six, Anne Becu drifted to Paris--the Mecca of her
+trade. And soon afterward, an admirer of Anne's, one Dumonceau, was
+coaxed into lavishing two dollars and forty cents a month on Marie's
+education. Dumonceau had been one of Anne's wooers in the village
+days, and it has been suggested that his interest in little Marie was
+prompted by more than mere kindness--in fact, that he and the infant
+were "more than kin and less than kind."
+
+In any case, the monthly two dollars and forty cents paid Marie's
+expenses in a convent school, where she spent the next ten years. This
+Sainte-Aurore convent, in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, was a
+philanthropic refuge "for all young persons of honest parentage who
+are in circumstances where they run the risk of ruin."
+
+The rules of the Sainte-Aurore were far stricter and icier than those
+of the most investigatable of modern orphanages. Among the punishments
+inflicted on these little wards of God were starvation, beatings, and
+imprisonment in cold and stone-floored dark cells--for the very
+mildest transgressions.
+
+Three dire sins, calling always for instant retribution, were: "To
+laugh, to sing, and to speak above a whisper." For such hideous and
+unnatural crimes as laughter, song, and ordinary speech, these poor
+loveless babies were treated like the vilest criminals. One hopes,
+morbidly, that the theologians who abolished Hell left at least one
+warm corner of it in commission, for the framers and enforcers of
+those gentle rules.
+
+All the foregoing is not sentimental mush, but is mentioned to show
+how dire must have been a pupil's sin that the convent authorities
+could not cope with.
+
+And such a sin--no one knows what it was--Marie committed when she was
+sixteen. For which she was expelled in black disgrace from her happy
+childhood home at Sainte-Aurore, and turned loose upon the world.
+
+Her mother's loving arms were open, ready to receive and succor the
+disgraced girl, and to start her afresh in life--as only a mother can.
+So, to keep Marie from feeling unduly dependent upon a poor working
+woman like herself, she taught her her own trade--the oldest on earth.
+
+With a little basket of cheap jewelry--which served the same purpose
+as a present-day beggar's stock of lead pencils--Marie went the rounds
+of the streets. Her career was cut out for her by her mother's fond
+forethought. And in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
+thousand, a girl thus launched would have ended in the gutter. But
+Marie was the thousandth woman--a true super-woman, in every sense of
+the word. The filth of the streets could not smirch her--outwardly.
+And luck was waiting around the corner for her.
+
+A rich and eccentric old woman of fashion--Madame Legrade--had a craze
+for amateur theatricals. Catching sight of Marie one day, she was
+struck by the girl's beauty, and hired her, partly as a companion and
+partly as a comedian for her private theatre.
+
+At Madame Legrade's, Marie got her first view of semidecent society.
+And, being adaptable, she picked up a smattering of manners and of
+grammatical speech; only a smattering, but all she cared to acquire.
+There, too, she met such men as the withered old wit, de Richelieu,
+and the Prince de Soubise; and the Duc de Brissac, whose son was one
+day to be the one real love of her life. Here, too, she met a genius
+whom she describes in her "Memoirs" as "a cunning fox; witty ... very
+ugly and very thin." He was Grimm, the fairytale man.
+
+Marie was in clover. But the fortune was too good to last. And because
+a far more glittering fortune was awaiting her just around the corner,
+Destiny soon joggled the girl out of her snug berth. Madame Legrade
+had two sons. Both of them fell crazily in love with Marie. It is not
+on record that she told them she would rather be the poor working girl
+that she was. And Madame Legrade, in horror, ordered her out of the
+house.
+
+Back to her dear, old loving mother, as before, went Marie. And once
+more mother love came to the rescue. Anne Becu had recently married a
+lackey of some great house. She was now "Madame Racon." Marie adopted
+her stepfather's name--the first to which she had ever possessed even
+a semilegal claim--and permitted her mother to get her a job in the
+millinery shop of Madame Labille. This shop was of a sort extremely
+common in that day. It sold not only hats for woman, but sword knots
+and shoe buckles for men. It employed only girls of extreme beauty.
+And it was a favorite lounging place for men about town. Altogether,
+there was no startling change in Marie's vocation from the era when
+she had hawked artificial jewelry.
+
+Her presence drew scores of young dandies to the shop. And she might
+readily have had her pick of the lot. But during a momentary weakness
+of intellect, she plunged into a love affair with a handsome young
+pastry cook, Nicolas Mothon. The other and more ambitious girls guyed
+her right unmercifully for her plebeian tastes. But it was terribly
+serious with Marie. Mathon was the first man to whom she had lost her
+heart. Many years later she wrote:
+
+    When I call to memory all the men who have adored me, I must say
+    it was not poor Nicolas who pleased me least. For I, too, have
+    known what first love can mean.
+
+But she forgot what "first love can mean" as readily as she had
+learned it. For soon she threw over Nicolas for a man of wealth, named
+De la Vauvenardiere; and she abandoned the latter for a suitor named
+Duval; and ousted Duval from her affection for Lamet, the court
+hairdresser.
+
+No, in choosing Lamet, she was not lowering her standard. A court
+hairdresser was far more than a mere barber. He was a functionary of
+vast importance, the confidant of the great, the counselor of the
+unwary, a man of substance and position, the only tradesman in all
+France who was permitted by court edict to wear a sword.
+
+Marie was envied as Lamet's sweetheart; until he went broke,
+overnight, and had to flee to England to dodge a debtor's cell.
+
+Then came the Cosse incident; at least, then it began. Cosse--or Louis
+Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac--was the Duc de Brissac's son. He
+met Marie in the street one day, so runs the story, followed her to
+the shop, and there, under the pretext of buying a sword knot, fell
+into talk with her. He loved her at first sight, and she loved him.
+Theirs was not such a love as either had hitherto known. It was the
+genuine article.
+
+Cosse was young and good looking and afflicted with republican ideas.
+He did not see in Marie the vender of cheap jewelry and cheaper
+affections, nor the girl who used her millinery job as a mask. To him,
+she was an angel. And--so far as concerned him--she was.
+
+They were young, and they dreamed. Cosse was unlike any man Marie had
+known. His love was utterly unlike any love she had known or heard of.
+Altogether, it was a pretty little romance, on both sides. And if we
+smile at it, let the smile be kindly, with nothing of the leer about
+it. For there was nothing to provoke a leer--at least, not then.
+
+This Cosse affair's early stages are so intertangled with romance,
+legend, court rumor, and later inventions, that I hasten to forstall
+corrections, from readers wiser than I, by confessing that all I know
+of it, or can learn from supposedly reliable sources, is that Marie
+and Cosse parted somewhat suddenly; and the causes variously given are
+that his father put a stop to the romance and that Cosse learned
+something of Marie's real character. It is gravely declared that he
+wanted to marry her, and that his indignant ducal parent not only
+opened his eyes to the bride elect's past, but threatened to throw
+Cosse into the Bastille by means of a ~lettre de cachet~. As I said, I
+vouch for none of these reasons for the break between the two lovers.
+It is all surmise. But what follows is not.
+
+The next man to lose his head and heart to Marie was a young nobleman
+whose repute may be guessed from the fact that--even in dissolute
+eighteenth-century Paris--he was known, not as a roue, but as "~The
+Roue~." He had come to Paris a few years earlier, leaving a wife
+somewhere on the way.
+
+He had squandered his patrimony en route, and reached the capital
+penniless. But he quickly caught the fancy of Madame Malouse, who had
+influence at court. She arranged that he should have practically the
+sole monopoly of supplying the French navy with all its various forms
+of merchandise. This meant fat profits, and he fattened them still
+further by running a select gambling house.
+
+He was Jean, Vicomte du Barry.
+
+Jean met and fell victim to Marie. Realizing what a cash attraction
+her beauty and charm could be made, he installed her as presiding
+genius of his gambling house, as a lure to draw youthful nobles to the
+place. Marie--or Madame Lange, as, for no known reason, she had begun
+to call herself--was the bright star at the Chance Goddess' shine. And
+the money poured fast into the crooked games whereby the house made
+Jean rich.
+
+For a time there was wholesale prosperity all around, with plenty more
+of it to come. Before I go on, may I quote a contemporary writer's
+word picture of Marie, as she appeared at this time?
+
+    Her hair is long, silky, curling like a child's, and blond with a
+    natural ash tint.... Her eyebrows and lashes are dark and curly.
+    Behind them the blue eyes, which one seldom sees quite open, look
+    out with coquettish, sidelong glances.... Her nose is small and
+    finely cut, and her mouth is a perfect cupid's bow.... Her neck,
+    her arms, and her feet and hands remind one of ancient Greek
+    statuary; while her complexion is that of a rose leaf steeped in
+    milk.... She carries with her a delicious atmosphere of
+    intoxication, victorious, amorous youth.
+
+Voltaire once exclaimed, before a portrait of her:
+
+"The original was made for the gods!"
+
+Even as the cherry tree was posthumously invented for Washington and,
+perhaps, the apple for William Tell and the egg for Columbus, so
+around Marie in after years sprang up countless tales of her youth.
+Some may have been true. Some were palpable lies. To which does the
+ensuing anecdote belong?
+
+In the spring of 1768, during her sojourn as "come-on" for the du
+Barry gambling hell, Marie noticed, three days in succession, that she
+was closely followed on the street by "a young man of a sober cast of
+countenance and elegant attire." Now, to be followed was no novelty to
+Marie. And more than one man of "elegant attire" had sued in vain for
+her favor. Yet this youth made no advances. He simply followed her
+wherever she went. And in his absence his face haunted her strangely.
+So, on the fourth day, as she turned suddenly in the street and saw
+him close behind her, she asked, with affected indignation:
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+The man bowed low, with no shadow of hesitancy, made this cryptic
+answer to her query:
+
+"Mademoiselle, will you grant me the first reasonable request I may
+make of you when you are Queen of France?"
+
+Thinking he was a crank--as perhaps he was--she sought to humor him,
+and replied:
+
+"Certainly, monsieur. I promise."
+
+"You take me for a madman," he returned, with a second grave bow. "But
+I am not insane. Adieu, mademoiselle. There will be nothing more
+extraordinary than your elevation--except your end."
+
+He spoke and vanished, either into the street crowd or into thin air.
+
+You may recall the story of the "Man in Black's" midnight visit to
+Ninon de l'Enclos, with a gift to the essence of youth and the warning
+of her death? This was a well-believed and oft-repeated narrative in
+Marie's day. It is highly possible that she built from it her recital
+of the adventure of the "elegantly attired" stranger.
+
+At all events, she told Jean du Barry about it. Whether or not he
+believed it, is no concern of yours or mine. But it assuredly gave him
+an idea; the supreme idea of his rotten life. He saw a one-in-fifty
+chance of making more money through Marie than she could have earned
+for him in a century as divinity of his gambling rooms. And, remote as
+were the scheme's prospects for success, he resolved to make a
+gambler's cast at the venture.
+
+Louis XV., King of France, had been ruled for nearly twenty years by
+the Marquise de Pompadour, who had squandered royal revenues, had made
+and unmade men's career by a nod or a shake of her pretty head, and
+had played at ducks and drakes with international politics. And now
+Madame de Pompadour was dead. Many a younger and prettier face had
+caught Louis' doddering fancy, since her death. But no other
+~maitresse en titre~ had ruled him and France since then.
+
+Briefly, Jean coveted the vacant office for Marie.
+
+Not for her own sake. Jean did not care for her happiness or welfare,
+or for the happiness or welfare of any mortal on earth except of one
+Jean, Vicomte du Barry. But he foresaw that with Marie as the royal
+favorite, he himself, as her sponsor, could reap a harvest such as is
+not the guerdon of one man in a million.
+
+He set to work at his self-appointed task with the same rare vigor and
+cunning that had so long enabled him to elude the hangman and to live
+on better men's money. The first step was to engage the help of Lebel,
+the king's ~valet de chambre~.
+
+Lebel was nominally a servant, but, in a sense, he was mightier than
+any prime minister. For Louis relied implicitly on the valet's taste
+in feminine beauty. It was Lebel, for instance, who had first brought
+Madame du Pompadour to the king's notice. He had done the same good
+turn to many another aspiring damsel. And now, heavily bribed by Jean
+du Barry, he consented to see if Marie was worth mentioning to Louis.
+
+At sight of Marie, the connoisseur valet realized to the full her
+super-woman charm. He recognized her as the thousandth woman--even the
+millionth.
+
+Yet Lebel was ever cautious about raising false hopes. So, not knowing
+that Jean had gone over the whole plan with Marie, he asked her if she
+would honor him by attending a little informal dinner he was soon to
+give, in his apartment, at the Versailles palace; a dinner in honor of
+"the Baron de Gonesse."
+
+Marie, with sweet innocence, accepted the invitation; then timidly
+asked Lebel if she might sit beside him at the dinner, as all the
+others would be strangers to her. The bare thought of his presuming to
+sit down in the presence of the king--otherwise "the Baron de
+Gonesse"--so filled Lebel with horror that he forgot his role of
+diplomacy and blurted out:
+
+"~I?~ Sit at the table with ~him~? I--I shall be unexpectedly called
+from the room, as usual, just as dinner is served. And I shall not
+return until it is over."
+
+When Marie--carefully coached as to behavior, repartee, and so forth,
+by the ever-thoughtful Jean--arrived at Lebel's apartments in the
+palace, on the night of the dinner, she found, to her disgust, that
+the king was nowhere in sight--not even disguised as "the Baron de
+Gonesse"--and that her fellow guests were merely a group of Versailles
+officials.
+
+Not being versed in palace secrets, she did not know that Louis was
+seated in a dark closet behind a film-curtained window, looking into
+the brightly lighted dining room and noting everything that went on,
+nor that cunningly arranged speaking tubes brought every whispered or
+loud-spoken word to him.
+
+Finding the king was not to be one of the guests, the girl
+philosophically choked back her chagrin and set herself to get every
+atom of fun out of the evening that she could. She ate much, drank
+more, and behaved pretty quite like a gloriously lovely street gamin.
+There was no use in wasting on these understrappers the fine speeches
+and the courtesy she had been learning for the king's benefit. So she
+let herself go. And the dinner was lively, to say the very least. In
+fact, it was the gayest, most deliciously amusing dinner ever held in
+those sedate rooms--thanks to Marie.
+
+Louis, in paroxysms of laughter, looked on until the sound of his
+guffaws betrayed his royal presence. Then he came out of hiding.
+
+Marie, for an instant, was thunder-struck at what she had done. She
+feared she had ruined her chances by the boisterous gayety of the past
+hour or so. Then--for her brain was as quick as her talk was dull--she
+saw the fight was not lost, but won, and she knew how she had won it.
+
+Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. He lived in France's most
+artificial period. No one dared be natural; least of all in the
+presence of the king. All his life he had been treated to honeyed
+words, profound reverence, the most polished and adroit courtesy.
+People--women especially--had never dared be ~human~ when he was
+around.
+
+Marie saw that it was the novelty of her behavior which had aroused
+the king's bored interest. And from that moment her course was taken.
+She did not cringe at his feet, or pretend innocence, or assume
+~grande-dame~ airs. She was ~herself~, Marie Becu, the slangy,
+light-hearted, feather-brained daughter of the streets; respecting
+nothing, fearing nothing, confused by nothing--as ready to shriek
+gutter oaths at her king as at her footman. And, of course, she was
+also Marie Becu, the super-woman whose magnetism and beauty were
+utterly irresistible.
+
+The combination was too much for Louis. He succumbed. What else was
+there for him to do? After the myriad poses of the women he had known,
+Marie's naturalness was like a bracing breeze sweeping through a
+hothouse; a slum breeze, if you like, but none the less a breeze, and
+delightfully welcome to the jaded old monarch.
+
+Louis fell in love with Marie. It was not a mere infatuation of an
+hour, like most of his affairs. He fell completely and foolishly in
+love with her. And he never fell out of love with her as long as he
+lived.
+
+Lebel was in despair. He had hoped Marie might amuse the king. He had
+had no shadow of an idea that the affair would go further. By reason
+of his privileges as an old servant, he actually ventured to
+remonstrate with Louis.
+
+"Sire," he protested, "she is not even legitimate. The birth records
+attest that."
+
+"Then," laughed the king, "let the right authorities make her so."
+
+Accordingly, messengers were sent posthaste to her babyhood home, and
+a new birth certificate was drawn up; also a certificate attesting to
+her mother's legal marriage to a wholly mythical Monsieur de Gomard de
+Vaubernier and to several other statements that made Marie's
+legitimacy as solid as Gibraltar.
+
+"Also," pleaded the valet, "she is neither a wife nor a woman of
+title."
+
+"We can arrange both those trifles," the king assured him.
+
+And, with charming simplicity, the thing was done. Jean sent for his
+worthless elder brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry, who was at that
+time an army captain. And on September 1, 1768, Marie and Guillaume
+were duly married. The lucky bridegroom received enough money to pay
+all his debts and to make him rich. Then he obligingly deserted his
+new-made wife at the church door, according to program, and wandered
+away to spend his fortune as might best please him. Thereby, Marie
+Becu became Madame la Comtesse du Barry, without having her cur of a
+husband to bother about.
+
+A list of her possessions and their values--duly set down in the
+marriage contract, which is still on file--shows the state of Marie's
+finances at this time. I copy it for the benefit of those who may be
+interested to learn of a useful life's by-products. At twenty-two--in
+1768--so says the contract, Marie was the sole owner of:
+
+    One diamond necklace, worth sixteen hundred dollars; an aigret and
+    a pair of earings in clusters, worth sixteen hundred dollars;
+    thirty dresses and petticoats, worth six hundred dollars; lace,
+    dress trimmings, caps, et cetera, worth twelve hundred dollars;
+    six dozen shirts of fine linen, twelve complete morning dresses,
+    and other articles of linen, et cetera, worth four hundred
+    dollars.
+
+One obstacle alone now barred Marie's road to supremacy. According to
+unbreakable royal etiquette, three things were indispensable to the
+woman who aspired to become a French king's ~maitresse en titre~--she
+must be legitimate, she must be of noble rank, and she must have been
+presented at court.
+
+The first two conditions, Marie had fulfilled. The third was a poser.
+In order to be presented at court, some reputable woman of the old
+nobility must act as sponsor. And not one decent woman of high rank
+would sink to acting as sponsor for Marie. Moreover, the king declared
+he did not care whether she were presented or not, and he would take
+no step to help her in the matter.
+
+Without this presentation, she could not appear publicly at court, she
+could not sway overt political influence, she could not have a suite
+of rooms at the palace. Between a presentation and no presentation lay
+all the difference between uncrowned queen and a light o' love. And no
+one would sponsor Marie.
+
+Jean du Barry, at last, solved the problem, as he had solved all the
+rest.
+
+He had able assistance. For, a court clique had been formed to back
+Marie's pretentions. The clique was headed by such men as the old Duc
+de Richelieu and the much younger Duc d'Aiguillon. The latter was
+violently in love with Marie, and there is no reason to think that his
+love was hopeless. But the rest of the clique cared not a straw about
+her. To them, the whole thing was a master move in politics. With
+Marie in control of the king, and themselves in control of Marie, they
+foresaw an era of unlimited power.
+
+The Duc de Choiseul, prime minister of France, was the sworn enemy of
+this clique, which formed the "opposition." And Choiseul swore to move
+heaven and earth to prevent Marie's presentation, for he knew it would
+lead to his own political ruin; as it did.
+
+Jean du Barry hunted around until he discovered somewhere in Navarre a
+crotchety and impoverished old widow, the dowager Comtesse de Bearn.
+She was a scion of the ancient nobility, the decayed and dying branch
+of a once mighty tree. She was not only poor to the verge of
+starvation, but she had a passion for lawsuits. She had just lost a
+suit, and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
+
+The good-hearted Jean, through the clique's help, arranged to have the
+case reopened and the decision reversed. This was before our own day
+of an incorruptible judiciary. He also promised her a gift of twenty
+thousand dollars in gold. All this in return for the trifling service
+of journeying up to Paris and thence to Versailles, to act as sponsor
+for the lovely Madame du Barry, who had wilfully declared that she
+would be presented under no less auspices than those of the
+illustrious Comtesse de Bearn.
+
+The old comtesse accepted the offer with all the shrinking reluctance
+a hungry dog shows at the proffer of a bone. She came up to Paris, at
+the expense of the clique, and was immured in Jean's house, with the
+gambler's sister, Chon (Fanchon) du Barry as her jailer and
+entertainer.
+
+Choiseul, through his spies, learned of the plot, and he tried in
+every way to kidnap the old lady or to out-bribe the du Barrys.
+
+Meanwhile, coached by Jean, the fair Marie was making King Louis' life
+miserable by throwing herself at his feet, in season and out of
+season, and beseeching him to silence her enemies forever by allowing
+her to be presented. When these tactics failed, she would let loose
+upon the poor king a flood of gutter language, roundly abusing him,
+turning the air blue with her profanity, and in other ways showing her
+inalienable right to a place in court circles.
+
+Louis would promise nothing. The turmoil alternately bored and amused
+him. At last--April 21, 1769--on his return from the hunt, after an
+unusually good day's sport, the king casually remarked to all
+concerned:
+
+"The presentation of Madame la Comtesse du Barry will occur at
+to-morrow evening's levee."
+
+The traditional and well-thumbed bombshell exploding among them would
+have created no more stir in court circles than did this yawned
+announcement. Choiseul and his followers were in despair. Jean ran
+around in circles, making preparations for the triumph. Marie
+rehearsed for the hundredth time the complicated forms of etiquette
+the occasion called for.
+
+The Choiseul faction tried one thing after another to block the
+ceremony. They kidnapped Marie's hairdresser, stole the coach in which
+she was to make the trip from her Paris house to Versailles, arranged
+a holdup on the road, and so forth. Thanks to Jean's wit and clique's
+power, a new hairdresser and coach were provided in the nick of time.
+And the Versailles road was so heavily guarded that a regiment of
+cavalry could scarce have dared intercept the carriage.
+
+According to one story, Choiseul even got a message past all the
+carefully reared barriers to Madame de Bearn, prevailing on her to
+plead agonized illness and to keep to her bed on the evening set for
+the presentation. Whereupon, so runs the yarn, a character actor from
+the Comedie Francaise was paid to "make up" as Madame de Bearn and to
+perform her functions of sponsor. This may or may not be true. It
+forms the central theme of De Vere Stacpoole's novel, "The
+Presentation."
+
+On the great night, the court was assembled, tensely waiting for Marie
+to arrive. At the appointed time--no Madame du Barry appeared. The
+minutes grew into an hour; people began to whisper and fidget; the
+Choiseul party looked blissful; the clique could not hide its worry.
+Louis stood, frowning, between the suspense stricken D'Aiguillon and
+Richelieu. At last he turned from them and stared moodily out of a
+window. Then, moving back into the room, he opened his lips to declare
+the levee at an end. As he started to speak, an usher announced:
+
+"Madame la Comtesse de Bearn! Madame la Comtesse du Barry!"
+
+And Marie entered, with her sponsor--or with some one who looked
+sufficiently like Madame de Bearn to deceive any one.
+
+According to one version, Marie was late because at the last instant
+another Choiseul obstacle had to be cleared away. According to
+another, she was purposely late to enhance the dramatic interest of
+her arrival. Here is an account of the presentation:
+
+    Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king
+    stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon.
+    The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the
+    ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right
+    hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter....
+
+    She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the
+    gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns
+    that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant
+    an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of
+    surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After
+    she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames,
+    to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.
+
+Marie had won. For the next five years she was the real Queen of
+France. And, during that time, she cost the French nation, in cold
+cash, something over seven million dollars.
+
+She was not at all on the style of the Pompadour, who had yearned to
+meddle in politics. Marie cared nothing for politics, except to help
+out her army of friends and dependents. She had no ambitions. She had
+not even craved on her own account to be the king's ~maitresse en
+titre~. All she wanted was to have a good time. And she had it. The
+pleasure was all hers. The French people did the paying; until, years
+later, they exacted bloody settlement of the score.
+
+Pompadour had worn out her life trying to "amuse the unamusable," to
+find novelties that would entertain the king. Marie did nothing of the
+sort. Instead, she demanded that the king amuse her. Pompadour had
+sought to sway the destinies of nations. Marie was quite happy if she
+could spend the revenues of her own nation.
+
+She treated Louis in a way that caused the court to gasp with horror.
+She scolded him shrilly; petted him, in public, as if he had been her
+peasant spouse; and always addressed him as "France." He enjoyed it.
+It was a novelty.
+
+Once, when she was giving an informal breakfast with a dozen or more
+nobles as guests, she ordered the king to make the coffee. Amused, he
+obeyed. She took one sip of the royal-brewed beverage, then tossed the
+cup into the fireplace, exclaiming:
+
+"France, your coffee is as insipid as your talk!"
+
+All political matters she turned over to d'Aiguillon, who was the
+clique's spokesman. To please him, and to "get even" for old scores,
+she caused the ruin of Choiseul.
+
+The mode of Choiseul's downfall is interesting as a side light on
+court intrigue. The clique taught Marie how to poison the king's
+ever-suspicious mind against the prime minister, and she did so with
+great success. Thanks to her, Louis was held to believe that Choiseul,
+feeling his power over the monarch slipping, was planning a war scare
+with Spain, so that he could prove his seeming worth to the kingdom of
+France by dispelling the cloud.
+
+The clique--having access, through a spy, to all of Choiseul's
+correspondence--resorted to a fairly ingenious trick. At Marie's
+suggestion, Choiseul's secretary was summoned to the palace. He was in
+the clique's pay. Before the king, he was questioned as to what he
+knew about Choiseul's affairs.
+
+The man, with an air of mystery, answered that he knew nothing of
+them, but that he would give his majesty one hint--let the king
+request Choiseul to write a letter to Spain, assuring that nation of
+France's peaceful intent. Should Choiseul do so without comment, it
+would show he was not plotting a war scare, as charged. But should he
+hesitate--well, what could that prove, instead?
+
+The plotters already knew that Choiseul had that very day sent a
+letter to Spain, proposing the mutual signing of a declaration of
+peace between the nations. The king requested his minister to send a
+letter that was almost identical with the one he had already written
+and dispatched. Naturally Choiseul hesitated. And the work was done.
+
+Yet, out of careless good nature--she would not have bothered to harm
+anybody, politically or otherwise, if she had had her own way--Marie
+insisted that the king settle a liberal pension on the fallen
+minister; this despite the fact that Choiseul and his sister, Madame
+de Grammont, had both worked with all their might and main to block
+her rise.
+
+She was good, too--as they all were--to her mother. She presented the
+horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income.
+She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry.
+Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman.
+Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood
+vied for chances to win her favor.
+
+The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her.
+The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of
+Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin--afterward Louis
+XVI.--and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase
+themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned
+supreme.
+
+Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not
+only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much
+time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was
+costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All
+Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any
+one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to
+shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness
+than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and
+quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's
+native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti--who had
+bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie--renamed him
+Louis Zamore.
+
+Marie was delighted with the boy--as soon as she heard the price paid
+for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She
+dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into
+screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The
+slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore,
+please. He will come back into the story.
+
+Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal
+expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of
+France:
+
+    To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand
+    dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one
+    hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for
+    furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five
+    hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble,
+    seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes--whose
+    chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom
+    she thrust into the Academy for doing it--she spent sixty-five
+    thousand dollars.
+
+ZThe heirs of one firm of creditors were, as late as 1836, still
+claiming the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars from her
+estate. She had "state dresses, hooped dresses, dresses sur ~la
+consideration, robes de toilette~;" dresses costing two hundred
+dollars, four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, and one thousand
+dollars; dresses with a base of silver strewn with clusters of
+feathers; dresses striped with big bars of gold; mosaic dresses shot
+with gold and adorned with myrtle; and riding habits of white Indian
+silk that cost twelve hundred dollars.
+
+She had dresses whose elaborate embroidery alone cost twenty-one
+hundred dollars. Her dressing gowns had lace on them worth five
+hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars. She had cuffs of lace
+costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, point-lace caps valued at
+three hundred dollars, and ~point Argentan~ costumes at eighteen
+hundred dollars. She ordered gold ornaments and trinkets of all sorts
+galore. Roettiers, the goldsmith, received an order from her for a
+toilet set of solid gold--for which she had a sudden whim. The
+government advanced twelve thousand ounces of gold for it.
+
+Boehmer, the Paris jeweler, knowing of her love for ultra-costly
+things, made up for her a huge diamond necklace, of a heterogeneous
+mass of many-carat diamonds, arranged with regard to show and wholly
+without a thought of good taste. The necklace was so big and so
+expensive that Marie declared at once she must have it. Louis
+willingly consented to buy it for her; but he died before the purchase
+was made, and Boehmer was left with the ugly treasure loop on his
+hands. Long afterward he tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette. And
+from that transaction rose the mystery of "The Queen's Necklace,"
+which did much to hasten the French Revolution.
+
+In the spring of 1774, as King Louis and Marie were driving toward
+Versailles, they saw a pretty girl in a wayside field, gathering grass
+for her cow. Louis greeted the girl with a fatherly smile. The girl
+looked back at him with perfect indifference.
+
+Piqued at such unwonted contempt for his royal self, the king got out
+of his carriage, waddled across to where the girl stood, and kissed
+her. The reason she had seemed indifferent was because she was dazed.
+The reason she was dazed was that she was in the early stages of
+smallpox.
+
+Louis caught the infection and died a few days later.
+
+The first act of Louis XVI.--the king's grandson and successor--was to
+order Marie to a convent. Later he softened the decree by allowing her
+to live at Luciennes, or anywhere else outside a ten-mile radius from
+Paris.
+
+Then it was that the fallen favorite met Cosse once more. And their
+old-time love story recommenced, this time on a less platonic footing.
+She kept her title of "Comtesse," and had enough money--as she paid
+few of her debts--to live in luxury; still beautiful, still loved,
+still moderately young.
+
+The Revolution burst forth. Marie enrolled herself as a stanch
+loyalist. Hearing that the king and queen were pressed for funds, she
+wrote to Marie Antoinette:
+
+    Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from
+    the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late
+    king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand
+    precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory
+    of these treasures--I offer them to you with eagerness. You have
+    so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow.
+    Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto Cćsar that which is
+    Cćsar's.
+
+When the king and queen were beheaded, she secretly wore black for
+them. Also, she made a trip to England, where she tried to sell some
+of her jewels to help the royalist cause. All these things were duly
+repeated to the revolutionary government by Louis Zamore, her
+Bengalese servant.
+
+One evening she was expecting a visit from Cosse. But midnight came,
+and he had not appeared.
+
+"Go down the road," she ordered Zamore, who had just returned from an
+errand to Paris, "and see if you can catch sight of him."
+
+"I can show him to you--or part of him--without troubling to do that,"
+retorted Zamore, with sudden insolence.
+
+Whipping one hand from behind his back, he tossed on the floor at
+Marie's feet the head of her lover. Cosse had been guillotined that
+day. Zamore, in return for certain information to the government, had
+received the head as a gift.
+
+The information he had given led to Marie's arrest on the following
+charges:
+
+"Having wasted the treasures of the state, conspiring with the enemies
+of the Republic, and having, in London, worn mourning for the late
+King."
+
+Marie was sentenced to death, on December 7, 1793, and was beheaded
+the same day. Almost alone of all the Frenchwomen thus put to death,
+she turned coward at the last. The strain of peasant blood came to the
+fore. And where aristocrats rode smiling to the scaffold, Marie du
+Barry behaved like a panic-stricken child. She fell on her knees and
+begged for her life. She told where every article of value she
+possessed was buried, in her garden. If she thought thus to buy back
+her life, she did not understand the souls of such men as her captors.
+
+They heard her to the end, jotting down the directions for finding her
+treasure. Then she was put into the tumbril, and was started on her
+way to the scaffold. The journey led past the old millinery shop where
+she had once worked. As she caught sight of its sign, she screamed
+out, twice.
+
+The crowd had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of death. Now
+they seemed to awaken to the fact that they were about to kill a
+woman, a wondrous beautiful woman, at that. A sigh of pity ran through
+the throng. The driver in charge of the tumbril, fearing a riot and a
+rescue, whipped up the horses and drove on with his load. There were
+others besides Madame du Barry in the death wagon.
+
+The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie
+was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.
+
+Says De Goncourt, her biographer:
+
+"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad
+with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy,
+crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."
+
+Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the
+people of France was paid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+"THE MOST GORGEOUS LADY BLESSINGTON"
+
+
+She was the ugly duckling of a family of seven beautiful children--the
+children of queer old "Shiver-the-Frills" Power, of Tipperary. Her
+name was Marguerite. Her father picked out a pretty name for the
+homely girl and then considered his duty done.
+
+Marguerite was a great trial to everybody; to her good-looking
+brothers and lovely sisters; to Shiver-the-Frills, who was bitterly
+chagrined that his record for beauteous offspring should have been
+marred by so hideous an exception; to the family governess, who
+wouldn't even take the trouble to teach her to read; to the neighbors,
+whose joy in beauty she offended. Altogether, Marguerite was taught to
+consider herself a mistake. It is a lesson that children learn with
+pitiful readiness. Perhaps the mystic "Unpardonable Sin" consists in
+teaching them such a damnable doctrine.
+
+Her father's baptismal name was not really Shiver-the-Frills, though
+nobody ever spoke of him by any other term. He had been christened
+Edmund, and he was a squireen of the Tipperary village of Knockbrit.
+He was a local magistrate, and he fulfilled his magisterial office
+almost as well as a mad dog might have done.
+
+He had an insane temper. He did not confine this to his home--where he
+beat his children and servants most unmercifully--but aired it on the
+bench as well. Notably when, in a rage, he lawlessly commandeered a
+troop of dragoons and galloped over Tipperary and Waterford Counties
+with them, hunting down and killing peasants who had stirred his anger
+to maniac heat by some petty uprising.
+
+He was a dandy--fop--macaroni--toff--whatever you choose, too; in a
+tarnished and down-at-heel way. And from his habit of eternally
+shaking out his dirty shirt ruffles and lace wristbands, in order to
+keep them from hanging limply, he was called "Shiver-the-Frills."
+
+Marguerite's home life was one unbroken hell. Starvation,
+shabby-genteel rags, beatings, and full-flavored curses were her daily
+portion. A kind-hearted neighbor, Miss Anne Dwyer, took pity on the
+poor, abused little ugly duckling and taught her to read and write.
+But for this, she would have grown up too ignorant to pass the very
+simplest literacy test.
+
+And an odd use the child proceeded to make of her smattering of
+education. Before she could spell correctly, she began to write
+stories. These she would read aloud by the peat smolder, on winter
+evenings, to her awed brothers and sisters, who looked on such an
+accomplishment as little short of super-natural.
+
+Wonderful stories she wrote, all about princesses who had all the
+clothes they could wear and who could afford three square meals, with
+real butter, every single day of their lives; and about princes who
+never swore at or beat children or flew into crazy rages or even
+fluttered dirty ruffles.
+
+The girl's gift at story writing gave her a higher place in the family
+esteem than she had ever enjoyed before. So did another miracle which
+came to pass when Marguerite was about twelve. She grew pretty. The
+ugly duckling, in less than a single year, developed from repulsive
+homeliness into a striking beauty. In fact, by the time she was
+fourteen, she was far and away the loveliest of all the "exquisite
+Power sisters."
+
+Then began her career of super-woman. For, with dawning beauty, came
+an access of the elusive charm that sets Marguerite's type apart from
+the rest of womankind. And men were swift to recognize her claim to
+their worship. The swains whom Shiver-the-Frills allowed to visit his
+tumble-down mansion paid court to her instead of to her sisters. The
+fame of her reached the near-by garrison town of Clonmel, and brought
+a host of young redcoat officers swarming to the Knockbrit house.
+
+Of these officers, two soon put themselves far in the van of all other
+contestants. They were Captain Murray and Captain Maurice St. Leger
+Farmer. Murray was a jolly, happy-go-lucky, penniless chap, lovable
+and ardent. The kindest thing one can say about Captain Farmer is that
+he was more than half insane.
+
+Marguerite met Captain Murray's courtship more than halfway. But
+Shiver-the-Frills told the sighing, but impecunious, swain to keep
+off, and ordered Marguerite to marry Farmer, who had a snug fortune.
+Marguerite very naturally objected. Shiver-the-Frills flew into a
+ready-made rage and frightened the poor youngster almost to death by
+his threats of what should befall her if she did not change her mind.
+
+So, cowed into submission, she meekly agreed to marry Farmer. And
+marry him she did, in 1805, when she was but fifteen.
+
+It was an early marrying age, even in that era of early marriages.
+Many years had passed since Sheridan's metrical toast "to the maiden
+of bashful fifteen." And, as now, a girl of fifteen was deemed too
+young for wedlock. But all this did not deter old Shiver-the-Frills
+from a laudable firmness in getting rid of the daughter he hated. So
+he married her off--to a man who ought to have been in an insane
+asylum; in an asylum for the criminally insane, at that.
+
+If Marguerite's life at Knockbrit had been unhappy, her new life was
+positive torture. Farmer's temper was worse than Shiver-the-Frills.
+And he added habitual drunkenness to his other allurements.
+
+There is no profit in going into full details of Marguerite's horrible
+sojourn with him. One of his milder amusements was to pinch her until
+the blood spurted from her white flesh. He flogged her as he never
+dared flog his dogs. And he used to lock her for days in an unheated
+room, in winter, with nothing to eat or drink.
+
+Marguerite stood it as long as she could. Then she ran away. You can
+imagine how insufferable she had found Farmer, when I say she went
+back by choice to her father's house.
+
+Shiver-the-Frills greeted the unhappy girl with one of his dear old
+rages. His rage was not leveled at the cur who had so vilely misused
+her, but against the young wife who had committed the crime of
+deserting her husband.
+
+Not being of the breed that uses bare fingers to test the efficiency
+of buzz-saws, I neither express, nor so much as dare to cherish in
+secret, any opinion whatsoever on the theme of Woman's Rights. But it
+is a wholly safe and noncontroversial thing to say that the fate of
+woman at large, and especially of husband-deserters, to-day, is
+paradise by comparison with what it was a century ago. For leaving a
+husband who had not refused to harbor her, Marguerite became in a
+measure an outcast. She could not divorce Farmer; she could not make
+him support her, unless she would return to him. She was eyed askance
+by the elect. Her own family felt that she was smirched.
+
+Shiver-the-Frills cursed her roundly, and is said to have assumed the
+heavy-father role by ordering her to leave his ramshackle old house.
+Without money, without protector, without reputation, she was cast
+adrift.
+
+There was no question of alimony, of legal redress, of freedom; the
+laws were all on Farmer's side. So was public opinion. Strange to say,
+no public benefactor even took the trouble to horsewhip the husband.
+He was not even ostracized from his own circle for his treatment to
+his girl wife.
+
+Remember, this was in the earliest years of the nineteenth century,
+and in a country where many people still regarded wife-beating as a
+healthful indoor sport. Less than three decades had elapsed since a
+man immortalized by Thackeray had made the proud boast that, during
+the first year of his married life, he had never, when sober, struck
+his wife in anger. Nor was it so very long after the Lord Chief
+Justice of England handed down an official decision that a man might
+legally "punish his wife with a rod no thicker than his lordship's
+thumb." Whereat, one woman inquired anxiously whether his lordship
+chanced to suffer from gouty swelling of the hands. Oh, it was a merry
+time and a merry land--for women--this "Merrie England of the good old
+days!"
+
+Marguerite vanished from home, from friends, from family. And a blank
+space follows. In the lives of scores of super-women--of Lola Montez,
+Marie de Chevreuse, Lady Hamilton, Adah Menken, Peg Woffington,
+Adrienne Lecouvreur, even of Cleopatra--there was somewhere a
+hiatus,--a "dark spot" that they would never afterward consent to
+illumine. And such a line of asterisks sheared its way across
+Marguerite's page at this point.
+
+She is next heard of as leading a charmingly un-nun-like existence at
+Cahair, and, two years later, at Dublin. At the Irish metropolis, she
+enamored the great Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose portrait of her is one
+of his most famous paintings, and one that is familiar to nearly
+everybody. The picture was painted in 1809 when Marguerite was just
+twenty and in the early prime of her beauty.
+
+She had ever a knack of enslaving army men, and her next wooer--in
+fact, Lawrence's lucky rival--was an Irish captain, one Jenkins. She
+and Jenkins fell very seriously in love with each other. There was
+nothing at all platonic in their relations.
+
+Jenkins was eager to marry Marguerite. And when he found he could not
+do so, because of the trifling obstacle that her husband was alive, he
+sought a chance to put Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer out of the
+road. But he was a square sort of chap, in his way, this lovelorn
+Jenkins. He balked at the idea of murder, and a duel would have put
+him in peril of losing Marguerite by dying. So he let Farmer severely
+alone, and contented himself by waiting impatiently until the drunken
+husband-emeritus should see fit to die.
+
+And, until that happy hour should come, he declared that Marguerite
+was at least his wife in the eyes of Heaven. Startingly novel mode of
+gluing together the fragments of a fractured commandment! But the
+strange part of the affair is that Captain Jenkins' eminently
+respectable family consented to take the same view of the case and
+publicly welcomed Marguerite as the captain's legal wife.
+
+And so, for a time, life went on. Marguerite was as nearly respectable
+as the laws of her time gave her the right to be. Jenkins was all
+devotion. She was moderately well received in local society, and she
+kept on winning the hearts of all the men who ventured within her
+sway.
+
+Then into her life swirled Charles John Gardiner, Earl of Blessington,
+one of the most eccentric and thoroughly delightful figures of his
+day.
+
+Blessington was an Irish peer, a widower, a man of fashion. He had a
+once-enormous rent roll, that had been sadly honeycombed by his mad
+extravagances, but that still totaled one hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars a year.
+
+What chance had the worthy, but humble, Captain Jenkins against this
+golden-tinged whirlwind wooer? And the answer to that conundrum is the
+same that serves for the question concerning the hackneyed snowball in
+the Inferno. Blessington swept Marguerite off her feet, bore her away
+from the protesting captain and installed her in a mansion of her own.
+
+Then, too late, came the happy event for which Jenkins and Marguerite
+had so optimistically been looking. In October, 1817, Captain Maurice
+St. Leger Farmer joined some boon companions in an all-night orgy in
+the upper room of a pothouse. Farmer waxed so much drunker than usual
+that he mistook the long window of the loom for the door. Bidding his
+friends good-by, he strolled out of the window into space. Being a
+heavier-than-air body, in spite of the spirits that buoyed him up, he
+drifted downward into the courtyard below, breaking his miserable
+neck.
+
+Marguerite was free. Jenkins hastened to her and besought her to marry
+him, offering her an honorable name and a place in the world, and
+pointing out to her how much better off she would be in the long run
+as Mrs. Captain Jenkins than as the brevet bride of a dissolute earl.
+
+But Blessington had by this time become the helpless thrall of
+Marguerite's charm. As soon as he heard of Farmer's death, he whisked
+her off to church and married her. And, by way of doing all things
+handsomely, he soothed the disconsolate Jenkins' feelings with a
+fifty-thousand-dollar check; thereby securing firm title to the good
+will and fixtures of the previous tenant of his wife's heart.
+
+The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest.
+And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken
+sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance
+Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so
+well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid
+results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to
+her delight, all through life.
+
+Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite,
+he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One
+of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own
+estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love
+for amateur theatricals.
+
+At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and
+their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have
+been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to
+every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for
+miles to witness one of them.
+
+For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and
+written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of
+these rules by the first, which read:
+
+    Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words
+    of the author, in case his own invention fails him.
+
+One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for
+stage dialogue.
+
+But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country
+house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to
+taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips.
+She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.
+
+There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the
+capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London
+season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.
+
+She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains,
+and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She
+had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in
+everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring
+themselves to hate her.
+
+She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in
+his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a
+lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the
+merciless pace began to tell on him.
+
+Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice,
+long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's
+lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they
+went, and London mourned them.
+
+They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish nobleman," says one
+biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels
+with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances
+of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of
+travel."
+
+They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and
+for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern
+pork-king might envy.
+
+One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:
+
+"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"
+
+One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box
+confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off
+posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who
+was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite
+was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the
+most noted--or notorious--men-about-town in all Europe.
+
+He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero.
+He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet,
+hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete--could
+ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,--and so on, through the whole list of
+sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could
+paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an
+amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to
+win fame as the premier man of fashion of the period. A once
+celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero.
+Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to
+his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington--who should have been wise
+enough to see what was coming--was no exception.
+
+Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along
+with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This
+meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment
+under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his
+military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his
+senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the
+love of her life.
+
+The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found
+England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had
+parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's
+beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the
+Blessington party of tourists.
+
+D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek god
+returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And--so far as one
+knows--that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the
+D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose
+her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over
+women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But
+Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living
+charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory
+fashion, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his
+powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.
+
+Still, the time passed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved
+his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his
+yacht--a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of.
+Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at
+a fancy figure.
+
+There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the
+Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa--on the white-elephant
+yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.
+
+They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady
+Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the
+once over," and passed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted
+with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two
+and a half years.
+
+The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere--which
+cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price
+was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to
+herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the
+place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according
+to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last
+the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most
+delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique,
+if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited
+Herculaneum, it was with the archćologist, Sir William Gell, as guide.
+When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman
+such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or
+the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was
+under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer
+Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her
+love.
+
+From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met
+Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her
+charms.
+
+By this time--nay, long before this time--people had begun to talk,
+and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the butt
+of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an
+effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing
+this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He
+promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry
+Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living
+child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to
+him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and
+there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.
+
+The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris.
+Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant,
+and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she
+was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to
+bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen
+receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room
+was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until
+everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:
+
+    The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of
+    two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every
+    feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of
+    a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with
+    white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the
+    columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk
+    curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal
+    the recess altogether.... A silvered sofa has been made to fit the
+    side of the room opposite the fireplace.
+
+    Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to
+    correspond.... The salle de bain is draped with white muslin
+    trimmed with lace.... The bath is of white marble, inserted in the
+    floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting
+    of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is
+    suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.
+
+It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829;
+perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.
+
+Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his
+estate--which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand
+dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was
+seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town
+house in London.
+
+All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons.
+When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and
+the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in
+Kensington--Albert Hall now stands on its site--for Marguerite could
+not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.
+
+She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen
+gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first
+pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the
+Genoa days. The ~New Monthly Magazine~ first printed serially this
+capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as
+"Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books,
+this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.
+
+She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to
+supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of
+Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a
+descriptive verse written by her under each picture--straight hack
+work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her
+pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day--or in any day, for
+that matter.
+
+Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess,"
+and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I
+think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored
+me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their
+truthful depiction of the social life of her times.
+
+She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as
+~Friendship's Offering~, ~The Amulet~, ~Keepsakes~, and others of like
+mushiness of name and matter.
+
+Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the
+best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent
+the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the
+sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had
+blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with
+Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.
+
+It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine
+as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and
+Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except--perhaps he was not fooled.
+Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.
+
+And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party
+any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the
+gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay
+stayed on.
+
+There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek
+God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to
+be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as
+adorable as in her teens.
+
+Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent
+presence--and more than one of them made desperate love to their
+hostess--were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain
+Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another
+genius.
+
+Disraeli--one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield--was
+at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally
+brilliant novelist. There is a story--I don't vouch for it--that,
+piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged
+himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau,"
+in his "Henrietta Temple."
+
+Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke
+of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes."
+Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to
+persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the
+picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:
+
+"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"
+
+To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were
+the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by
+every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a
+similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even
+start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother.
+Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work
+than any other author our country has produced.
+
+During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an
+invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called
+almost every day. He fairly raved over her.
+
+"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever
+known!" he wrote.
+
+Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one
+of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it
+would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an
+English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.
+
+Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a
+job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of
+Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked
+around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made
+clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a
+while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for
+loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to
+the Bonaparte cause.
+
+Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money,
+and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman
+outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out
+of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite
+Blessington's.
+
+Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a
+thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a
+few minutes how he repaid their generosity.
+
+While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius
+for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be
+only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about
+five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was
+a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could
+people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current
+on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?
+
+The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an
+answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.
+
+They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of
+Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more
+money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough.
+Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the
+all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious
+Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down,
+the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to
+keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope
+to pay.
+
+Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position,
+D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated
+panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping
+Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now
+stood her in fine stead.
+
+They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them,
+they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than
+five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone.
+D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five
+thousand from overtrustful personal friends.
+
+Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his
+"Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay,
+before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the
+earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate.
+He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting
+brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the
+bottomless gulf of extravagance.
+
+Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never
+going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a
+crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and
+prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to
+Marguerite and D'Orsay.
+
+Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of
+egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring
+streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the
+house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore
+House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby
+people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred
+Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.
+
+On Sunday alone--when the civil arm of the law rests--did the
+much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which
+had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they
+entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the
+drawing-room in the guise of a guest.
+
+Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great
+ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped
+by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the
+man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a
+half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in
+the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined
+him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.
+
+Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne,
+in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for
+debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear
+land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like
+sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray
+water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They
+would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for
+the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had
+known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a
+penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives,
+fifty times more bitter than death.
+
+It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself
+among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she
+was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in
+France.
+
+She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of
+poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already
+there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the
+Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he assuredly could do
+no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a
+flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady
+Blessington."
+
+Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did
+nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarrassed and not at all
+over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made
+them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have
+had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was
+wont to make.
+
+Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors
+had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art
+treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer,
+and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of
+the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.
+
+Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her
+beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had
+squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot,"
+(ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street,
+while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.)
+She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And
+now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.
+
+A younger and stronger woman might readily have succumbed under such a
+crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face
+it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.
+
+D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in
+her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that
+mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay
+was laid there at her side.
+
+Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony.
+Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a
+creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MADAME RECAMIER
+
+THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL
+
+
+Paris--the hopelessly mixed, ~sans-culotte~-philosopher new Paris
+society of 1793--took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on
+the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.
+
+The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty.
+Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few
+hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December.
+The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to
+look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned
+to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the
+day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic
+murder dreams.
+
+The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter
+of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes--a
+mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and
+steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.
+
+The groom was Jacques Recamier--by profession a powerful banker, by
+choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons.
+Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their
+house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.
+
+As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after
+the "civil ceremony"--so runs the story--a passing man halted and
+gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every
+line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name.
+And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the
+inspiration for the wonderful "~Jeune fille~" picture that made
+him immortal.
+
+The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had
+the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by
+the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a
+cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous
+of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine--around which they
+had lately gathered, gloating--spattered on their clothes and unwashed
+faces.
+
+In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried
+by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked ~sans-culottes~.
+And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that
+vile gathering--a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly
+marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.
+
+Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations,
+strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from
+the ~halls~.
+
+Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that
+April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers--and fellow
+beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of
+dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat--for whose shrunken
+chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was
+sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.
+
+An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the
+little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid
+superstitions.
+
+Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a
+contemporary?
+
+"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and
+transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist;
+coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein
+float rose leaves."
+
+Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the
+seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had
+received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in
+her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed
+away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully.
+Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against
+her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever
+breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)
+
+Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame
+Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly
+declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the
+theme:
+
+"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection
+was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his
+name."
+
+Says Turquan:
+
+"She was Recamier's daughter."
+
+And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a
+love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had
+condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the
+day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.
+
+Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but
+worshiped her. Not a day had passed but he had come to see her. He had
+loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy godfather.
+She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."
+
+Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable
+danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch
+executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard
+was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the
+rotten Paris of that day.
+
+So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard
+the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a
+meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a
+retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter
+she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over
+her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a
+total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.
+
+These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early
+marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had
+fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his
+flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.
+
+Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the
+more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society reassembled on its
+peak, after the years of guillotine-aided class leveling. And, in this
+heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says
+Sainte-Beuve:
+
+"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and
+very ardent."
+
+To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal
+ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured
+forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no
+response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting,
+and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such
+encouragement was really needed.
+
+Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose
+Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this
+series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of
+super-women--Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges,
+Countess Potocka, and the rest--and his name is more often seen in all
+history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient
+if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.
+
+Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a
+young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman.
+Now in his days of power and--for him--leisure, he amply made up for
+such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black
+eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right
+ardent love to her.
+
+Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually
+lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his
+cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic
+young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.
+
+She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been
+written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells
+another story.
+
+Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras,
+where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire
+of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow
+sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the
+late Mrs. Cćsar.
+
+To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who
+had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and
+he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time
+to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.
+
+Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon--whom she did not even
+pretend to love--by saying that the young man had a great future.
+Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged,
+mutinous Army of Italy.
+
+Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the
+world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home
+the hero and idol of the hour--to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that
+Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She
+wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon
+shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he
+treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was
+stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found.
+Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.
+
+"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this
+moment?"
+
+"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of
+Dantzig.
+
+"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or
+both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of
+company she can find at such short notice."
+
+Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to
+overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans'
+ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well--aristocrats
+of the noblesse--who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the
+Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings--all flocked to
+the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.
+
+Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy--or frosty--virtue were the
+talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out
+this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should
+make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?
+
+Other women--women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years
+earlier, save as a dependent--were making fools of themselves over the
+Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred
+frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect
+in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make
+lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.
+
+She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but
+took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her
+seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war
+campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to
+keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon,
+thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could
+fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear.
+Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff
+from his charmer.
+
+It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a
+big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with
+much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier
+as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.
+
+This was a master stroke--a ~tour de force~--a knock-out--anything you
+will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers throughout the empire were
+yelping for slices of the state finances. And the post of lady in
+waiting was one for which nearly any woman of the court would gladly
+have parted with all she no longer possessed.
+
+Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be
+administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier
+coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in
+waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not
+mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated
+absence.
+
+It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.
+
+In a burst of babyish fury, he--the ruler of France and the arbiter of
+Europe's fate--crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.
+
+He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge
+of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or ~les
+majeste~ or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the
+strength of it, he banished her from Paris.
+
+It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half
+of Europe by a single convolution of his demigod brain; or could
+screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his
+thin hair.
+
+From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console
+his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to
+build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one.
+Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he amassed enough
+money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.
+
+To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and
+then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman
+friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a
+tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and
+facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.
+
+This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile
+conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been
+banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that
+when she once said to an ill-favored man:
+
+"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers
+laughed--at her, not at her victim.
+
+In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and
+man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame
+Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After
+the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them,
+remarking airily:
+
+"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."
+
+"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted
+courtesy.
+
+The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave
+of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no
+secret of his devotion.
+
+In those days the title of prince-royal carried real weight, and the
+gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made
+Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame
+Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk
+of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the
+prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his
+royal-blooded self.
+
+It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a
+hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic
+union he proposed--he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.
+
+The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his
+amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to
+let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose--or an annulment
+of their marriage, which would have been still simpler--and marry
+Prince Augustus.
+
+Always impersonal and adoring in his attitude toward Jeanne, Recamier
+now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and
+becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a
+father than in a husband.
+
+But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning
+her back on the wealth and title of a princess in order to remain with
+the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For,
+again, physical reasons intervened.
+
+Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another
+ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother,
+until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest,
+Jeanne--after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation--gave a
+decided refusal.
+
+General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her
+out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom
+court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to
+carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed
+and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so
+unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in
+France mad with chagrin.
+
+Benjamin Constant, too--cunning statesman of the old school--loved
+her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain
+fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that
+mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the
+rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as
+a friend.
+
+Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself
+on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of
+statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been
+laid to her influence.
+
+Another exile--General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war
+and love--now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.
+He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court
+to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism
+chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he
+found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too,
+departed, hopeless.
+
+The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He
+was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of
+Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after
+conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter
+brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
+
+When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms
+and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for
+the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And--though it has been denied
+by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason--almost
+at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's
+enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
+
+Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was
+set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one
+another to join the alliance against him.
+
+The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
+
+As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers
+returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had
+banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in
+something of their old style there.
+
+Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of
+kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of
+newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling
+over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
+
+The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly
+about--they would have run up a tree, two years earlier--and bragging
+of Napoleon's fall.
+
+There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had
+once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow
+campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too,
+was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none
+the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the
+victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians,
+not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the
+Allies.
+
+Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among
+them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak
+of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor
+of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
+
+The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive
+libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret
+of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British
+morality.
+
+Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a
+friend:
+
+"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on
+his knees before me in sinful adulation."
+
+I fear he would have roused crass horror in the bosom of the
+mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and
+Cleopatra," exclaimed:
+
+"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious
+queen!"
+
+The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man
+of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons--but for a very brief
+time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests
+being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.
+
+Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country.
+Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out
+of her house.
+
+By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the
+omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris--which adored
+Jeanne and hated the English hero--went wild with delight. Jeanne's
+popularity from that moment was boundless.
+
+Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat
+hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his
+ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.
+
+Canova, the premier sculptor of his day--he who later paid such
+assiduous court to Elizabeth Paterson--fell in love with Jeanne. So
+indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her
+knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.
+
+When the busts were done, Canova--who was constantly receiving and
+rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts--showed her
+his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity.
+She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do
+her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection
+and left the studio.
+
+The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her
+acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers
+to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.
+
+Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received
+shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the
+love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have
+noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the
+host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth
+of devotion lavished on him.
+
+And so it was with Jeanne Recamier--although the affair from first to
+last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had
+rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe
+out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike
+author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother
+read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."
+
+Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for
+transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to
+the next had won for him the sobriquet "~L'Inconstant~." He had
+traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had
+hobnobbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of
+introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during
+the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's
+tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.
+
+Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and
+earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke,
+sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as
+a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in
+jail--Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.
+
+From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a
+crazily passionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of
+mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.
+
+When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in
+marriage. She refused--for reasons best known to herself and her
+physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives,
+faithful and utterly devoted lovers.
+
+Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad
+foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to
+cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded
+his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross,
+bringing out its cleaner, nobler traits.
+
+"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing
+more beautiful nor more good than you."
+
+When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty.
+Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne
+looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.
+
+Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she
+refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature
+years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when
+she was seventy.
+
+The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not
+interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."
+
+The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for
+years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's
+eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut
+himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him,
+became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.
+
+His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of
+life left in his heart--his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a
+frightened child to a tender mother.
+
+Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful
+Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her
+blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its
+sweetness.
+
+Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man
+she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which
+had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million
+whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the
+gleaming past.
+
+The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a
+baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the
+world, lingered on for several years longer.
+
+When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned
+Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It
+broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she
+followed her lover to the grave.
+
+Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose
+very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and
+flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any
+way resembles hers.
+
+Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for
+the men who loved them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+LADY HAMILTON
+
+PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES
+
+
+She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha
+the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione,
+the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible
+the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of
+all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or
+otherwise--probably otherwise--of all their authors. Because, at a
+period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose
+from nursemaid to title.
+
+Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did
+not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's
+crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady
+of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed
+askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose
+momentarily as a lady's maid.
+
+Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me
+work up by degrees to the happening itself.
+
+She was a Lancashire lass, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she
+dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why.
+Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact,
+she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with
+the legal right to one.
+
+Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her
+mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs.
+Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen.
+She had already learned to read--a rare accomplishment in those days
+for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she
+greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as
+well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as
+quickly as a Chinaman.
+
+There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so
+in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of
+asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in sex-problem
+fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.
+
+Emma reappeared from the asterisk cloud in London, where she was
+nursemaid in the house of a Doctor Budd, one of the physicians at St.
+Bartholomew's Hospital. Doctor Budd's housemaid at that time, by the
+way, later became a Drury Lane star, under the name of "Mrs. Powell."
+And in that bright afterday she and the even more apotheosized Emma
+renewed their below-stairs friendship.
+
+For some reason Emma left Doctor Budd's service rather suddenly and
+found a job as helper in the shop of a St. James' Market mercer. She
+was sixteen, and she was gloriously beautiful. Her figure was superb.
+Already she had a subtle charm of her own which drew to her feet
+crowds of footmen, shopboys, apprentices, and such small deer. There
+is no record that they one and all were sent away disconsolate.
+
+During her brief career as helper to the St. James' Market mercer,
+Emma chanced to attract the notice of a woman of quality who one day
+entered the shop. And forthwith she was hired as lady's maid. The girl
+had picked up a smattering of education. She had scraped from her pink
+tongue the rough Lancashire bur-r-r. She had learned to speak
+correctly, to ape the behavior of the solid folk whose servant she had
+been. Now, from her new employer, she was to learn at firsthand how
+people in the world of fashion comported themselves. And,
+chameleonlike, she took on the color of her gay surroundings.
+
+Soon she could lisp such choice and fashionable expletives as "Scrape
+me raw!" and "Oh, lay me bleeding!" and could talk and walk and
+posture as did her mistress. Trashy novels by the dozen fell into her
+hands from her mistress' table. Emma devoured them, gluttonously and
+absorbed their precepts as the human system absorbs alcohol fumes.
+
+Please don't for one moment get the idea that there was anything
+profitable to a young girl in the novels of the latter eighteenth
+century. Perhaps you have in mind such dreary sterling works as
+"Pamela," "Clarissa Harlow," "Sir Charles Grandison," and others that
+were crammed into your miserably protesting brain in the Literature
+Courses. Those were the rare--the very rare--exceptions to a large and
+lurid list, which included such choice classics as "Moll Flanders,"
+"Roxana"--both of them by the same Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe,"
+and whose other novels would send a present-day publisher to States
+prison--"Peregrine Pickle," "Fanny Hill," "The Delicate Distress,"
+"Roderick Random," and the rest of a rank-flavored multitude.
+
+Emma reveled in the joys of the local "circulating library," too; one
+of those places that loaned books of a sort to cause even the kindly
+Sheridan to thunder his famous dictum:
+
+"A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical
+knowledge. It blossoms through the year. And, depend on't, they who
+are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last."
+
+Much reading filled Emma with wonderful new ideas of life.
+Incidentally, it made her neglect her work, and she was discharged.
+Her next step was to become barmaid in a tavern. While she was there,
+a young admirer of hers was seized by the navy press gang. Emma went
+to the captain of the ship to beg for her swain's release. The captain
+was John Willett Payn, afterward a rear admiral. Payne granted the
+lovely girl's plea. He not only gave her what she asked, but his own
+admiration as well. Her story as a heart winner had begun.
+
+In fiction, the gallant captain would soon have tired of his lively
+sweetheart and cast her aside. But Emma was not a lowly sweetheart.
+She was a super-woman. She showed how much stranger than fiction truth
+may be by deserting Payne for a richer man. First, however, she had
+wheedled the captain into hiring tutors and music masters for her, and
+she profited vastly by their teachings.
+
+Her new flame was a sporting baronet, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, of
+Up Park, Sussex. Sir Harry was an all-round athlete and a reckless
+horseman. He taught Emma to ride--"a beggar on horseback?"--and she
+became the most daring equestrienne of the century. He taught her to
+spend money, too. And so splendidly did she learn her lesson that
+inside of a year Sir Harry was bankrupt.
+
+Perhaps ~all~ rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very good
+reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't. The
+rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the
+exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble
+rodent.
+
+There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the
+bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly
+consideration, she left him.
+
+She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend;
+equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm,
+but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black
+hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.
+
+And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack,
+Graham by name.
+
+Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine--from Doctor Faustus down,
+the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised
+as a means of exchanging age for youth--and he vowed that it would
+make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an
+example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said,
+had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had
+become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis."
+Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out
+Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in
+gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which
+Emma posed:
+
+    He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which,
+    in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman,
+    nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as
+    Hygeia, goddess of health.
+
+Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to
+suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to
+behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and
+sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed
+through the shimmer of rose-colored light.
+
+And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was
+slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him,
+and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He
+was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage
+of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained
+to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no
+less than thirty-nine pictures of her.
+
+"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is
+superior to all womankind."
+
+The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure.
+Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth.
+Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels,
+but racing abreast.
+
+Soon, out of the ruck and forging far ahead, appeared Charles Francis
+Greville, wit, art connoisseur, and nephew and heir of the famed
+antiquary diplomat, Sir William Hamilton. Greville cut out all rivals,
+Romney among the rest, and won Emma for his own.
+
+Theirs was an odd love affair. For here, too, Emma gave full rein to
+her craving for education. And she showed for the first time just why
+she was so eager to be highly educated. It was not for mere learning's
+sake, but to enhance the charm that gave her a hold over men. She
+cared nothing for any but the showy accomplishments. She already had a
+fair groundwork in English and ordinary school studies. She made
+Greville get her the best teachers in singing, in dancing, in acting.
+Perhaps she looked forward to a stage triumph, but more likely to
+outshining the colorless bread-and-butter women of her day.
+
+Never did pupil better repay the pains of her teachers. Her voice
+presently rivaled that of many a prima donna. Her dancing was a
+delight. It was she who conceived the celebrated "shawl dance" that
+was the rage throughout Europe for years thereafter, and that still is
+used, in very slightly modified form, by ~premieres danseuses~.
+But acting was Emma's forte. Says a contemporary writer:
+
+    With a common piece of stuff she could so arrange and clothe
+    herself as to offer the most appropriate representations of a
+    Jewess, a Roman matron, a Helen, Penelope, or Aspasia. No character
+    seemed foreign to her, and the grace she was in the habit of
+    displaying under such representations excited the admiration of
+    all who were fortunate enough to be present on such occasions.
+    Siddons could not surpass the grandeur of her style or O'Neil be
+    more melting in the utterance of deep pathos.
+
+In this heyday of her prosperity, Emma hunted up her aged and
+disreputable mother, bestowed on her the name "Mrs. Cadogan," and
+settled a rich pension on her. At about the same time, too, Emma bade
+a cheery farewell to the serviceable name of Lyon and took to calling
+herself Emma Harte.
+
+Then Greville went broke.
+
+In his new-found poverty, he hit on a plan of life foreign to all his
+old ideas.
+
+He decided to ask his rich old uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to pay his
+debts and settle a little annuity on him. With this sum as a means of
+livelihood, he intended to marry Emma, and, with her and their three
+children, settle down in some cheap suburb.
+
+How this appealed to Emma history forgets to say. Judging by both past
+and future, it is not unjust to suppose that she may have been making
+ready once more to emulate the ship-deserting rat. But this time she
+did not need to. The ship was about to desert her--for a
+consideration.
+
+Greville, full of his new hopes, went to Sir William Hamilton and laid
+the plan before him. His nephew's derelictions from the straight and
+narrow path had long distressed the virtuous old diplomat. And in
+Greville's financial troubles Sir William thought he saw a fine chance
+to break off his nephew's discreditable affair with Emma.
+
+He offered to set Greville on his feet again if that luckless youth
+would drop Emma's acquaintance. The enamored Greville refused. Sir
+William insisted, raising his offer of financial aid, and pointing
+out, with tearful eloquence, the family disgrace that a marriage to a
+woman of Emma's desolute character must cause. It was all quite like a
+scene from a modern problem play. But Fate, her tongue in her cheek,
+was preparing to put a twist on the end of the scene worthy of the
+most cynical French vaudeville writer.
+
+Greville resented his uncle's rash judgment of his adored Emma, and
+begged him to come and see her for himself, hoping that Emma's wonder
+charm might soften the old man's virtue-incrusted heart. Reluctantly,
+Sir William consented to one brief interview with the wicked siren.
+
+At sight of Emma, Sir William's heart melted to mushiness. He fell
+crazily in love with the woman he had come to dispossess. There was
+another long and stormy scene between uncle and nephew; after which
+Greville, for an enormous lump sum, transferred to Sir William
+Hamilton all right and title and good will to the adorable Emma Harte.
+And Sir William and Emma departed thence, arm in arm, leaving Greville
+a sadder but a richer man. What became of the three children I don't
+know. By the way, Emma had taught them to call her "aunt," not
+"mother."
+
+Will you let me quote a deadly dry line or two from an encyclopedia,
+to prove to you how important a personage Sir William was, and how
+true is the axiom about "no fool like an old fool"?
+
+    Hamilton, Sir William, British diplomatist and antiquary
+    (1730-1803), student of art, philosophy and literature. From 1764
+    to 1800 English ambassador to the Court of Naples. Trustee of
+    British Museum, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice president of the
+    Society of Antiquaries, distinguished member of the Dilettante
+    Club, author of several books. Sir Joshua Reynolds, his intimate
+    friend, painted his portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery.
+
+Sir William, who was home on leave of absence when he met Emma, took
+her back with him to Italy. But before they sailed she had prevailed
+on him to marry her.
+
+It was easy. He was old.
+
+The marriage was kept secret until, in 1791, she led her husband back
+to England on another leave of absence and up to the altar of St.
+George's Church, where, on September 6th of that year, they were
+married all over again; this time with every atom of publicity Emma
+could compass. She was then twenty-seven; her husband was sixty-one.
+
+In state they returned to the court of Naples--the most corrupt,
+licentious, false, utterly abominable court in all Europe. If you will
+glance at the annals of the courts of that period you will find this
+statement is as true as it is sweeping. On her earlier visit, as the
+supposed brevet bride of the ambassador, Emma had been warmly received
+by Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples and sister to Marie Antoinette of
+France. Emma and Marie Caroline were kindred spirits--which is perhaps
+the unkindest thing I could say about either of them--and they quickly
+formed a lasting friendship for each other.
+
+Emma was glad to get back to Naples. Apart from her marriage, her
+visit to England had not been a success. A certain element in London
+society, attracted by her beauty, her voice, and her talent as an
+actress, had taken her up. But Queen Charlotte had refused her a
+presentation at the British court, and the more reputable element of
+the nobility had followed royal example and given her a wide berth.
+English society under George III. was severely respectable--at least
+in the matter of externals; a quality it was soon to mislay, under
+George IV. Hence Emma's joy at returning to a court where
+respectability was a term to be found only in the dictionary.
+
+The King of Naples was a fool. His wife was the little kingdom's
+ruler. Emma, Lady Hamilton, became her chief adviser. Writes one
+historian:
+
+    It is not too much to say of these two women that for years they
+    wielded the destinies of Naples, and seriously affected the
+    character of the wars that ended with the peace of Europe in 1815,
+    when both were dead.... Both were endowed with powers of mind far
+    above the average of their sex; both exhibited energy and
+    understanding that inspired them to bold and decisive, if not
+    always laudable, deeds; both were as remarkable for their personal
+    beauty as for their self-reliance, their knowledge of men, and
+    their determination to make the most of their information. To say
+    that Marie Caroline loved Lady Hamilton is to misstate a fact;
+    there was no love in the royal composition; but her ungovernable
+    and undying hatred of the French inclined her, no doubt, in the
+    first instance toward the wife of the English ambassador, and the
+    subsequent devotion of the favorite secured an attachment that is
+    confessed and reiterated through whole pages of a vehement and
+    overstrained correspondence.
+
+Naples, just then, was between two fires. There was fear of a French
+invasion--which arrived on schedule time--and there was also danger
+that England would ruin Neopolitan commerce. Emma's white hands were
+at once plunged, wrist-deep, into the political dough; and a sorry
+mess she proceeded to make of it. For example, the King of Spain wrote
+a confidential letter to his brother, the King of Naples, accusing the
+English government of all sorts of public and private crimes and
+telling of Spain's secret alliance with France. The king showed it to
+his wife, who in turn showed it to Lady Hamilton. Emma stole and
+secretly sent the letter to the British cabinet. The result was a
+bloody war between England and Spain.
+
+About two years after Emma's marriage, an English warship, the
+~Agamemnon~, touched at Naples, and her captain called to pay his
+respects to the British ambassador and to deliver a letter from the
+admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. After a few minutes' talk with the
+captain, Sir William insisted that the latter should meet Lady
+Hamilton.
+
+He bustled into the drawing-room to prepare Emma for the visitor's
+arrival, saying excitedly to her:
+
+"I am bringing you a little man who cannot boast of being very
+handsome, but who, I pronounce, will one day astonish the world. I
+know it from the very words of conversation I have had with him."
+
+On the heels of Sir William's announcement, the "little man" came into
+the room. At first glance, he scarcely seemed to justify Hamilton's
+enthusiasm. He was clad in a full-laced uniform. His lank, unpowdered
+hair was tied in a stiff Hessian queue of extraordinary length.
+Old-fashioned, flaring waistcoat flaps added to the general oddity of
+his figure.
+
+Sir William introduced him as "Captain Horatio Nelson."
+
+Lady Hamilton lavished on the queer guest no especial cordiality. It
+is not known that she gave him a second thought. Nelson, little more
+impressed by the super-woman, wrote to his wife in England an account
+of the call, saying of Lady Hamilton--whose story, of course, he and
+everybody knew:
+
+"She is a young woman of amiable manners, who does honor to the
+station to which she has been raised."
+
+Yet Nelson had unwittingly met the woman who was to tarnish the pure
+glory of his fame; and Emma had met the man but for whom she would
+to-day be forgotten. So little does Fate forecast her dramas that, at
+the first meeting, neither of the two immortal lovers seems to have
+felt any attraction for the other.
+
+Not for five busy years did Nelson and Emma Hamilton see each other
+again.
+
+Then Nelson came back to Naples, this time in triumph--a
+world-renowned hero, the champion of the seas, Britain's idol. He had
+become an admiral, a peer of England, a scourge of his country's foes.
+Back to Naples he came. Part of him; not all--for victorious warfare
+had set cruel marks on him. He had left his right eye at Calvi in
+1794, and his right arm at Teneriffe in 1797. He was more odd looking
+than ever, but he was an acclaimed hero. And Naples in general and
+Emma Hamilton in particular welcomed him with rapture.
+
+He was in search of the French fleet, and he wanted the King of Naples
+to let him reprovision his ships in the Neapolitan harbor. Now, France
+and Naples just then happened to be at peace. And, by their treaty, no
+more than two English warships at a time could enter any Neapolitan or
+Sicilian port. The king's council declared the treaty must stand. Lady
+Hamilton decided otherwise.
+
+She used all her power with the queen to have the treaty set aside. As
+a result Marie Caroline issued an order directing "all governors of
+the two Sicilies to water, victual, and aid" Nelson's fleet. This
+order made it possible for Nelson to go forth reprovisioned--and to
+crush the French in the Battle of the Nile.
+
+In the first rumor of this battle that reached Naples, Nelson was
+reported killed. Soon afterward he appeared, alive and well, in the
+harbor. Here is his letter to his wife, telling how Lady Hamilton
+received him on his return. Nelson, by the way, had been married for
+nearly twelve years. He and his wife were devoted to each other.
+Judging from this letter, he was lamentably ignorant of women or was
+incredibly sure of Lady Nelson's love and trust. Or else his courage
+was greater than that of mortal husband. He wrote:
+
+    Sir William and Lady Hamilton came out to sea to meet me. They, my
+    most respectable friends, had nearly been laid up and seriously
+    ill, first from anxiety and then from joy. It was imprudently told
+    Lady Hamilton, in a moment, that I was alive; and the effect was
+    like a shot. She fell, apparently dead, and is not yet perfectly
+    recovered from severe bruises. Alongside came my honored friends.
+    The scene in the boat was terribly affecting. Up flew her
+    ladyship, and, exclaiming: "Oh, God, is it possible?" she fell
+    into my arm, more dead than alive. Tears, however, soon set
+    matters to rights; when alongside came the king.... I hope, some
+    day, to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton. She
+    is one of the very best women in the world; she is an honor to her
+    sex. Her kindness, with Sir William's, to me, is more than I can
+    express. I am in their house, and I may tell you, it required all
+    the kindness of my friends to set me up. Lady Hamilton intends
+    writing to you. May God Almighty bless you, and give us in due
+    time a happy meeting!
+
+France sought revenge for the help given to Nelson's fleet, and
+declared war on Naples. The Neapolitans, in fury at being dragged into
+such a needless conflict, rose against their dear king and adored
+queen--especially against their adored queen--and threatened to kill
+them. By Lady Hamilton's aid the royal family reached Nelson's
+flagship and took refuge there from the mob. Sir William and Lady
+Hamilton went along. The populace looted the British embassy and stole
+everything of value Sir William owned--about one hundred and
+ninety-five thousand dollars' worth of property in all. Thus, Hamilton
+was the third man who had lost a fortune through Emma.
+
+Meanwhile, Nelson had sailed to Palermo, taking the fugitives along.
+There he made his home with the Hamiltons. And scandal awoke, even in
+that easy-going crowd. Nor did the scandal die down to any appreciable
+extent on the birth of Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia, a year or so
+later.
+
+Sir William's conduct in the matter is still a puzzle. He felt, or
+professed to feel, that there was no occasion for jealousy. And so for
+a long time the trio shared the same house.
+
+One of the courtiers who had fled with the king and queen to Palermo
+was Prince Caraccioli, Nelson's close friend and Lady Hamilton's
+bitter enemy. Caraccioli asked leave to go back to Naples to look
+after his endangered property. As soon as he reached the city, he
+threw in his lot with the rebels and was made admiral of their navy.
+
+Presently, by the aid of England's fleet, the royal family returned.
+The rebellion was put down, and the king and queen were once more
+seated firmly on their thrones. The rebel leaders were seized and
+brought to trial. Nelson is said to have promised immunity to
+Caraccioli if he would surrender. Relying on his friend's pledge,
+Caraccioli surrendered. At Emma's request Nelson had the overtrustful
+man hanged from the yardarm of his own flagship.
+
+This is the darkest smear on Nelson's character, a smear that even his
+most blatant admirers have never been able to wipe away. It is not in
+keeping with anything else in his life. But by this time he belonged
+to Lady Hamilton, body and soul.
+
+She, by the way, had managed to acquire from her friend, the Queen of
+Naples, a nice tendency toward blood-thirstiness; as witness the
+following sweet anecdote by Pryne Lockhart Gordon, who tells of dining
+with the Hamiltons at Palermo, in company with a Turkish officer:
+
+    In the course of conversation, the officer boasted that with the
+    sword he wore he had put to death a number of French prisoners.
+    "Look," he said, "there is their blood remaining on it." When the
+    speech was translated to her, Lady Hamilton's eyes beamed with
+    delight. "Oh, let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!"
+    she exclaimed. Taking the sword in her hands, which were covered
+    with jewels, she looked at it, then kissed the incrusted blood on
+    the blade, and passed it on to Nelson. Only one who was a witness
+    to the spectacle can imagine how disgusting it was.
+
+Enshrined once more at Naples, hailed as savior of the realm,
+acclaimed for her share in the Nile victory, the confidante of
+royalty--it would be pleasant to say good-by here to Emma Lyon,
+ex-nursemaid, ex-barmaid, ex-lady's maid, nameless offspring of a
+Lancashire inn slavey. It was the climax of a wonderful life. But
+there was anticlimax aplenty to follow.
+
+Nelson went home to England to receive the plaudits of his fellow
+countrymen and to settle accounts with his wife. Home, too, came the
+Hamiltons, Sir William having been recalled.
+
+Lady Nelson was not at the dock to meet her hero husband. Bad news
+traveled fast, even before we boosted it along by wire and then by
+wireless. Lady Nelson had heard. And Lady Nelson was waiting at home.
+Thither, blithely enough, fared the man in whose praise a million
+Englishmen were cheering themselves hoarse--and in whose
+silver-buckled shoes perhaps no married Englishman would just then
+have cared or dared to stand. But Nelson was a hero. He went home.
+
+I once had a collie puppy that had never chanced to be at close
+quarters with a cat. I was privileged to see him when he made his
+first gleefully fearless attack upon one, ignorant of the potential
+anguish tucked away behind a feline's velvety paws. Somehow--with no
+disrespect to a great man--I always think of that poor,
+about-to-be-disillusioned puppy when I try to visualize the picture of
+Nelson's home-coming.
+
+Just what happened no one knows. But whatever it was, it did not teach
+Nelson the wisdom of husbandly reticence. For, a few weeks later, he
+remarked at breakfast:
+
+"I have just received another letter from dear Lady Hamilton."
+
+"I am sick of hearing of 'dear' Lady Hamilton!" flared the
+long-suffering wife. "You can choose between us. You must give up her
+or me."
+
+"Take care, Fanny!" warned Nelson. "I love you dearly. But I cannot
+forget all I owe to dear Lady Hamilton."
+
+"This is the end, then," announced Lady Nelson, and she left the
+house.
+
+Only once again did she and her husband meet.
+
+Nelson cast off all pretense at concealment after his wife left him.
+His affair with Lady Hamilton became public property. Their daughter,
+Horatia, was openly acclaimed by him as his heiress. The English were
+in a quandary. They loved Nelson; they hated the woman who had dragged
+his name into the filth. They could not snub her without making him
+unhappy; they could not honor him without causing her to shine by
+reflected glory. It was unpleasant all around.
+
+In 1805 the deadlock was broken. Nelson was again to fight the French.
+He told Lady Hamilton and many others that this campaign was to end in
+his death. He ordered his coffin made ready for him. Then he sailed
+against the French fleet, met it off Cape Trafalgar, and annihilated
+it. In the thick of the fight a musket ball gave him his death wound.
+He was carried below, and there, the battle raging around him, he
+laboriously wrote a codicil to his will, entreating his king and
+country to repay his services by settling a pension on Lady Hamilton.
+Then to his next-in-command he panted:
+
+"I am going fast. Come nearer. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my
+hair and all other things belonging to me. Take care of my dear Lady
+Hamilton--poor Lady Hamilton! Thank God I have done my duty!"
+
+And so he died, this knightly little demigod--true lover, false
+husband--who had fouled his snowy escutcheon for a worthless woman.
+
+Now comes the inevitable anticlimax.
+
+All England turned with loathing from Lady Hamilton. Her husband was
+dead. Lovers stood aloof. Folk who had received her for Nelson's sake
+barred their doors against her. She had followed the popular custom of
+living in luxury on nothing a year. Now her creditors swarmed upon
+her.
+
+Her house was sold for debt. Next she lived in Bond Street lodgings,
+growing poorer day by day until she was condemned to the debtor's
+prison. A kind-hearted--or hopeful--alderman bought her out of jail. A
+former coachman of hers, whose wages were still unpaid, threatened her
+with arrest for debt. She fled to Calais.
+
+There she lived in an attic, saved from absolute starvation by a
+fellow Englishwoman, a Mrs. Hunter. Her youth and charm had fled. The
+power that had lured Nelson and Greville and Hamilton to ruin was
+gone.
+
+In 1815 she died. She was buried in a pine box, with an old black silk
+petticoat for a pall. No clergyman could be found to take charge of
+her funeral. So the burial service was read by a fellow debt exile--a
+half-pay Irish army captain.
+
+One wonders--perhaps morbidly--if Nelson's possible punishment in
+another world might not have been the knowledge of what befell his
+"dear" Lady Hamilton in her latter days.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+  BUY THESE TITLES
+  where
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+MYSTERY
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+  Strange Murders at Greystones
+  _By Elsie N. Wright_
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+  Guilt
+  _By Henry James Forman_
+
+  The Stretelli Case
+  _By Edgar Wallace_
+
+  Silinski, Master Criminal
+  _By Edgar Wallace_
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+  The Great Hold-up Mystery
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+  The Uncanny House
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+  Long Shadows
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+  By Foul Means
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+
+  The Phantom Rickshaw
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+  Dreamy Hollow
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+  The Diamond Cross Mystery
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+HISTORY
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+  In the Old West
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+  The Gold Hunters
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+
+WESTERN
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+  Don Coyote
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+
+
+BIOGRAPHY
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+  Face to Face with Our Presidents
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+ROMANCE
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+  The Girl He Left Behind
+  _By Helen Beecher Long_
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+  Sins of the Children
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+  Bed Rock
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+  Doubloons and The Girl
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+  Quadrille Court
+  _By Cecil Adair_
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+  The Lovely Malincourt
+  _By Helen Mathers_
+
+  Sem's Moroccan Love
+  _By Arthur Kay_
+
+  The Justice of the King
+  _By Hamilton Drummond_
+
+  The Star of Hollywood
+  _By Edward Stilgebauer_
+
+  Some Honeymoon
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+
+  Children of the Whirlwind
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+
+  Who Cares
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+  The Man Who Lived in a Shoe
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+  The Enchanted Garden
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+  The Blindness of Virtue
+  _By Cosmo Hamilton_
+
+  Dancing Desire
+  _By Petronilla Clayton_
+
+  Why Marry
+  _By Farguson Johnson_
+
+
+ADVENTURE
+
+  Letters of Marque
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
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+  Under the Deodars
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  On Autumn Trails
+  _By Emma-Lindsay Squier_
+
+  Soldiers Three
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
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+  Tales of the Fish Patrol
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+  When God Laughs
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+  On the Highest Hill
+  _By H. M. Stephenson_
+
+  South Sea Tales
+  _By Jack London_
+
+  Wilbur Crane's Handicap
+  _By John Maxwell Forbes_
+
+  The Light That Failed
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  Rainbow Island
+  _By Mark Caywood_
+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Superwomen, by Albert Payson Terhune
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Superwomen
+
+Author: Albert Payson Terhune
+
+Release Date: April 1, 2012 [EBook #39339]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERWOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="Front Cover" width="291" height="450"></div>
+
+<h1>
+SUPERWOMEN
+</h1>
+
+<h2>
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+</h2>
+
+<p class="ctr"><img src="images/logo.jpg" alt="Publisher's logo" width="98" height="116"></p>
+
+<h4>
+INTERNATIONAL FICTION LIBRARY<br>
+CLEVELAND, O.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NEW YORK, N.Y.
+</h4>
+
+<h4>
+Copyright, MCMXVI<br>
+By Moffat Yard &#38; Company
+</h4>
+
+<h5>
+<i>Printed in the United States of America<br>
+by</i><br>
+THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO.<br>
+CLEVELAND
+</h5>
+
+<hr class="med">
+
+<div class="tn">
+<p>
+Transcriber's Note: The headings for Chapters 8, 11, and 12 have been
+retained as roman numerals, as printed.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="med">
+
+<p class="section">
+FOREWORD
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Find the Woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will discover her in almost every generation, in almost every
+country, in almost every big city&#8212;the Super-Woman. She is not the
+typical adventuress; she is not a genius. The reason for her strange
+power is occult. When psycho-vivisectionists have thought they had
+segregated the cause&#8212;the formula&#8212;what you will&#8212;in one particular
+Super-Woman or group of Super-Women, straightway some new member of
+the clan has arisen who wields equal power with her notable sisters,
+but who has none of the traits that made them irresistible. And the
+seekers of formulas are again at sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What makes the Super-Woman? Is it beauty? Cleopatra and Rachel were
+homely. Is it daintiness? Marguerite de Valois washed her hands but
+twice a week. Is it wit? Pompadour and La Valliere were avowedly
+stupid in conversation. Is it youth? Diane de Poictiers and Ninon de
+l'Enclos were wildly adored at sixty. Is it the subtle quality of
+femininity? George Sand, who numbered her admirers by the score&#8212;poor
+Chopin in their foremost rank&#8212;was not only ugly, but disgustingly
+mannish. So was Semiramis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nameless charm is found almost as often in the masculine,
+"advanced" woman as in the ultrafeminine damsel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here are stories of Super-Women who conquered at will. Some of them
+smashed thrones; some were content with wholesale heart-smashing.
+Wherein lay their secret? Or, rather, their secrets? For seldom did
+two of them follow the same plan of campaign.
+</p>
+
+<p class="sig">
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sunnybank,"<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Pompton Lakes,<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New Jersey<br>
+1916
+</p>
+
+<hr class="med">
+
+
+<p class="section">
+CONTENTS
+</p>
+
+<table summary="Contents">
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER ONE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">LOLA MONTEZ</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#one">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER TWO</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#two">19</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER THREE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+PEG WOFFINGTON</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#three">41</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER FOUR</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+HELEN OF TROY</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#four">62</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER FIVE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+MADAME JUMEL</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#five">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER SIX</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#six">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER SEVEN</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+CLEOPATRA</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#seven">135</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER EIGHT</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+GEORGE SAND</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#eight">156</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER NINE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+MADAME DU BARRY</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#nine">175</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER TEN</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+LADY BLESSINGTON</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#ten">204</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER ELEVEN</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+MADAME RECAMIER</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#eleven">230</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="chpt" colspan="2">CHAPTER TWELVE</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td class="txt">
+LADY HAMILTON</td>
+<td class="pg"><a href="#twelve">250</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="med">
+
+<a name="one">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="firstchapter">
+CHAPTER ONE
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+LOLA MONTEZ
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+THE DANCER WHO KICKED OVER A THRONE
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Her Majesty's Theatre in London, one night in 1843, was jammed from
+pit to roof. Lumley the astute manager, had whispered that he had a
+"find." His whisper had been judiciously pitched in a key that enabled
+it to penetrate St. James Street clubs, Park Lane boudoirs, even City
+counting-rooms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The managerial whisper had been augmented by a "private view," to
+which many journalists and a few influential men about town had been
+bidden. These lucky guests had shifted the pitch from whisper to p&#230;an.
+By word of mouth and by ardent quill the song of praise had spread.
+One of the latter forms of tribute had run much in this
+rural-newspaper form:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A brilliant <b>divertissement</b> is promised by Mr. Lumley for the
+forthcoming performance of 'The Tarantula,' at Her Majesty's. Thursday
+evening will mark the British debut of the mysterious and bewitchingly
+beautiful Castilian dancer, Lola Montez.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Through the delicate veins of this lovely daughter of dreamy
+Andalusia sparkles the <b>sang azur</b> which is the birthright of the
+hidalgo families alone. In her is embodied not alone the haughty
+lineage of centuries of noble ancestry, but all the fire and mystic
+charm that are the precious heritage of the Southland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At a private view, yesterday, at which your correspondent had the
+honor to be an invited guest, this peerless priestess of
+Terpsichore&#8212;&#8212;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so on for well-nigh a column of adjective-starred panegyric, which
+waxed more impassioned as the dictionary's supply of unrepeated
+superlatives waned. This was before the day of the recognized press
+agent. Folk had a way of believing what they read. Hence the
+gratifyingly packed theater to witness the mysterious Spaniard's
+debut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Royalty itself, surrounded by tired gentlemen in waiting who wanted to
+sit down and could not, occupied one stage box. In the front of
+another, lolled Lord Ranelagh, arbiter of London fashion and accepted
+authority on all matters of taste&#8212;whether in dress, dancers, or
+duels. Ranelagh, recently come back from a tour of the East, divided
+with royalty the reverent attention of the stalls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pit whistled and clapped in merry impatience for the appearance of
+the danseuse. The West End section of the house waited in equal, if
+more subdued eagerness, and prepared to follow every possible
+expression of Ranelagh's large-toothed, side-whiskered visage as a
+signal for its own approval or censure of the much-advertised Lola's
+performance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first scene of the opera passed almost unnoticed. Then the stage
+was cleared and a tense hush gripped the house. A fanfare of cornets;
+and from the wings a supple, dark girl bounded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A whirlwind of welcome from pit and gallery greeted her. She struck a
+sensuous pose in the stage's exact center. The cornetists laid aside
+their instruments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Guitars and mandolins set up a throbby string overture. Lola drew a
+deep breath, flashed a vivid Spanish smile on the audience at large,
+and took the first languid step of her dance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that the dutiful signal seekers cast covert looks once
+more at Lord Ranelagh. That ordinarily stolid nobleman was leaning far
+forward in his stage box, mouth and eyes wide, staring with
+incredulous amaze at the posturing Andalusian. Before her first step
+was complete, Ranelagh's astonishment burst the shackles of silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Gad!" he roared, his excited voice smashing through the soft music
+and penetrating to every cranny. "Gad! It's little Betty James!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke into a Homeric guffaw. A toady who sat beside him hissed
+sharply. The hiss and the guffaw were cues quite strong enough for the
+rest of the house. A sizzling, swishing chorus of hisses went up from
+the stalls, was caught by the pit, and tossed aloft in swelling
+crescendo to the gallery, where it was intensified to treble volume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lola's artistically made-up face had gone white under its rouge and
+pearl powder at Ranelagh's shout. Now it flamed crimson. The girl
+danced on; she was gallant, a thoroughbred to the core&#8212;even though
+she chanced to be thoroughbred Irish instead of thoroughbred
+Spanish&#8212;and she would not be hissed from the stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But now "boos" mingled with the hisses. And Ranelagh's immoderate
+laughter was caught up by scores of people who did not in the least
+know at what they were laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The storm was too heavy to weather. Lumley growled an order. Down
+swooped the curtain, leaving the crowd booing on one side of it, and
+Lola raging on the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which ended the one and only English theatrical experience of Lola
+Montez, the dreamy Andalusian dancer from County Limerick, Ireland.
+That night at Almack's, Lord Ranelagh told a somewhat lengthy story&#8212;a
+story whose details he had picked up in the East&#8212;which was repeated
+with interesting variations next day on Rotten Row, in a dozen clubs,
+in a hundred drawing rooms. There is the gist of the tale:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some quarter century before the night of Lola's London
+<b>premiere</b>&#8212;and <b>derniere</b>&#8212;an Irish girl, Eliza Oliver by
+name, had caught the errant fancy of a great man. The man chanced to
+be Lord Byron, at that time loafing about the Continent and trying,
+outwardly at least, to live up to the mental image of himself that was
+just then enshrined in the hearts of several thousand demure English
+schoolmaids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Byron soon tired of Miss Oliver&#8212;it is doubtful whether he ever saw
+her daughter&#8212;and the Irish beauty soon afterward married a fellow
+countryman of her own&#8212;Sir Edward Gilbert, an army captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The couple's acquaintances being overmuch given to prattling about
+things best forgotten, Gilbert exchanged to a regiment in India,
+taking along his wife and her little girl. The child had meantime been
+christened Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna; which, for practical purposes,
+was blue-penciled down to "Betty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seven years afterward, Gilbert died. His widow promptly married
+Captain Craigie, a solid, worthy, Scotch comrade-at-arms of her
+late husband's. Craigie generously assumed all post-Byronic
+responsibilities, along with the marriage vows. And, at his expense,
+Betty was sent to Scotland&#8212;later to Paris&#8212;to be educated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At sixteen the girl was a beauty&#8212;and a witch as well. She and her
+mother spent a season at Bath, a resort that still retained in those
+days some shreds of its former glory. And there&#8212;among a score of
+younger and poorer admirers&#8212;two men sued for Betty's hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One was Captain James, a likable, susceptible, not over-clever army
+officer, home on furlough from India. The other was a judge, very old,
+very gouty, very rich.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Betty's mother chose the judge, out of all the train of suitors,
+as her son-in-law-elect. Years had taught worldly wisdom to the
+once-gay Eliza.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Betty listened in horror to the old man's mumbled vows. Then, at top
+speed, she fled to Captain James. She told James that her mother was
+seeking to sacrifice her on the altar of wealth. James, like a true
+early-Victorian hero, rose manfully to the occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He and Betty eloped, were married by a registrar, and took the next
+out-bound ship for India.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a day of long and slow voyages. Betty beguiled the time on
+shipboard by a course of behavior such as would have prevented the
+most charitable fellow passenger from mistaking her for a returning
+missionary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were many Anglo-Indians&#8212;officers and civilians&#8212;aboard. And
+Betty's flirtations, with all and sundry, speedily became the scandal
+of the ship. By the time the vessel docked in India, there were dozens
+of women ready to spread abroad the bride's fame in her new home land.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+English society in India was, and is, in many respects like that of a
+provincial town. In the official and army set, one member's business
+is everybody's business.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did Betty take any pains to erase the impressions made by her
+volunteer advance agents. Like a blazing star, she burst upon the
+horizon of India army life. Gloriously beautiful, willful, capricious,
+brilliant, she speedily had a horde of men at her feet&#8212;and a still
+larger number of women at her throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her flirtations were the talk of mess-room and bungalow. Heartlessly,
+she danced on hearts. There was some subtle quality about her that
+drove men mad with infatuation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And her husband? He looked on in horrified wonder. Then he argued and
+even threatened. At last he shut up and took to drink. Betty wrote
+contemptuously to a friend, concerning this last phase:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"He spends his time in drinking, and then in sleeping like a gorged
+boa-constrictor."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+James was liked by the English out there, and his friends fiercely
+resented the domestic treatment that was turning a popular and
+promising officer into a sodden beast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One morning James rode away over the hills and neglected to come back.
+His wife never again heard of him. And at his exit from the scene, the
+storm broke; a storm of resentment that swept Betty James out beyond
+even the uttermost fringe of Anglo-Indian society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hunted up her generous old step-father, Craigie, and induced him
+to give her a check for a thousand pounds, to get rid of her forever.
+She realized another thousand on her votive offerings of jewelry; and,
+with this capital, she took the dust of India from her pretty
+slippers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here ends Lord Ranelagh's scurrilous narrative, told at Almack's.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On her way back to England, Betty broke her journey at Spain,
+remaining there long enough to acquire three valuable assets&#8212;a
+Spanish accent, a semi-tolerable knowledge of Spanish dancing, and the
+ultra-Spanish name of Lola Montez, by which&#8212;through mere courtesy to
+her wishes&#8212;let us hereafter call her. Then she burst upon the British
+public&#8212;only to retire amid a salvo of hisses and catcalls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the premature fall of the curtain at Her Majesty's Theater,
+begins the Odyssey of Lola Montez.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went from London to Germany, where she danced for a time, to but
+scant applause, at second-rate theaters, and at last could get no more
+engagements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thence she drifted to Brussels, where, according to her own later
+statement, she was "reduced to singing in the streets to keep from
+starving." Contemporary malice gives a less creditable version of her
+means of livelihood in the Belgian capital. It was a period of her
+life&#8212;the black hour before the garish dawn&#8212;of which she never
+afterward would talk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But before long she was on the stage again; this time at Warsaw,
+during a revolution. She danced badly and was hissed. But the
+experience gave her an idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went straightway to Paris, where, by posing as an exiled Polish
+patriot, she secured an engagement at the Porte St. Martin Theater. It
+was her last hope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The "Polish patriot" story brought a goodly crowd to Lola's first
+performance in Paris. But, after a single dance, she heard the
+horribly familiar sound of hisses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And at the first hiss, her Irish spirit blazed into a crazy rage; a
+rage that was the turning point of her career.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Glaring first at the spectators like an angry cat, Lola next glared
+around the stage for a weapon wherewith to wreak her fury upon them.
+But the stage was bare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frantic, she kicked off her slippers, and then tore loose her
+heavy-buckled garters. With these intimate missiles she proceeded to
+pelt the grinning occupants of the front row, accompanying the volley
+with a high-pitched, venomous Billingsgate tirade in three languages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was enough. On the instant the hisses were drowned in a salvo of
+applause that shook the rafters, Lola Montez had "arrived." Paris
+grabbed her to its big, childish, fickle heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a spitfire and she couldn't dance. But she had given the
+Parisians a genuine thrill. She was a success. Two slippers and two
+garters, hurled with feminine rage and feminine inaccuracy into the
+faces of a line of bored theatergoers, had achieved more for the fair
+artillerist than the most exquisite dancing could have hoped to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not
+now have dimmed her fame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat
+shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity
+sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French
+adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer,
+challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola,
+accepted the challenge&#8212;and was borne off the field of honor with a
+bullet through his brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lola sought to improve the occasion by swathing herself somberly and
+right becomingly in crape, and by vowing a vendetta against the
+slayer. But before she could profit by the excellent advertisement,
+Dumas chanced to say something to a friend&#8212;who repeated it to another
+friend, who repeated it to all Paris&#8212;that set the superstitious,
+mid-century Frenchmen to looking askance at Lola and to avoiding her
+gaze. Said Monte Cristo's creator:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She has the evil eye. She will bring a curse upon any man who loves
+her."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And by that (perhaps) senseless speech, Dumas drove Lola Montez from
+Paris. But she took with her all her new-born prestige as a danseuse.
+She took it first to Berlin. There she was bidden to dance at a court
+reception tendered by King Frederick William, of Prussia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rooms of the palace, on the night of the reception, were
+stiflingly hot. Lola asked for a glass of water. A much-belaced and
+bechained chamberlain&#8212;to whom the request was repeated by a
+footman&#8212;sent word to Lola that she was there to dance for the king
+and not to order her fellow-servants around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The net result of this answer was another Irish rage. Lola, regardless
+of her pompous surroundings, rushed up to the offending chamberlain
+and loudly made known her exact opinion of him. She added that she was
+tired of dealing with understrappers, and that, unless the king
+himself would bring her a glass of water, there would be no dreamy
+Spanish dance at the palace that night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scandalized officials moved forward in a body to hustle the
+lesemajeste perpetrator out of the sacred precincts. But the rumpus
+had reached the ears of King Frederick William himself, at the far end
+of the big room. His majesty came forward in person to learn the cause
+of the disturbance. He saw a marvelously beautiful woman in a
+marvelously abusive rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the monarch's amused queries, the chamberlain bleated out the
+awful, sacrilegious, <b>schrecklich</b> tale of Lola's demand. The
+king did not order her loaded with chains and haled to the donjon
+keep. Instead, he gave a laughing order&#8212;this gracious and gentle
+sovereign who had so keen an eye for beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A moment later a lackey brought the king a glass of water. First
+gallantly touching the goblet to his own lips, his majesty handed it
+with a deep obeisance to Lola.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Except for the advertisement it gave her, she could gain no real
+advantage from this odd introduction to a king. For, next day, she
+received a secret, but overwhelmingly official hint that an instant
+departure not only from Berlin, but from Prussia, too, would be one of
+the wisest moves in her whole career. She went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Bavaria, and to greatness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer, was billed at a Munich theater. She
+danced there but three times. For, on the third evening, the royal box
+was occupied by a drowsy-eyed sexagenarian whose uniform coat was
+ablaze with decorations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old gentleman was Ludwig I. <b>Dei gratia</b>, King of Bavaria, a
+ruler who up to this time had been beloved of his subjects; and whose
+worst vice, in his people's eyes, was that he encouraged art rather
+than arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ludwig watched breathlessly while Lola danced. Afterward he sent for
+her to come to the royal box and be presented to him. She never danced
+again in Bavaria.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For next day Ludwig introduced her at court as "my very good friend."
+Lola dazzled Munich with her jewels and her equipages. The king
+presented her with a huge and hideous mansion. He stretched the laws
+by having her declared a Bavarian subject. And, having done that, he
+bestowed upon her the titles of "Baroness von Rosenthal and Countess
+von Landfeld." Next, he granted her an annuity of twenty thousand
+florins. Things were coming Lola's way, and coming fast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Bavarians did not dislike her&#8212;at first. When Ludwig forced his
+queen to receive her and to pin upon the dancer-emeritus' breast the
+Order of St. Theresa, there was, to be sure, a shocked murmur. But it
+soon died down. Had Lola been content with her luck, she might have
+continued indefinitely in her new and delightfully comfortable mode of
+life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, according to Lola's theory, a mortal who is content with success
+would be content with failure. And she strove to play a greater role
+than the fat one assigned to her by the love-sick old king.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had read of Pompadour and other royal favorites whose vagrom whims
+swayed the destinies of Europe. She sought to be a world power; the
+power behind the throne; the woman who could mold the politics of a
+dynasty. And she laid her plans accordingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not even a dream, this new ambition of Lola's. It was a
+comic-opera fantasy. Bavaria, at best, was only a little German state
+with no special voice in the congress of nations. And Lola herself had
+no more aptitude for politics than she had for dancing. Nor did she
+stop to consider that Germans in 1846 were much more likely to
+tolerate a fair foreigner's meddling with their puppet king's domestic
+affairs than with matters of public welfare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Lola Montez ever did the bulk of her sane thinking when it was too
+late. So she proceeded to put her idiotic plans into operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+First, she cajoled King Ludwig into dismissing in a body his perfectly
+capable and well-liked ministry. As delighted with that success as is
+the village cut-up when he pulls a chair from under the portly
+constable&#8212;and with even less wholesome fear of the result to
+herself&#8212;Lola next persuaded the king to change his whole policy of
+state. Then things began to happen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One morning Lola awoke in her ugly and costly mansion to find the
+street in front of the door blocked by a highly unfriendly mob, whose
+immediate ambition seemed to be the destruction of the house and
+herself. This was the signal for one more Irish rage, the last on
+public record.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lola, throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, snatched up a loaded
+pistol, and, pushing aside her screaming servants, ran out on the
+front steps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the
+steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing
+mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was
+content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine
+for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling
+them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal
+bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd
+and rescued the angry woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely
+unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the
+avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same
+avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to
+knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her
+twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian
+frontier with stern instructions never to return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on
+her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from
+power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a
+noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish
+girl with a variegated past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Ludwig scandal preceded Lola wherever she tried to go. The
+divinity that hedges a king was everywhere on guard against her. The
+gate to practically every country in Europe was slammed in her face.
+Folk fell to repeating Dumas' "evil-eye" words, and to applying them
+to discrowned old Ludwig. Lola Montez was not wanted anywhere;
+certainly nowhere east of the Atlantic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So she came to New York. Here there were no kings, to bar her out lest
+they share Ludwig's fate. And Americans knew little and cared less
+about the evil eye. If Lola Montez could make good on the stage,
+America was willing to welcome her: If not, it had no further general
+interest in her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, she was well past thirty; at an age when the first glory of
+a woman's siren charms may reasonably be supposed to be slightly
+blurred. New Yorkers were curious to see her, on account of her
+history; but that was their only interest in her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She danced at the old Broadway Theater. People thronged the theater
+for the first few performances. Then, having gazed their fill on the
+Bavarian throne's wrecker and finding she could not dance, they stayed
+away; and Lola ended her engagement at the Broadway to the hackneyed
+"beggarly array of empty benches."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An enterprising manager&#8212;P. T. Barnum, if I remember aright&#8212;raked up
+the Byron story and starred Lola in a dramatization of Lord Byron's
+poem "Mazeppa." But people here had already looked at her, and the
+production was a failure. Next she appeared in one or two miserably
+written plays, based on her own European adventures. These, too,
+failed. She then wrote a beauty book that had a small sale, and wrote
+also a drearily stupid volume of humor, designed as a mock "Guide to
+Courtship."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On her way to America, Lola had stopped in England long enough to
+captivate and marry a British army officer, Heald by name. But she
+soon left him, and arrived in this country without visible matrimonial
+ties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+New York having tired of her, Lola went West. She created a brief, but
+lively, furore among the gold-boom towns along the Pacific coast; not
+so much by reason of her story as for the wondrous charm that was
+still hers. She gave lectures in California, and then made an
+Australian tour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San
+Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One
+of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper
+owner, of San Francisco.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands.
+Back she came to New York. And&#8212;to the wonder of all, and the
+incredulity of most&#8212;she there announced that, though she had been a
+great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to
+penance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday
+she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among
+women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had
+on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day
+in their behalf.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces.
+She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty
+and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough
+money to bury her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez;
+Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and
+worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the
+great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her neglected grave&#8212;in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the
+way&#8212;bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired
+woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering
+reads:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    <b>Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.</b>
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have
+possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could
+have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="two">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER TWO
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+PREMIERE SIREN OF TWO CENTURIES
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+This story opens with the account of a deathbed scene; somewhat
+different from any other you may have read. It is brought in to throw
+a light on what heredity and careful instruction can do in molding a
+young mind. But don't necessarily skip it for that reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day in 1630, the Sieur de L'Enclos lay dying in his great, dreary
+bedroom in his great, dreary Touraine castle. There was no especial
+tragedy about the closing of his life. He was elderly, very rich, and
+possessed of a record for having used, to the full, every minute of a
+long and exciting life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Beside his bed stood a fifteen-year-old girl, his only daughter, Anne;
+affectionately nicknamed by him&#8212;and later by all Europe and still
+later by all history&#8212;"Ninon." She was something below medium height,
+plump, with a peachblow complexion, huge dark eyes, and a crown of
+red-gold hair. Ninon and her father had been chums, kindred spirits,
+from the girl's babyhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dying noble opened his eyes. They rested lovingly on the daughter
+who had bent down to hear the whispered sounds his white lips were
+striving to frame. Then, with a mighty effort, De L'Enclos breathed
+his solemn last words of counsel to the girl&#8212;counsel intended to
+guide her through the future that he knew must lie before so rich and
+so beautiful a damsel. This was his message to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Ninon&#8212;little girl of mine&#8212;in dying I have but one single regret. I
+regret that I did not&#8212;get more fun out of life. I warn
+you&#8212;daughter&#8212;do not make the terrible mistake that I have made.
+Live&#8212;live so that at the last you will not have the same cause for
+sorrow!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So saying, the Sieur de L'Enclos bade an exemplary farewell to earth
+and to its lost opportunities of fun. To judge from his career as well
+as from his last words, one may venture the optimistic belief that he
+had not thrown away as many such priceless chances as he had led his
+daughter to believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon, then, at fifteen, was left alone in the world. And her actions
+in this sad state conformed to those of the customary helpless
+orphan&#8212;about as closely as had her father's death speech to the
+customary "last words." With a shrewdness miraculous in so young a
+girl, she juggled her Touraine property in a series of deals that
+resulted in its sale at a little more than double its actual value.
+Rich beyond all fear of want, she settled in Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not there or then that her love life set in. That had begun
+long before. As a mere child she had flashed upon her little world of
+Touraine as a wonder girl. The superwoman charm was hers from the
+first. And she retained it in all its mysterious power through the
+seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; men vying for her love
+when she was ninety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A full year before her father died, she had met the youthful Prince de
+Marsillac, and had, at a glance, wholly captivated his semi-royal
+fancy. It was Ninon's first love affair&#8212;with a prince. She was
+dazzled by it just a little, she whom monarchs later could not dazzle.
+She was only fourteen. And in Touraine a princely admirer was a
+novelty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Marsillac's boyish supplication, Ninon consented to elope with him.
+Off they started. And back to their respective homes they were brought
+in dire disgrace. There was all sorts of a scandal in the
+neighborhood. The princeling was soundly spanked and packed off to
+school. The Sieur de L'Enclos came in for grave popular disapproval by
+laughingly refusing to mete out the same stern penalties to Ninon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Paris, then, at sixteen, went the orphaned Ninon. Laughing at
+convention and at the threats of her shocked relatives, she set up
+housekeeping on her own account, managing the affairs of her Rive
+Gauche mansion with the ease of a fifty-year-old grande dame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Paris burst the new star. In a month the city was crazy over her.
+Not her beauty alone, nor her wit, nor her peculiar elegance, nor her
+incredibly high spirits.&#8212;Not any or all of these, but an
+all-compelling magnetism drew men to her in shoals and swarms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By reason of her birth and breeding she took at once her place in the
+court society of the day. Before she was twenty, she was setting the
+fashions for feminine Paris, and was receiving in her salon the
+stateliest ladies of the court, in equal numbers with their far less
+stately husbands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frankly, she declared herself a votary, not of love, but of loves. For
+constancy she had no use whatsoever. One admirer who had won a
+temporary lease of her gay heart swore he would kill himself unless
+Ninon would swear to love him to eternity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as she loved him ardently, she made the rash vow. When at the end
+of ninety days she gave him his dismissal, he reproached her wildly
+and bitterly for her broken pledge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You swore you would love me to eternity!" he raged. "And now&#8212;&#8212;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And now," she explained, as one might soothe a cranky child, "I have
+kept my vow. I have loved you for three endless months. That is an
+eternity&#8212;for love!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And three months remained, to the end, Ninon's record for fidelity to
+any one man; which was, perhaps, as well, for the waiting list was as
+long as that of a hyper-fashionable club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now we come to a story that I do not ask you to believe, although
+all France unquestionably and unquestioningly believed it. Whether
+Ninon herself at first coined it as a joke, or whether it was a hoax
+that she herself credited, it is certain that she grew at last to have
+firm faith in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night&#8212;so Ninon always declared&#8212;when she was about twenty, she
+returned home late from a ball at the Hotel St. Evremond. As she stood
+before the mirror of her boudoir, after her maid had left her for the
+night, she became aware of a shadowy reflection behind her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning, she saw a man clad all in black, his face hidden by the low
+brim of his hat and by his cloak's folds. What little was visible of
+his countenance was ghastly pale. Ninon, ever fearless, did not cry
+out for help. Instead, she approached the black-shrouded stranger and
+demanded to know his business and how he had penetrated to her
+close-barred room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man in black, by way of answer, drew one sable-gloved hand from
+beneath his cloak. In his fingers he grasped a large phial, wherein
+sparkled and glowed a strange, pinkish liquid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Life is short," said the visitor, as Ninon still looked in amazed
+inquiry from his half-hidden face to the rose-colored phial he
+carried. "Life is short, but youth is far shorter. When youth is gone,
+love is gone. Love is the goal of life. Without youth, there is no
+love. Without love, life is a desert. The gifts of youth and beauty
+are yours. Would you make them long-lasting, instead of transient
+blessings that shall too soon become mere memories?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Ninon, dumb with wonder, hesitated to reply, he continued:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The admiration of men melts like summer snow at the first touch of
+age in a woman. Their admiration is now yours. Would you hold it? One
+drop a day from this phial, in your bath, will keep you young, will
+keep you beautiful, will retain for you the love of men."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He set the flask on her dressing table and turned to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You will see me again," he said very slowly and distinctly, "just
+three days before your death."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he vanished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To a generation that has substituted science for superstition, this
+tale of the Man in Black reads like stark nonsense. Perhaps it is. But
+no one in the seventeenth century thought so. It was an age rife with
+demon legends; legends of favors granted to mortals in return for a
+residuary mortgage on their souls; and all that sort of thing. The
+tale of Faust was still almost brand-new. Compared with many of the
+traditions that then passed for solid fact, the incident of Ninon and
+the Man in Black was almost commonplace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We laugh at such things; probably with due justification. Yet was
+Ninon's adventure more inexplicable than some of the absolutely
+authenticated cases of Cagliostro's magic? As, for a single example,
+when on a certain date Cagliostro announced in Paris: "The Empress
+Maria Theresa of Austria died this morning." This was long before the
+time of telegraphy or even of railroads. It was a journey of several
+days from Paris to Vienna. Dispatches, reaching the French court a
+week later, announced the unforeseen death of Maria Theresa at the
+very hour named by Cagliostro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon may have invented the Man in Black. Or he may have been one of
+the many quacks who hung on the fringes of courts and made capital out
+of the superstitious folly of the rich. Or perhaps&#8212;&#8212;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At all events, seventy years later, Ninon had either a most remarkable
+encounter with the same man, or else, in her dying moments, she took
+odd trouble to substantiate a silly lie that was nearly three-quarters
+of a century old. Finish the story and then form your own theories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paris was alive in those days with titled women whose antecedents were
+doubtful and about whose characters there could unluckily be no doubt.
+They moved in the best society&#8212;or, rather, in the highest. Most of
+them made a living by one form or another of graft. And always there
+was an exclusive class of women who would not receive them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon quickly proved she had neither lot nor parcel with these titled
+adventuresses. From first to last she accepted not a sou, not a jewel,
+not a favor&#8212;political or otherwise&#8212;from the grands seigneurs who
+delighted to do her honor. From first to last, too, she accepted as
+her due the friendship of the most respectable and respected members
+of her own sex.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was never an adventuress, never a grafter, never a climber. She
+loved for love's own sake. And if the men to whom in lightning
+succession she gave her resilient heart chanced often to be among the
+foremost of the realm, it was only because the qualities that made
+them what they were made them also the type of man Ninon preferred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She never benefited in any material way from their adoration. The
+nearest approach was when Richelieu, the grim old iron cardinal, bent
+his ecclesiastical and consumptive body before her altar. She used her
+power over Richelieu freely, but never for herself; always to soften
+the punishment of some luckless man or woman who had fallen under the
+rod of his eminence's displeasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thereby, and through Richelieu's love for her, Ninon clashed with no
+less a personage than the Queen of France herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Anne of Austria came from Spain to be the bride of Louis XIII of
+France, Richelieu fell in love with the pretty young queen. Anne had
+not wit enough to appreciate the cardinal's genius or to fear his
+possible hate. So&#8212;seeing in him only a homely and emaciated little
+man, whose pretensions she considered laughable&#8212;the queen hit on a
+scheme of ridding herself forever of Richelieu's love sighs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pretended to listen to his courtship, then told him coyly that his
+austerity and lack of human weakness and of humor made her afraid of
+him. The enamored Richelieu insisted that he could be as human and as
+fun loving as any other man. Anne bade him prove it by dressing as a
+circus clown and dancing a saraband for her. She said she would hide
+behind the curtains of a room in the palace and watch him do it. Then,
+were she convinced that he could really unbend and could she overcome
+her fear of his lofty dignity, she would come forth and tell him so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The all-powerful Richelieu&#8212;the man of blood, whom even the haughtiest
+nobles feared&#8212;so far lost every remnant of sanity as to do as the
+queen bade him. As a harlequin, he capered and leaped about the empty
+room, his eyes ever on the curtain at its far end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suddenly, in the midst of his idiotic performance, the curtain was
+dashed aside; a howl of laughter swept the room; and the queen stood
+revealed to his gaze. Clustered around her and reeling with mirth were
+a score of courtiers; men and women both.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that day Richelieu was Anne's sworn foe. He wrecked her repute
+with the king, and for a long time managed to have her kept a prisoner
+in the palace. In a thousand ways he made her life a torment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, through the grim cardinal's love for Ninon de L'Enclos, Anne
+thought she saw a way of striking back at her enemy. She sent for
+Ninon, chided her for her mode of living, and ended by ordering her
+sharply to retire at once to a convent. Ninon simply smiled at the
+command, curtsied to the queen, and said demurely:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I will gladly go to any convent your majesty may designate&#8212;just as
+soon as I become as unattractive to men as is the woman who wants to
+send me there."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She left the royal presence. And so great was the power of the girl's
+beauty in the hearts of those in France's high places, Anne did not
+dare put her command into effect. The tale of the conversation spread
+like the prehistorically bromidic "wildfire," and Ninon won new
+laurels thereby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Duke of St. Evremond, at that time one of the greatest men in
+Europe, offered her his heart and his princely fortune. She replied
+that his heart was a precious gift which she would prize forever&#8212;or
+for a month or two at the very least; but that she had no use whatever
+for his fortune, as she had all the money she needed and more would be
+only a burden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the duke&#8212;veteran of many a love affair where fortunes had counted
+for far more than hearts&#8212;made the quaint, historic reply:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    "<b>Mademoiselle, tu es un honnete homme!</b>" ("Mademoiselle, you
+    are an honest man!")
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Three generations of Sevignes&#8212;father, son, and grandson&#8212;in turn
+loved Ninon during her seventy-five years of heartbreaking. Love for
+her seemed a hereditary trait in the Sevigne family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was the old Duke of St. Evremond, of all her numberless wooers,
+for whom Ninon cared most. Though their love was soon dead, they
+remained loyal and devoted friends to the day of the duke's death.
+Their correspondence&#8212;prettily formal, yet with an undercurrent of
+true affection&#8212;is still extant. And through life Ninon ran always to
+the duke with every sorrow or perplexity; notably when, at the age of
+sixty, she discovered her first wrinkle, an all but invisible crease
+between her brows. In horror she related to St. Evremond the fearful
+tragedy. With a laugh he banished her dread.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"That is no wrinkle, ma petite," he reassured her. "Love placed it
+there to nestle in."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mighty Prince de Conde, the left-handedly royal D'Estrees, La
+Rochefoucauld (the Machiavelli of France,) and many another of like
+rank and attainment were proud to count themselves Ninon's worshipers.
+To no one did she show more favor than to another. King of France or
+Scarron, the humpback poet&#8212;so long as they could amuse her, Ninon
+gave no thought to their titles or wealth or name. To her, one was as
+good as another. To none did she give fidelity. Nearly all of them she
+treated outrageously. Yet of them all, only one was ever driven away
+by her caprices before she was fully ready to dismiss him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That sole exception was the gallant Comte de Fiesque, who, for a brief
+space of time, held her wandering heart and thoughts. Ninon as a rule
+was not quarrelsome. But she and De Fiesque were as flint and steel.
+Their affair was one fierce series of spats and disputes that blazed
+out at last in a pyrotechnic row.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a result of this climax quarrel, De Fiesque scuttled away in red
+wrath, vowing that he was forever and ever done with so ill-tempered
+and cranky a woman as Ninon de L'Enclos.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon was aghast. Paris was aghast. France was aghast. The love world
+at large was aghast. For the first time in her whole hectic life,
+Ninon de L'Enclos had been deserted&#8212;actually deserted! And by a
+nobody like De Fiesque! She who had snubbed a king, had tired of
+Condez, had yawned daintily in the half-monarchical face of D'Estrees
+himself!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was unbelievable. For an instant her fame as a peerless and
+all-conquering Wonder Woman threatened to go into partial eclipse. But
+only for an instant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Fiesque, placed during a little hour on a pinnacle of flaring
+originality, began to receive tenderly reproachful letters from Ninon,
+beseeching him to come back to her, saying she had been wrong in their
+dispute, begging his forgiveness&#8212;Ninon, to whom princes had knelt
+trembling!&#8212;promising all sorts of meek, womanly behavior if only he
+would cure her heartbreak by a word of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These letters of hers to her deserter would have moved an equestrian
+statute to maudlin tears. But De Fiesque's pride had been too deeply
+cut by that last quarrel, to let him relent. Besides, he was vastly
+enjoying his novel position as the only man on earth to whom Ninon de
+L'Enclos had made such an appeal. So while his fellow courtiers
+alternately envied him and longed to kick him, they wondered what
+might be the secret of his fascination over Ninon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, for a few days, matters stood. Then Ninon hit on a master
+stroke. The thing that had first attracted De Fiesque to her had been
+the glory of her red-gold hair. He had loved to bury his face in its
+shimmering, soft masses, to run its silk strands through his fingers.
+Incidentally, in the course of their epoch-marking quarrel, he had
+called Ninon supremely vain and selfish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now she cut off all her wonderful hair; cut it off, wrapped it up, and
+sent it, without a word of explanation, to De Fiesque. He understood.
+She had made this supreme sacrifice for him&#8212;for the man who had
+deserted her. To him she was offering this chief beauty of hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Fiesque's pride vanished. Through the streets he ran, bareheaded,
+to Ninon's house. Into her presence he dashed and flung himself at her
+feet, imploring forgiveness for his brutality and vowing that he loved
+her alone in all the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the rest of the dialogue did not at all work out along any
+recognized lines of lovers' reconciliations. Ninon patiently heard to
+an end De Fiesque's blubbered protestations of devotion. Then, very
+calmly and triumphantly, she pointed to the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The interview was over. So was the affair. Ninon de L'Enclos was
+vindicated. No lover had ever permanently deserted her. There was no
+man so stubborn that she could not lure him back to her. The De
+Fiesque incident was closed. All that remained for Ninon to do was to
+introduce among Paris women a temporary fashion of wearing the hair
+short. Which she promptly did. And thus she suffered not at all by her
+ruse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some two centuries later, George Sand, who had read of the incident,
+tried the same trick to win back Alfred de Musset. In her case, it was
+a right dismal failure. De Musset, too, was entirely cognizant of the
+story of Ninon's shorn hair. And even without her hair, Ninon was
+lovely; while, even with hers, George Sand was hideous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Queen Christina of Sweden came to France. Ninon delighted the
+eccentric Swede. Christina made a confidante and familiar friend of
+her. She begged Ninon to return with her to Sweden, promising her a
+title and estates and a high place at court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon called unexpectedly at Christina's Paris apartments one morning
+to talk over the plan. She entered the queen's drawing-room
+unannounced. There on the floor lay a man, one of the Swedish
+officials in Christina's suite. He was dead&#8212;murdered&#8212;and was lying
+as he had fallen when he had been stricken down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above him stood Christina, at her side the assassin who had struck the
+blow. The queen turned to Ninon and explained. The official had
+displeased her majesty by some undiplomatic act; and taking justice
+into her own hands, Christina had ordered another member of her suite
+to murder the offender. She was as unconcerned over the killing as if
+she had ordered a rabid dog to be shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon fled in panic fear from the apartment. Nor ever again could she
+be induced to come into the presence of the royal murderess. Thus
+ended the Swedish project.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though the confidential friendship of one queen was thus taken
+forcibly from Ninon, she had later the satisfaction of helping on the
+cause of another and uncrowned queen. It is her one recorded
+experience in dabbling with politics, and the role she played therein
+is interesting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+King Louis XIV.&#8212;son of that Anne of Austria who had hated Ninon&#8212;had
+reached the age when life began at times to drag. The "<b>Grand
+Monarque</b>" had still fewer reasons than those of Ninon's father to
+deplore the missing of any good times. But youth had fled from him at
+last. He found himself, in middle age, a sour-faced, undersized man,
+with a huge periwig, a huger outjutting beak of a nose, and wearing
+egregiously high boot heels to eke out his height. People&#8212;a very few
+of them and at a safe distance&#8212;were beginning to laugh at his
+pretensions as a lady-killer. Nature, too, was proving herself less a
+tender mother than a Gorgonlike stepmother, by racking him with
+dyspepsia, bad nerves, and gout.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These causes led him to turn temporarily to what he termed "the higher
+life." In other words, by his whim, the court took to wearing somber
+garments, changing its scandalous conversation for pious reflections
+and its unprintable novels for works on philosophy. Whereat, yawns of
+boredom assailed high Heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of his brief penitence, Louis frowned majestically upon
+his tempest-tempered favorite, Madame de Montespan. And she&#8212;tactless
+or over-sure of her position&#8212;scowled back, harshly derided the new
+order of affairs, and waxed more evil-tempered than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Madame de Montespan's household was a certain Madame de Maintenon,
+widow of the humpbacked little Scarron, who had once sued for Ninon de
+L'Enclos' favor. Strangely enough, his widow and Ninon were close
+friends. And at this court crisis. Ninon made the term "friendship"
+mean something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She herself had plainly shown that she had no interest in the king.
+Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de
+Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always
+disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the
+king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage
+director coaches a promising but raw actor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery
+De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the
+presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and attitude of awed
+devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow&#8212;of his own accord,
+as he thought&#8212;and spending more and more time in her company. And De
+Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students,
+managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration
+that slowly warmed into love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under
+her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right
+sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a
+royal favorite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace
+chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband
+of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one
+of the ceremony's few witnesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ninon had "played politics" just once&#8212;and with far-reaching results
+to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to
+prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is
+laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and
+partly populated America.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts
+and a setter of fashions. She found herself a social arbiter as well.
+Without an introduction to the illustrious Ninon de L'Enclos and a
+word of indorsement from her, no young man could hope to make his way
+in Paris society. Noblemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris
+for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of
+introduction to Ninon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired.
+With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at
+court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing
+amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power
+wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and
+her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one
+or other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For instance, in her old age&#8212;or rather in what would have passed for
+old age in any other woman&#8212;she took an interest in a wizened,
+monkey-like boy of the people. She set him on the path to advancement
+and supplied him with the money for his education. To his dying day,
+the little man remembered her with a veneration most people would have
+bestowed on a saint; even though he used the education she had given
+him to help in tearing down the monarchy whose nobles had been his
+benefactress' slaves. He is known to fame as Voltaire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Years came and went. They merged into decades and quarter centuries.
+The men who once had loved Ninon de L'Enclos grew old and died, and
+their places were taken by sons and then by grandsons. Dynasties
+changed. The world rolled on. New times brought new customs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Ninon remained unchanged. Still beautiful, still vibrant with all
+her early gay charm, she remained to outward appearances what she had
+been for the past fifty years. The grandsons of her girlhood suitors
+were as madly in love with her as had been their grandsires. In love,
+in society, in fashion, she was still the unquestioned sovereign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throughout Europe, there was now no one who doubted the unadorned
+truth of the story concerning the Man in Black; for it seemed that no
+mortal agency could have kept any woman so perennially young. As the
+years passed, folk fell to speculating on how many drops of the
+precious rose-colored liquid might still remain in the phial. And, in
+scared voices, they repeated the prophecy of the man in black:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    "<b>You shall see me once again three days before your death.</b>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps, now that you know Ninon better, you may laugh less
+contemptuously at the tale of the Man in Black; or, at the least,
+credit her with believing it. Throughout her life, she never changed
+the story in any way; nor could the shrewdest cross-examining lead her
+to contradict herself about any of its most minute details. A haunting
+fear of the Man in Black's promised return was always in her mind,
+even during her gayest days and nights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As late as her ninetieth year men made vehement love to her. At an age
+when most women are withered crones, she still broke hearts. Men
+fought duels by the dozen for her favor. In her old age a youth blew
+out his brains on her account.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During her later years a great sorrow came to her. Through no
+conscious fault of her own, she was enmeshed in what was probably the
+most horrible tragedy of its sort in history. This tragedy cannot even
+be touched on here. In no book written in the English language can you
+find its complete details. It is enough to say that the nameless
+horror of it wrecked Ninon's health and her mind, leaving her for the
+time a mental and physical wreck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable
+spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled
+as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature,
+becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated,
+lauded to the skies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author.
+Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank
+or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and
+pass them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was
+identical with her private letters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is odd, and possibly&#8212;or possibly not&#8212;significant, that of the
+world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any
+other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one
+common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms.
+The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest
+itself by use of the pen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also
+authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one
+has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon
+de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame
+Roland, and Marie Stuart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered
+Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had
+worshiped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself
+was ninety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross
+exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black
+claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring
+and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women&#8212;women young
+enough to be her grandchildren&#8212;were neglected for her sake. It is
+said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration
+of love from a noble who had met her but a few days earlier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in
+blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to
+one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until
+nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon
+died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken
+hand, this sentence:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    "<b>I have just seen the man in black again!</b>"
+</p>
+
+
+
+<a name="three">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER THREE
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+PEG WOFFINGTON
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+IRISH HEART CONJURER
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+A throng of people&#8212;barefoot peasants, modish idlers, tradesfolk,
+riffraff&#8212;stood in a Dublin courtyard one day in 1727, providing the
+much-admired "sea of upturned faces." All eyes were raised, all necks
+were back bent. Every one was looking aloft to where a taut wire was
+stretched between two post tops.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Along the wire walked a harlequin, taking mincing dance steps and
+balancing across his shoulders a pole from whose extremities dangled
+two huge baskets. To make the feat the more interesting by adding a
+spice of possible peril, announcement had been made that each basket
+contained a live child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chance of a triple tragedy in the event of a misstep made the
+tight-wire walk a right diverting spectacle, and thrilling withal, to
+the good folk of Dublin. But half way between the two extremity posts,
+still a new element of interest was added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, at that point, the top suddenly popped off one of the baskets,
+and a big-eyed, laughing face beamed down, over the edge, at the
+crowd. The face of a seven-year-old child&#8212;a girl. A roar of applause
+followed upon the youngster's unrehearsed appearance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus did Peg Woffington, a queen of her century's actresses and
+consummate heart conjurer, make her professional debut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg&#8212;her full first name, which nobody dreamed of using, was
+Margaret&#8212;was the daughter of an Irish bricklayer who had one point in
+common with certain modernists in that he was rabidly opposed to all
+doctors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the medical guild had in due time its revenge on the sacrilegious
+brick artist. For once, when Woffington fell ill, he fiercely refused
+to have a physician summoned. And he rapidly grew better. As her
+husband was convalescing, Mrs. Woffington sought to make assurance
+doubly certain by calling in a doctor. The pill juggler looked at the
+invalid and pronounced him out of danger. Next day Woffington died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg was just learning to walk at the time of her lamented father's
+tilt with the cult of &#198;sculapius. She and her baby sister, Mary, at
+once set about helping to earn their own living, by toddling on either
+side of their mother when the widow hawked watercress through the
+streets, and shrilly piping in duet the virtues of her wares.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Dublin, when Peg was seven, came one Madame Violante, with a troupe
+of tumblers and rope dancers. Peg was apprenticed to Madame Violante.
+But her term of service as a baby acrobat was short. Her employer had
+better use for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Madame Violante who originated the ever-since-popular custom of
+producing famous plays and operas, with child actors filling all the
+roles. Her "Liliputian Troupe" scored a big success in Dublin and the
+provinces. Much of this success was due to Peg, who almost invariably
+was cast for old-woman parts, and who "doubled in the brass" by doing
+quaint little step dances between the acts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was cruelly hard work for a growing child; nor was the early
+eighteenth-century theater the very best sort of nursery and moral
+training school for little girls. But apart from other and less
+creditable lessons acquired, she learned stage presence and
+practically every art and trick of the profession.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the "Liliputian Troupe," Peg graduated into the more lucrative
+and equally moral pursuit of theater orange vender. In slack seasons,
+when no cargo of oranges chanced to have landed recently from the
+Americas, she acted, off and on; playing, at twelve, mature roles in
+provincial theater comedies, and exhibiting a rollicking humor that
+carried her audiences by assaut. At seventeen, she was playing&#8212;at
+seven dollars and fifty cents a week&#8212;<b>Ophelia</b> and other
+exacting parts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incidentally, on both sides of the footlight candles&#8212;as actress and
+as orange girl in the pit&#8212;she had long since made herself the toast
+of the Dublin beaux. She was pretty&#8212;though not strikingly so. She had
+a ready, and occasionally flaying, Irish wit. She had, too, the magic,
+if still undeveloped, fascination of the super-woman. As to her
+morals&#8212;they were the morals of any and every other girl of her
+environment and upbringing. She was quite as good as she knew how to
+be. There was not a grain of real vice in her whole cosmos.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was a blazing ambition; an ambition that was cramped and
+choked in the miserable, makeshift provincial playhouses. She burned
+to be a famous actress. There was no chance for her in Ireland. So she
+came to London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a case of burning her bridges behind her. For she carried a
+worn purse that held seventeen shillings. And the not-overnew dress
+she wore was her sole wardrobe. These were her tangible assets. On
+this capital and on genius and pluck and ambition and good looks and
+the charm that was daily growing more and more irresistible, Peg
+relied to keep her going.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To manager after manager she trudged. Not one would find work for her.
+In all, she made nineteen applications. And she scored just precisely
+nineteen rank failures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, half starved and wholly discouraged, she succeeded in
+interesting the manager of the Covent Garden Theater. And he gave her,
+or sold her, the chance she sought&#8212;the chance to appear before a
+London audience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her first appearance on the metropolitan stage was all that was needed
+to prove her worth. At once she caught the public fancy. Soon she
+found herself the most popular actress in England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An air of mingled sadness and gayety in her stage work, an audacity
+and fresh youthfulness&#8212;and the mystic charm&#8212;carried her straight to
+the front. At this period she touched nothing but comedy&#8212;at which she
+had no peer&#8212;and preferably played male roles. Masculine attire set
+forth her stunning figure, and she played devil-may-care, boyish parts
+as could no other woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night, after the first act of "The Constant Couple," wherein, clad
+in small-clothes and hose, she was playing <b>Sir Harry Wildair</b>,
+Peg ran laughing and triumphant into the greenroom. There she chanced
+to find her bitterest friend and rival, Mistress Kitty Clive, a clever
+but somewhat homely actress. Said Peg in delight:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They applauded me to the echoes! Faith, I believe half the men in the
+house thought I was really a boy."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Perhaps," sneered envious Kitty. "But it is certain that at least
+half of them knew you weren't."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg stopped short in her gay laugh and eyed Kitty's plain visage
+quizzically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mistress Clive," observed Peg, in irrelevant reflection, "did you
+ever stop to consider how much utterly useless modesty an ugly woman
+is responsible for unloading upon this poor world of ours?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kitty did not again cross swords with Peg. Indeed, after the first
+encounter, few people did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fops, the wits, the macaronis, the bloods, the Corinthians&#8212;all
+had discovered Peg long before this time. She was their darling, their
+idol. As this poor article is too brief in scope to contain a
+transcript of London's Social and Club Register of the day, most of
+Peg's minor conquests must be passed over without a word. One or two
+alone stand out as worth a few sentences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Macklin, matinee favorite and really great actor, fell heels over head
+in love with her. So did Hallam, the doctor-author. Macklin, having no
+hope of winning Peg's favor, was content to watch over her and to
+guard her like a faithful bulldog. Hallam was not so humble.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg did not inherit her father's hatred for doctors, for she flirted
+lazily with Hallam and amused herself with his admiration. In time she
+tired of him and frankly told him so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hallam, lacking the game, sought the name. Furious at his dismissal,
+he was still eager to be considered a successful wooer of the famous
+actress. So he took to boasting loudly at White's and the Cocoa Tree
+that Peg cared for him alone, and that she had written him reams of
+burningly ardent love letters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg heard of the boast and was foolish enough to run to the devoted
+Macklin with the story, entreating him to punish the braggart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Macklin did not wait to write a challenge, or even go home for his
+sword, which he did not happen to be wearing that day. Snatching up
+his cane, he rushed to a near-by coffeehouse where he knew Hallam was
+likely to be found at that hour. There he discovered the author-doctor
+drinking with a circle of friends, to whom he was descanting upon
+Peg's worship of himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Macklin sprang at Hallam, seized him by the throat, and caned him
+unmercifully. Hallam writhed free and whipped out his sword. Macklin,
+forgetting that he himself was wielding a cane and not a sword,
+parried Hallam's first thrust and lunged for the doctor's face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ferrule of the cane pierced Hallam's left eyeball and penetrated
+to his brain, killing him instantly&#8212;an odd climax to one of history's
+oddest duels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Macklin was placed on trial for his life. But he was promptly
+acquitted. And Peg's renown glowed afresh, because, through her, a man
+had died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A pamphlet, written by still another vehement admirer, contains a
+description of Peg Woffington, written about the time of Hallam's
+taking off. Part of this word picture is worth repeating verbatim. You
+will note that, though contemporary, it is in the past tense. Here it
+is:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    Her eyes were black as jet, and, while they beamed with ineffable
+    luster, at the same time revealed all the sentiments of fair
+    possessor. Her eyebrows were full and arched, and had a peculiar
+    property of inspiring love or striking terror. Her cheeks were
+    vermilioned with nature's best rouge, and outvied all the labored
+    works of art.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    Her nose was somewhat of the aquiline, and gave her a look full of
+    majesty and dignity. Her lips were of the color of coral and the
+    softness of down and her mouth displayed such beauties as would
+    thaw the very bosom of an anchorite. Her teeth were white and
+    even. Her hair was of a bright auburn color. Her whole form was
+    beauteous to excess.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+In the heyday of her glory, Peg went "to drink a dish of tea" with a
+party of friends one afternoon. Among the guests was a slender little
+commercial man, a wine merchant, in fact; shrewd, stingy, and smug.
+How such a character as his could have awakened the very faintest
+response in impulsive, big-hearted Peg's is one of the innumerable
+mysteries of hearts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at first glance she loved the little man; loved him as never
+before she had loved, and as she would never love again. She had met
+the love of her life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She asked to have him introduced. The little vintner, tickled that the
+great Mistress Woffington should have deigned to notice an unknown
+nonentity, was duly brought up and presented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg, her head swimming, did not at once catch his name and bade him
+repeat it. Obediently, the dapper youth replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"David Garrick, madam."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the hour that ensued, Peg led Garrick to talk about himself&#8212;a
+never-difficult task. He told her that he hated his trade and that he
+was not making money thereby. Peg, appraising the man's appearance as
+well as a woman newly in love could hope to, saw that, though short,
+he was graceful and strikingly handsome. Also, that he had a marvelous
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abruptly, she broke in on his soliloquy by suggesting that he go on
+the stage. Garrick stared. She spoke of the glories of a star's life.
+Garrick yawned. She mentioned that successful actors drew large
+salaries. Garrick sat up and began to listen. When she went on to
+speak of the fabulous receipts that awaited a star, Garrick feverishly
+consented to her plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg set to work, using to the straining point all her boundless
+theatrical influence. She got Garrick a chance. She coached him in the
+rudiments of acting. She found that the little wine seller had a
+Heaven-sent gift for the stage. So did the managers. So, in short
+order, did the public.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Garrick's success was as instantaneous as had been Peg's own. Peg
+rejoiced unspeakably in his triumph. So did he. The lofty motives that
+actuated Garrick's stage work may be guessed at from this entry in his
+diary October 20, 1741:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>An infatuated swain swore that if she did not return his love,
+    he would hang, drown, or shoot himself; and in order not to be
+    responsible for his suicide, she consented to listen to his
+    sighs. Then there came along a gentleman with money who won her
+    affection. Another next presented and outbid the former. Another
+    offered, and she received him in her train.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But he made infinitely more than the prophesied one thousand, five
+hundred dollars a year. For he speedily became an actor manager. His
+business training and his notorious stinginess were splendid assets.
+Money flowed in, beyond his wildest dreams of avarice. And he held on
+to it all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg was inordinately proud of his achievements. So was Garrick. Peg
+loved him to distraction. He graciously consented to be loved. Indeed,
+it is probable that he cared for Peg as much as he could care for
+anybody except David Garrick. A swarm of women fell in love with him
+when he made his stage success. In spite of this, he still loved Peg.
+Even if not exclusively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Peg and Garrick appeared for the time as co-stars. And, with him,
+she returned to the scene of her early struggles at Dublin. At the
+Smock Alley Theater there, the two acted in repertoire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The pair were an enormous hit. So much so that they were forced, by
+popular clamor, to play straight through the summer. It was one of the
+hottest summers on record, but great crowds jammed the theater at each
+performance. An epidemic swept Dublin. A good many of the playgoers
+caught the infection at the playhouse and died; which caused the
+epidemic to receive the sinister nickname, "the Garrick fever."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg was no less popular than was her colleague. Together they toured
+Ireland, then came back to London, as openly avowed lovers. They were
+engaged to be married; but the marriage was from time to time
+postponed. Always at Garrick's suggestion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a suitor for Peg's favor at this time,
+was the author&#8212;among half a bookful of odes, sonnets, and so forth,
+to her charms&#8212;of "Lovely Peggy," a popular song "hit" of the day, a
+stanza of which runs:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>Once more I'll tune the vocal shell,</p>
+<p>To hills and dales my passion tell,</p>
+<p>A flame which time can never quell,</p>
+<p class="i6">That burns for lovely Peggy.</p>
+<p>Ye greater bards the lyre should hit,</p>
+<p>To say what subject is more fit,</p>
+<p>Than to record the sparkling wit</p>
+<p class="i6">And bloom of lovely Peggy.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>
+But Sir Charles wooed her in vain. She had thoughts for no one else
+but Garrick. One day, reproached by the poet with her greater regard
+for his rival, and not wishing to cause needless pain to the loser,
+Peg sought to evade the charge by saying that she had not seen Garrick
+for an age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Nay," contradicted the luckless Sir Charles, "I know you saw him only
+yesterday."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Well," she retorted, "and is not that an age?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She and Garrick had a singular rule for maintaining their antemarital
+establishment. It was arranged&#8212;by Garrick&#8212;that each should bear the
+monthly expenses alternately. When it was Peg's turn, it was
+noticeable that much better food was provided and that many more
+dinner guests were invited to the house than during the alternate
+months when Garrick was running the place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, during a Garrick month, a crowd of people dropped in
+unexpectedly to tea. Garrick eyed them with scarce-disguised
+hostility. Peg was delighted to see them. But no more so than if their
+call had come on her month for paying the bills, for she was lavishly
+hospitable, and was always generous&#8212;even prodigal to a fault; traits
+that caused her thrifty lover much pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To-day, as usual, Peg brewed the tea. Glancing at his own new-filled
+cup, as Macbeth might have glared at the imaginary Banquo, Garrick
+groaned aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Peg, you've made this tea so strong it's as red as blood. Zounds,
+ma'am, d'ye think 'tis to be bought at a penny the pound that you
+squander it so?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has ever been the fashion of romantic chroniclers, in writing of
+this strange union, to paint Peg as a suffering saint and Garrick as a
+crank. The latter picture is flawless. The former, unluckily, is not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, though Peg loved the actor manager and&#8212;temporarily&#8212;loved no one
+else, yet it was not in her superwoman nature to rest meekly content
+with the attentions of one man. Even though that man chanced to be the
+celebrated Davy Garrick. Running through the warp of her love was a
+woof of flirtations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For one instance, Lord Darnley, a rich and notorious Piccadilly
+gallant, proclaimed himself her adorer. Flattered at so famous a
+nobleman's love, Peg flirted outrageously with Darnley. She even
+denied to him that she cared for Garrick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once Darnley found Garrick's wig in Peg's boudoir and railed at her
+infidelity to himself. Peg explained that she had borrowed the actor's
+wig and had brought it home in order to practice in it a masculine
+role she was soon to play at the Drury Lane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Garrick, in jealous wrath, protested against her affair with Darnley.
+So she swore to Garrick that she had dismissed his rival&#8212;and gayly
+continued to meet Darnley on the sly. In time, Garrick found her out
+and the discovery led to their separation. Afterward, in remorse, Peg
+is said to have dropped Darnley. But then, as usual, it was too late
+for her renunciation to do any good except to punish herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time after time Garrick had set back the date of the wedding. When at
+last the Darnley crisis came, Peg asked him frankly if he meant to
+keep his pledge or not. He replied gloomily that he did. And he went
+out and bought a wedding ring. He sighed in utter misery as he slipped
+the gold loop on her finger. Out flashed Peg's Irish temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"If you had ten times the wealth and repute and ability that the world
+credits you with," she declared, "I would not become your wife after
+this silent confession."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Almost at once she repented her rash words of release. But Garrick
+held her to them. He considered himself freed. And they parted. Peg
+sent back all Garrick's presents. He refused to return hers&#8212;they
+included a pair of diamond shoe buckles she had given him&#8212;on the
+tender plea that they would serve him as reminders of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg wrote an angry letter, pointing out very clearly the wide gulf
+between sentiment and graft, and telling Garrick on exactly which side
+of that gulf his action in regard to the presents placed him. Garrick
+retaliated by blackening her name on every occasion. She made no reply
+to any of his dirty slurs; nor spoke of him save in praise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus ended the great love of Peg's life. But there were a host of
+minor loves to help take its place. Next came Spanger Berry, a fiery
+Irish actor who, to revenge Peg's supposed wrongs, did his level best
+on the stage to crowd Garrick out of several of the latter's favorite
+roles. He did not wholly succeed in this loverly attempt, but he
+caused Garrick many an hour of uneasiness, and wounded him severely by
+causing a drop in the actor manager's box-office receipts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came a succession. To quote a biographer who wrote while Peg's
+name was yet fresh:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    An infatuated swain swore that if she did not return his love,
+    he would hang, drown, or shoot himself; and in order not to be
+    responsible for his suicide, she consented to listen to his
+    sighs. Then there came along a gentleman with money who won her
+    affection. Another next presented and outbid the former. Another
+    offered, and she received him in her train.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    A fifth appeared, and was well received. A sixth declared his
+    suit, and his suit was not rejected. In a word, a multitude of
+    love's votaries paid their adorations to the shrine of their fair
+    saint, and their fair saint was not cruel.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Then, according to the same chronicler and another, came into Peg's
+life "a personage." There is no hint as to his identity. Whether she
+was true to him or not is debatable. But she soon discovered that he
+had grown tired of her. It was borne to her ears that he was paying
+court to an heiress; intending to break with Peg, by degrees, if his
+suit were successful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heiress gave a masked ball in honor of her birthday. Peg gained
+admittance, in male costume, to the affair, and contrived to become
+her rival's partner in a minuet.
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+"When she straightway poured so many and such vile stories anent
+    the gentleman's character into the lady's ears that the latter
+    fainted and the ball broke up in confusion."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But Peg had gained her aim, by hopelessly discrediting with the
+heiress the recreant lover. The match was broken off. Peg felt herself
+right cozily revenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next wooer was a "person." Not a "personage." He was Owen
+McSwinney, a buffoon. He was the premier clown of his day and a local
+celebrity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+McSwinny was fairly well to do. And, when he died soon afterward, it
+was found that he had left his whole estate&#8212;some two hundred pounds a
+year&#8212;to Peg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not long after this that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in his
+early prime, engaged Peg at four hundred pounds a season, to play at
+his theater. Sheridan was fervid in his admiration of the Irish
+beauty. Perhaps this fact, as well as the marked success she scored in
+his plays, led "The Rivals'" author to double her salary after the
+first season.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yearly she grew more popular with her audiences. Having won a
+matchless reputation as a comedian, she turned for a time to tragic
+characters, and won thereby a wholly new renown as one of England's
+foremost tragedians. But comedy was her forte. And to it she returned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg always vowed she hated the society of her own sex; a lucky thing
+for her, since she was not received by ladies of quality, as were many
+of her fellow actresses, and since her sharp tongue and the fact that
+men went wild over her made her hated by these fellow actresses. But
+her popularity with men endured, and she wasted few tears over women's
+dislikes. Few superwomen have been popular with their own sex.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg was elected president of the famed Beefsteak Club, and she always
+presided at the board in man's attire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this time she had been supporting her mother in a luxury undreamed
+of in the days of the medicophobic bricklayer. And she had educated
+and jealously safeguarded her younger sister, Mary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mary became engaged to Captain George Cholmondeley, son of the Earl of
+Cholmondeley; a glittering match for a bricklayer's daughter. The earl
+was justly indignant and posted away to Peg to break off the affair,
+if need be, by bribing her and the entire tribe of Woffington.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg met the irate old fellow with the full battery of her charm. In a
+trice she had him bewildered, then half relenting. Feebly he tried to
+bluster. Peg cut him short with:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My lord, I'm the one to complain; not you. For now I'll have two
+beggars, instead of one, to feed."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a true forecast, for the earl, despite Peg's blandishments,
+withheld for a time his check book. And in the interim she gave the
+new-wed pair a house to live in and the money to run it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now for the last "big scene" of Peg's stage career: For some time
+she had been ailing. But she kept on with her acting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the evening of May 17, 1757, when she was at the very acme of her
+career, she played Rosalind at Covent Garden. Throughout the comedy
+she was at her scintillant best. The house was hers. Wave after wave
+of frantic applause greeted her, as, still in Rosalind's male
+habiliments, she stepped before the curtain, flushed and smiling, to
+deliver the epilogue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gayly stretching out her arms to pit and stalls, she began the
+familiar lines. With a gesture of infinite coquetry she continued:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+"I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me;
+    complexions that liked me&#8212;that liked me&#8212;&#8212;"
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+She faltered, whitened under her make-up, skipped three full lines,
+and came to the "tag:"
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    "&#8212;&#8212;when I make curtsy&#8212;bid me&#8212;bid me&#8212;farewell!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last line haltingly spoken, she threw her hands high in air and
+screamed in a voice of abject terror:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Oh, God! Oh, God!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a prayer, not an oath. Reeling, the actress staggered to the
+wings, and there fell, swooning, leaving the packed house behind her
+in an uproar of confusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kindly arms bore her from the stage she was never more to tread. Next
+day, all London knew that Mistress Peg Woffington had been stricken
+with paralysis and that from the neck down she was dead. Only the
+keen-witted brain lived, to realize the wreck of the beautiful body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sorrowing crowds blocked the street in front of her house for days,
+momentarily expecting news of her death. But Peg did not die. She did
+not die until three tedious years had passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Little by little she partly regained the use of her body. But she was
+feeble. Her rich beauty was wiped out as an acid-soaked sponge might
+efface a portrait.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of the gay life that had been the breath of her nostrils, feeble
+as an old woman, plain of face and halting of speech&#8212;she nevertheless
+retained enough of the wondrous ancient charm to enslave another
+adorer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The newest&#8212;and last&#8212;wooer was Colonel C&#230;sar, of the Guards. On
+learning that Peg in her stricken state had infatuated the gallant
+colonel, a coffeehouse wit sized up the situation by cruelly quoting:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    "Aut C&#230;sar, aut nullus."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a vile thing to say. And C&#230;sar hunted up the humorist, so runs
+the story, and thrashed him within an inch of his life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some time later, Tate Wilkinson, an "impersonator" of that era&#8212;yes,
+there were pests on the earth, even in those days&#8212;was scheduled to
+give a series of humorous impersonations of famous actors and
+actresses at the Drury Lane; then managed and partly owned by David
+Garrick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg feared she might be held up to ridicule by the mimicry. The fear
+preyed on her mind, to a pathetic extent. Colonel C&#230;sar went to the
+theater and there informed Garrick that if he permitted Wilkinson to
+impersonate Mistress Woffington, the colonel would first give him a
+public caning and would then call him out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The impersonation of Peg had been mysteriously lost from the
+imitator's repertoire when the performance was given.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Peg died in 1760, at the age of forty. She left more than five
+thousand pounds. She left it to charity. And, as a testimonial to her,
+a range of low-roofed, wistaria-covered cottages was built for the
+exclusive use of the poor. The dwellings were known as "The Margaret
+Woffington Cottages."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Samson's costume would start a panic on modern Broadway, yet it was
+doubtless deemed correct in his time. Queen Elizabeth's table manners
+would cause her speedy ejectment from any civilized restaurant, yet
+she was sixteenth century's model for etiquette. George Washington's
+spelling would not pass muster in a primary school, though in 1776 he
+was regarded as a man of high education. While as for Lady Godiva&#8212;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+New times, new ways. Won't you remember that, in dealing with Peg
+Woffington? She was a product&#8212;and a fine product&#8212;of her generation
+and surroundings. Think of her only as an unfortunate, warm-hearted,
+beautiful girl, whom men adored almost as much for her lovable
+qualities as for her siren fascinations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She merits a pedestal in the temple of superwomen. If I have failed to
+establish her right to it, the fault is mine, not hers.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="four">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER FOUR
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+HELEN OF TROY
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+MODEL FOR ALL THE SIRENS OF THE CENTURIES
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Some wise folk say she never existed. But, for that matter, some wise
+folk also say that her press agent, Homer, never existed, and that his
+"Iliad" and "Odyssey" were compilations of lesser men's writings. As
+well say that Napoleon was a "compilation" of his marshals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some aver that she indeed walked the earth, a Wonder Woman, and that
+her charm perhaps stirred up strife among nations, but that her fame
+kept on growing after she was dead, until&#8212;even as hundreds of jokes
+were attributed to Joe Miller that Joe never perpetrated or even
+heard&#8212;people got to making her the heroine of a myriad impossible
+deeds and adventures that no one woman or no ten women could have
+achieved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still others declare that she and her story were allegorical, standing
+for feminine charm and for its fatal power; that she embodied the
+Greek idea of superwoman perfection. The same sort of people gravely
+tell us that Hercules and Cr&#339;sus and William Tell were "solar
+myths"&#8212;whatever that may mean&#8212;and their descendants will put the
+myth brand, ten thousand years hence, on Napoleon, Roosevelt, John L.
+Sullivan, and Lydia Pinkham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While common sense may balk at the tale of Helen of Troy, common sense
+would as readily balk at a narrative of the high cost of living or of
+the All-Europe War. And what is common sense among friends? I am going
+to tell Helen's story as if it were gospel truth. For all I know, it
+may be. I am not going to draw on a dull imagination for any of it,
+but to take it entirely from a dozen of the olden authorities, from
+Homer down. After all, since we believe in Santa Claus, why not in
+Helen of Troy?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(I cannot help feeling a little thrill of pride in this preamble. In
+spots, it is almost scholarly. And so to the story.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was the daughter of Tyndareus of Argos, one of the horde of
+kinglets who split up the Greek archipelago among them. She lived
+three thousand years ago. And so adorable was she that some one
+started a rumor that she was not the daughter of Tyndareus, but of
+great Jove himself. This kind of talk passed as complimentary in those
+benighted days. Wherefore, Helen's parents did not start a suit for
+criminal libel against the flatterer, but heaped honors on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the time Helen reached young womanhood, she was the wonder of all
+Greece. She was tall, slender, and red-haired. In a day of almost
+universal dowdiness, she knew how to wear her clothes&#8212;although she
+did not use that knowledge to any prodigal extent; clothes, in balmy
+prehistoric Greece, being used for adornment rather than as coverings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her wit and her subtle magnetism vied with her good looks. Suitors
+came from one end of the archipelago to the other to visit the palace
+of Tyndareus and to pay court to the Wonder Girl. They were a goodly
+throng, these suitors; kings one and all, even though most of their
+kingdoms were smaller than Delaware. Here are a few names culled from
+the endless list:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ulysses, craftiest of Greeks, a short-legged man, with the upper body
+of a giant; Agamemnon, overlord of all Greece, titular King of Mycen&#230;,
+a hot-tempered, long-winded potentate; Menelaus of Sparta, Agamemnon's
+brother, an honest, not overbright, kind-hearted chap, who loved sport
+better than statesmanship; Nestor, the wisest of men, (yet old enough
+to have known better than to come a-courting, for already his hair and
+beard were white); the two Ajaxes, thickheads both, one of whom was
+later to crown a silly life by defying Jove's lightning to mortal
+combat; Diomed, champion heavyweight battler of his century; Achilles,
+fiery demigod and prehistoric matinee hero; these and many another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, in that benighted age, kings had a way of gratifying personal
+grudges by declaring war on their fellow sovereigns. Tyndareus was a
+shrewd old fellow. Also, he was fond of his glorious daughter, and he
+wanted to save her and her future husband from possible misfortune.
+So, before he allowed Helen to make her choice he bound each and all
+of the suitors to the following solemn oath: That they would not only
+abide peacefully by Helen's decision, but would pledge themselves to
+fight to the death in behalf of the contest's winner if, at any future
+time, his domestic peace should be threatened, or his wife stolen from
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This pledge was not as fanciful as it may seem. For, cave-man tactics
+of "wooing by capture" were still more or less in vogue. A man who
+fell in love with another's wife was wont to kidnap her and to defy
+her bereft spouse to get her back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, Tyndareus was not only preventing civil war in Greece, but he
+was making it prohibitively perilous for any outsider to try to win
+Helen. Such a wooer would find himself at odds with practically every
+country in the whole archipelago. Yes, decidedly Tyndareus knew what
+he was about. He was assuring his daughter&#8212;as far as was humanly
+possible&#8212;a safe married life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the royal suitors&#8212;being very much in love&#8212;were in a condition to
+promise anything. They bound themselves, right willingly, to the oath
+Tyndareus exacted; even Nestor, who, as I think I said, was old and
+wise enough to have known better. It is a supreme tribute to Helen's
+glory that the wisest man alive should have behaved just as foolishly
+over her as did the osseous-brained Ajax Telemon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The oath being taken, Helen's choice was made known. And, out of the
+ruck of greater and richer and handsomer men, she chose the plodding
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were black looks, there were highly unstoical gusts of
+anger&#8212;but the disappointed suitors made the best of their bad luck.
+After consoling themselves by getting gloriously drunk at the marriage
+feast, they called it a day, and went home; not one of them realizing
+how fearfully his lovelorn oath was one day to bind him. And the
+golden Helen departed for the prim little, grim little kingdom of
+Sparta with her liege lord, Menelaus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The years drifted on, lazily, happily, in humdrum fashion. If Menelaus
+were not inspiring as a husband, he was at least pleasanter to live
+with than a cleverer man might have been. He and Helen had one child,
+a daughter, Hermione.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Placid years make sweet living, but poor telling. So let us get along
+to the day when heralds from the port of Pylos brought news of a
+strange prince's arrival on the Spartan shores. The messengers knew
+not who the stranger might be, nor whence he came. But, from his
+retinue and dress and bearing, they judged him worthy to be a guest of
+honor. So a gorgeous guard was sent to escort him to the palace, and
+great preparations were made there to receive him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The event seems to warrant a more Homeric wealth of language than I
+can compass, but it would be hard not to drop into semi-stately&#8212;not
+to say semi-Homeric and wholly plagiaristic&#8212;diction over it. So bear
+with me. It won't last long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adown the dry white road that ran to Pylos through the plain, a dust
+cloud was advancing; shields of bronze and weapons gleaming through
+it, here and there, with glimpses of purple robes. In the palace,
+tables were set out, with fair linen on them. Meats were brought
+forth, with rare wine from the Ismarian vineyards to the north. A
+votive heifer was driven in, lowing, from the fields, for the guest
+sacrifice. Her horns were soon sheathed with gold; then the ax-man
+felled and killed her with a single blow. She was quartered, and her
+fat was laid on the fire, along with barley grain. And the savor of
+the sacrifice rose, grateful, to high Olympus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, through the yellow dust cloud, chariots were to be seen. A hardy
+band of mariners plodded beside the wheels and behind. They were
+bronzed and clear-eyed, these sea rovers, beguiling the journey with
+gay speech and with deep, mighty laughs. And they shouted, instead of
+speaking as do landfolk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the foremost chariot rode two men. One was King Diocles of Pherae.
+The other was the goodliest man mortal eye ever looked upon. A mane of
+fine-spun golden hair fell over the shoulders of his Sidonian robe;
+his face was like the sunshine, and his eyes were filled with the
+gladness of living. He was Paris, son of King Priam, and a prince of
+Troy. And his right hand gripped a shadow-casting spear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the banquet hall, when the visitors and their host were seated,
+appeared Helen, the wife of Menelaus, with her little daughter,
+Hermione. When the cries of hunger and of thirst had died down, Helen
+addressed the strangers, asking no direct question&#8212;since to question
+a guest were discourteous&#8212;but saying that mayhap they would deign to
+explain who they were, and why they had come hither.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then arose Paris, standing by the board, facing the golden Helen. And
+he spoke winged words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was prophesied at his birth, he began, that he would one day be the
+ruin of Troy. To prevent his living to fulfill his ordained fate, his
+father, King Priam&#8212;weeping at the deed's black necessity&#8212;had him
+borne to the lonely top of Mount Ida, there to die of exposure, or at
+the fangs of wild beasts. But a great she-bear, roaming the mountain
+crest, found the babe and brought him down to her cave, and there laid
+him among her own soft-coated young. Here he was found one day by
+herdsmen, among whom he grew up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In time he owned a herd. The best-loved of his cattle was a white
+bull, called The Star. Now it came to pass that King Priam, urged on
+by a dream, sent his slaves to Mount Ida's slopes to secure the finest
+bull that grazed there, for a sacrifice to Neptune. The slaves came
+upon The Star and drove him away with them. Paris gave chase, but in
+vain. Then he hastened to the city of Troy to beg redress from the
+king. And as he entered the outer gates of Priam's palace, his own
+sister, Cassandra, recognized him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cassandra was a prophetess. Apollo had loved her, and, as a love gift,
+had endowed her with a gift of foretelling all things. But when she
+rejected his suit, he willed that while she might still retain the
+gift of prophecy, her forecasts should never be believed. So now her
+words were laughed to scorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Priam questioned the mountaineer. And, by the resemblance the
+youth bore to his father, and the ring that he still wore around his
+neck, where it had been placed when he had been taken up into the
+mountain as an infant, the king at last knew him. Great was his joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, elevated to his rightful princely station, Paris passed the
+next few years, no longer in the harsh toil and on the poor fare of a
+herder, but as a king's son; wholly forgetting &#338;none, the forest
+girl of Mount Ida whom he had wooed and won and deserted, and whom he
+to-day mentioned merely in the pride of a past conquest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, breaking in upon Paris' somewhat long-winded story of his life,
+let us come to the real reason of his presence in Sparta. The Goddess
+of Strife had tried to enliven things in peaceful Olympus by tossing
+down in front of Venus and Juno and Minerva a golden apple. On the
+apple's rind was graven the inscription:
+</p>
+
+<p class="ctr">
+    "<b>For the most beautiful.</b>"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Straightway, the three goddesses, who had been tolerably good friends,
+fell to quarreling as to which should have the apple of gold. And they
+compromised by leaving the decision to Paris. Every member of the trio
+tried secretly to bribe him; Juno offering him power, Minerva offering
+him wisdom, Venus promising him love&#8212;the love of the fairest woman on
+earth. Being very young and very human, Paris chose Love; casting
+aside all hope of power and of wisdom to gain it. And Venus bade him
+sail forth in search of the Wonder Woman she had promised him. He had
+departed on this Quest of the Golden Girl, and fate had led him to
+Helen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am not going to touch on the mythological part of Helen's career,
+more than I can help. But I protest most solemnly that the foregoing
+tale of Paris and the three goddesses is not mythology, but absolute
+truth. It may never have happened; indeed, it could not have happened,
+but it is truth, none the less. If you doubt that a silly apple could
+cause such strife among three erstwhile friendly deities and stir up
+unending enmity and discord and hatred, just remember that the apple
+was of <b>gold</b>. Wait until the family estate is divided among the
+heirs&#8212;the heirs who have hitherto been such good friends&#8212;and watch
+what the Golden Apple of Discord can do to breed hate and dissensions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those old Greeks were wise, even in their myths. They knew human
+nature. And human nature's sole change since their day is the
+substitution of conventionality for simplicity. At heart, there is no
+difference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Take, too, Paris' choice of love, rather than of wisdom or of power.
+When we read about that, as children, we said smugly: "What a fool
+Paris was!" Then, as we grew older&#8212;Well, if Paris was a fool, just
+note in what goodly company he stands. His compeers in the same divine
+idiocy are such immortals as Mark Antony, Marie Stuart, Francis I.,
+almost the whole Bourbon dynasty, Sappho, Cleopatra, Solomon, and a
+sheaf of other shimmeringly splendid sinners. They were monomaniacs,
+all of them, and they sold their birthright of decency for a mess of
+ambrosia; too blinded to know or care how much they were losing, and
+for how barren a price. Wherein, their particular brand of insanity
+gives them full right and privilege to claim, kinship with the
+Gadarene swine of Holy Writ.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, then, Paris had quested forth to find and win the most beautiful
+of women. And he found her&#8212;at the banquet board of her spouse,
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long he abode, an honored and trusted guest in his host's palace. And
+Menelaus suspected nothing, not even that a man of godlike beauty and
+comfortable dearth of morals was a dangerous visitor in the home of a
+plodding, middle-aged husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night&#8212;while Menelaus snored peacefully in preparation for a boar
+hunt he had planned for the next day&#8212;Paris and Helen stole forth
+together in the darkness and sped, hand in hand, to Pylos, where the
+lover's ship was in waiting. In his own arms, Paris bore his inamorata
+from shore to deck. Away across the wine-hued &#198;gean fled the lovers,
+to Troy. There they were wed; regardless of the fact that Helen had
+left a perfectly good husband alive in Greece. The laws against
+bigamy&#8212;if there were any at that day&#8212;do not seem to have been very
+rigidly enforced; nor do those laws' fracturers appear to have lost
+caste thereby.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mind you, Helen was no love-sick girl to be swept off her feet by an
+impetuous wooer with spun-gold hair and a Romeo manner. When Paris
+stole her from Menelaus and married her, she was forty years old. But,
+like Ninon de Lenclos and Diane de Poictiers and other of the world's
+true super-women, age had no power to mar her. Father Time could not
+pass a face like hers without pausing to kiss it; but the kiss was
+very tender and loving, and it left in its wake no wrinkles or
+telltale lines. Helen was ageless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ilium worshipped beauty, even as did Greece. And the Trojans, from old
+Priam down, hailed their new princess with rapture; all save
+Cassandra, that daughter of Priam who was blest by the gift of
+prophecy and cursed by the incredulity of all who heard her. At sight
+of Helen, Cassandra shrieked aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Trojans, you nurse to your hearts a snake that shall sting you to
+death! You cherish a firebrand that shall burn our city to the dust!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she fell, writhing and foaming, at Helen's feet. But folk laughed
+at the forecast, and the cheers of welcome drowned the wail of the
+seeress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So did Argive Helen come to her husband's people. And thus did her
+beauty win all hearts. Paris adored her wildly, uncontrollably, to the
+hour of his death. Her passing infatuation for him soon cooled into
+contemptuous toleration. And for the second time in her life she
+learned that a husband is merely what is left of a lover after the
+nerve has been extracted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus
+learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went,
+heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his
+wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise
+to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but
+volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to
+make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite
+another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. The swain who
+at twenty declares to a girl: "If ever you want me, say the word, and
+I swear I will come to you, from the ends of the earth!" would be
+horribly embarrassed if, as a sedate husband and father at forty, that
+same half-forgotten sweetheart should hold him to his calf-love oath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was with Helen's suitors-emeritus. Long ago they had loved her.
+She had married some one else. And, during the past twenty years,
+other interests in their lives had crowded out her memory. If they
+thought of her at all, it was, now and then, to court domestic
+tempests by mentally or verbally comparing her golden loveliness and
+eternal youth with their own wives' dumpy, or slatlike, matronly
+aspect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For they had wives, most of them, by this time, wives and children.
+Just stop for an instant, husbands all, and figure to yourselves what
+would happen if you should come home to-morrow night and break to your
+wives the tidings that you were about to go to war&#8212;for the sake of
+another woman! A woman, moreover, whom you had once adored, and whose
+memory had ever stood, wistful, winsome, wraithlike, between your
+wives and you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, when Agamemnon's fiat went forth that those long-dead promises
+were to be redeemed at once, there were home scenes throughout Greece
+whose bare recital would forever have crushed the spirit of Mormonism.
+War must have seemed almost a relief to some of those luckless
+husbands after they had finished listening to their wives' remarks on
+the subject. For, of all overdue debts in this world of varied
+indebtedness, the hardest by a million-fold to pay are the sight
+drafts of defunct sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These olden heroes were not especially heroic in the crisis that
+threatened them, and none but a single man will be unduly harsh with
+them for their reluctance. One after another, they sought to dodge the
+fulfillment of their pledges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ulysses, for example, after an interview with his embarrassingly
+faithful wife, Penelope&#8212;she has always reminded me of Mrs.
+Micawber&#8212;harnessed oxen to a plow and proceeded to give the
+impression that he had suddenly gone crazy, by plowing furrows in the
+salt sands of the seashore. Those whose minds had fled were supposed
+to be directly under divine protection, and naturally such people were
+never called upon to fight or to meet any other obligation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Truly, Ulysses was living up to his reputation as the craftiest of the
+Greeks. Yet his craft was put to naught by the wisdom of old
+Nestor&#8212;one of the few suitors who had not tried to crawl out of his
+agreement. Nestor placed Ulysses' baby son, Telemachus, on the
+seashore, in the path of the advancing oxen. Ulysses turned the beasts
+aside to keep them from trampling the child to death. Whereat, it was
+decided that Ulysses was not insane&#8212;at least, not too insane to do
+his share of fighting&#8212;and he was enrolled as one of the chiefs of the
+Grecian host.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having been caught, Ulysses set out, morbidly, to get even with
+Destiny by catching others. And he, as well as Nestor, began to strip
+away the subterfuges of the reluctant kings. Achilles, for instance,
+tried to escape military service by dressing as a girl and hiding
+among the women of his household. Ulysses, disguised as a peddler,
+visited these women, carrying a basket full of feminine gewgaws. At
+the bottom of the basket lay a magnificent sword. While the women were
+examining the jewelry and clothing in the peddler's stock, Achilles
+caught sight of the sword. For the first time, he showed interest in
+the intruder's visit. Paying no heed to the rest of the wares, he
+picked up the sword and fell to examining it with a professional
+interest. At once, Ulysses recognized him not only as a man, but as a
+warrior; and the sulky Achilles was forced to join the expedition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day and night, throughout Greece, the smiths' hammers clinked, and the
+smithy fires roared. Weapons were forged; armor was repaired; army
+equipments were set to rights. The woods and hilltops reechoed to ax
+blows, as great trees were felled for ship timber. At last, twelve
+hundred ships lay at anchor, waiting to bear the avenging host to
+Troy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this preparation was a matter of many months, and for a long time
+no hint of it reached Troy. Then&#8212;first in vague rumor, and soon in
+form not to be doubted&#8212;came news of the Greeks' preparation for war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time, Helen had ceased to be a novelty in Troy. And now men
+cursed her, beneath their breath, as a sorceress who was to bring war
+and destruction upon them. Women hated her as the cause of their men's
+possible death in battle. But Priam, and the noblest blest of his
+sons&#8212;Hector&#8212;were still her stanch champions. And, with such backing,
+her position in the city was at least outwardly assured.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came a minor tragedy, a foreshadowing of the wholesale
+misfortunes that were to follow. I have said that when Paris was still
+a herdsman on Mount Ida, he had met and loved a forest maid, &#338;none,
+and, on learning that he was a prince, he had promptly deserted her,
+leaving her to grief and loneliness. &#338;none had borne Paris a
+son&#8212;although this was unknown to him. In the years since she had last
+seen the fickle prince, this son had grown up. He was known as
+"Corythus." When word reached &#338;none of Helen's arrival in Troy, she
+sent her unfortunate rival a message. She wrote the message on birch
+bark and dispatched it, by Corythus, to the city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Corythus arrived at the palace, and was led to Helen's bower, where he
+begged the princess to dismiss her maids, as he was the bearer of a
+word for her ears alone. Helen, obeying, received from him the folded
+birch bark and opened it. She read:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+O thou that dost scan these lines, hast thou forgotten quite thine
+    ancient sin, thy palace, thy husband and child&#8212;even as Paris hath
+    forgotten me? Thou shalt not forget. For I send thee my curse,
+    with which I shall scourge thee till I die. Soon Paris must look
+    into the eyes of death. And little in that hour will he care for
+    thy sweet lips, thy singing voice, thine arms of ivory, thy
+    gold-red hair. Nay, remembering that thou hast cost his life, he
+    will bid the folk that hate thee have their joy, and give thee to
+    the mountain beasts to tear, or burn thy body on a tower of Troy!
+    My son&#8212;and his&#8212;beareth this word to thee.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+As she finished reading, Helen fell, in a swoon, at Corythus' feet.
+The youth was alarmed, and dropped on his knees beside her, lifting
+her head. And at that moment Paris entered the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seeing a stranger kneeling beside Helen, he went wild with jealous
+rage. Whipping out his sword, he sprang upon Corythus, and buried the
+blade in the lad's neck. Then he turned, to plunge the weapon into
+Helen's breast. But, as he turned, he saw the birch-bark message on
+the floor and stooped to pick it up. Reading it, he realized what he
+had done, and whom, in his jealous frenzy, he had killed. He flung
+himself, wailing, forth from the palace and into the night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three days later, Corythus was laid on his funeral pyre in the market
+place of Troy. As Paris was advancing with the lighted torch, &#338;none
+appeared. She leaped upon the pyre and shrieked down at her recreant
+lover:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I hear the prayer that thou some day shall make in vain! Thou shalt
+die, and leave thy love behind thee, for another. And little shall she
+love thy memory! But"&#8212;turning upon the onlookers&#8212;"O ye foolish
+people&#8212;see! What death is coming on you from across the waters?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the shrieked words, all turned and looked seaward. Bearing down on
+the coast, in a driving rain, oar blades flashing, sails straining at
+their rigging, came the long-dreaded Greek fleet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Trojan war had begun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of
+that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of
+Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and
+again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen
+stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men
+who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her
+worthless sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men
+who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and
+long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they
+hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought
+upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the
+ramparts to berate her with her sin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her
+white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair.
+And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come
+hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious
+a woman were well worth the loss of Troy&#8212;aye, of all the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards
+is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted
+the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged.
+Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on
+the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow
+at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal
+wound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where
+the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in
+fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for
+him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the
+sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the
+pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that,
+even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his
+eyes glazing, he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Long ago, dear, we were glad&#8212;we who never more shall be together.
+Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on
+me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed
+him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The torch was set to the unlucky prince's pyre. From the crowd around
+it sprang &#338;none. She mounted the blazing pile of wood, and her body
+was consumed with that of the man who was not worth dying for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen, almost at once, married Paris' younger brother Deiphobus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed
+away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were
+nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city,
+the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous
+wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it
+there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to
+their native chores.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a
+memento of the great war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the
+clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of
+some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a
+concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a
+score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the
+horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest
+massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept,
+women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were
+slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was
+burned to ashes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and
+demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had
+at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the
+wooden horse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against
+the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes,
+forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who
+had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant
+men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed
+her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph
+as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride.
+Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who
+cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her
+as she passed them on the way to the palace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting
+words&#8212;spoken in her presence&#8212;to the Greek army on the shores of
+Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not.
+And to the assembled host he had shouted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very
+fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago,
+but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye
+shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may
+find&#8212;ye that the winds waft and the waters bear&#8212;that you are quite
+gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there;
+your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you;
+on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you
+wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"These sorrows hath Helen brought on you. So fall upon her
+straightway, that she die, and clothe her beauty in a cloak of stone!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak.
+But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And
+from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her
+too beautiful for death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none
+to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the
+wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is
+one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him
+in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at
+Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are
+silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly
+enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too,
+was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed
+decade&#8212;"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through
+the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the
+populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even
+as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's
+home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the
+situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the
+breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence
+gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the
+merciless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence,
+advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the
+daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on
+the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in
+the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the
+militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One
+or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out
+through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seashore.
+There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of
+his crew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And once more across the "wine-hued &#198;gean" fared the golden Helen, not
+this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in
+guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who
+had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home
+she knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ashore on the island of
+Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just
+as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen
+of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other
+woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So,
+the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian
+queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that
+fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being
+blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's
+loveliest creation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So perished the golden Helen. For her sin, she is known to fame as
+"Helen of Troy," not "Helen of Sparta," or even "Helen of Argos."
+Posterity has branded her, thus, with the name of the land she
+destroyed, instead of the land of her birth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poets and dreamers of dreams, even in her own century, have said that
+Helen did not die; that loveliness such as hers could not be destroyed,
+any more than can the smile of the springtide or the laughter of the
+sea. They say she escaped the Rhodians and set sail once more upon
+her wanderings. From shore to shore she voyaged,&#8212;ageless, divine,
+immortal, as eternal as Love itself. Ever, where she went, men adored
+her and besought her to remain among them to bless or curse their
+lives. But, ever, women banded together to drive her forth again upon
+her endless wanderings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One legend tells of her sojourn in Egypt, and of her meeting, there,
+Ulysses, "sacker of cities." Penelope was dead, and Ulysses had
+recommenced his voyaging. He and Helen met, and the old, old love of
+nearly a half century earlier flared into new flame. And, as ever,
+Helen's love brought death in its wake. For the Sacker of Cities fell
+in battle within a few weeks after their reunion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another and more popular legend is that Helen, in return for
+everlasting youth, formed a highly discreditable business partnership
+with Satan, whereby she was to serve as his lure for the damning of
+men's souls. Do you recall, in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," it was by
+promise of Helen's love that the devil won Faustus over to his
+bargain? There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry,
+as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>"Is this the face that launched a thousand ships</p>
+<p>And burned the topless towers of Ilium?</p>
+<p>Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"</p></div></div>
+
+<p>
+She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was
+damnation, like that of her million other swains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's
+successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified
+the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls
+from them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden
+Helen&#8212;typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at
+reason and at destruction&#8212;lives and shall live while men are men. She
+lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She
+lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch
+and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk
+robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her
+mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she
+passes, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them
+damn themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band
+together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Helen! Or&#8212;is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to
+be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to
+herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very
+women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to
+new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable
+hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their
+placid lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="five">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER FIVE
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+MADAME JUMEL
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+NEW YORK'S FIRST OFFICIAL HEART BREAKER
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side&#8212;on One Hundred and
+Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue&#8212;stands almost the sole
+American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial
+dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed
+gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the
+architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it
+originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful
+man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but
+futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman
+whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as
+Mrs. Burr.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin,
+throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day
+the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and
+top-heavy flat houses&#8212;happy hunting ground for none-too-rich
+homeseekers&#8212;and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central
+trains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine,
+from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd
+at the Grand Central!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts
+walk&#8212;the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who
+made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats
+were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such
+things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or
+indelicate for discussion&#8212;and a few things still were, in that
+ante-white-slave era&#8212;people were prone to refer to such doubtful
+topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was
+more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that
+called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence
+will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events.
+I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has
+used it to account for hiati&#8212;(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds
+more cultured, somehow&#8212;) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all,
+if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by
+well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for
+complete comfort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so to the story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a
+woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was
+not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger
+before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's
+father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly
+diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the
+Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see
+the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the
+biography.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode
+Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the
+solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the
+rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No
+one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling
+one at that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And
+at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but
+one of the cleverest and&#8212;so declared the pious&#8212;one of the very
+worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to
+acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to
+all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty
+Bowen&#8212;her commonly used name&#8212;the benefit of the doubt?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an
+exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the
+nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless,
+high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen
+over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural
+admirers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her
+life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New
+York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century
+later, would have been called a "rounder."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How this middle-aged Lothario chanced to meet the Rhode Island belle,
+no one knows. But meet her he did. He was the first man of the world
+who had come into Betty's rustic life. By contrast with the local
+swains, he was irresistible. Or so she found him. At all events, she
+did not resist. She eloped with him, and Rhode Island knew her no
+more. Her real career as a heart breaker had set in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To New York, Colonel Croix brought his inamorata. There he installed
+her in a stately country house at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth
+Avenue, on the spot where, afterward, A. T. Stewart's white marble
+domicile used to excite the out-of-towners' awe, and where now a trust
+company's building stands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Betty wore amazingly costly clothes, paying for a single dress far
+more than for her year's wardrobe in Rhode Island. Croix festooned
+jewelry, Christmas-tree-like, over her neck, hair, and hands. She
+blossomed like the rose. Croix, inordinately proud of his conquest,
+also brought shoals of his friends to call, which was a mistake; for
+Betty had no leanings toward monopolies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like the hackneyed, but ever-useful, meteor, Betty flashed upon stark
+young eighteenth-century New York. The city&#8212;so far as its male
+population was concerned&#8212;threw up both hands in blissful surrender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Croix's friends&#8212;some of them rounders like himself, some of them fat,
+solid, but beauty-loving financiers&#8212;formed a court of beauty around
+the fair newcomer. Betty's consummate charm drew to this court other
+and loftier men, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For example, one of her foremost adorers was a brilliant, magnetic
+young statesman whose birth was perhaps as unblest as her own, but
+whose self-made name was already beginning to ring through America. He
+was Alexander Hamilton. He had a high-born and attractive wife of his
+own, and an adoring nestful of children. But Hamilton believed in
+monopolies no more than did Betty, and he became her adorer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another of the higher type of men who came a-courting Betty was a
+statesman of almost equal fame&#8212;a little fellow, scarce five feet four
+inches tall and slight of build, whose strikingly handsome face was
+lighted by enormous black eyes almost snake-like in their mesmeric
+power&#8212;particularly over women. He was Aaron Burr.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burr was a lady-killer of the first order. He was not a man of bad
+morals. He was simply a man of no morals at all. But he was also a man
+of no fear, and a genius withal. He knelt, not in submission, but in
+ironic admiration before Betty. And she, like fifty other women, was
+swayed by his hypnotic eyes and his wondrous love eloquence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the house of which Croix had made Betty the chatelaine, Burr and
+Hamilton often met, but never at the wish of either. For they hated
+every bone in each other's bodies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had been at loggerheads as mere lads, when together they had
+served on General Washington's staff during the Revolutionary War.
+Afterward, in social and political life, they had clashed, and clashed
+fiercely. Now, as rivals for the interest of the volatile Betty, their
+smoldering hate flamed forth lurid and deathless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thenceforth, fanned by new political and other causes, that death
+hate grew. It came to a head seven years later, when, in the gray of a
+chilly morning, the lifelong rivals faced each other, pistol in hand,
+in the fields beyond Weehawken Heights; and when, at the first volley,
+Hamilton sprang high in air, then crashed to the earth, mortally
+wounded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, in her time Betty had&#8212;directly or indirectly&#8212;much to answer
+for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+George Washington Bowen, in after years, swore that he was the son of
+Betty and of the Father of his Country. This the Jumels have fiercely
+denied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the business-men guests Croix brought to see Betty was an
+enormously rich old French wine merchant, Stephen Jumel by name. This
+was in 1804&#8212;the year of Hamilton's death. Jumel was fifty; Betty was
+thirty-five. Jumel was passing rich; Betty had shrewdness enough to
+realize that her own fortunes, under her present circumstances,
+depended solely on her looks and her charm. As beauty is not eternal
+and as charm sometimes fails to outlive it, the super-woman deemed it
+wise to accept the infatuated wine merchant's offer of marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed, she is said to have angled with Napoleonic strategy for that
+same offer, and to have won it only after a sharp struggle of wits.
+Jumel was no fit opponent for her, then or ever after. From the first,
+they appear to have had but a single will between them&#8212;and that was
+hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On April 17, 1804, Betty and Jumel were married in St. Peter's Church
+in Barclay Street. The wedding's record still stands in the parish
+archives. So does the statement made on that occasion by Betty&#8212;a
+statement charmingly at variance with all other records of her origin.
+For in the church register she wrote that she was born in 1777 and was
+the daughter of Phoebe and John Bowen&#8212;the latter a drowned sea
+captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+New York, having a somewhat tenacious memory, eyed the bride
+askance&#8212;or so she fancied. And, like many a later American, she
+sought to cover any possible reputation scars by a European veneer.
+She persuaded her husband to sell out some of his New York interest
+and to take her to Paris to live. Which, ever obedient, he did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Napoleon I. was at the heyday of his glory. About him was a court
+circle that did not look overclosely into peoples' antecedents.
+Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, had started life as a tavern waiter;
+Napoleon himself was the son of a poor Corsican lawyer and had never
+been able to learn to speak French without a barbarous accent. As for
+his sister, Pauline, if "a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,"
+Pauline's spouse, Prince Borghese, had not a ghost of a chance of
+skipping into the king row. Nor was Napoleon's first wife, Josephine,
+of flawless repute. Altogether, it was a coterie unlikely to ask many
+questions about Betty's early history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fascinations of Madame Jumel and the vast wealth of Monsieur Jumel
+were not to be withstood. Speedily the husband and wife were in the
+turgid center of things; part and parcel of imperial court life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Betty had charmed level-headed New York, there is no need to
+describe in windy detail what she did to Paris. Her conquests
+there&#8212;like the stars of the Milky Way&#8212;shine indistinct and blurred
+because of their sheer numbers. But through the silvery blur gleams
+forth the name of Lafayette. The old marquis was delighted, at sight,
+with the lovely young American; and he eagerly offered to act as her
+sponsor at court. Which he did, to the amusement of many and to the
+indefinite advancement of Betty's social hopes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great Napoleon glanced in no slightest disfavor on Lafayette's
+social protegee. He willingly set the seal of imperial approval on the
+court's verdict. The emperor was Stephen Jumel's idol. Himself a
+self-made man, the old merchant worshiped this self-made demigod, the
+model and unattainable example of every self-making man since his day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jumel's hero-worship took a practical form. He placed his resources at
+the emperor's service, and once tactlessly, but generously, offered
+his own wealth and his New York home as solace and refuge in the
+increasingly probable event of the emperor's mislaying his crown. To
+which Napoleon replied&#8212;speaking, as ever, to the gallery:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Whatever reverses Fortune may inflict on me, Duty will chain me to
+France. It would be unworthy my greatness and an insult to my empire
+for me to seek asylum across the seas."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, when the inevitable Day dawned, the fugitive emperor made plans
+to do that very thing. And Jumel met him more than halfway by crossing
+from New York to Havre on his own yacht&#8212;the Elizabeth, named for his
+wife&#8212;and seeking to bear away his fallen idol to safety. The plan, of
+course, fell through, and Napoleon in consequence was almost the only
+Bonaparte who did not sooner or later come to New York.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imperial friendship and a gloriously extravagant&#8212;and extravagantly
+glorious&#8212;wife are things to brag of. They are splendid
+advertisements. But they are not on the free list. In fact, they rip
+hideous breaches in the solidest wall of wealth. They played havoc
+with Papa Jumel's supposedly boundless fortune. One morning in Paris,
+the Jumels awoke to find themselves nastily close to bankruptcy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The French court was emphatically no fitting place wherein to go
+bankrupt. The scared Jumels realized this. Back they scurried to New
+York; in that bourne of fast-made and faster-lost fortunes to face
+what the future might bring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, all praise to Betty Jumel, erstwhile queen of money wasters!
+Instead of repining, or blaming her husband for letting her break him,
+or flitting to some wooer whose wealth was still intact, she did the
+very last thing her past would have led any one to expect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She became, in effect, her husband's business partner. She displayed a
+genius for finance. It must have been stark genius, for her personal
+experience in the credit side of the money ledger was nil. More
+through his wife's aid than through his own sound business acumen,
+Papa Jumel began to win back the ground Betty had so industriously
+helped him to lose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One daring and lucky venture followed another. In an incredibly short
+time the Jumels were again numbered among the very richest people in
+America. Once more Betty launched on a career of luxury; but now and
+ever after she kept just within her abundant resources. Bankruptcy was
+a peril forever banished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Betty, you see, did not belong to the type of fool who runs his head
+twice into the same hornet's nest. There really was no need for such
+monotony. There were plenty of hornets' nests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first expenditure, to celebrate the new fortune, was the buying of
+the big white house far away on the hillock above the Harlem River; a
+long, long coach drive, up the Broad Way, from the city's fashionable
+residence district to the south of Duane Street. Remember, this was a
+full twenty years before the Southern merchant made his historic
+speech: "When I come to New York on business, I never think of
+stopping at the Astor House. It's much too far uptown for a busy man."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The house Betty made her husband buy had been built years earlier by
+Colonel Roger Morris, after he married Mary Phillipse, the colonial
+belle, whose father owned most of Westchester County and lived in a
+manor house there among his vassals like a feudal lord.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this abode moved the Jumels. Thither they brought a retinue of
+servants whose numbers amazed the thrifty New Yorkers. Here, too, were
+deposited such furniture as New York had seldom seen&#8212;a marvelously
+hideous marble-top table given to Papa Jumel by the Sultan of Turkey;
+a set of chairs that had been Napoleon's; a truly gaudy and cumbrous
+gold clock, which had been one of the emperor's gifts to Betty;
+tapestry and pictures that had once belonged to the Empress Josephine;
+dining-room furniture that had graced the <b>salle a manger</b> of
+King Charles X. of France; a massive, glittering chandelier, the gift
+of General Moreau, who had vied with the emperor for Betty's smiles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Above all these and the rest of her home's rich furnishings, Betty
+treasured two other gifts from Napoleon&#8212;odd <b>gages d'amour</b> for
+such a man to have given such a woman. They were the battered army
+chest and army cot used by him throughout the wonderful Italian
+campaign that had first established his fame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The world was scoured by Jumel's merchant ships to secure rare plants
+and trees for the hundred-and-fifty-acre park surrounding the mansion.
+Cedars from Mount Lebanon, cypresses from Greece, exotic flowers from
+South America, roses from Provence&#8212;these were but a few of the
+innumerable exotics that filled the grounds. (The "park," to-day, is a
+wilderness of dingy, apartment-lined streets).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once established in their new home, the Jumels began to entertain on a
+scale that dwarfed even the much-vaunted hospitality of the
+ante-bellum South. And the people who, of yore, had looked obliquely
+and frostily on Betty Bowen, now clamored and schemed and besought for
+invitations to her dinners. Well they might; for not only America's
+great folk delighted to honor the mansion by their presence, but every
+titled foreigner who touched our shores became a guest there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hither came Joseph Bonaparte&#8212;kicked off the ready-made throne to
+which his emperor brother had vainly sought to fit the incompetent
+meager form and more meager intellect&#8212;and here he was entertained
+with royal honor, as if he had been still a sovereign instead of
+merely a crownless puppet no longer upheld by the mightiest of human
+hands. Here he was "Your Majesty," and people backed out of the room
+in which he chanced to be, stood until he gave them gracious leave to
+sit, and otherwise showered upon him the adoring servility that the
+freeborn are prone to lavish upon the representatives of monarchy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bonaparte after Bonaparte visited the Jumels. The name, "Bonaparte,"
+was still one wherewith to conjure, and that fact by itself made its
+thick-headed and impecunious bearers welcome in almost every land they
+might choose to visit. They graciously accepted the Jumel house's
+hospitality and the veneration of their fellow guests; still more
+graciously they borrowed money&#8212;which they never returned&#8212;of Papa
+Jumel; and most graciously of all they made ardent and heavy love to
+Betty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the Jumel mansion came finally the last and least esteemed of the
+Bonaparte visitors; a squat, puffy-eyed princeling&#8212;pallid, crafty
+shadow of the Austerlitz Man&#8212;who had left France and jail one jump
+ahead of the police, had served as special constable in London to pick
+up enough money for food, and now for similar reason was teaching
+school in Bordentown, New Jersey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was Louis Napoleon, alleged nephew of Napoleon I. I say "alleged"
+on the authority of Victor Hugo's famous sneer that Louis was "neither
+the nephew of his uncle, the son of his father, nor the father of his
+son." It was Hugo, too, who, when Louis became emperor of the French,
+under the title of Napoleon III., dubbed him "Napoleon the Little."
+For which witticism, Monsieur Hugo was promptly banished from France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis was the son of Napoleon's younger brother of the same name and
+of his wife&#8212;and step-niece&#8212;Hortense Beauharnais. The son had not a
+single Bonapartist feature nor trait. He strongly resembled, however,
+a certain dashing Dutch admiral, one Flahaut, on whom Hortense had
+been credited with bestowing a more than neighborly interest. It is
+not libelous, in view of many proven facts&#8212;indeed, it is scarce
+gossip&#8212;to say that Hortense, like her mother, the Empress Josephine,
+had had the foible of loving not wisely, but too often.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In any event, whoever may have been his father, Louis Napoleon was
+kindly received by the Jumels; not as a prince, but as a guest of
+honor. And Papa Jumel lent him much hard-earned American money. Among
+all the Bonapartes, Louis was the least promising of the Jumels'
+beneficiaries. And of them all, he alone was to make any return for
+their goodness to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Prince de Joinville&#8212;here to investigate, and if necessary buy
+off, Eleazer Williams' claim to be the "lost Dauphin"&#8212;stayed at the
+mansion and paid charming attentions to Betty. So did the polished old
+scoundrel, Talleyrand, whom Napoleon had daintily described as "a silk
+stocking filled with muck."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Less lofty of birth, but worth all the Bonapartes put together in
+point of genius, was a young American poet who vastly admired Betty,
+and who, on her invitation, spent weeks at a time at the mansion. He
+was Fitz-Greene Halleck; and, seated on the porch of the Jumel house,
+he wrote a poem that a million schoolboys were soon to spout&#8212;"Marco
+Bozzaris."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One morning in 1830, Papa Jumel set out for New York on a business
+call to his bankers. He rode forth from the long, winding
+driveway&#8212;several flat houses and stores and streets cut across that
+driveway's course to-day&#8212;in the lumbering and costly family coach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An hour later he was brought home dying. The coach had upset on the
+frost-rutted road a few miles to the south. Jumel had fallen out&#8212;on
+his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Papa Jumel was in the late seventies at the time of his death. His
+widow was either fifty-three or sixty-one&#8212;all depending on whether
+you believe her own statement or the homely Rhode Island facts. What
+does it matter? She was one of the super-women who do not grow old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarce was her worthy spouse stretched comfortably in his last sleep,
+when suitors thronged the house. And it was not alone because the
+Widow Jumel was one of the richest women in America. She still held
+her ancient sway over men's hearts; still made sentimental mush of
+men's brains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Gossip, silenced of late years, sprang eagerly and happily to life.
+Once more did New York ring with Betty's daring flirtations. But she
+cared little for people's talk. She was rich enough, famous enough,
+clever enough, still beautiful enough to be a law unto herself. The
+very folk who gossiped so scandalously about her were most eager to
+catch her eye in public or to secure an invitation to the great
+mansion on the Harlem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As to men, she had never yet in all her fifty-three&#8212;or was it
+sixty-one?&#8212;years, met her match at heart smashing. But she was to
+meet him. And soon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Will you let me go back for a space and sketch, in a mere mouthful of
+words, the haps and mishaps of one of Betty's earlier admirers?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States when he shot
+Hamilton. The bullet that killed Hamilton rebounded and killed Burr's
+political future; for Hamilton was a national favorite and Burr was
+not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burr served out his term as vice president amid a whirlwind of
+national hatred. Then he went West, a bitterly disappointed and
+vengeful man, and embarked on an incredibly audacious scheme whereby
+he was to wrench free the great West and Southwest from the rest of
+the Union and install himself as emperor of that vast region, under
+the title of "Aaron I."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scheme failed, and Burr was hauled before the bar of justice on
+charges of high treason. Through some lucky fate or other, he was
+acquitted, but he was secretly advised to leave America. He followed
+the advice. And when he wanted to come back to the United States, he
+found every port closed against him. So he starved for a time in
+obscure European lodging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His heart had been broken, years earlier, by the death of the only
+woman he ever truly loved. She was not one of the hundreds who made
+fools of themselves over him. She was not his wife, who had died so
+long before. She was his only daughter, Theodosia; the only holy
+influence in his tempestuous life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Theodosia had been lost at sea. No authentic word of her, or of
+the ship that carried her, has ever been received. Burr had spent
+every day for months pacing the Battery sea wall, straining those
+uncanny black eyes of his for glimpses of her ship. He had spent every
+dollar he could lay hands on in sending for news of her. And then he
+had given up hope. This had been long before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His daughter dead, his political hopes blasted, his country's gates
+barred against him, he dragged out a miserable life in Europe. Then,
+after years of absence, he slipped into the United States in disguise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first news of his return came in a New York newspaper announcement
+that "Colonel Aaron Burr has opened law offices on the second floor of
+23 Nassau Street." The government made no move to deport him. Clients
+by the dozen flocked to take advantage of his brilliant legal
+intellect. Poverty, in a breath, gave place to prosperity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was in the spring of 1833, a scant three years after Papa Jumel's
+sudden demise. Tidings came to Betty that her old adorer, after so
+long a lapse of time, was back in New York. And across the gap of
+years came memories of his mesmeric eyes, his wonderful voice&#8212;the
+eyes and voice no woman could resist&#8212;the inspired manner of his
+love-making. And Betty went to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Throughout his love-starred life it was Burr's solemn declaration that
+never once did he take a single step out of his path to win any woman;
+that all his myriad conquests came to him unsought. Probably this was
+true. There are worse ways of bagging any form of game than by "still
+hunting." Perhaps there are few better.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At all events, down Broadway in her France-built coach rolled Betty
+Jumel&#8212;tall, blond, statuesque as in the Betty Bowen days when Peter
+Croix had "bought a book for his friends to read." She called on Burr,
+ostensibly to consult him about a legal matter involving a real-estate
+deal. But Burr understood. Burr always understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw, too, that Betty was still fair to look upon and that she had
+lost little of her charm. By common report he knew she was egregiously
+rich. He himself was wizened, white of hair, and seventy-eight years
+old. Poverty, griefs, bitter disappointments had sadly broken him.
+Save for his eyes and voice and brain, there was little about him to
+remind Betty of the all-conquering and dapper little Lothario of forty
+years back. Yet, as he listened and looked, she loved him. Yes, there
+is a goodly assortment of hornets' nests wherein a fool may run his
+head without visiting the same nest twice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few days after her call at his office, Betty gave one of her
+renowned dinner parties. It was "in honor of Colonel Burr." The guest
+of honor carried all before him that evening. The people who had come
+to stare at him as an escaped arch-criminal went home wholly enslaved
+by his magnetic charm. Aaron Burr had come to his own again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In saying good night to his hostess, Burr lingered after the other
+guests had trundled off cityward in their carriages. Then, taking his
+leave with bared head, there in the moonlight on the steps of the
+Jumel mansion, he dropped lightly to one knee and raised Betty's hand
+to his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madam," he breathed, the merciful moonlight making him for the moment
+his young and irresistible self again, "madam, I give you my hand. My
+heart has long been yours."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought&#8212;or affected to
+think&#8212;it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift
+campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing
+law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he
+drew the siege lines closer to the citadel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common
+sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back.
+But he did. He came back the very next day&#8212;July 1, 1833. And with him
+in the carriage was another old man&#8212;the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who
+had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first
+wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame
+Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room.
+Wondering, she obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to
+marry you. Pray get ready at once!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the
+clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate
+eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love
+pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill
+at argument that had made him master of men and women alike&#8212;all were
+brought into play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful
+and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts.
+But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality.
+Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was
+won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all
+Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and
+let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was
+won. He knew it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little later Betty reappeared at the head of the stairs. She was
+resplendent in a gown of thick, stiff, dove-colored satin, and she
+glittered with a thousand jewels. Burr, lightly as a boy, ran up the
+stairs to meet her. Without a word she took his proffered arm.
+Together they walked to where the clergyman, stationed by Burr,
+awaited them. And they were married&#8212;super-woman and super-man. I know
+of no other instance in the History of Love where two such consummate
+heart breakers became man and wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be pleasant to record that the magnetic old couple walked
+hand and hand into the sunset; that their last years were spent
+together in the light of the afterglow. Here was a husband after
+Betty's own heart. Here was a wife to excite the envy of all Burr's
+friends, to rehabilitate him socially and financially. It seemed an
+ideal union.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the new-wed pair did none of the things that any optimist would
+predict, that any astute student of human nature would set down in a
+novel about them. Before the honeymoon was over, they were quarreling
+like cat and dog. About money, of course. Burr sold some stock for his
+wife, and neglected to turn over the proceeds to her. She asked for
+the money. He curtly replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madam, this time you are married to a <b>man</b>. A man who will
+henceforth take charge of all your business affairs."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Betty's temper had never, at best, threatened to rob the patient
+Griselda of her laurels. Men had been her slaves, not her masters. She
+had no fancy for changing the lifelong conditions. So, in a blaze of
+anger, she not only demanded her money, but hinted very strongly that
+Colonel Burr was little better than a common fortune hunter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burr ordered her to go to her room and stay there until she could
+remember the respect due from a wife to her husband. She made a hot
+retort to the effect that the house was hers, and that, but for her
+wealth, Burr was a mere outcast and beggar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Burr, without a word, turned and left the house. This was just ten
+days after the wedding. He went to New York and took up his abode in
+his former Duane Street lodgings. Betty, scared and penitent, went
+after him. There was a reconciliation, and he came back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But soon there was another squabble about money. And Betty, in another
+tantrum, went to a lawyer and brought suit to take the control of her
+fortune out of her husband's hands. Again Burr left his new home,
+vowing he would never return.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The poor old fellow, once more cast upon his own resources, and
+self-deprived of the luxuries his wife's money had brought him, fell
+ill. When Betty, in another contrite fit, went to plead with him to
+come back, she found him delirious. She had him carried out to the
+mansion, and for weeks nursed him right tenderly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But when he came again to his senses, Burr would not speak to his
+wife. The moment he was able to get out of bed, he left the house.
+Betty never saw him again. Not very long afterward he died, in a
+Staten Island hotel&#8212;alone, unmourned, he who had been the darling of
+women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Did Betty mourn her husband emeritus? Not noticeably. She was not of
+the type that mourns. Before Burr was fairly under the sod, she was
+flirting gayly and was demanding and receiving the same admiration
+that had always been hers. She sought to make people forget that she
+had ever been Mrs. Burr, and she asked them to call her, once more,
+"Madame Jumel." She dazzled New York with a mammoth flower fete in the
+summer of 1837; and once more, heedless of people's opinions, ruled as
+queen of New York's little social realm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so the years sped on, until the super-woman of other days could no
+longer fight off that incurable disease, old age. American men no
+longer vied for her favors. She decided that American men's taste for
+beauty had been swallowed up by commercialism. And she went again to
+Paris, where, she remembered, men had never ceased to sue for her
+love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was in 1853. Louis Napoleon had just made himself "Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French." He had a way, in the days of his power, of
+forgetting those who had befriended him when he was down-at-the-heel
+exile, and of snubbing former friends who were so foolish as to claim
+present notice on the ground of past favors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he made a notable exception in the case of Madame Jumel. He
+received her with open arms, gave a court ball in honor of her return
+to Paris, and in every way treated her almost as if she had been a
+visiting sovereign. One likes to think his overworked recording angel
+put all this down in large letters on the credit side of Napoleon the
+Little's celestial ledger page. Heaven knows there was plenty of blank
+space on that side of the page for any such entries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But on Betty herself the effect of all this adoration was decidedly
+startling. Treated like a queen, she grew to believe she was a queen.
+The razor-keen wits that had stood by her so gallantly for
+three-quarters of a century or more were dulling. Her mind began
+wandering helplessly in the realms of fancy. An odd phase of her
+mental decay was that she took to babbling incessantly of Aaron
+Burr&#8212;whose name she had not spoken in years&#8212;and she seemed to forget
+that she had ever met a man named Jumel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She came back to the old house on the hill, overlooking the Harlem.
+The stream was no longer as pastoral and deserted as in earlier days,
+and houses and cottages had begun to spring up all around the confines
+of the mansion's grounds. New York was slowly creeping northward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it is to be doubted that Betty realized the change. She was a
+queen; no less a queen because she ruled an imaginary kingdom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She declared that her position as a sovereign demanded a body of
+household troops. So she hired a bodyguard of twenty soldiers, dressed
+them in gay uniforms, and placed them on duty around the house. She
+increased her staff of servants to an amazing degree. She assumed
+regal airs. Every visitor was announced as if entering the presence of
+royalty. Betty no longer "received callers." Instead, she "held
+audiences." Yearly she journeyed in state to Saratoga, with a retinue
+of fifty servants and "officers of the household."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The
+once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to amass began to
+shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than
+a million dollars of it was left after she died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied
+because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her
+dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the mansion on the hill, on July 16, 1865, she fell asleep. A
+score of New York's foremost men were her honorary pallbearers. And
+all society made, for the last time, the long journey to Harlem to
+honor her memory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So died Betty Bowen&#8212;Betty Jumel&#8212;Betty Burr&#8212;whatever you prefer to
+call her. She was New York's first and greatest official heart
+breaker. She was doubly fortunate, too, in missing the average
+old-super-woman's realization of having outgrown her wonder-charm. For
+when her life book of beauty and power and magnetism closed, Delusion
+tenderly took up the tale. And through a fairyland of imagined
+admiration and regal rank, Betty tottered happily to the very end.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="six">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER SIX
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+THE "ACTRESS HEART QUEEN"
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all
+spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the
+strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand&#8212;a
+four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's
+attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling
+interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's
+super-women, she sprang from the masses. Her childhood was spent in
+beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At
+fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was
+acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared
+to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was
+one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had
+divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at Lille, while she was still in her apprenticeship as an
+actress, that Adrienne met a young baron; a captain in the local
+garrison. He loved her, and he was her first love. It was not the
+custom of the early eighteenth century for a French noble to propose
+marriage to a former laundress who was playing utility parts in a
+third-rate road show. Probably there was no precedent for it. And such
+a proposal would have been a waste of windy words, at best. For
+neither the king nor the man's parents would have allowed it to lead
+to marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet&#8212;or perhaps because of it&#8212;the baron asked Adrienne Lecouvreur to
+be his wife. She was in the seventh paradise of first love. It was all
+turning out the way it did in plays. And plays were, thus far,
+Adrienne's chief guidebook of life. So the prettily staged engagement
+began; with roseate light effects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before Adrienne had time for disillusionment, the baron died. In the
+first grief&#8212;she was at an age when every tragedy is absolutely
+permanent and irrevocable&#8212;the luckless girl tried to kill herself.
+Her kindly fellow actors took turns in watching her and in abstracting
+unobtrusively any lethal weapons that might chance to be within her
+reach. And at last Youth came to the rescue; permanent heartbreak
+being too mighty a feat for sixteen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne fell to referring to the baron's death as her life tragedy,
+not yet realizing that the affair was but an insignificant curtain
+raiser.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By and by another nobleman crossed her horizon. He was Philippe le
+Ray. And for the moment he fascinated Adrienne. Once more there was a
+hope&#8212;or she thought there was&#8212;of a marriage into the aristocracy.
+Then, just as everything seemed to be along smoothly, she threw away
+her possible chances with both hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Into the road company came a new recruit, Clavel by name. You will not
+find him in the shining records of the French stage, nor under the
+"Cs" in any encyclopedia. His name has been picked in history's museum
+solely from the fact that he jilted Adrienne Lecouvreur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Philippe le Ray was promptly shelved for the new love. And with him
+Adrienne sacrificed all her supposed chances of wealth, rank, and
+ease; for the sake of a penniless actor, and for love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She became engaged to Clavel. They planned to marry as soon as their
+joint earnings would permit, and to tour France as co-stars. Or, if
+the public preferred, with Clavel as star, and with Adrienne as an
+adoringly humble member of the cast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Early in the affair, Clavel found a better-paying position in another
+company. Adrienne urged him to accept it, for the temporary parting
+promised to bring nearer the day of their marriage. And Clavel, to
+please her, took the offer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, again, Adrienne found herself alone. But it was a loneliness that
+vibrated with hope. It was at this time that she chose for herself a
+motto, which thereafter emblazoned her letters and lingerie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was, "<b>Que Faire Au Monde Sans Aimer?</b>" ("What is living
+without loving?") She was soon to learn the grim answer to the
+challenge-query she so gayly hurled at fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Clavel's letters grew few. They waned in warmth. Odd rumors with which
+the theater world has ever been rife began to reach Adrienne. And at
+last she wrote her absent lover a missive that has been numbered by
+<b>cognoscenti</b> among the great love letters of the ages. Here it
+is, in part&#8212;a halting translation:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I scarce know what to believe, from your neglect. But be certain
+    always that I love you for yourself a hundred times more dearly
+    than on my own account. Oh, love me, dear, as I shall forever love
+    you! That is all I ask from life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    But don't promise to, unless you can keep your word. Your welfare
+    is far more precious to me than my own. So always follow the
+    course that seems most pleasant to you. If ever I lose you and you
+    are still happy, I shall have the joy of knowing I have not been a
+    bar to your happiness.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The worthy Clavel took Adrienne at her word. He proceeded to "follow
+the course that seemed most pleasant to him"&#8212;by breaking the
+engagement and marrying a lesser woman who had a dot of several
+thousand francs. He explained his action by saying that he must look
+out for his own future, and that Adrienne had no prospects of success
+on the stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thus the thrifty actor passes out of history. Thus, too, he lost a
+future chance to handle the funds of Europe's richest actress, and of
+starring as her husband. Peace to his puny soul!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne Lecouvreur no longer clamored to die. She was older
+now&#8212;nearly twenty. And the latest blow hardened instead of crushing
+her. By this time the girlish chrysalis had been shed and a gloriously
+beautiful woman had emerged. Already she was hailed as the "Actress
+Heart Queen." Men were straining the vocabulary of imbecility to coin
+phrases for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And for the first and last time in her career, Adrienne resolved to
+capitalize her charms. It was the one adventuress-moment in all her
+story. And the Hand that ever guided her course picked her up and set
+her back, very hard and very promptly, in the destined path of tragedy
+from which she had tried to stray.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stinging and heart-dead from Clavel's desertion, she listened to the
+vows of the Comte de Klinglin. He was rich; he was a soldier of note;
+and Adrienne was no longer the world-innocent child of her first
+engagement days. She played her cards with the skill of a perfect
+actress. From mere flirtation, the count advanced to the point of
+worshiping her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Klinglin besought her to marry him. And with seeming reluctance,
+she yielded. She even pointed out a way by which they might evade
+royal and family law by emigrating for a time to some other country,
+and then, by judicious bribery, arranging a return and a
+reinstatement. De Klinglin entered eagerly into the plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, on the very eve of their proposed wedding, the count deserted
+her and married an heiress. Decidedly, the Hand was guiding Adrienne
+against every effort or desire of her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This latest blow to pride and to new-born ambition was the turning
+point in Adrienne Lecouvreur's road. It changed her from a
+professional beauty into an inspired actress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She threw herself into her work with a tragic intensity bred of her
+own sorrows. She turned her back on social distractions, and on
+everything that came between her and success. Her acting as well as
+her beauty became the talk of the provinces. Word of her prowess
+drifted to Paris, the Mecca of eighteenth-century actor-folk. A Paris
+manager came to see her act, and he at once engaged her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1717, when she was twenty-three, she burst unheralded upon the
+French metropolis. In a night, Paris was at her feet. Almost at once,
+she was made a leading woman of the <b>Comedie Francaise</b>; where,
+for thirteen years, she reigned, undisputed sovereign of the French
+stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never before had such acting been witnessed or even imagined. It was a
+revelation. Up to this time French actors had mouthed their words
+noisily and grandiloquently, reciting the Alexandrine or otherwise
+metrical lines&#8212;wherein practically all the classic plays of the
+period, except some of Moliere's, were written&#8212;in a singsong chant
+that played sad havoc with the sense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Incidentally, the costuming&#8212;as you may see from contemporary
+cuts&#8212;was a nightmare. And when a character on the stage was not
+declaiming or dramatically listening, he usually stood stock-still in
+a statuesque attitude, staring into blank space, with the look of an
+automaton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this seems ridiculous to us; but it had come straight down as an
+almost inviolable "classic tradition" from the ancient Greek drama,
+which had been more a series of declamations than a vital play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a revelation to Paris. On the stage her
+voice was as soft and musical as it was penetrating. Instead of
+intoning a pompous monologue, she spoke her lines as people in real
+life spoke. Her emotions were keenly human. Every syllable and every
+shade of voice meant something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without sacrificing the poetry of the rhymed couplets, she put the
+breath of life and of conversational meaning into them. She dressed
+the characters she played in the way such persons might reasonably
+have been supposed to dress. She made them a joy to the eye instead of
+an insult to the intelligence. And when she was not speaking, she was
+forever acting; introducing a million bits of byplay to replace the
+old statuesque poses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had lived. And she put the breath of that life into her work. This
+seems simple enough to us in these days of stage realism. But it was a
+wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting,
+diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused
+term was for once well applied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and
+sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them
+all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic
+through many firm repetitions:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Love is a folly which I detest!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?"
+throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only did she revolutionize the stage, but she was the first
+actress to be taken up by society. Not only the foremost men in
+France, but their wives as well, threw open to her the magic doors of
+the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say
+that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The
+unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like
+the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this
+loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A
+hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had
+so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the
+<b>Mercure</b>, of 1719:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of
+    distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as
+    eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words.
+    In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head
+    is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire;
+    her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is
+    wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear,
+    sorrow.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one
+sentence from a letter she wrote:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even
+then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake
+France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself,
+he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"&#8212;a name to which he had
+no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire
+was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a
+dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on
+government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one
+of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de
+Rohan&#8212;bearer of the proudest name in all Europe&#8212;sauntered in. He
+eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no
+one in particular:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Who is this young man who talks so loud?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger
+along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure
+respect for the name he has."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Rohan's tasseled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its
+fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close
+there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and
+beaten half to death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in
+France at that time, against a member of the <b>haute noblesse</b>. So
+Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing
+for a year or more in the use of the small-sword.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan
+professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and,
+through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by <b>lettre de cachet</b>,
+to the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release,
+Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the perihelion of Adrienne's Dianalike sway over French hearts, a
+new social lion arrived in Paris. He was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, born
+of a morganatic union between a German countess and Augustus the
+Strong, King of Poland. (Augustus, by the way, was the parent of no
+less than one hundred and sixty-three children&#8212;an interesting record
+even in those days of large families, and one that should have gone
+far toward earning for him the title of "Father of his Country.")
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Saxe came to Paris crowned with laurels won as a dashing military
+leader, as a fearless duelist, and as an irresistible heart breaker.
+He had won, by sheer bravery and strategic skill, the rank of Marshal.
+He was of the "man on horseback" type over whom crowds go wild.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The new hero was a giant in stature, strikingly handsome, and so
+strong that in one hand he could crush a horseshoe into a shapeless
+lump. He was a paladin&#8212;Ajax, Don Juan, Tamerlane, Mark Antony,
+Baldur, all rolled into one. He was a glorious animal, high of spirits
+and of hopes, devoid of fear and of the finer feelings. A Greek
+god&#8212;or whatever you will. And about him hung the glamour of countless
+conquests on the battlefield and in love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That such a man should have turned Paris' head was inevitable. Equally
+natural was it that Paris women should make fools of themselves over
+him. But why so gross and unintellectual a wooer should have made the
+very slightest impression on a character like Adrienne Lecouvreur's
+must be relegated to the "mystery of choice" collection of riddles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, at sight, she, who for years had scoffed at passion, and who had
+so often declared her heart was dead, felt that she had met the love
+of her life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave her revivified heart and her whole soul into Maurice de
+Saxe's keeping, forever and ever. There were no reservations. Hers was
+a love that could die only with her life. The former affairs were to
+her as half-forgotten dreams. Saxe, and Saxe alone, held her love;
+held it as no other man had been able to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne at first dazzled Saxe&#8212;as a tropic butterfly might dazzle a
+champion bulldog. The dazzle soon wore off; but it left behind a
+comfortable feeling of affection, of admiration, of gratified vanity
+that he alone had been chosen by her, out of all the world of suitors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the deft hands of a sculptor, Adrienne Lecouvreur molded Saxe's
+rough nature. She refined him; taught him to replace the ways of the
+camp by those of civilization; made him less of a beast and more of a
+man; showed him how to think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All of which added to the man's popularity with other women; which was
+the sole reward Adrienne reaped for her educative efforts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Saxe was notoriously untrue to her. In his rages he berated her as a
+cabby might have scolded his drunken wife. He used his power over her
+to raise himself in others' esteem. In short, he was wholly selfish
+throughout, and he gruffly consented to accept Adrienne's worship as
+his just due.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Adrienne's love merely waxed stronger and brighter under such
+abominable treatment. She lived for Saxe alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Duchy of Courland lost its duke. His place was to be filled by
+election. And with the dukedom went the hand of a Russian princess,
+whose face Saxe unchivalrously compared to a Westphalia ham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Saxe's ambition awoke. In his veins ran royal blood. He wanted to be a
+duke and the husband of a princess. He entered as candidate in the
+contest. Lack of money, for judicious bribes to the free and
+incorruptible electors, stood in his way. He went, as ever in trouble,
+to Adrienne. And, as ever, she rose to the occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She knew that, as Duke of Courland, he could not see her again, or be
+within several hundred miles of her. She knew, too, that, by helping
+him with the dukedom, she was helping to give him to another woman. A
+lesser love than hers would have rebelled at either possibility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Adrienne's love for Saxe was that which not only casts out fear,
+but casts out self along with it. She sold every piece of jewelry and
+every costly dress and stick of furniture in her possession, borrowed
+money right and left, and mortgaged her salary at the <b>Comedie
+Francaise</b>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The net result was fifteen thousand dollars, which she gladly handed
+over to Saxe for the expenses of his campaign. With these sinews of
+war, Saxe hastened to Courland. There he remained for a year; working
+hard for his election; making love to the ham-faced princess; fighting
+like a Norse berserker in battle after battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was elected duke. But Russia refused to sanction the election. At
+the head of a handful of fellow adventurers, Saxe went on fighting;
+performing prodigies of personal valor and strength in conflicts
+against overwhelming odds. But at last he was hopelessly beaten in
+battle, and still more hopelessly outpointed in the game of politics.
+And back he came to Paris&#8212;a failure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne used every art and charm to make him forget his misfortunes
+and find happiness once more in her love. He treated her overtures as
+a surly schoolboy might treat those of an over-affectionate little
+sweetheart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He consented to be petted and comforted by the woman who adored him.
+But he wreaked in her the ill-temper bred of his defeat. For example,
+he professed to believe her untrue to him. He was furiously
+jealous&#8212;or pretended to be. And he accused her of the infidelity he
+had himself a thousand times practiced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor Adrienne, aghast at such insane charges, vainly protested her
+innocence and her utter love for him. One of her letters to Saxe,
+during this dark hour, has been preserved. It begins:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I am worn out with grief. I have wept this livelong night. It is
+    foolish of me; since I have nothing wherewith to reproach myself.
+    But I cannot endure severity from you. I am suspected, accused by
+    you. Oh, how can I convince you&#8212;you who alone can wound my heart?
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of this wretched misunderstanding came a crumb of comfort
+to the luckless woman&#8212;albeit the incident that caused it led also,
+indirectly, to her death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Francoise de Lorraine, Duchesse de Bouillon, fell violently in love
+with Saxe, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Saxe laughed in her
+face, and hinted that he cared too much for Adrienne Lecouvreur just
+then to be interested in any one else. It was not the truth, for his
+love for Adrienne had never served as an obstacle to any other of his
+myriad amours. But it served to rebuff the duchesse, who did not
+interest him, and to make Adrienne very, very happy when he repeated
+to her the conversation. As a by-product, it threw the duchesse into a
+frame of mind described by Congreve in his line about the Gehenna-like
+fury of a woman scorned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few days after this&#8212;in July, 1729&#8212;Adrienne received an anonymous
+note asking her to be at a certain corner of the Luxembourg Gardens at
+eleven o'clock the following morning. Being quite without fear, and
+not at all without curiosity, she went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, she was not set upon by masked assassins. She found awaiting her
+nothing more formidable than a pale and badly scared young man in
+clerical garb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clerical youth introduced himself as the Abbe Bouret, a hanger-on
+of the Bouillon household. Bouret told Adrienne that the duchesse had
+bribed him heavily to send her rival a box of poisoned bonbons, with a
+note saying the candies were the gift of an unknown and humble
+admirer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The abbe had seen Adrienne a few nights earlier at the theater. So
+struck had he been by the gentleness and beauty of her face that he
+could not carry out his murderous commission. Hence the warning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne took the abbe, and the candy, too, straight to the police. A
+bonbon was fed to a street dog. The animal, screaming and writhing in
+agony, died within fifteen minutes. This seemed, even to the
+eighteenth-century Paris police, a fairly good proof of the duchesse's
+guilt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naturally, they did not arrest her grace. But they put certain
+respectful queries to her. Strangely enough, the duchesse indignantly
+denied that she had tried to poison Adrienne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bouret, cross-examined, stuck determinedly to his story. So, through
+the Bouillon influence, he was thrown into prison and was kept there
+in solitary confinement, in a damp and unlighted dungeon, with
+occasional torture, until he saw the error of his ways, and confessed
+that his charge had been a lie. Thus was the faultless Duchesse de
+Bouillon triumphantly cleared of an unjust accusation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The duchesse celebrated her vindication by attending the theater, one
+night when Adrienne Lecouvreur was playing in "Phedre." The duchesse
+sat in a stage box and mockingly applauded her rival.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adrienne paid no overt heed at first to her presence. But when she
+came to the scene in which <b>Phedre</b> expresses to <b>&#338;none</b>
+her contempt for a certain class of women, Adrienne turned her back on
+the wondering <b>&#338;none</b>, strode to the footlights, and, her
+blazing eyes seizing and gripping the duchesse's, declaimed directly
+to her <b>Phedre's</b> lines:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+"I know my own faults; but I am not one of those brazen women who,
+    calm even in the exposure of their crimes, can face the world
+    without a blush."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The duchesse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face.
+Shielding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the
+theater.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same title,
+make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk
+openly declared that the Duchesse de Bouillon would not long rest
+impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers
+declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by
+mortal illness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Less than half a century had passed since the dying King Charles had
+"lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the
+science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the
+past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the
+best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Doctors great and doctors greater&#8212;the quacks of the Rive Gauche
+and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg&#8212;all stood in
+turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin;
+while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn
+nincompoops&#8212;which they were.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and
+potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so
+much as name the ailment. At least, they did not&#8212;aloud. For the
+memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still
+fresh in men's minds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by
+the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the
+victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature
+who had defied God's laws by going on the stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings
+of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly
+heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs
+outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be
+wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his
+knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as
+did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At
+all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all
+earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of
+Extreme Unction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly the great dark eyes&#8212;already wide with the Eternal
+Mystery&#8212;turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the
+opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms
+toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her
+weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<b>There</b> is my Universe, my Hope, my <b>God</b>!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur
+sank back upon the pillows, dead&#8212;and unabsolved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That night&#8212;acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had
+heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy&#8212;the police carried
+Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at
+another woman.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="seven">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+CLEOPATRA
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+"THE SERPENT OF OLD NILE"
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Some thirty-five years ago, in the north Jersey village of Pompton,
+the township undertaker's barn burned down. It was a spectacular
+midnight fire. All the natives turned out to view it. Dominie Jansen
+even hinted, I remember, that it was a visitation on the community for
+some of his neighbors' sins. Whereat, Lem Saulsbury took the
+pledge&#8212;for the eighth time that year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, the next week, when the Pompton <b>Clarion</b> appeared, no
+mention was made of the fire&#8212;the only event of intense human
+interest, by the way, since Joel Binswanger, the official local sot,
+six months earlier had, at the village tavern, swallowed a half-pint
+flask of carbolic acid&#8212;set aside for cleaning the brasses&#8212;under the
+conviction that it was applejack. Joel had complained of a rough
+throat and an unwonted taste in his mouth for days afterward. The
+Clarion editor, taken to task for printing nothing about the fire,
+excused the omission by saying;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What'd 'a been the use of writing the story? Everybody knows about
+it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That's all there is to the anecdote. Yes, I've heard better, myself.
+I've even heard the same one better told. It serves, though, as a
+fitting preamble to my story about Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Everybody knows about it."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Who can say anything about her that you have not heard? Perhaps I can.
+Probably not. Will you be patient with me, and, even as tourists visit
+European shrines to verify their Baedekers, read this story to verify
+what you have always known? Cleopatra cannot be omitted from any
+super-woman series. And I will make her as interesting as I know how.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Personally, I believe the Pomptonians would far rather have read about
+that barn blaze, which they had seen, than about the conflagration of
+a whole foreign metropolis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At sixteen&#8212;in 52 B.C.&#8212;Cleopatra's known career as a heartbreaker
+began; although there are rumors of more than one still earlier
+affair, with Egyptian nobles as their heroes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes&#8212;Ptolemy the Piper&#8212;cordially
+hated ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra and her baby brother, young Ptolemy,
+nominally shared the throne for a time. They were both children. They
+ruled much as the baby "drives" when he holds the reins of the horse
+at whose head is the hostler's guiding hand. All manner of
+adventurers&#8212;both native and Greek&#8212;were the real rulers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of these factions drove Cleopatra from the throne and from her
+capital at Alexandria, leaving the "triple Ur&#230;us crown," with its
+mystic lotus adornments, on the head of baby Ptolemy alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crown was the only fragment of actual kingship the child
+possessed. The power and the graft lay in the hands of a trio of
+industriously grasping Greek adventurers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra, meantime, out in the cold, schemed to regain her place on
+the double throne, and, even at that early age, amused herself in the
+interim by planning the tortures she would wreak on little Ptolemy
+when her turn should come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While she was casting about for means to outwit the Greeks, and
+seeking means to buy up a mercenary army of invasion, she learned that
+Julius C&#230;sar, an elderly Roman of vast repute as a conqueror, had come
+to Alexandria at the head of a few legions, on a mission of diplomacy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra may have known little of men's strength, but already she was
+a profound student of their weaknesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She began to ask questions about C&#230;sar. Brushing away (as immaterial
+if true), her scared native attendants' statements that he had the
+body of an elephant, the head of a tiger, and the claws of a dragon,
+and that he fed on prisoners served raw, she pumped one or two exiled
+Romans and gleaned an inkling of the conqueror's history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the details of C&#230;sar's Gallic invasion, his crushing of Pompey,
+and his bullying of semihostile fellow Romans, she did not in the
+least concern herself. What most interested Cleopatra were the
+following domestic revelations:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been married at least four times, and three of his wives were
+still living. Cossutia, the wife of his youth, he had divorced by law
+because he had been captivated by the charms of one Cornelia, whom he
+had forthwith married, and who had died before he had had time to name
+her successor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next in order he had wed Pompeia; and, on the barest rumor of
+indiscretion on her part, had announced dramatically: "C&#230;sar's wife
+must be above suspicion!" and had divorced her to marry his present
+spouse, Calpurnia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The interstices between these unions had been garnished with many a
+love episode. Adamant as he was toward men, C&#230;sar was far from being
+an anchorite where women were concerned; and he had the repute of
+being unswervingly loyal to the woman whom he, at the time, chanced to
+love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This scurrilous information was quite enough for Cleopatra. She had
+her plans accordingly. She would see C&#230;sar. More to the point, she
+would be seen by C&#230;sar. But how? C&#230;sar was in Alexandria, the
+stronghold of her enemies. It would mean capture and subsequent death
+for Cleopatra to be found in the city. Yet she planned not only to
+enter Alexandria, but to make her first appearance before C&#230;sar in a
+way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest
+from the very start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Julius C&#230;sar sat in the great audience hall of the Alexandria palace,
+whose use he had commandeered as his temporary headquarters. Behind
+him stood his guards; heavy armored, tanned of face; short, thick
+swords at hip. Before his dais trailed a procession of folk who hated
+him as starkly as they feared him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were Egyptians with favors to ask, and they bore gifts to indorse
+their pleas. They were Greeks who sought to outwit the barbarian
+victor, or to trick him into the granting of concessions. One by one
+the suppliants crawled past, each crying out an appeal or a grievance.
+Nearly every one made a peace offering, until the mass of gifts was
+stacked high on the stone floor of the audience hall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently entered two black porters, (strapping Nubian giants), who
+bore lightly between them a roll of rare Persian carpet. They halted,
+laid down their burden on the floor at C&#230;sar's feet, fell on their
+knees in obeisance, and&#8212;waited. On the floor lay the roll of
+priceless weave, no one coming forward to make the rich gift an excuse
+for the urging of some boon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+C&#230;sar grew inquisitive. He leaned forward to examine the tight-folded,
+shimmering rug more carefully. As he did so, the folds were suddenly
+flung aside, and a girl leaped to her feet from among them. Thus had
+Cleopatra entered Alexandria. Thus had she penetrated to C&#230;sar's
+presence. Thus, too, by her craft and daring, had she won the
+attention of the man whose daring and craft had conquered the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+C&#230;sar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully&#8212;and
+wholly undraped&#8212;before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed
+and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw
+everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination&#8212;a
+magnetism&#8212;that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had
+known in all his fifty-eight years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Julius C&#230;sar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the
+super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain
+face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties
+who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an
+elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man,
+nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin
+gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of
+laurel leaves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused
+sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican
+Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was
+an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded
+to play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet she speedily found that C&#230;sar's was but a surface weakness, and
+that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her
+foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as
+were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of
+Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of
+her ancestors, at Rome's expense&#8212;he had not the remotest idea of
+doing that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor could all her most bewildering blandishments wring such a foolish
+concession from him. He made love to her&#8212;ardent love; but he did not
+let love interfere in any way with politics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of carrying her to the throne, through seas of her enemies'
+blood, he carried Cleopatra back to Rome with him and, to the scandal
+of the whole city, installed her in a huge marble villa there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And there, no secret being made of C&#230;sar's infatuation for her,
+Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until C&#230;sar's
+death. There, too, C&#230;sar's son, C&#230;sarion, was born; and with the boy's
+birth came to Cleopatra the hope that C&#230;sar would will to him all his
+vast estates and other wealth; which would have been some slight
+compensation for the nonrestoring of her throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Cleopatra abode in Rome, more than one man of world-fame bowed
+in homage before her. For example, Lepidus&#8212;fat, stupid, inordinately
+rich, fit dupe for cleverer politicians. Marcus Antonius, too,
+&#8212;C&#230;sar's protege, and at this time a swaggering, lovable, dissolute
+soldier-demagogue, whose fortunes were so undissolubly fastened to
+C&#230;sar's that he, the winner of a horde of women, dared not lift his
+eyes to the woman C&#230;sar loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the rest&#8212;Marcus Brutus, snarling Casca, and the others&#8212;came
+one more guest to the villa&#8212;a hard-faced, cold-eyed youth whom
+Cleopatra hated. For he was Caius Octavius, C&#230;sar's nephew and
+presumptive heir; the man who was, years hence, to be the Emperor
+Augustus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At length, one day, Rome's streets surged with hysterical mobs and
+factions. And news came to the villa that C&#230;sar had been assassinated
+at the Forum. Speedily an angry crowd besieged Cleopatra's house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now that the all-feared C&#230;sar no longer lived to protect her, the
+people were keen to wreak punishment on this foreign sorceress who had
+enmeshed the murdered man's brain, and had made him squander upon her
+so much of the public wealth that might better have gone into Roman
+pockets. Rome's new government, too, at once ordered her expulsion
+from the city.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra, avoiding the mob and dodging arrest, fled from Rome with
+her son, her fortune, and her few faithful serfs. One more hope was
+gone. For, instead of leaving his money to C&#230;sarion, C&#230;sar, in his
+will, had made the cold-eyed youth, Caius Octavius, his heir.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Back to the East went Cleopatra, her sun of success temporarily in
+shadow. In semi-empty, if regal, state, she queened it for a time, her
+title barren, her real power in Egypt practically confined to her
+brain and to her charm. Nominal Queen of Egypt, she was still merely
+holding the reins, while iron-handed Rome strode at the horse's head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From afar, she heard from time to time the tidings from Rome. The men
+who had slain C&#230;sar had themselves been overthrown. In their place
+Rome&#8212;and all the world&#8212;was ruled by a triumvirate made up of three
+men she well remembered&#8212;Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next news was that Antony and Octavius had painlessly extracted
+Lepidus from the combination, and were about to divide the government
+of the whole known world between themselves. Antony, to whom first
+choice was given, selected the eastern half for his share, leaving the
+west to Octavius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came word that Antony was on his way toward Egypt; thither bound
+in order to investigate certain grave charges made by her subjects
+against Cleopatra herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once more were the queen's throne and her life itself in peril. And
+once more she called upon her matchless power over men to meet and
+overcome the new menace. When Antony drew near to the capital,
+Cleopatra set forth to meet him; not with such an army as she might
+perchance have scraped together to oppose the invader, but relying
+solely on her own charms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Antony by this time was well past his first youth. Here is Plutarch's
+word picture of him:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+He was of a noble presence. He had a goodly, thick beard, a broad
+    forehead, and a crooked nose. And there appeared such a manly look
+    in his countenance as is seen in the statues of Hercules&#8230;. And
+    it is incredible what marvelous love he won.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and it is incredible into what messes that same "marvelous love,"
+first and last, dragged him. He had a wondrous genius for war and for
+statesmanship; but ever, just as those qualities lifted him to
+eminence, some woman would drag him down. For instance, as a young
+man, his budding political hopes were wrecked by Flavia, a charmer who
+enslaved him. Later, Rome turned a deaf ear to the tales of his
+military glory because he chose to escort openly along the Appian Way
+a frail beauty named Cytheria, in a chariot drawn by four lions. In
+rapid succession he&#8212;like his idol, C&#230;sar&#8212;married four wives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Flavia was the first&#8212;she who blasted his early statesmanship
+ambitions; next Antonia, from whom he soon separated; third, Fulvia, a
+shrew who made his home life a burden, and whose temper drove him far
+from her&#8212;not that he really needed such incentive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Fulvia loved him, as did all women. For when Cicero lay dead, she
+went to the orator's bier and thrust a bodkin through the once magic
+tongue; thus punishing the tongue, she explained, for its calumnies
+against her beloved husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fulvia was not exactly a cozy-corner wife, as you, perhaps, have
+observed; yet, when she died, Antony was heartily sorry. He said so.
+At the time, he was far away from Rome and home&#8212;he had not taken
+Fulvia to Egypt with him&#8212;and was basking in Cleopatra's wiles. On a
+visit to Rome he next married Octavia, sister of Octavius. It was a
+state match. He speedily deserted her and hurried back to Egypt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Antony&#8212;true lover and false husband, hero and fool, rake and
+statesman&#8212;had fifty sides to his character&#8212;and a woman was on every
+side. In times of peace he wallowed in the wildest dissipation, and
+spent vast fortunes without a second thought. In war, he was the idol
+of his men, carousing with them, sharing their hard fare and harder
+life, never losing their adoring respect, always the hero for whom
+they would blithely die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so back to the story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up the River Cydnus sailed Antony, bent on restoring order to Egypt
+and punishing the cruel Cleopatra. And down the River Cydnus to meet
+him came Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The barge, wherein lay the queen, had sails of purple and gold. It was
+propelled by oars of pure silver. Around the recumbent Cleopatra were
+beautiful attendants, clad&#8212;or unclad&#8212;as Nymphs, Graces, Cupids. She
+herself wore, on her left ankle, a jeweled band in which was set a
+sacred scarab. That was the full extent of her costume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a single look, Antony forgot forever the punitive object of his
+journey to Egypt; forgot that he was ruler of half the world, and that
+he had the cleverness and power to oust Octavius from the other half,
+and to rule it all. He forgot everything, except that he loved her,
+and was content to be her helpless and happy slave; that she was the
+supreme love of his thousand loves; that the world was well lost for
+such love as hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From that moment the old-time magnetic statesman and general, Marcus
+Antonius&#8212;with his shrewd plans for world conquest&#8212;was dead. In his
+place lived Mark Antony, prince of lovers; a man whose sole thought
+and aim in life consisted in worshipping at the bare feet of a
+red-haired, snub-nosed Egyptian woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+C&#230;sar had loved Cleopatra&#8212;and won. Mark Antony loved her&#8212;and lost;
+lost everything&#8212;except perfect happiness. But for her, Antony might
+have striven night and day, with brain, will, and body, using his
+friends as sacrifices, employing a statesmanship that was black
+treachery, drenching all Europe in blood. But for Cleopatra, he might
+have done all this. He might, as a result, have ousted Octavius and
+made himself, for the minute, master of all the world&#8212;as a price for
+his years of racking toil&#8212;before some patriotic assassin got a chance
+to kill him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thanks to Cleopatra's malign influence, the old warrior spent his last
+years, instead, in a golden Fool's Paradise, whose joys have become
+historic. Wherefore, the schoolbooks hold up Antony as a horrible
+example of what a man may throw away, through folly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have tried, in the preceding few paragraphs, to reenforce the
+school-books' teachings; to show that it is better to toil than to
+trifle, to sweat and suffer than to saunter through Arcady, to die
+dead-tired than to die divinely happy. I am sure I make the point
+clear. If I do not, the fault is not mine; and the sad, sad example of
+Antony has gone for naught.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had a wonderful time there, in the Lotus Land, these two
+super-lovers. Each had had a host of earlier "affairs." But these now
+served merely as do the many rough "detail sketches" that work up at
+last into the perfected picture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was no heavy-tragedy romance. The two mature lovers had a saving
+sense of fun that sent them on larks worthy of high-school revelers.
+By night, they would go in disguise through the city, to revel
+unrecognized at some peasant wedding or orgy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, the incognito Antony, on such an expedition, got a sound
+thrashing and a broken head from taking too prominent a part on a slum
+festivity. And Cleopatra never let him hear the last of it. That the
+all-conquering Marcus Antonius should have been beaten up by a crowd
+of Egyptian <b>fellaheen</b>, who trembled at the very mention of his
+name, struck her as the joke of the century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had a right lively sense of humor, had this "Serpent of Old Nile,"
+as Antony playfully nicknamed her. And probably this sense of humor
+was one of the strongest fetters that bound to her the love veteran,
+who was sick of a succession of statelily humorless Roman beauties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra was forever playing practical jokes on her lover. Once, for
+example, as she and Antony sat fishing off their anchored barge in the
+Alexandria harbor, Antony wagered that he would make the first catch.
+Cleopatra took the bet. A moment afterward Antony felt a mighty tug at
+his line. With the zest of a born fisherman, he "drew in."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He brought to the surface, suspended from his hook, an enormous
+fish&#8212;dried, boned, and salted! Cleopatra had privily sent one of her
+divers over the far side of the barge to swim down and fasten the
+salted fish to her sweetheart's line.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, the talk ran to the unbelievable cost of some of the feasts the
+ancient Persian monarchs had been wont to give, and the wholesale
+quantity of priceless wines drunk at those banquets. Whereat,
+Cleopatra offered to wager that she could drink ten million sesterces
+($450,000) worth of wine at a single sitting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Antony loudly assured her that the thing was impossible. Even so
+redoubtable a tankard man as himself could not hope to drink
+one-hundredth that value of wine in the most protracted debauch. She
+insisted. The wager was made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Calling for a goblet of "slaves' wine"&#8212;a species of vinegar&#8212;the
+queen dropped into it the largest pearl of Egypt's royal treasury, a
+gem appraised at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The treasure
+dissolved under the vinegar's sharp acid; and Cleopatra&#8212;to a gasp of
+horror from the more frugal onlookers&#8212;drained the goblet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such banquets staggered Egypt's resources. So did other jolly
+extravagances. Rumors of Antony's strange infatuation reached Rome.
+Rome was used to Antony's love affairs, and Rome knew Cleopatra of
+old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Rome merely grinned and shrugged its shoulders. But when the big
+revenues that Antony had promised to wring from the conquered country
+failed to arrive, Rome&#8212;sorely wounded in the pocketbook&#8212;began to
+protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Antony's friends at home pointed out to him what capital the crafty
+Octavius would try to make of this new-born dissatisfaction against
+his colleague. In a momentary gleam of sanity, Antony left the weeping
+Cleopatra and hastened back to Rome to face his enemies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There, all too briefly, the man's old genius flamed up. He appeased
+the populace, won his former ascendency over the disapproving Senate,
+blocked Octavius' plot to hurl him from power, and sealed his campaign
+of inspired diplomacy by marrying his rival's sister, Octavia.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a stroke, Antony had won back all he had lost Octavius was
+checkmated, the people were enthusiastic, and once more Antony had
+world rulership within his easy reach.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in busy, iron-hard Rome, he fell to remembering the lazy sunshine
+of Egypt. The primly gentle Octavia was hopelessly insipid by contrast
+with the glowing super-woman. Memory tugged, ever harder and harder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even if this story were fiction, instead of prosy fact, you would
+foresee just what was bound to happen. Back to Egypt, on some flimsy
+pretext, fled Antony. He turned his back on Rome, on his wife, on
+Octavius, on friend, on foe, on future. He was to see none of them
+again. Nor was there to be a second outflash of his old genius. The
+rest was&#8212;Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reunited lovers flew from bliss to bliss, from one mad
+extravagance to another. Statecraft, regal dignity&#8212;common sense&#8212;all
+went by the board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Rome, the effect of Antony's whirlwind reinstatement campaign
+gradually wore off. Revenues did not flow in from Egypt. But all sorts
+of wild stories did. And the wilder they were, the truer they were.
+Rome at large did not bother its brutal head over Antony's morals. But
+all Rome stormed and howled over the fact that the boundlessly rich
+kingdom of Egypt was bringing in practically no more money to the
+coffers of Rome. It was as if men who had invested a fortune in a
+thirty-story office building should find that the superintendent was
+holding back all the rents and losing tenants every day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Octavius was quick to take advantage of all this. Personally, he hated
+Antony, and he was bitterly resentful of his sister's desertion.
+Politically, he wanted to be lord of the world&#8212;as later he was&#8212;under
+the title of "Emperor Augustus;" and poor, enfeebled Antony alone
+stood in his way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the plea that a new money-getter was needed for Rome in Antony's
+place, Octavius easily roused public feeling into a clamor that Egypt
+be invaded, Antony overthrown, and Cleopatra put to death. Octavius,
+as master of Rome, headed the punitive army of invasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, on news of his foes' approach, Antony's spirit&#8212;but this time
+not his genius&#8212;flickered back to a ghost of its old flame. By
+messenger, he sent Octavius a very sporting offer: namely, that waste
+of lives be avoided by Octavius and Antony meeting in single combat,
+to the death; "winner take all."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Octavius was a politician, not a d'Artagnan; which is why he at
+last became Emperor of Rome and ruler of the known earth. He had not
+those cold, light eyes and thin lips for nothing. He was a strategist
+rather than a gladiator. Back to the challenger came this terse reply:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Can Antony find no readier mode of death than at the sword of
+Octavius?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On moved the invaders. And Antony took enough time from Cleopatra's
+side to make halfhearted preparations to resist. The first clash of
+any importance was the sea fight off Actium. There Fortune was
+inclined for the time to smile once again on her old prime favorite.
+All along the line, Antony's warships were driving back and breaking
+the formation of Octavius'. Then, at the crucial moment of the fight,
+Cleopatra, who, in a royal galley, was watching the conflict, ordered
+her galley put about and headed for the distant shore. To this day no
+one knows whether her fatal order was the result of a whim or of
+sudden cowardice or of both.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her galley swept away from the battle. Antony, seeing it depart,
+feared Cleopatra might have been wounded by a stray arrow. At once he
+forgot that the issue of the day depended solely on him. He realized
+only that the woman he worshipped might be injured. And he ordered his
+own galley to put off in pursuit of Cleopatra's.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captains of Antony's other ships, seeing their leader apparently
+running away, were seized with panic terror, and followed. The fight
+became a rout. Antony's fleet was annihilated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With that strangely won battle, the last real obstacle between
+Octavius and complete victory was down. Steadily the conqueror
+advanced on Alexandria. Cleopatra saw how things were going. She knew
+that Antony was forever broken, and that, as a protector against the
+oncoming Romans, he was helpless. So she thriftily shifted her
+allegiance to Octavius; sending him word that she was his admiring
+slave, and that she craved a personal interview.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the same old siren trick. At sight, when she was sixteen, she
+had won C&#230;sar's heart; at sight, when she was twenty-eight, she had
+won Antony's heart and soul. On sight, now, at thirty-eight, she hoped
+to make of Octavius a second Antony. But C&#230;sar had had black eyes, and
+Antony's eyes were a soft brown; whereas the eyes of Octavius were
+pale gray and fire-less. Had Cleopatra bothered to study physiognomy,
+she might have sought some more hopeful plan than to enslave such a
+man as this new invader.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Octavius, cold and heartless as he was, would not trust himself to
+meet the super-woman; which was, perhaps, the highest of the billion
+tributes that were, soon or late, paid to Cleopatra's charms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead, Octavius sent her a courteous message, assuring her of his
+respect and infinite admiration, and saying that he would see that she
+was treated with every consideration due her rank. To his friends,
+however, he loudly boasted that she should walk barefoot through Rome,
+bound by gold chains to his chariot axle. And word of this boast came
+to Cleopatra. The game was up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She walled herself into the huge Royal Mausoleum and had word sent
+forth that she was dead. Antony, himself in hiding from the advancing
+Romans, heard and believed. Nothing was left. He had blithely thrown
+away the world for love. And now, after ten years of glorious
+happiness, the woman for whom he had been so glad to sacrifice
+everything, was dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His foes were hastening to seize him. There was but one course for a
+true Roman in such a plight to follow. The example of Brutus, of Cato,
+of a hundred other iron patriots, rose before him. And their example
+Antony followed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He drove his sword through his body and fell dying, just as news came
+to him that Cleopatra lived. With almost his last breath, Antony
+ordered his slaves to carry him to the queen. The doors and lower
+windows of the mausoleum were bricked up. There was no time to send
+for masons to break an opening in them, if the dying man would reach
+Cleopatra alive. So he was lifted by ropes to an upper window of the
+tomb, and was then swung into the room where Cleopatra awaited him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in the arms of the woman who had wrecked him, and who at the
+last&#8212;though, mercifully, he never knew it&#8212;had sought to betray him,
+Mark Antony died. Perhaps it was an ignoble death, and an anticlimax.
+Perhaps it was a fit end for the life of this man, who had ever been
+the adored of women; and the death he himself would have chosen. Fate
+seldom makes a blunder in setting her scenes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So perished Mark Antony; to whose life and death, before you judge
+him, I beg you to apply the words of a country preacher I once heard.
+The preacher was discanting on the Biblical personage "out of whom
+were cast seven devils."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Brethren," said the exhorter, "a man must be far above the ordinary,
+to contain seven devils. In the average man's petty nature there isn't
+room even for a single half-size devil, to say nothing of seven
+full-grown ones."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra had long since made up her mind to die sooner than walk in
+chains through the streets where once she had swept as C&#230;sar's
+peerless sweetheart. But she was part Greek and part Egyptian&#8212;both
+soft nations, lacking in the stern qualities of Rome. She had no taste
+for naked steel. She was content to die, but she wanted to die without
+pain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On certain of her slaves she practiced the effects of various Oriental
+poisons. Some of these slaves died in agony, some in mere discomfort.
+One of them died with a smile on his lips&#8212;a slave on whom had been
+inflicted the bite of the tiny gray Nile-mud asp.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cleopatra's question was answered. She put an asp to her breast. The
+serpent fixed its fangs in her white flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Cleopatra&#8212;model and synonym for a worldful of super-women&#8212;was
+very comfortably spared the shame of walking chained and barefoot in a
+Roman Triumph.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="eight">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER VIII
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+GEORGE SAND
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+THE HOPELESSLY UGLY SIREN
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+A very famous woman discovered once that men are not paragons of
+fidelity. Or, finding that one man was not, she decided that all men
+were alike. And to Jules Sandeau, who had deceived her, she exclaimed,
+in fine, melodrama frenzy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"My heart is a grave!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"From the number of its occupants," drawled Sandeau, "I should rather
+call it a cemetery."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman, too angry to grasp the meaning of the ungallant speech,
+raged on:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"But I will be avenged. I shall write the tragedy of my love&#8212;in
+romance form&#8212;and&#8212;"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Why not in city-directory form?" suggested the man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the loverly conversation ended in hysterics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman was Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin Dudevant. History,
+literature, and the annals of superwomen know her as George Sand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As one may glean from her verbal tilt with Sandeau, she was not a
+recluse or a misanthropist. In fact, she numbered her ardent wooers by
+the dozen. Her love life began at a convent school when she was little
+more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list
+of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a
+city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a
+cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it
+embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin,
+Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many
+demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I am sick of great men. I would far rather see them in Plutarch
+    than in real life. In Plutarch or in marble or in bronze, their
+    human side would not disgust me so.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+And the personality, the appearance, the Venusberg charm of this heart
+monopolist? One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that
+launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic
+paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental
+vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts. Here is Balzac's
+description of her. It is found in a letter written to Madame Hanska
+in 1838, when George Sand was at the acme of her super-woman career:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    I found her in her dressing gown, smoking an after-dinner cigar,
+    beside the fire in an immense room. She wore very pretty yellow
+    slippers with fringes, coquettish stockings, and red trousers.
+    Physically, she has acquired a double chin, like a well-fed
+    priest. She has not a single white hair, in spite of her terrible
+    misfortunes. Her beautiful eyes are as sparkling as ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    When she is sunk in thought, she looks just as stupid as
+    formerly&#8212;as I told her&#8212;for her expression lies wholly in her
+    eyes. She goes to bed at six in the morning and rises at noon. (I
+    go to bed at six in the evening and rise at midnight; but, of
+    course, I am conforming myself to her habits.) She smokes to
+    excess and plays, perhaps, too much the grande dame.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Carlyle, still less merciful, snarls forth the following wholly
+Carlylean epitome of George Sand's looks:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She has the face of a horse!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another contemporary writer declares:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Her hair is as black and shiny as ebony; her swarthy face is red and
+heavy; her expression fierce and defiant, yet dull."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So much for the verity of traditional siren dreams I So much, too, for
+the theory that beauty or daintiness or feminity has anything to do
+with the nameless charm of the world's super-women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+George Sand came, honestly, if left-handedly, by her cardiac prowess.
+For she was a great-great-granddaughter of Adrienne Lecouvreur and
+Marshal Saxe; two of history's stellar heart breakers&#8212;a fact of which
+she made much.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her father was a French army officer&#8212;Lieutenant Dupin&#8212;and as a mere
+baby his only daughter, Aurore, was acclaimed "daughter of the
+regiment." Decked out in a tiny uniform, the ugly duckling ran wild in
+the army posts where her father was stationed, and joined right
+boisterously in the soldiers' rough sports.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, she was sent to a convent. From her own description of this
+particular retreat, it was a place that crushed out all normal and
+childish ideas and filled the growing mind with a morbid melancholy.
+Yet it was there that love first found the girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The victim&#8212;or victor&#8212;was one Stephane de Grandsaigne, professor of
+physiology. Under his tuition she developed a queer craving for
+dissection&#8212;a fad she followed, in psychic form, through life. The
+love scenes between herself and her adored professor were usually
+enacted while they were together dissecting a leg or an arm or probing
+the mysteries of retina and cornea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a semigruesome, unromantic episode, and it ended with
+suddenness when the pupil was sent out into the world. There a husband
+was found for her. He was Casimir Dudevant, a man she liked well
+enough and who was mildly fond of her. They lived together for a time
+in modified content. Two children were born to them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By and by, Casimir took to drink. Many people refused to blame him.
+Indeed, there are present-day students of George Sand's life who can
+find a host of excuses for his bibulous failings. But once, coming
+home from a spree, Casimir forgot to take his wife's lofty reproaches
+with his wonted good nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a flash of drunken anger, he struck her. And she left him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The high spirit of her act of independence is marred just a little by
+the fact that she chanced to be in love with another man. This other
+man was Aurelian de Seze, a ponderous country magistrate. The affair
+was brief. Presently the two had parted. And George Sand, penniless,
+went to Paris to make a living by literature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She obtained hack work of a sort, lived in the typical drafty garret
+so dear to unrecognized genius, and earned for a time only fifteen
+francs&#8212;three dollars&#8212;a month. It was the customary nadir, wherein
+one gathers equipment for success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she met Jules Sandeau. He was a lawyer who dabbled in literature.
+He fell in love with the lonely woman and she with him. They formed a
+literary partnership. Together they wrote novels and began to achieve
+a certain measure of good luck. Their novels were signed "George
+Sand." Why, no one knows. It was a pen name devised by the feminine
+member of the novelistic firm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But before long Sandeau was left far behind in the race for fame. His
+more or less fair partner wrote a novel on her own account. It was
+"Indiana." Like Byron, she woke one morning to find herself famous.
+The book had lifted her forever out of obscurity and need.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At about the same period, she entered Sandeau's study one day just in
+time to see him kiss another woman. The other woman chanced to be
+their laundress, who, presumably, was more kissable, if less
+inspiring, than was the newly acclaimed celebrity on whom Sandeau had
+been lavishing his fickle affections.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a scene, unequaled for violence in any of their joint
+novels. And in the course of it occurred the repartee recorded at the
+beginning of this story. As an upshot, Sandeau followed Dudevant, de
+Seze, Grandsaigne, and the rest into the limbo of George Sand's
+discarded lovers; where he was soon to be joined by many another and
+far greater man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her faith in men shattered for at lest the fourth time, George Sand
+forswore fidelity and resolved to make others suffer; even as she
+liked to imagine she herself had suffered. The literary world was by
+this time cheering itself hoarse over her. And literary giants were
+vying for her love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of the swarm, she selected Prosper Merimee. The author of "Carmen"
+was then in his prime as a lion of the salons. To him George Sand gave
+her heart irrevocably and forever. Through youth and maturity they
+worshiped each other&#8212;for eight consecutive days. On the ninth day,
+George Sand informed "Carmen's" creator that he was far too cynical to
+be her ideal any longer. Merimee retorted that her "pose of divine
+exaltation" was better suited to an angel than to an ugly woman who
+continually smoked cigars and who swore as pyrotechnically as one of
+her father's most loquacious troopers. So the romance ended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Followed a bevy of loves well-nigh as brief, most of whose heroes'
+names are emblazoned on the book backs of the world's libraries. And
+after this populous interregnum, came Alfred de Musset.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Musset was a mere boy. But his wonderful poetry had already
+awakened Europe to ecstacy. He was the beau-ideal of a million
+youthful lovers and their sweethearts; even as, a generation earlier,
+Byron had been.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in 1833 that he and George Sand met. De Musset had seen her
+from afar and had begged for an introduction. She was six years older
+than he, and the prettiest girls in France were pleading wistfully for
+his smile. But, at sight, he loved the horse-faced, almost middle-aged
+swearer of strange oaths and smoker of strong cigars. Hence his plea
+to be introduced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sainte-Beuve, to whom he made the request, wrote, asking leave to
+bring him to one of George Sand's "at homes." The same day she
+returned a most positive refusal, writing:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I do not want you to introduce De Musset to me. He is a fop, and
+    we would not suit each other. Instead, bring Dumas; in whose art I
+    have found a soul, if only the soul of a commercial traveler.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But de Musset, unrebuffed, succeeded in his ambition. He managed to
+secure an introduction to her at a banquet given by the <b>Revue des
+Deux Mondes</b> editors. And almost at once his love was reciprocated.
+Then began a union that was alternately the interest, the scandal, and
+the laughing-stock of a continent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the
+world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the
+heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such
+immortals might reasonably be expected&#8212;was expected&#8212;to be akin to
+the noble romances of poetry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of
+babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the
+inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two
+master intellects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless
+idealism. When he did so, she berated him as heartless. When he failed
+to, she denounced him as an animal. She was never content with
+whatever course he might follow. Yet she was madly in love with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some
+furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily
+commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of
+her warmer moods:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I,
+    and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing
+    to you that I am dying of love?&#8212;torment of my life that you are!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless
+    hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate
+    from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as
+    from one key to its remote neighbor.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the
+composer's meeting with George Sand:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception
+    was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented
+    phantom. In superstitious fear, he would have left the house at
+    once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and
+    described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the
+    guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman&#8212;the premiere
+    novelist, Madame Dudevant&#8212;George Sand.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+In his diary that same night Chopin wrote of his new acquaintance:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    I do not like her face. There is something in it that repels me.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Yet within a day or so he was her adorer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time all went as well as any love story could with such a
+heroine. She gloried in her power to build up for the moment her
+lover's waning strength. Her friends' praise of the feat was as music
+to her. But she was not the type of woman who can forever wait
+patiently upon a fretful convalescent's whims. Her self-sacrifice was
+a flash, not a steady flame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in time she girded at the restraints of playing nurse and vitality
+giver. Then, instead of boasting as before, she waxed complaining. She
+told the world at large how exacting and cross and tiresome Chopin
+was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She once referred to him publicly as "that detestable invalid." She
+announced that she was his ever-patient comrade and nurse. There is no
+authority but hers to bear out the claim of patience. And so the
+once-beautiful relationship dragged out its weary length until George
+Sand could endure the strain no longer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She deserted Chopin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not content with this final blow to the invalid who had loved her for
+years, she continued to vilify him. Among her complaints was one that
+has since passed, in slightly altered form, into a good old reliable
+vaudeville wheeze. She wrote:
+</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<p>We never addressed a single reproach to each other except once.</p>
+<p>And that was from the first to the last time we met.</p></div></div>
+
+<p>
+George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from
+it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and
+appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him&#8212;not
+only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former
+divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such
+lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room.
+A historian describes the encounter:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    Thinking herself unobserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and
+    held out her hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    "Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+    He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant,
+    subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly
+    pale, and without a word he left the room.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down.
+Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached
+her; perhaps she thought it a trick&#8212;she had tried something of the
+sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so
+short.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at
+once to the dying composer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the
+sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would
+not obey the summons, that he would never again see her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and
+over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that night he died&#8212;no less than seven different women claiming
+later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+George Sand was conscience-stricken. She wrote and proclaimed long and
+more or less plausible reasons to account for her failure to go to
+Chopin. But no one who really knew her was convinced of her excuses'
+truth. And so ended one more of her heart stories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+De Musset, by the way refused to admit her to his rooms when he
+himself lay dying&#8212;a grisly joke that Paris appreciated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Back to her work, as once before, George Sand fled for forgetfulness.
+And her fame grew. She was the most prolific woman writer, by the way,
+in literature's history; writing, in all, twenty plays and more than
+one hundred novels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An Englishman (name buried) courted her at about this time. Still
+miserable over Chopin's death&#8212;and far more so over the way people
+were talking about her treatment of him&#8212;she was decidedly waspish to
+the trans-Channel admirer. Seeking to win her interest, in a literary
+discussion, he opened one conversation by inquiring:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Dudevant, what is your favorite novel?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Olympia,'" she answered, without a second of hesitance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"'Olympia?'" the Englishman repeated, vainly ransacking his memory. "I
+don't think I recall any book of that name."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Of course you don't," she snapped. "I haven't written it yet."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And perhaps&#8212;or perhaps not&#8212;his British brain some day unraveled the
+meaning of cryptic retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For her infidelities George Sand felt no compunction. She wrote
+frankly concerning them:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+I have never imposed constancy upon myself. When I have felt that
+    love is dead, I have said so without shame or remorse, and have
+    obeyed Providence that was leading me elsewhere.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+By her marriage with Dudevant, she had had a son and a daughter. The
+daughter, Solange, inherited much of her mother's lawlessness, with
+none of the latter's inspiration. And now George Sand was to see how
+her own nature worked in another of the same blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She arranged a splendid marriage for Solange, a marriage with a man of
+rank and money. And on the very eve of the wedding Solange proceeded
+to elope with a poor sculptor, Clesinger by name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mother was equal to the emergency. She ran after the fugitives,
+caught them, bullied Clesinger into marrying Solange, hushed all
+scandal, and installed the young couple in a Paris flat, settling on
+them the bulk of her property. In revenge, Clesinger permanently
+estranged Solange from her mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon afterward George Sand's sway over men's hearts ceased. Whether
+she was weary of love, or whether love was weary of her, the old
+fascination deserted her. No more as lovers, but as profound admirers
+of her intellect, great men still flocked about her&#8212;Matthew Arnold,
+Flaubert, Feuillet, and a host of others. But it was now her brain
+alone they worshiped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By many years George Sand outlived her charm, dying in 1876 at the age
+of seventy-two, her grandchildren about her&#8212;a smugly proper, if sadly
+anticlimactic, ending to a career in which anticlimax had been almost
+as infrequent as propriety.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="nine">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER NINE
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+MADAME DU BARRY
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+THE SEVEN-MILLION-DOLLAR SIREN.
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+She came from the same neighborhood that had produced Joan of Arc. She
+even claimed relationship to the long-dead Maid. But at that point all
+likeness between the two comes to a very abrupt end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She is known to history as "Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier,
+Comtesse du Barry." The parish register of her birthplace describes
+her, less flamboyantly, as "Marie Jeanne, natural daughter of Anne
+Becu, known as Quantigny; born Aug., A.D. 1746."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are many details in Marie Jeanne du Barry's story that I am
+going to omit&#8212;at my own request; not only because they are
+unwriteable, but because their sordid vulgarity is also drearily
+stupid. I apologize in advance for the omissions. But even after the
+process of weeding out, I think there will be quite enough left to
+hold the interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Marie was six, Anne Becu drifted to Paris&#8212;the Mecca of her
+trade. And soon afterward, an admirer of Anne's, one Dumonceau, was
+coaxed into lavishing two dollars and forty cents a month on Marie's
+education. Dumonceau had been one of Anne's wooers in the village
+days, and it has been suggested that his interest in little Marie was
+prompted by more than mere kindness&#8212;in fact, that he and the infant
+were "more than kin and less than kind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In any case, the monthly two dollars and forty cents paid Marie's
+expenses in a convent school, where she spent the next ten years. This
+Sainte-Aurore convent, in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, was a
+philanthropic refuge "for all young persons of honest parentage who
+are in circumstances where they run the risk of ruin."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rules of the Sainte-Aurore were far stricter and icier than those
+of the most investigatable of modern orphanages. Among the punishments
+inflicted on these little wards of God were starvation, beatings, and
+imprisonment in cold and stone-floored dark cells&#8212;for the very
+mildest transgressions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three dire sins, calling always for instant retribution, were: "To
+laugh, to sing, and to speak above a whisper." For such hideous and
+unnatural crimes as laughter, song, and ordinary speech, these poor
+loveless babies were treated like the vilest criminals. One hopes,
+morbidly, that the theologians who abolished Hell left at least one
+warm corner of it in commission, for the framers and enforcers of
+those gentle rules.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the foregoing is not sentimental mush, but is mentioned to show
+how dire must have been a pupil's sin that the convent authorities
+could not cope with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And such a sin&#8212;no one knows what it was&#8212;Marie committed when she was
+sixteen. For which she was expelled in black disgrace from her happy
+childhood home at Sainte-Aurore, and turned loose upon the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mother's loving arms were open, ready to receive and succor the
+disgraced girl, and to start her afresh in life&#8212;as only a mother can.
+So, to keep Marie from feeling unduly dependent upon a poor working
+woman like herself, she taught her her own trade&#8212;the oldest on earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a little basket of cheap jewelry&#8212;which served the same purpose
+as a present-day beggar's stock of lead pencils&#8212;Marie went the rounds
+of the streets. Her career was cut out for her by her mother's fond
+forethought. And in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
+thousand, a girl thus launched would have ended in the gutter. But
+Marie was the thousandth woman&#8212;a true super-woman, in every sense of
+the word. The filth of the streets could not smirch her&#8212;outwardly.
+And luck was waiting around the corner for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A rich and eccentric old woman of fashion&#8212;Madame Legrade&#8212;had a craze
+for amateur theatricals. Catching sight of Marie one day, she was
+struck by the girl's beauty, and hired her, partly as a companion and
+partly as a comedian for her private theatre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At Madame Legrade's, Marie got her first view of semidecent society.
+And, being adaptable, she picked up a smattering of manners and of
+grammatical speech; only a smattering, but all she cared to acquire.
+There, too, she met such men as the withered old wit, de Richelieu,
+and the Prince de Soubise; and the Duc de Brissac, whose son was one
+day to be the one real love of her life. Here, too, she met a genius
+whom she describes in her "Memoirs" as "a cunning fox; witty &#8230; very
+ugly and very thin." He was Grimm, the fairytale man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie was in clover. But the fortune was too good to last. And because
+a far more glittering fortune was awaiting her just around the corner,
+Destiny soon joggled the girl out of her snug berth. Madame Legrade
+had two sons. Both of them fell crazily in love with Marie. It is not
+on record that she told them she would rather be the poor working girl
+that she was. And Madame Legrade, in horror, ordered her out of the
+house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Back to her dear, old loving mother, as before, went Marie. And once
+more mother love came to the rescue. Anne Becu had recently married a
+lackey of some great house. She was now "Madame Racon." Marie adopted
+her stepfather's name&#8212;the first to which she had ever possessed even
+a semilegal claim&#8212;and permitted her mother to get her a job in the
+millinery shop of Madame Labille. This shop was of a sort extremely
+common in that day. It sold not only hats for woman, but sword knots
+and shoe buckles for men. It employed only girls of extreme beauty.
+And it was a favorite lounging place for men about town. Altogether,
+there was no startling change in Marie's vocation from the era when
+she had hawked artificial jewelry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her presence drew scores of young dandies to the shop. And she might
+readily have had her pick of the lot. But during a momentary weakness
+of intellect, she plunged into a love affair with a handsome young
+pastry cook, Nicolas Mothon. The other and more ambitious girls guyed
+her right unmercifully for her plebeian tastes. But it was terribly
+serious with Marie. Mathon was the first man to whom she had lost her
+heart. Many years later she wrote:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+When I call to memory all the men who have adored me, I must say
+    it was not poor Nicolas who pleased me least. For I, too, have
+    known what first love can mean.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+But she forgot what "first love can mean" as readily as she had
+learned it. For soon she threw over Nicolas for a man of wealth, named
+De la Vauvenardiere; and she abandoned the latter for a suitor named
+Duval; and ousted Duval from her affection for Lamet, the court
+hairdresser.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, in choosing Lamet, she was not lowering her standard. A court
+hairdresser was far more than a mere barber. He was a functionary of
+vast importance, the confidant of the great, the counselor of the
+unwary, a man of substance and position, the only tradesman in all
+France who was permitted by court edict to wear a sword.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie was envied as Lamet's sweetheart; until he went broke,
+overnight, and had to flee to England to dodge a debtor's cell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the Cosse incident; at least, then it began. Cosse&#8212;or Louis
+Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac&#8212;was the Duc de Brissac's son. He
+met Marie in the street one day, so runs the story, followed her to
+the shop, and there, under the pretext of buying a sword knot, fell
+into talk with her. He loved her at first sight, and she loved him.
+Theirs was not such a love as either had hitherto known. It was the
+genuine article.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cosse was young and good looking and afflicted with republican ideas.
+He did not see in Marie the vender of cheap jewelry and cheaper
+affections, nor the girl who used her millinery job as a mask. To him,
+she was an angel. And&#8212;so far as concerned him&#8212;she was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were young, and they dreamed. Cosse was unlike any man Marie had
+known. His love was utterly unlike any love she had known or heard of.
+Altogether, it was a pretty little romance, on both sides. And if we
+smile at it, let the smile be kindly, with nothing of the leer about
+it. For there was nothing to provoke a leer&#8212;at least, not then.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This Cosse affair's early stages are so intertangled with romance,
+legend, court rumor, and later inventions, that I hasten to forstall
+corrections, from readers wiser than I, by confessing that all I know
+of it, or can learn from supposedly reliable sources, is that Marie
+and Cosse parted somewhat suddenly; and the causes variously given are
+that his father put a stop to the romance and that Cosse learned
+something of Marie's real character. It is gravely declared that he
+wanted to marry her, and that his indignant ducal parent not only
+opened his eyes to the bride elect's past, but threatened to throw
+Cosse into the Bastille by means of a <b>lettre de cachet</b>. As I
+said, I vouch for none of these reasons for the break between the two
+lovers. It is all surmise. But what follows is not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next man to lose his head and heart to Marie was a young nobleman
+whose repute may be guessed from the fact that&#8212;even in dissolute
+eighteenth-century Paris&#8212;he was known, not as a roue, but as "<b>The
+Roue</b>." He had come to Paris a few years earlier, leaving a wife
+somewhere on the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had squandered his patrimony en route, and reached the capital
+penniless. But he quickly caught the fancy of Madame Malouse, who had
+influence at court. She arranged that he should have practically the
+sole monopoly of supplying the French navy with all its various forms
+of merchandise. This meant fat profits, and he fattened them still
+further by running a select gambling house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was Jean, Vicomte du Barry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean met and fell victim to Marie. Realizing what a cash attraction
+her beauty and charm could be made, he installed her as presiding
+genius of his gambling house, as a lure to draw youthful nobles to the
+place. Marie&#8212;or Madame Lange, as, for no known reason, she had begun
+to call herself&#8212;was the bright star at the Chance Goddess' shine. And
+the money poured fast into the crooked games whereby the house made
+Jean rich.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a time there was wholesale prosperity all around, with plenty more
+of it to come. Before I go on, may I quote a contemporary writer's
+word picture of Marie, as she appeared at this time?
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Her hair is long, silky, curling like a child's, and blond with a
+    natural ash tint&#8230;. Her eyebrows and lashes are dark and curly.
+    Behind them the blue eyes, which one seldom sees quite open, look
+    out with coquettish, sidelong glances&#8230;. Her nose is small and
+    finely cut, and her mouth is a perfect cupid's bow&#8230;. Her neck,
+    her arms, and her feet and hands remind one of ancient Greek
+    statuary; while her complexion is that of a rose leaf steeped in
+    milk&#8230;. She carries with her a delicious atmosphere of
+    intoxication, victorious, amorous youth.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Voltaire once exclaimed, before a portrait of her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The original was made for the gods!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as the cherry tree was posthumously invented for Washington and,
+perhaps, the apple for William Tell and the egg for Columbus, so
+around Marie in after years sprang up countless tales of her youth.
+Some may have been true. Some were palpable lies. To which does the
+ensuing anecdote belong?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1768, during her sojourn as "come-on" for the du
+Barry gambling hell, Marie noticed, three days in succession, that she
+was closely followed on the street by "a young man of a sober cast of
+countenance and elegant attire." Now, to be followed was no novelty to
+Marie. And more than one man of "elegant attire" had sued in vain for
+her favor. Yet this youth made no advances. He simply followed her
+wherever she went. And in his absence his face haunted her strangely.
+So, on the fourth day, as she turned suddenly in the street and saw
+him close behind her, she asked, with affected indignation:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"What do you want of me?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man bowed low, with no shadow of hesitancy, made this cryptic
+answer to her query:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Mademoiselle, will you grant me the first reasonable request I may
+make of you when you are Queen of France?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thinking he was a crank&#8212;as perhaps he was&#8212;she sought to humor him,
+and replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Certainly, monsieur. I promise."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You take me for a madman," he returned, with a second grave bow. "But
+I am not insane. Adieu, mademoiselle. There will be nothing more
+extraordinary than your elevation&#8212;except your end."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He spoke and vanished, either into the street crowd or into thin air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may recall the story of the "Man in Black's" midnight visit to
+Ninon de l'Enclos, with a gift to the essence of youth and the warning
+of her death? This was a well-believed and oft-repeated narrative in
+Marie's day. It is highly possible that she built from it her recital
+of the adventure of the "elegantly attired" stranger.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At all events, she told Jean du Barry about it. Whether or not he
+believed it, is no concern of yours or mine. But it assuredly gave him
+an idea; the supreme idea of his rotten life. He saw a one-in-fifty
+chance of making more money through Marie than she could have earned
+for him in a century as divinity of his gambling rooms. And, remote as
+were the scheme's prospects for success, he resolved to make a
+gambler's cast at the venture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis XV., King of France, had been ruled for nearly twenty years by
+the Marquise de Pompadour, who had squandered royal revenues, had made
+and unmade men's career by a nod or a shake of her pretty head, and
+had played at ducks and drakes with international politics. And now
+Madame de Pompadour was dead. Many a younger and prettier face had
+caught Louis' doddering fancy, since her death. But no other
+<b>maitresse en titre</b> had ruled him and France since then.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Briefly, Jean coveted the vacant office for Marie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for her own sake. Jean did not care for her happiness or welfare,
+or for the happiness or welfare of any mortal on earth except of one
+Jean, Vicomte du Barry. But he foresaw that with Marie as the royal
+favorite, he himself, as her sponsor, could reap a harvest such as is
+not the guerdon of one man in a million.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He set to work at his self-appointed task with the same rare vigor and
+cunning that had so long enabled him to elude the hangman and to live
+on better men's money. The first step was to engage the help of Lebel,
+the king's <b>valet de chambre</b>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lebel was nominally a servant, but, in a sense, he was mightier than
+any prime minister. For Louis relied implicitly on the valet's taste
+in feminine beauty. It was Lebel, for instance, who had first brought
+Madame du Pompadour to the king's notice. He had done the same good
+turn to many another aspiring damsel. And now, heavily bribed by Jean
+du Barry, he consented to see if Marie was worth mentioning to Louis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At sight of Marie, the connoisseur valet realized to the full her
+super-woman charm. He recognized her as the thousandth woman&#8212;even the
+millionth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Lebel was ever cautious about raising false hopes. So, not knowing
+that Jean had gone over the whole plan with Marie, he asked her if she
+would honor him by attending a little informal dinner he was soon to
+give, in his apartment, at the Versailles palace; a dinner in honor of
+"the Baron de Gonesse."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie, with sweet innocence, accepted the invitation; then timidly
+asked Lebel if she might sit beside him at the dinner, as all the
+others would be strangers to her. The bare thought of his presuming to
+sit down in the presence of the king&#8212;otherwise "the Baron de
+Gonesse"&#8212;so filled Lebel with horror that he forgot his role of
+diplomacy and blurted out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"<b>I?</b> Sit at the table with <b>him</b>? I&#8212;I shall be
+unexpectedly called from the room, as usual, just as dinner is served.
+And I shall not return until it is over."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Marie&#8212;carefully coached as to behavior, repartee, and so forth,
+by the ever-thoughtful Jean&#8212;arrived at Lebel's apartments in the
+palace, on the night of the dinner, she found, to her disgust, that
+the king was nowhere in sight&#8212;not even disguised as "the Baron de
+Gonesse"&#8212;and that her fellow guests were merely a group of Versailles
+officials.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not being versed in palace secrets, she did not know that Louis was
+seated in a dark closet behind a film-curtained window, looking into
+the brightly lighted dining room and noting everything that went on,
+nor that cunningly arranged speaking tubes brought every whispered or
+loud-spoken word to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finding the king was not to be one of the guests, the girl
+philosophically choked back her chagrin and set herself to get every
+atom of fun out of the evening that she could. She ate much, drank
+more, and behaved pretty quite like a gloriously lovely street gamin.
+There was no use in wasting on these understrappers the fine speeches
+and the courtesy she had been learning for the king's benefit. So she
+let herself go. And the dinner was lively, to say the very least. In
+fact, it was the gayest, most deliciously amusing dinner ever held in
+those sedate rooms&#8212;thanks to Marie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis, in paroxysms of laughter, looked on until the sound of his
+guffaws betrayed his royal presence. Then he came out of hiding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie, for an instant, was thunder-struck at what she had done. She
+feared she had ruined her chances by the boisterous gayety of the past
+hour or so. Then&#8212;for her brain was as quick as her talk was dull&#8212;she
+saw the fight was not lost, but won, and she knew how she had won it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. He lived in France's most
+artificial period. No one dared be natural; least of all in the
+presence of the king. All his life he had been treated to honeyed
+words, profound reverence, the most polished and adroit courtesy.
+People&#8212;women especially&#8212;had never dared be <b>human</b> when he was
+around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie saw that it was the novelty of her behavior which had aroused
+the king's bored interest. And from that moment her course was
+taken. She did not cringe at his feet, or pretend innocence, or
+assume <b>grande-dame</b> airs. She was <b>herself</b>, Marie Becu,
+the slangy, light-hearted, feather-brained daughter of the streets;
+respecting nothing, fearing nothing, confused by nothing&#8212;as ready
+to shriek gutter oaths at her king as at her footman. And, of
+course, she was also Marie Becu, the super-woman whose magnetism and
+beauty were utterly irresistible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The combination was too much for Louis. He succumbed. What else was
+there for him to do? After the myriad poses of the women he had known,
+Marie's naturalness was like a bracing breeze sweeping through a
+hothouse; a slum breeze, if you like, but none the less a breeze, and
+delightfully welcome to the jaded old monarch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis fell in love with Marie. It was not a mere infatuation of an
+hour, like most of his affairs. He fell completely and foolishly in
+love with her. And he never fell out of love with her as long as he
+lived.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lebel was in despair. He had hoped Marie might amuse the king. He had
+had no shadow of an idea that the affair would go further. By reason
+of his privileges as an old servant, he actually ventured to
+remonstrate with Louis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Sire," he protested, "she is not even legitimate. The birth records
+attest that."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Then," laughed the king, "let the right authorities make her so."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Accordingly, messengers were sent posthaste to her babyhood home, and
+a new birth certificate was drawn up; also a certificate attesting to
+her mother's legal marriage to a wholly mythical Monsieur de Gomard de
+Vaubernier and to several other statements that made Marie's
+legitimacy as solid as Gibraltar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Also," pleaded the valet, "she is neither a wife nor a woman of
+title."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"We can arrange both those trifles," the king assured him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, with charming simplicity, the thing was done. Jean sent for his
+worthless elder brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry, who was at that
+time an army captain. And on September 1, 1768, Marie and Guillaume
+were duly married. The lucky bridegroom received enough money to pay
+all his debts and to make him rich. Then he obligingly deserted his
+new-made wife at the church door, according to program, and wandered
+away to spend his fortune as might best please him. Thereby, Marie
+Becu became Madame la Comtesse du Barry, without having her cur of a
+husband to bother about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A list of her possessions and their values&#8212;duly set down in the
+marriage contract, which is still on file&#8212;shows the state of Marie's
+finances at this time. I copy it for the benefit of those who may be
+interested to learn of a useful life's by-products. At twenty-two&#8212;in
+1768&#8212;so says the contract, Marie was the sole owner of:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+One diamond necklace, worth sixteen hundred dollars; an aigret and
+    a pair of earings in clusters, worth sixteen hundred dollars;
+    thirty dresses and petticoats, worth six hundred dollars; lace,
+    dress trimmings, caps, et cetera, worth twelve hundred dollars;
+    six dozen shirts of fine linen, twelve complete morning dresses,
+    and other articles of linen, et cetera, worth four hundred
+    dollars.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+One obstacle alone now barred Marie's road to supremacy. According to
+unbreakable royal etiquette, three things were indispensable to the
+woman who aspired to become a French king's <b>maitresse en
+titre</b>&#8212;she must be legitimate, she must be of noble rank, and she
+must have been presented at court.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first two conditions, Marie had fulfilled. The third was a poser.
+In order to be presented at court, some reputable woman of the old
+nobility must act as sponsor. And not one decent woman of high rank
+would sink to acting as sponsor for Marie. Moreover, the king declared
+he did not care whether she were presented or not, and he would take
+no step to help her in the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without this presentation, she could not appear publicly at court, she
+could not sway overt political influence, she could not have a suite
+of rooms at the palace. Between a presentation and no presentation lay
+all the difference between uncrowned queen and a light o' love. And no
+one would sponsor Marie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean du Barry, at last, solved the problem, as he had solved all the
+rest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had able assistance. For, a court clique had been formed to back
+Marie's pretentions. The clique was headed by such men as the old Duc
+de Richelieu and the much younger Duc d'Aiguillon. The latter was
+violently in love with Marie, and there is no reason to think that his
+love was hopeless. But the rest of the clique cared not a straw about
+her. To them, the whole thing was a master move in politics. With
+Marie in control of the king, and themselves in control of Marie, they
+foresaw an era of unlimited power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Duc de Choiseul, prime minister of France, was the sworn enemy of
+this clique, which formed the "opposition." And Choiseul swore to move
+heaven and earth to prevent Marie's presentation, for he knew it would
+lead to his own political ruin; as it did.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean du Barry hunted around until he discovered somewhere in Navarre a
+crotchety and impoverished old widow, the dowager Comtesse de Bearn.
+She was a scion of the ancient nobility, the decayed and dying branch
+of a once mighty tree. She was not only poor to the verge of
+starvation, but she had a passion for lawsuits. She had just lost a
+suit, and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The good-hearted Jean, through the clique's help, arranged to have the
+case reopened and the decision reversed. This was before our own day
+of an incorruptible judiciary. He also promised her a gift of twenty
+thousand dollars in gold. All this in return for the trifling service
+of journeying up to Paris and thence to Versailles, to act as sponsor
+for the lovely Madame du Barry, who had wilfully declared that she
+would be presented under no less auspices than those of the
+illustrious Comtesse de Bearn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old comtesse accepted the offer with all the shrinking reluctance
+a hungry dog shows at the proffer of a bone. She came up to Paris, at
+the expense of the clique, and was immured in Jean's house, with the
+gambler's sister, Chon (Fanchon) du Barry as her jailer and
+entertainer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Choiseul, through his spies, learned of the plot, and he tried in
+every way to kidnap the old lady or to out-bribe the du Barrys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, coached by Jean, the fair Marie was making King Louis' life
+miserable by throwing herself at his feet, in season and out of
+season, and beseeching him to silence her enemies forever by allowing
+her to be presented. When these tactics failed, she would let loose
+upon the poor king a flood of gutter language, roundly abusing him,
+turning the air blue with her profanity, and in other ways showing her
+inalienable right to a place in court circles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis would promise nothing. The turmoil alternately bored and amused
+him. At last&#8212;April 21, 1769&#8212;on his return from the hunt, after an
+unusually good day's sport, the king casually remarked to all
+concerned:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The presentation of Madame la Comtesse du Barry will occur at
+to-morrow evening's levee."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The traditional and well-thumbed bombshell exploding among them would
+have created no more stir in court circles than did this yawned
+announcement. Choiseul and his followers were in despair. Jean ran
+around in circles, making preparations for the triumph. Marie
+rehearsed for the hundredth time the complicated forms of etiquette
+the occasion called for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Choiseul faction tried one thing after another to block the
+ceremony. They kidnapped Marie's hairdresser, stole the coach in which
+she was to make the trip from her Paris house to Versailles, arranged
+a holdup on the road, and so forth. Thanks to Jean's wit and clique's
+power, a new hairdresser and coach were provided in the nick of time.
+And the Versailles road was so heavily guarded that a regiment of
+cavalry could scarce have dared intercept the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+According to one story, Choiseul even got a message past all the
+carefully reared barriers to Madame de Bearn, prevailing on her to
+plead agonized illness and to keep to her bed on the evening set for
+the presentation. Whereupon, so runs the yarn, a character actor from
+the Comedie Francaise was paid to "make up" as Madame de Bearn and to
+perform her functions of sponsor. This may or may not be true. It
+forms the central theme of De Vere Stacpoole's novel, "The
+Presentation."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the great night, the court was assembled, tensely waiting for Marie
+to arrive. At the appointed time&#8212;no Madame du Barry appeared. The
+minutes grew into an hour; people began to whisper and fidget; the
+Choiseul party looked blissful; the clique could not hide its worry.
+Louis stood, frowning, between the suspense stricken D'Aiguillon and
+Richelieu. At last he turned from them and stared moodily out of a
+window. Then, moving back into the room, he opened his lips to declare
+the levee at an end. As he started to speak, an usher announced:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame la Comtesse de Bearn! Madame la Comtesse du Barry!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Marie entered, with her sponsor&#8212;or with some one who looked
+sufficiently like Madame de Bearn to deceive any one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+According to one version, Marie was late because at the last instant
+another Choiseul obstacle had to be cleared away. According to
+another, she was purposely late to enhance the dramatic interest of
+her arrival. Here is an account of the presentation:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king
+    stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon.
+    The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the
+    ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right
+    hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter&#8230;.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the
+    gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns
+    that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant
+    an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of
+    surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After
+    she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames,
+    to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Marie had won. For the next five years she was the real Queen of
+France. And, during that time, she cost the French nation, in cold
+cash, something over seven million dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was not at all on the style of the Pompadour, who had yearned to
+meddle in politics. Marie cared nothing for politics, except to help
+out her army of friends and dependents. She had no ambitions. She had
+not even craved on her own account to be the king's <b>maitresse en
+titre</b>. All she wanted was to have a good time. And she had it. The
+pleasure was all hers. The French people did the paying; until, years
+later, they exacted bloody settlement of the score.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pompadour had worn out her life trying to "amuse the unamusable," to
+find novelties that would entertain the king. Marie did nothing of the
+sort. Instead, she demanded that the king amuse her. Pompadour had
+sought to sway the destinies of nations. Marie was quite happy if she
+could spend the revenues of her own nation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She treated Louis in a way that caused the court to gasp with horror.
+She scolded him shrilly; petted him, in public, as if he had been her
+peasant spouse; and always addressed him as "France." He enjoyed it.
+It was a novelty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, when she was giving an informal breakfast with a dozen or more
+nobles as guests, she ordered the king to make the coffee. Amused, he
+obeyed. She took one sip of the royal-brewed beverage, then tossed the
+cup into the fireplace, exclaiming:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"France, your coffee is as insipid as your talk!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All political matters she turned over to d'Aiguillon, who was the
+clique's spokesman. To please him, and to "get even" for old scores,
+she caused the ruin of Choiseul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mode of Choiseul's downfall is interesting as a side light on
+court intrigue. The clique taught Marie how to poison the king's
+ever-suspicious mind against the prime minister, and she did so with
+great success. Thanks to her, Louis was held to believe that Choiseul,
+feeling his power over the monarch slipping, was planning a war scare
+with Spain, so that he could prove his seeming worth to the kingdom of
+France by dispelling the cloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The clique&#8212;having access, through a spy, to all of Choiseul's
+correspondence&#8212;resorted to a fairly ingenious trick. At Marie's
+suggestion, Choiseul's secretary was summoned to the palace. He was in
+the clique's pay. Before the king, he was questioned as to what he
+knew about Choiseul's affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man, with an air of mystery, answered that he knew nothing of
+them, but that he would give his majesty one hint&#8212;let the king
+request Choiseul to write a letter to Spain, assuring that nation of
+France's peaceful intent. Should Choiseul do so without comment, it
+would show he was not plotting a war scare, as charged. But should he
+hesitate&#8212;well, what could that prove, instead?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The plotters already knew that Choiseul had that very day sent a
+letter to Spain, proposing the mutual signing of a declaration of
+peace between the nations. The king requested his minister to send a
+letter that was almost identical with the one he had already written
+and dispatched. Naturally Choiseul hesitated. And the work was done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, out of careless good nature&#8212;she would not have bothered to harm
+anybody, politically or otherwise, if she had had her own way&#8212;Marie
+insisted that the king settle a liberal pension on the fallen
+minister; this despite the fact that Choiseul and his sister, Madame
+de Grammont, had both worked with all their might and main to block
+her rise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was good, too&#8212;as they all were&#8212;to her mother. She presented the
+horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income.
+She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry.
+Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman.
+Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood
+vied for chances to win her favor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her.
+The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of
+Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin&#8212;afterward Louis
+XVI.&#8212;and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase
+themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned
+supreme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not
+only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much
+time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was
+costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All
+Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any
+one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to
+shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness
+than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and
+quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's
+native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti&#8212;who had
+bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie&#8212;renamed him
+Louis Zamore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie was delighted with the boy&#8212;as soon as she heard the price paid
+for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She
+dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into
+screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The
+slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore,
+please. He will come back into the story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal
+expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of
+France:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand
+    dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one
+    hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for
+    furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five
+    hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble,
+    seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes&#8212;whose
+    chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom
+    she thrust into the Academy for doing it&#8212;she spent sixty-five
+    thousand dollars.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+ZThe heirs of one firm of creditors were, as late as 1836, still
+claiming the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars from her
+estate. She had "state dresses, hooped dresses, dresses sur <b>la
+consideration, robes de toilette</b>;" dresses costing two hundred
+dollars, four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, and one thousand
+dollars; dresses with a base of silver strewn with clusters of
+feathers; dresses striped with big bars of gold; mosaic dresses shot
+with gold and adorned with myrtle; and riding habits of white Indian
+silk that cost twelve hundred dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had dresses whose elaborate embroidery alone cost twenty-one
+hundred dollars. Her dressing gowns had lace on them worth five
+hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars. She had cuffs of lace
+costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, point-lace caps valued at
+three hundred dollars, and <b>point Argentan</b> costumes at eighteen
+hundred dollars. She ordered gold ornaments and trinkets of all sorts
+galore. Roettiers, the goldsmith, received an order from her for a
+toilet set of solid gold&#8212;for which she had a sudden whim. The
+government advanced twelve thousand ounces of gold for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Boehmer, the Paris jeweler, knowing of her love for ultra-costly
+things, made up for her a huge diamond necklace, of a heterogeneous
+mass of many-carat diamonds, arranged with regard to show and wholly
+without a thought of good taste. The necklace was so big and so
+expensive that Marie declared at once she must have it. Louis
+willingly consented to buy it for her; but he died before the purchase
+was made, and Boehmer was left with the ugly treasure loop on his
+hands. Long afterward he tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette. And
+from that transaction rose the mystery of "The Queen's Necklace,"
+which did much to hasten the French Revolution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the spring of 1774, as King Louis and Marie were driving toward
+Versailles, they saw a pretty girl in a wayside field, gathering grass
+for her cow. Louis greeted the girl with a fatherly smile. The girl
+looked back at him with perfect indifference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Piqued at such unwonted contempt for his royal self, the king got out
+of his carriage, waddled across to where the girl stood, and kissed
+her. The reason she had seemed indifferent was because she was dazed.
+The reason she was dazed was that she was in the early stages of
+smallpox.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louis caught the infection and died a few days later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first act of Louis XVI.&#8212;the king's grandson and successor&#8212;was to
+order Marie to a convent. Later he softened the decree by allowing her
+to live at Luciennes, or anywhere else outside a ten-mile radius from
+Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that the fallen favorite met Cosse once more. And their
+old-time love story recommenced, this time on a less platonic footing.
+She kept her title of "Comtesse," and had enough money&#8212;as she paid
+few of her debts&#8212;to live in luxury; still beautiful, still loved,
+still moderately young.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Revolution burst forth. Marie enrolled herself as a stanch
+loyalist. Hearing that the king and queen were pressed for funds, she
+wrote to Marie Antoinette:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from
+    the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late
+    king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand
+    precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory
+    of these treasures&#8212;I offer them to you with eagerness. You have
+    so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow.
+    Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto C&#230;sar that which is
+    C&#230;sar's.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+When the king and queen were beheaded, she secretly wore black for
+them. Also, she made a trip to England, where she tried to sell some
+of her jewels to help the royalist cause. All these things were duly
+repeated to the revolutionary government by Louis Zamore, her
+Bengalese servant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One evening she was expecting a visit from Cosse. But midnight came,
+and he had not appeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Go down the road," she ordered Zamore, who had just returned from an
+errand to Paris, "and see if you can catch sight of him."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I can show him to you&#8212;or part of him&#8212;without troubling to do that,"
+retorted Zamore, with sudden insolence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Whipping one hand from behind his back, he tossed on the floor at
+Marie's feet the head of her lover. Cosse had been guillotined that
+day. Zamore, in return for certain information to the government, had
+received the head as a gift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The information he had given led to Marie's arrest on the following
+charges:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Having wasted the treasures of the state, conspiring with the enemies
+of the Republic, and having, in London, worn mourning for the late
+King."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marie was sentenced to death, on December 7, 1793, and was beheaded
+the same day. Almost alone of all the Frenchwomen thus put to death,
+she turned coward at the last. The strain of peasant blood came to the
+fore. And where aristocrats rode smiling to the scaffold, Marie du
+Barry behaved like a panic-stricken child. She fell on her knees and
+begged for her life. She told where every article of value she
+possessed was buried, in her garden. If she thought thus to buy back
+her life, she did not understand the souls of such men as her captors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They heard her to the end, jotting down the directions for finding her
+treasure. Then she was put into the tumbril, and was started on her
+way to the scaffold. The journey led past the old millinery shop where
+she had once worked. As she caught sight of its sign, she screamed
+out, twice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The crowd had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of death. Now
+they seemed to awaken to the fact that they were about to kill a
+woman, a wondrous beautiful woman, at that. A sigh of pity ran through
+the throng. The driver in charge of the tumbril, fearing a riot and a
+rescue, whipped up the horses and drove on with his load. There were
+others besides Madame du Barry in the death wagon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie
+was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Says De Goncourt, her biographer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad
+with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy,
+crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the
+people of France was paid.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="ten">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER TEN
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+"THE MOST GORGEOUS LADY BLESSINGTON"
+</p>
+<p class="space">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>
+She was the ugly duckling of a family of seven beautiful children&#8212;the
+children of queer old "Shiver-the-Frills" Power, of Tipperary. Her
+name was Marguerite. Her father picked out a pretty name for the
+homely girl and then considered his duty done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite was a great trial to everybody; to her good-looking
+brothers and lovely sisters; to Shiver-the-Frills, who was bitterly
+chagrined that his record for beauteous offspring should have been
+marred by so hideous an exception; to the family governess, who
+wouldn't even take the trouble to teach her to read; to the neighbors,
+whose joy in beauty she offended. Altogether, Marguerite was taught to
+consider herself a mistake. It is a lesson that children learn with
+pitiful readiness. Perhaps the mystic "Unpardonable Sin" consists in
+teaching them such a damnable doctrine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her father's baptismal name was not really Shiver-the-Frills, though
+nobody ever spoke of him by any other term. He had been christened
+Edmund, and he was a squireen of the Tipperary village of Knockbrit.
+He was a local magistrate, and he fulfilled his magisterial office
+almost as well as a mad dog might have done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had an insane temper. He did not confine this to his home&#8212;where he
+beat his children and servants most unmercifully&#8212;but aired it on the
+bench as well. Notably when, in a rage, he lawlessly commandeered a
+troop of dragoons and galloped over Tipperary and Waterford Counties
+with them, hunting down and killing peasants who had stirred his anger
+to maniac heat by some petty uprising.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a dandy&#8212;fop&#8212;macaroni&#8212;toff&#8212;whatever you choose, too; in a
+tarnished and down-at-heel way. And from his habit of eternally
+shaking out his dirty shirt ruffles and lace wristbands, in order to
+keep them from hanging limply, he was called "Shiver-the-Frills."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite's home life was one unbroken hell. Starvation,
+shabby-genteel rags, beatings, and full-flavored curses were her daily
+portion. A kind-hearted neighbor, Miss Anne Dwyer, took pity on the
+poor, abused little ugly duckling and taught her to read and write.
+But for this, she would have grown up too ignorant to pass the very
+simplest literacy test.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And an odd use the child proceeded to make of her smattering of
+education. Before she could spell correctly, she began to write
+stories. These she would read aloud by the peat smolder, on winter
+evenings, to her awed brothers and sisters, who looked on such an
+accomplishment as little short of super-natural.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wonderful stories she wrote, all about princesses who had all the
+clothes they could wear and who could afford three square meals, with
+real butter, every single day of their lives; and about princes who
+never swore at or beat children or flew into crazy rages or even
+fluttered dirty ruffles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl's gift at story writing gave her a higher place in the family
+esteem than she had ever enjoyed before. So did another miracle which
+came to pass when Marguerite was about twelve. She grew pretty. The
+ugly duckling, in less than a single year, developed from repulsive
+homeliness into a striking beauty. In fact, by the time she was
+fourteen, she was far and away the loveliest of all the "exquisite
+Power sisters."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then began her career of super-woman. For, with dawning beauty, came
+an access of the elusive charm that sets Marguerite's type apart from
+the rest of womankind. And men were swift to recognize her claim to
+their worship. The swains whom Shiver-the-Frills allowed to visit his
+tumble-down mansion paid court to her instead of to her sisters. The
+fame of her reached the near-by garrison town of Clonmel, and brought
+a host of young redcoat officers swarming to the Knockbrit house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of these officers, two soon put themselves far in the van of all other
+contestants. They were Captain Murray and Captain Maurice St. Leger
+Farmer. Murray was a jolly, happy-go-lucky, penniless chap, lovable
+and ardent. The kindest thing one can say about Captain Farmer is that
+he was more than half insane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite met Captain Murray's courtship more than halfway. But
+Shiver-the-Frills told the sighing, but impecunious, swain to keep
+off, and ordered Marguerite to marry Farmer, who had a snug fortune.
+Marguerite very naturally objected. Shiver-the-Frills flew into a
+ready-made rage and frightened the poor youngster almost to death by
+his threats of what should befall her if she did not change her mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So, cowed into submission, she meekly agreed to marry Farmer. And
+marry him she did, in 1805, when she was but fifteen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was an early marrying age, even in that era of early marriages.
+Many years had passed since Sheridan's metrical toast "to the maiden
+of bashful fifteen." And, as now, a girl of fifteen was deemed too
+young for wedlock. But all this did not deter old Shiver-the-Frills
+from a laudable firmness in getting rid of the daughter he hated. So
+he married her off&#8212;to a man who ought to have been in an insane
+asylum; in an asylum for the criminally insane, at that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Marguerite's life at Knockbrit had been unhappy, her new life was
+positive torture. Farmer's temper was worse than Shiver-the-Frills.
+And he added habitual drunkenness to his other allurements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no profit in going into full details of Marguerite's horrible
+sojourn with him. One of his milder amusements was to pinch her until
+the blood spurted from her white flesh. He flogged her as he never
+dared flog his dogs. And he used to lock her for days in an unheated
+room, in winter, with nothing to eat or drink.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite stood it as long as she could. Then she ran away. You can
+imagine how insufferable she had found Farmer, when I say she went
+back by choice to her father's house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shiver-the-Frills greeted the unhappy girl with one of his dear old
+rages. His rage was not leveled at the cur who had so vilely misused
+her, but against the young wife who had committed the crime of
+deserting her husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not being of the breed that uses bare fingers to test the efficiency
+of buzz-saws, I neither express, nor so much as dare to cherish in
+secret, any opinion whatsoever on the theme of Woman's Rights. But it
+is a wholly safe and noncontroversial thing to say that the fate of
+woman at large, and especially of husband-deserters, to-day, is
+paradise by comparison with what it was a century ago. For leaving a
+husband who had not refused to harbor her, Marguerite became in a
+measure an outcast. She could not divorce Farmer; she could not make
+him support her, unless she would return to him. She was eyed askance
+by the elect. Her own family felt that she was smirched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shiver-the-Frills cursed her roundly, and is said to have assumed the
+heavy-father role by ordering her to leave his ramshackle old house.
+Without money, without protector, without reputation, she was cast
+adrift.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no question of alimony, of legal redress, of freedom; the
+laws were all on Farmer's side. So was public opinion. Strange to say,
+no public benefactor even took the trouble to horsewhip the husband.
+He was not even ostracized from his own circle for his treatment to
+his girl wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Remember, this was in the earliest years of the nineteenth century,
+and in a country where many people still regarded wife-beating as a
+healthful indoor sport. Less than three decades had elapsed since a
+man immortalized by Thackeray had made the proud boast that, during
+the first year of his married life, he had never, when sober, struck
+his wife in anger. Nor was it so very long after the Lord Chief
+Justice of England handed down an official decision that a man might
+legally "punish his wife with a rod no thicker than his lordship's
+thumb." Whereat, one woman inquired anxiously whether his lordship
+chanced to suffer from gouty swelling of the hands. Oh, it was a merry
+time and a merry land&#8212;for women&#8212;this "Merrie England of the good old
+days!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite vanished from home, from friends, from family. And a blank
+space follows. In the lives of scores of super-women&#8212;of Lola Montez,
+Marie de Chevreuse, Lady Hamilton, Adah Menken, Peg Woffington,
+Adrienne Lecouvreur, even of Cleopatra&#8212;there was somewhere a
+hiatus,&#8212;a "dark spot" that they would never afterward consent to
+illumine. And such a line of asterisks sheared its way across
+Marguerite's page at this point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She is next heard of as leading a charmingly un-nun-like existence at
+Cahair, and, two years later, at Dublin. At the Irish metropolis, she
+enamored the great Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose portrait of her is one
+of his most famous paintings, and one that is familiar to nearly
+everybody. The picture was painted in 1809 when Marguerite was just
+twenty and in the early prime of her beauty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had ever a knack of enslaving army men, and her next wooer&#8212;in
+fact, Lawrence's lucky rival&#8212;was an Irish captain, one Jenkins. She
+and Jenkins fell very seriously in love with each other. There was
+nothing at all platonic in their relations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jenkins was eager to marry Marguerite. And when he found he could not
+do so, because of the trifling obstacle that her husband was alive, he
+sought a chance to put Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer out of the
+road. But he was a square sort of chap, in his way, this lovelorn
+Jenkins. He balked at the idea of murder, and a duel would have put
+him in peril of losing Marguerite by dying. So he let Farmer severely
+alone, and contented himself by waiting impatiently until the drunken
+husband-emeritus should see fit to die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, until that happy hour should come, he declared that Marguerite
+was at least his wife in the eyes of Heaven. Startingly novel mode of
+gluing together the fragments of a fractured commandment! But the
+strange part of the affair is that Captain Jenkins' eminently
+respectable family consented to take the same view of the case and
+publicly welcomed Marguerite as the captain's legal wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, for a time, life went on. Marguerite was as nearly respectable
+as the laws of her time gave her the right to be. Jenkins was all
+devotion. She was moderately well received in local society, and she
+kept on winning the hearts of all the men who ventured within her
+sway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then into her life swirled Charles John Gardiner, Earl of Blessington,
+one of the most eccentric and thoroughly delightful figures of his
+day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Blessington was an Irish peer, a widower, a man of fashion. He had a
+once-enormous rent roll, that had been sadly honeycombed by his mad
+extravagances, but that still totaled one hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars a year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What chance had the worthy, but humble, Captain Jenkins against this
+golden-tinged whirlwind wooer? And the answer to that conundrum is the
+same that serves for the question concerning the hackneyed snowball in
+the Inferno. Blessington swept Marguerite off her feet, bore her away
+from the protesting captain and installed her in a mansion of her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, too late, came the happy event for which Jenkins and Marguerite
+had so optimistically been looking. In October, 1817, Captain Maurice
+St. Leger Farmer joined some boon companions in an all-night orgy in
+the upper room of a pothouse. Farmer waxed so much drunker than usual
+that he mistook the long window of the loom for the door. Bidding his
+friends good-by, he strolled out of the window into space. Being a
+heavier-than-air body, in spite of the spirits that buoyed him up, he
+drifted downward into the courtyard below, breaking his miserable
+neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite was free. Jenkins hastened to her and besought her to marry
+him, offering her an honorable name and a place in the world, and
+pointing out to her how much better off she would be in the long run
+as Mrs. Captain Jenkins than as the brevet bride of a dissolute earl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Blessington had by this time become the helpless thrall of
+Marguerite's charm. As soon as he heard of Farmer's death, he whisked
+her off to church and married her. And, by way of doing all things
+handsomely, he soothed the disconsolate Jenkins' feelings with a
+fifty-thousand-dollar check; thereby securing firm title to the good
+will and fixtures of the previous tenant of his wife's heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest.
+And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken
+sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance
+Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so
+well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid
+results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to
+her delight, all through life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite,
+he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One
+of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own
+estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love
+for amateur theatricals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and
+their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have
+been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to
+every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for
+miles to witness one of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and
+written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of
+these rules by the first, which read:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words
+    of the author, in case his own invention fails him.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for
+stage dialogue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country
+house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to
+taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips.
+She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the
+capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London
+season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains,
+and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She
+had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in
+everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring
+themselves to hate her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in
+his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a
+lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the
+merciless pace began to tell on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice,
+long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's
+lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they
+went, and London mourned them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish nobleman," says one
+biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels
+with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances
+of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of
+travel."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and
+for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern
+pork-king might envy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box
+confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off
+posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who
+was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite
+was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the
+most noted&#8212;or notorious&#8212;men-about-town in all Europe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero.
+He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet,
+hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete&#8212;could
+ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,&#8212;and so on, through the whole list of
+sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could
+paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an
+amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to
+win fame as the premier man of fashion of the period. A once
+celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero.
+Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to
+his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington&#8212;who should have been wise
+enough to see what was coming&#8212;was no exception.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along
+with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This
+meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment
+under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his
+military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his
+senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the
+love of her life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found
+England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had
+parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's
+beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the
+Blessington party of tourists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek god
+returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And&#8212;so far as one
+knows&#8212;that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the
+D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose
+her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over
+women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But
+Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living
+charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory
+fashion, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his
+powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, the time passed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved
+his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his
+yacht&#8212;a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of.
+Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at
+a fancy figure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the
+Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa&#8212;on the white-elephant
+yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady
+Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the
+once over," and passed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted
+with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two
+and a half years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere&#8212;which
+cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price
+was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to
+herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the
+place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according
+to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last
+the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most
+delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique,
+if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited
+Herculaneum, it was with the arch&#230;ologist, Sir William Gell, as guide.
+When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman
+such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or
+the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was
+under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer
+Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her
+love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met
+Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her
+charms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time&#8212;nay, long before this time&#8212;people had begun to talk,
+and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the butt
+of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an
+effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing
+this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He
+promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry
+Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living
+child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to
+him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and
+there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris.
+Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant,
+and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she
+was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to
+bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen
+receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room
+was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until
+everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:
+</p>
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+    The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of
+    two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every
+    feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of
+    a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with
+    white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the
+    columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk
+    curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal
+    the recess altogether&#8230;. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the
+    side of the room opposite the fireplace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to
+    correspond&#8230;. The salle de bain is draped with white muslin
+    trimmed with lace&#8230;. The bath is of white marble, inserted in the
+    floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting
+    of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is
+    suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829;
+perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his
+estate&#8212;which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand
+dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was
+seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town
+house in London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons.
+When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and
+the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in
+Kensington&#8212;Albert Hall now stands on its site&#8212;for Marguerite could
+not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen
+gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first
+pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the
+Genoa days. The <b>New Monthly Magazine</b> first printed serially
+this capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as
+"Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books,
+this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to
+supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of
+Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a
+descriptive verse written by her under each picture&#8212;straight hack
+work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her
+pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day&#8212;or in any day, for
+that matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess,"
+and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I
+think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored
+me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their
+truthful depiction of the social life of her times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as
+<b>Friendship's Offering</b>, <b>The Amulet</b>, <b>Keepsakes</b>, and
+others of like mushiness of name and matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the
+best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent
+the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the
+sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had
+blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with
+Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine
+as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and
+Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except&#8212;perhaps he was not fooled.
+Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party
+any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the
+gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay
+stayed on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek
+God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to
+be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as
+adorable as in her teens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent
+presence&#8212;and more than one of them made desperate love to their
+hostess&#8212;were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain
+Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another
+genius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Disraeli&#8212;one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield&#8212;was
+at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally
+brilliant novelist. There is a story&#8212;I don't vouch for it&#8212;that,
+piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged
+himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau,"
+in his "Henrietta Temple."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke
+of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes."
+Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to
+persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the
+picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were
+the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by
+every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a
+similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even
+start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother.
+Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work
+than any other author our country has produced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an
+invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called
+almost every day. He fairly raved over her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever
+known!" he wrote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one
+of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it
+would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an
+English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a
+job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of
+Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked
+around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made
+clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a
+while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for
+loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to
+the Bonaparte cause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money,
+and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman
+outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out
+of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite
+Blessington's.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a
+thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a
+few minutes how he repaid their generosity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius
+for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be
+only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about
+five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was
+a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could
+people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current
+on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an
+answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of
+Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more
+money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough.
+Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the
+all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious
+Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down,
+the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to
+keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope
+to pay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position,
+D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated
+panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping
+Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now
+stood her in fine stead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them,
+they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than
+five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone.
+D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five
+thousand from overtrustful personal friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his
+"Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay,
+before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the
+earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate.
+He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting
+brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the
+bottomless gulf of extravagance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never
+going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a
+crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and
+prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to
+Marguerite and D'Orsay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of
+egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring
+streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the
+house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore
+House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby
+people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred
+Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Sunday alone&#8212;when the civil arm of the law rests&#8212;did the
+much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which
+had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they
+entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the
+drawing-room in the guise of a guest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great
+ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped
+by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the
+man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a
+half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in
+the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined
+him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne,
+in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for
+debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear
+land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like
+sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray
+water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They
+would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for
+the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had
+known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a
+penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives,
+fifty times more bitter than death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself
+among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she
+was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in
+France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of
+poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already
+there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the
+Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he assuredly could do
+no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a
+flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady
+Blessington."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did
+nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarrassed and not at all
+over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made
+them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have
+had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was
+wont to make.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors
+had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art
+treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer,
+and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of
+the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her
+beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had
+squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot,"
+(ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street,
+while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.)
+She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And
+now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A younger and stronger woman might readily have succumbed under such a
+crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face
+it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in
+her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that
+mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay
+was laid there at her side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony.
+Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a
+creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="eleven">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER XI
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+MADAME RECAMIER
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+Paris&#8212;the hopelessly mixed, <b>sans-culotte</b>-philosopher new Paris
+society of 1793&#8212;took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on
+the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty.
+Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few
+hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December.
+The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to
+look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned
+to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the
+day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic
+murder dreams.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter
+of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes&#8212;a
+mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and
+steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The groom was Jacques Recamier&#8212;by profession a powerful banker, by
+choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons.
+Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their
+house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after
+the "civil ceremony"&#8212;so runs the story&#8212;a passing man halted and
+gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every
+line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name.
+And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the
+inspiration for the wonderful "<b>Jeune fille</b>" picture that made
+him immortal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had
+the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by
+the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a
+cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous
+of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine&#8212;around which they
+had lately gathered, gloating&#8212;spattered on their clothes and unwashed
+faces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried
+by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked <b>sans-culottes</b>.
+And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that
+vile gathering&#8212;a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly
+marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations,
+strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from
+the <b>halls</b>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that
+April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers&#8212;and fellow
+beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of
+dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat&#8212;for whose shrunken
+chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was
+sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the
+little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid
+superstitions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a
+contemporary?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and
+transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist;
+coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein
+float rose leaves."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the
+seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had
+received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in
+her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed
+away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully.
+Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against
+her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever
+breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame
+Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly
+declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the
+theme:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection
+was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his
+name."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Says Turquan:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She was Recamier's daughter."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a
+love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had
+condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the
+day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but
+worshiped her. Not a day had passed but he had come to see her. He had
+loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy godfather.
+She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable
+danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch
+executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard
+was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the
+rotten Paris of that day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard
+the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a
+meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a
+retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter
+she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over
+her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a
+total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early
+marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had
+fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his
+flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the
+more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society reassembled on its
+peak, after the years of guillotine-aided class leveling. And, in this
+heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says
+Sainte-Beuve:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and
+very ardent."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal
+ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured
+forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no
+response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting,
+and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such
+encouragement was really needed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose
+Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this
+series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of
+super-women&#8212;Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges,
+Countess Potocka, and the rest&#8212;and his name is more often seen in all
+history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient
+if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a
+young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman.
+Now in his days of power and&#8212;for him&#8212;leisure, he amply made up for
+such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black
+eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right
+ardent love to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually
+lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his
+cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic
+young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been
+written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells
+another story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras,
+where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire
+of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow
+sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the
+late Mrs. C&#230;sar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who
+had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and
+he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time
+to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon&#8212;whom she did not even
+pretend to love&#8212;by saying that the young man had a great future.
+Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged,
+mutinous Army of Italy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the
+world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home
+the hero and idol of the hour&#8212;to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that
+Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She
+wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon
+shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he
+treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was
+stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found.
+Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this
+moment?"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of
+Dantzig.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or
+both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of
+company she can find at such short notice."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to
+overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans'
+ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well&#8212;aristocrats
+of the noblesse&#8212;who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the
+Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings&#8212;all flocked to
+the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy&#8212;or frosty&#8212;virtue were the
+talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out
+this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should
+make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other women&#8212;women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years
+earlier, save as a dependent&#8212;were making fools of themselves over the
+Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred
+frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect
+in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make
+lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but
+took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her
+seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war
+campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to
+keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon,
+thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could
+fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear.
+Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff
+from his charmer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a
+big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with
+much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier
+as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was a master stroke&#8212;a <b>tour de force</b>&#8212;a
+knock-out&#8212;anything you will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers
+throughout the empire were yelping for slices of the state finances.
+And the post of lady in waiting was one for which nearly any woman of
+the court would gladly have parted with all she no longer possessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be
+administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier
+coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in
+waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not
+mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated
+absence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a burst of babyish fury, he&#8212;the ruler of France and the arbiter of
+Europe's fate&#8212;crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge
+of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or <b>les
+majeste</b> or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the
+strength of it, he banished her from Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half
+of Europe by a single convolution of his demigod brain; or could
+screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his
+thin hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console
+his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to
+build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one.
+Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he amassed enough
+money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and
+then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman
+friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a
+tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and
+facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile
+conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been
+banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that
+when she once said to an ill-favored man:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers
+laughed&#8212;at her, not at her victim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and
+man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame
+Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After
+the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them,
+remarking airily:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted
+courtesy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave
+of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no
+secret of his devotion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In those days the title of prince-royal carried real weight, and the
+gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made
+Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame
+Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk
+of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the
+prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his
+royal-blooded self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a
+hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic
+union he proposed&#8212;he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his
+amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to
+let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose&#8212;or an annulment
+of their marriage, which would have been still simpler&#8212;and marry
+Prince Augustus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always impersonal and adoring in his attitude toward Jeanne, Recamier
+now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and
+becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a
+father than in a husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning
+her back on the wealth and title of a princess in order to remain with
+the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For,
+again, physical reasons intervened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another
+ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother,
+until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest,
+Jeanne&#8212;after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation&#8212;gave a
+decided refusal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her
+out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom
+court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to
+carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed
+and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so
+unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in
+France mad with chagrin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Benjamin Constant, too&#8212;cunning statesman of the old school&#8212;loved
+her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain
+fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that
+mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the
+rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as
+a friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself
+on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of
+statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been
+laid to her influence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another exile&#8212;General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war
+and love&#8212;now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.
+He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court
+to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism
+chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he
+found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too,
+departed, hopeless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He
+was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of
+Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after
+conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter
+brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms
+and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for
+the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And&#8212;though it has been denied
+by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason&#8212;almost
+at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's
+enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was
+set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one
+another to join the alliance against him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers
+returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had
+banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in
+something of their old style there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of
+kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of
+newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling
+over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly
+about&#8212;they would have run up a tree, two years earlier&#8212;and bragging
+of Napoleon's fall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had
+once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow
+campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too,
+was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none
+the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the
+victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians,
+not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the
+Allies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among
+them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak
+of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor
+of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive
+libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret
+of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British
+morality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a
+friend:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on
+his knees before me in sinful adulation."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I fear he would have roused crass horror in the bosom of the
+mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and
+Cleopatra," exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious
+queen!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man
+of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons&#8212;but for a very brief
+time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests
+being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country.
+Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out
+of her house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the
+omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris&#8212;which adored
+Jeanne and hated the English hero&#8212;went wild with delight. Jeanne's
+popularity from that moment was boundless.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat
+hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his
+ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Canova, the premier sculptor of his day&#8212;he who later paid such
+assiduous court to Elizabeth Paterson&#8212;fell in love with Jeanne. So
+indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her
+knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the busts were done, Canova&#8212;who was constantly receiving and
+rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts&#8212;showed her
+his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity.
+She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do
+her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection
+and left the studio.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her
+acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers
+to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received
+shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the
+love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have
+noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the
+host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth
+of devotion lavished on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it was with Jeanne Recamier&#8212;although the affair from first to
+last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had
+rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe
+out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike
+author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother
+read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for
+transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to the
+next had won for him the sobriquet "<b>L'Inconstant</b>." He had
+traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had
+hobnobbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of
+introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during
+the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's
+tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and
+earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke,
+sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as
+a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in
+jail&#8212;Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a
+crazily passionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of
+mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in
+marriage. She refused&#8212;for reasons best known to herself and her
+physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives,
+faithful and utterly devoted lovers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad
+foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to
+cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded
+his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross,
+bringing out its cleaner, nobler traits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing
+more beautiful nor more good than you."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty.
+Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne
+looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she
+refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature
+years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when
+she was seventy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not
+interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for
+years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's
+eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut
+himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him,
+became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of
+life left in his heart&#8212;his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a
+frightened child to a tender mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful
+Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her
+blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its
+sweetness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man
+she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which
+had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million
+whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the
+gleaming past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a
+baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the
+world, lingered on for several years longer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned
+Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It
+broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she
+followed her lover to the grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose
+very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and
+flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any
+way resembles hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for
+the men who loved them.
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<a name="twelve">&nbsp;</a>
+<p class="chapter">
+CHAPTER XII
+</p>
+
+<p class="head">
+LADY HAMILTON
+</p>
+
+<p class="subhead">
+PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES
+</p>
+
+
+<p>
+She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha
+the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione,
+the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible
+the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of
+all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or
+otherwise&#8212;probably otherwise&#8212;of all their authors. Because, at a
+period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose
+from nursemaid to title.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did
+not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's
+crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady
+of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed
+askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose
+momentarily as a lady's maid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me
+work up by degrees to the happening itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was a Lancashire lass, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she
+dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why.
+Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact,
+she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with
+the legal right to one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her
+mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs.
+Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen.
+She had already learned to read&#8212;a rare accomplishment in those days
+for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she
+greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as
+well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as
+quickly as a Chinaman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so
+in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of
+asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in sex-problem
+fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Emma reappeared from the asterisk cloud in London, where she was
+nursemaid in the house of a Doctor Budd, one of the physicians at St.
+Bartholomew's Hospital. Doctor Budd's housemaid at that time, by the
+way, later became a Drury Lane star, under the name of "Mrs. Powell."
+And in that bright afterday she and the even more apotheosized Emma
+renewed their below-stairs friendship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For some reason Emma left Doctor Budd's service rather suddenly and
+found a job as helper in the shop of a St. James' Market mercer. She
+was sixteen, and she was gloriously beautiful. Her figure was superb.
+Already she had a subtle charm of her own which drew to her feet
+crowds of footmen, shopboys, apprentices, and such small deer. There
+is no record that they one and all were sent away disconsolate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During her brief career as helper to the St. James' Market mercer,
+Emma chanced to attract the notice of a woman of quality who one day
+entered the shop. And forthwith she was hired as lady's maid. The girl
+had picked up a smattering of education. She had scraped from her pink
+tongue the rough Lancashire bur-r-r. She had learned to speak
+correctly, to ape the behavior of the solid folk whose servant she had
+been. Now, from her new employer, she was to learn at firsthand how
+people in the world of fashion comported themselves. And,
+chameleonlike, she took on the color of her gay surroundings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon she could lisp such choice and fashionable expletives as "Scrape
+me raw!" and "Oh, lay me bleeding!" and could talk and walk and
+posture as did her mistress. Trashy novels by the dozen fell into her
+hands from her mistress' table. Emma devoured them, gluttonously and
+absorbed their precepts as the human system absorbs alcohol fumes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Please don't for one moment get the idea that there was anything
+profitable to a young girl in the novels of the latter eighteenth
+century. Perhaps you have in mind such dreary sterling works as
+"Pamela," "Clarissa Harlow," "Sir Charles Grandison," and others that
+were crammed into your miserably protesting brain in the Literature
+Courses. Those were the rare&#8212;the very rare&#8212;exceptions to a large and
+lurid list, which included such choice classics as "Moll Flanders,"
+"Roxana"&#8212;both of them by the same Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe,"
+and whose other novels would send a present-day publisher to States
+prison&#8212;"Peregrine Pickle," "Fanny Hill," "The Delicate Distress,"
+"Roderick Random," and the rest of a rank-flavored multitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Emma reveled in the joys of the local "circulating library," too; one
+of those places that loaned books of a sort to cause even the kindly
+Sheridan to thunder his famous dictum:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical
+knowledge. It blossoms through the year. And, depend on't, they who
+are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much reading filled Emma with wonderful new ideas of life.
+Incidentally, it made her neglect her work, and she was discharged.
+Her next step was to become barmaid in a tavern. While she was there,
+a young admirer of hers was seized by the navy press gang. Emma went
+to the captain of the ship to beg for her swain's release. The captain
+was John Willett Payn, afterward a rear admiral. Payne granted the
+lovely girl's plea. He not only gave her what she asked, but his own
+admiration as well. Her story as a heart winner had begun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fiction, the gallant captain would soon have tired of his lively
+sweetheart and cast her aside. But Emma was not a lowly sweetheart.
+She was a super-woman. She showed how much stranger than fiction truth
+may be by deserting Payne for a richer man. First, however, she had
+wheedled the captain into hiring tutors and music masters for her, and
+she profited vastly by their teachings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her new flame was a sporting baronet, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, of
+Up Park, Sussex. Sir Harry was an all-round athlete and a reckless
+horseman. He taught Emma to ride&#8212;"a beggar on horseback?"&#8212;and she
+became the most daring equestrienne of the century. He taught her to
+spend money, too. And so splendidly did she learn her lesson that
+inside of a year Sir Harry was bankrupt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps <b>all</b> rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very
+good reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't.
+The rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining
+the exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the
+humble rodent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the
+bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly
+consideration, she left him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend;
+equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm,
+but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black
+hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack,
+Graham by name.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine&#8212;from Doctor Faustus down,
+the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised
+as a means of exchanging age for youth&#8212;and he vowed that it would
+make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an
+example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said,
+had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had
+become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis."
+Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out
+Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in
+gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which
+Emma posed:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which,
+    in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman,
+    nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as
+    Hygeia, goddess of health.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to
+suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to
+behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and
+sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed
+through the shimmer of rose-colored light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was
+slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him,
+and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He
+was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage
+of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained
+to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no
+less than thirty-nine pictures of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is
+superior to all womankind."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure.
+Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth.
+Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels,
+but racing abreast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soon, out of the ruck and forging far ahead, appeared Charles Francis
+Greville, wit, art connoisseur, and nephew and heir of the famed
+antiquary diplomat, Sir William Hamilton. Greville cut out all rivals,
+Romney among the rest, and won Emma for his own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Theirs was an odd love affair. For here, too, Emma gave full rein to
+her craving for education. And she showed for the first time just why
+she was so eager to be highly educated. It was not for mere learning's
+sake, but to enhance the charm that gave her a hold over men. She
+cared nothing for any but the showy accomplishments. She already had a
+fair groundwork in English and ordinary school studies. She made
+Greville get her the best teachers in singing, in dancing, in acting.
+Perhaps she looked forward to a stage triumph, but more likely to
+outshining the colorless bread-and-butter women of her day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never did pupil better repay the pains of her teachers. Her voice
+presently rivaled that of many a prima donna. Her dancing was a
+delight. It was she who conceived the celebrated "shawl dance" that
+was the rage throughout Europe for years thereafter, and that still is
+used, in very slightly modified form, by <b>premieres danseuses</b>.
+But acting was Emma's forte. Says a contemporary writer:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+With a common piece of stuff she could so arrange and clothe
+    herself as to offer the most appropriate representations of a
+    Jewess, a Roman matron, a Helen, Penelope, or Aspasia. No character
+    seemed foreign to her, and the grace she was in the habit of
+    displaying under such representations excited the admiration of
+    all who were fortunate enough to be present on such occasions.
+    Siddons could not surpass the grandeur of her style or O'Neil be
+    more melting in the utterance of deep pathos.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+In this heyday of her prosperity, Emma hunted up her aged and
+disreputable mother, bestowed on her the name "Mrs. Cadogan," and
+settled a rich pension on her. At about the same time, too, Emma bade
+a cheery farewell to the serviceable name of Lyon and took to calling
+herself Emma Harte.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Greville went broke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his new-found poverty, he hit on a plan of life foreign to all his
+old ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He decided to ask his rich old uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to pay his
+debts and settle a little annuity on him. With this sum as a means of
+livelihood, he intended to marry Emma, and, with her and their three
+children, settle down in some cheap suburb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How this appealed to Emma history forgets to say. Judging by both past
+and future, it is not unjust to suppose that she may have been making
+ready once more to emulate the ship-deserting rat. But this time she
+did not need to. The ship was about to desert her&#8212;for a
+consideration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greville, full of his new hopes, went to Sir William Hamilton and laid
+the plan before him. His nephew's derelictions from the straight and
+narrow path had long distressed the virtuous old diplomat. And in
+Greville's financial troubles Sir William thought he saw a fine chance
+to break off his nephew's discreditable affair with Emma.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He offered to set Greville on his feet again if that luckless youth
+would drop Emma's acquaintance. The enamored Greville refused. Sir
+William insisted, raising his offer of financial aid, and pointing
+out, with tearful eloquence, the family disgrace that a marriage to a
+woman of Emma's desolute character must cause. It was all quite like a
+scene from a modern problem play. But Fate, her tongue in her cheek,
+was preparing to put a twist on the end of the scene worthy of the
+most cynical French vaudeville writer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greville resented his uncle's rash judgment of his adored Emma, and
+begged him to come and see her for himself, hoping that Emma's wonder
+charm might soften the old man's virtue-incrusted heart. Reluctantly,
+Sir William consented to one brief interview with the wicked siren.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At sight of Emma, Sir William's heart melted to mushiness. He fell
+crazily in love with the woman he had come to dispossess. There was
+another long and stormy scene between uncle and nephew; after which
+Greville, for an enormous lump sum, transferred to Sir William
+Hamilton all right and title and good will to the adorable Emma Harte.
+And Sir William and Emma departed thence, arm in arm, leaving Greville
+a sadder but a richer man. What became of the three children I don't
+know. By the way, Emma had taught them to call her "aunt," not
+"mother."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Will you let me quote a deadly dry line or two from an encyclopedia,
+to prove to you how important a personage Sir William was, and how
+true is the axiom about "no fool like an old fool"?
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Hamilton, Sir William, British diplomatist and antiquary
+    (1730-1803), student of art, philosophy and literature. From 1764
+    to 1800 English ambassador to the Court of Naples. Trustee of
+    British Museum, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice president of the
+    Society of Antiquaries, distinguished member of the Dilettante
+    Club, author of several books. Sir Joshua Reynolds, his intimate
+    friend, painted his portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Sir William, who was home on leave of absence when he met Emma, took
+her back with him to Italy. But before they sailed she had prevailed
+on him to marry her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was easy. He was old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The marriage was kept secret until, in 1791, she led her husband back
+to England on another leave of absence and up to the altar of St.
+George's Church, where, on September 6th of that year, they were
+married all over again; this time with every atom of publicity Emma
+could compass. She was then twenty-seven; her husband was sixty-one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In state they returned to the court of Naples&#8212;the most corrupt,
+licentious, false, utterly abominable court in all Europe. If you will
+glance at the annals of the courts of that period you will find this
+statement is as true as it is sweeping. On her earlier visit, as the
+supposed brevet bride of the ambassador, Emma had been warmly received
+by Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples and sister to Marie Antoinette of
+France. Emma and Marie Caroline were kindred spirits&#8212;which is perhaps
+the unkindest thing I could say about either of them&#8212;and they quickly
+formed a lasting friendship for each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Emma was glad to get back to Naples. Apart from her marriage, her
+visit to England had not been a success. A certain element in London
+society, attracted by her beauty, her voice, and her talent as an
+actress, had taken her up. But Queen Charlotte had refused her a
+presentation at the British court, and the more reputable element of
+the nobility had followed royal example and given her a wide berth.
+English society under George III. was severely respectable&#8212;at least
+in the matter of externals; a quality it was soon to mislay, under
+George IV. Hence Emma's joy at returning to a court where
+respectability was a term to be found only in the dictionary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The King of Naples was a fool. His wife was the little kingdom's
+ruler. Emma, Lady Hamilton, became her chief adviser. Writes one
+historian:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+It is not too much to say of these two women that for years they
+    wielded the destinies of Naples, and seriously affected the
+    character of the wars that ended with the peace of Europe in 1815,
+    when both were dead&#8230;. Both were endowed with powers of mind far
+    above the average of their sex; both exhibited energy and
+    understanding that inspired them to bold and decisive, if not
+    always laudable, deeds; both were as remarkable for their personal
+    beauty as for their self-reliance, their knowledge of men, and
+    their determination to make the most of their information. To say
+    that Marie Caroline loved Lady Hamilton is to misstate a fact;
+    there was no love in the royal composition; but her ungovernable
+    and undying hatred of the French inclined her, no doubt, in the
+    first instance toward the wife of the English ambassador, and the
+    subsequent devotion of the favorite secured an attachment that is
+    confessed and reiterated through whole pages of a vehement and
+    overstrained correspondence.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Naples, just then, was between two fires. There was fear of a French
+invasion&#8212;which arrived on schedule time&#8212;and there was also danger
+that England would ruin Neopolitan commerce. Emma's white hands were
+at once plunged, wrist-deep, into the political dough; and a sorry
+mess she proceeded to make of it. For example, the King of Spain wrote
+a confidential letter to his brother, the King of Naples, accusing the
+English government of all sorts of public and private crimes and
+telling of Spain's secret alliance with France. The king showed it to
+his wife, who in turn showed it to Lady Hamilton. Emma stole and
+secretly sent the letter to the British cabinet. The result was a
+bloody war between England and Spain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About two years after Emma's marriage, an English warship, the
+<b>Agamemnon</b>, touched at Naples, and her captain called to pay his
+respects to the British ambassador and to deliver a letter from the
+admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. After a few minutes' talk with the
+captain, Sir William insisted that the latter should meet Lady
+Hamilton.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bustled into the drawing-room to prepare Emma for the visitor's
+arrival, saying excitedly to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am bringing you a little man who cannot boast of being very
+handsome, but who, I pronounce, will one day astonish the world. I
+know it from the very words of conversation I have had with him."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the heels of Sir William's announcement, the "little man" came into
+the room. At first glance, he scarcely seemed to justify Hamilton's
+enthusiasm. He was clad in a full-laced uniform. His lank, unpowdered
+hair was tied in a stiff Hessian queue of extraordinary length.
+Old-fashioned, flaring waistcoat flaps added to the general oddity of
+his figure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir William introduced him as "Captain Horatio Nelson."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lady Hamilton lavished on the queer guest no especial cordiality. It
+is not known that she gave him a second thought. Nelson, little more
+impressed by the super-woman, wrote to his wife in England an account
+of the call, saying of Lady Hamilton&#8212;whose story, of course, he and
+everybody knew:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"She is a young woman of amiable manners, who does honor to the
+station to which she has been raised."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Nelson had unwittingly met the woman who was to tarnish the pure
+glory of his fame; and Emma had met the man but for whom she would
+to-day be forgotten. So little does Fate forecast her dramas that, at
+the first meeting, neither of the two immortal lovers seems to have
+felt any attraction for the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not for five busy years did Nelson and Emma Hamilton see each other
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Nelson came back to Naples, this time in triumph&#8212;a
+world-renowned hero, the champion of the seas, Britain's idol. He had
+become an admiral, a peer of England, a scourge of his country's foes.
+Back to Naples he came. Part of him; not all&#8212;for victorious warfare
+had set cruel marks on him. He had left his right eye at Calvi in
+1794, and his right arm at Teneriffe in 1797. He was more odd looking
+than ever, but he was an acclaimed hero. And Naples in general and
+Emma Hamilton in particular welcomed him with rapture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was in search of the French fleet, and he wanted the King of Naples
+to let him reprovision his ships in the Neapolitan harbor. Now, France
+and Naples just then happened to be at peace. And, by their treaty, no
+more than two English warships at a time could enter any Neapolitan or
+Sicilian port. The king's council declared the treaty must stand. Lady
+Hamilton decided otherwise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She used all her power with the queen to have the treaty set aside. As
+a result Marie Caroline issued an order directing "all governors of
+the two Sicilies to water, victual, and aid" Nelson's fleet. This
+order made it possible for Nelson to go forth reprovisioned&#8212;and to
+crush the French in the Battle of the Nile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the first rumor of this battle that reached Naples, Nelson was
+reported killed. Soon afterward he appeared, alive and well, in the
+harbor. Here is his letter to his wife, telling how Lady Hamilton
+received him on his return. Nelson, by the way, had been married for
+nearly twelve years. He and his wife were devoted to each other.
+Judging from this letter, he was lamentably ignorant of women or was
+incredibly sure of Lady Nelson's love and trust. Or else his courage
+was greater than that of mortal husband. He wrote:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+Sir William and Lady Hamilton came out to sea to meet me. They, my
+    most respectable friends, had nearly been laid up and seriously
+    ill, first from anxiety and then from joy. It was imprudently told
+    Lady Hamilton, in a moment, that I was alive; and the effect was
+    like a shot. She fell, apparently dead, and is not yet perfectly
+    recovered from severe bruises. Alongside came my honored friends.
+    The scene in the boat was terribly affecting. Up flew her
+    ladyship, and, exclaiming: "Oh, God, is it possible?" she fell
+    into my arm, more dead than alive. Tears, however, soon set
+    matters to rights; when alongside came the king&#8230;. I hope, some
+    day, to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton. She
+    is one of the very best women in the world; she is an honor to her
+    sex. Her kindness, with Sir William's, to me, is more than I can
+    express. I am in their house, and I may tell you, it required all
+    the kindness of my friends to set me up. Lady Hamilton intends
+    writing to you. May God Almighty bless you, and give us in due
+    time a happy meeting!
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+France sought revenge for the help given to Nelson's fleet, and
+declared war on Naples. The Neapolitans, in fury at being dragged into
+such a needless conflict, rose against their dear king and adored
+queen&#8212;especially against their adored queen&#8212;and threatened to kill
+them. By Lady Hamilton's aid the royal family reached Nelson's
+flagship and took refuge there from the mob. Sir William and Lady
+Hamilton went along. The populace looted the British embassy and stole
+everything of value Sir William owned&#8212;about one hundred and
+ninety-five thousand dollars' worth of property in all. Thus, Hamilton
+was the third man who had lost a fortune through Emma.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, Nelson had sailed to Palermo, taking the fugitives along.
+There he made his home with the Hamiltons. And scandal awoke, even in
+that easy-going crowd. Nor did the scandal die down to any appreciable
+extent on the birth of Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia, a year or so
+later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sir William's conduct in the matter is still a puzzle. He felt, or
+professed to feel, that there was no occasion for jealousy. And so for
+a long time the trio shared the same house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the courtiers who had fled with the king and queen to Palermo
+was Prince Caraccioli, Nelson's close friend and Lady Hamilton's
+bitter enemy. Caraccioli asked leave to go back to Naples to look
+after his endangered property. As soon as he reached the city, he
+threw in his lot with the rebels and was made admiral of their navy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Presently, by the aid of England's fleet, the royal family returned.
+The rebellion was put down, and the king and queen were once more
+seated firmly on their thrones. The rebel leaders were seized and
+brought to trial. Nelson is said to have promised immunity to
+Caraccioli if he would surrender. Relying on his friend's pledge,
+Caraccioli surrendered. At Emma's request Nelson had the overtrustful
+man hanged from the yardarm of his own flagship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the darkest smear on Nelson's character, a smear that even his
+most blatant admirers have never been able to wipe away. It is not in
+keeping with anything else in his life. But by this time he belonged
+to Lady Hamilton, body and soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She, by the way, had managed to acquire from her friend, the Queen of
+Naples, a nice tendency toward blood-thirstiness; as witness the
+following sweet anecdote by Pryne Lockhart Gordon, who tells of dining
+with the Hamiltons at Palermo, in company with a Turkish officer:
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="blockquote">
+<p>
+In the course of conversation, the officer boasted that with the
+    sword he wore he had put to death a number of French prisoners.
+    "Look," he said, "there is their blood remaining on it." When the
+    speech was translated to her, Lady Hamilton's eyes beamed with
+    delight. "Oh, let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!"
+    she exclaimed. Taking the sword in her hands, which were covered
+    with jewels, she looked at it, then kissed the incrusted blood on
+    the blade, and passed it on to Nelson. Only one who was a witness
+    to the spectacle can imagine how disgusting it was.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>
+Enshrined once more at Naples, hailed as savior of the realm,
+acclaimed for her share in the Nile victory, the confidante of
+royalty&#8212;it would be pleasant to say good-by here to Emma Lyon,
+ex-nursemaid, ex-barmaid, ex-lady's maid, nameless offspring of a
+Lancashire inn slavey. It was the climax of a wonderful life. But
+there was anticlimax aplenty to follow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nelson went home to England to receive the plaudits of his fellow
+countrymen and to settle accounts with his wife. Home, too, came the
+Hamiltons, Sir William having been recalled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lady Nelson was not at the dock to meet her hero husband. Bad news
+traveled fast, even before we boosted it along by wire and then by
+wireless. Lady Nelson had heard. And Lady Nelson was waiting at home.
+Thither, blithely enough, fared the man in whose praise a million
+Englishmen were cheering themselves hoarse&#8212;and in whose
+silver-buckled shoes perhaps no married Englishman would just then
+have cared or dared to stand. But Nelson was a hero. He went home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I once had a collie puppy that had never chanced to be at close
+quarters with a cat. I was privileged to see him when he made his
+first gleefully fearless attack upon one, ignorant of the potential
+anguish tucked away behind a feline's velvety paws. Somehow&#8212;with no
+disrespect to a great man&#8212;I always think of that poor,
+about-to-be-disillusioned puppy when I try to visualize the picture of
+Nelson's home-coming.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just what happened no one knows. But whatever it was, it did not teach
+Nelson the wisdom of husbandly reticence. For, a few weeks later, he
+remarked at breakfast:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I have just received another letter from dear Lady Hamilton."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am sick of hearing of 'dear' Lady Hamilton!" flared the
+long-suffering wife. "You can choose between us. You must give up her
+or me."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"Take care, Fanny!" warned Nelson. "I love you dearly. But I cannot
+forget all I owe to dear Lady Hamilton."
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"This is the end, then," announced Lady Nelson, and she left the
+house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only once again did she and her husband meet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nelson cast off all pretense at concealment after his wife left him.
+His affair with Lady Hamilton became public property. Their daughter,
+Horatia, was openly acclaimed by him as his heiress. The English were
+in a quandary. They loved Nelson; they hated the woman who had dragged
+his name into the filth. They could not snub her without making him
+unhappy; they could not honor him without causing her to shine by
+reflected glory. It was unpleasant all around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1805 the deadlock was broken. Nelson was again to fight the French.
+He told Lady Hamilton and many others that this campaign was to end in
+his death. He ordered his coffin made ready for him. Then he sailed
+against the French fleet, met it off Cape Trafalgar, and annihilated
+it. In the thick of the fight a musket ball gave him his death wound.
+He was carried below, and there, the battle raging around him, he
+laboriously wrote a codicil to his will, entreating his king and
+country to repay his services by settling a pension on Lady Hamilton.
+Then to his next-in-command he panted:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+"I am going fast. Come nearer. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my
+hair and all other things belonging to me. Take care of my dear Lady
+Hamilton&#8212;poor Lady Hamilton! Thank God I have done my duty!"
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so he died, this knightly little demigod&#8212;true lover, false
+husband&#8212;who had fouled his snowy escutcheon for a worthless woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now comes the inevitable anticlimax.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All England turned with loathing from Lady Hamilton. Her husband was
+dead. Lovers stood aloof. Folk who had received her for Nelson's sake
+barred their doors against her. She had followed the popular custom of
+living in luxury on nothing a year. Now her creditors swarmed upon
+her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her house was sold for debt. Next she lived in Bond Street lodgings,
+growing poorer day by day until she was condemned to the debtor's
+prison. A kind-hearted&#8212;or hopeful&#8212;alderman bought her out of jail. A
+former coachman of hers, whose wages were still unpaid, threatened her
+with arrest for debt. She fled to Calais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There she lived in an attic, saved from absolute starvation by a
+fellow Englishwoman, a Mrs. Hunter. Her youth and charm had fled. The
+power that had lured Nelson and Greville and Hamilton to ruin was
+gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In 1815 she died. She was buried in a pine box, with an old black silk
+petticoat for a pall. No clergyman could be found to take charge of
+her funeral. So the burial service was read by a fellow debt exile&#8212;a
+half-pay Irish army captain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One wonders&#8212;perhaps morbidly&#8212;if Nelson's possible punishment in
+another world might not have been the knowledge of what befell his
+"dear" Lady Hamilton in her latter days.
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="ctr">
+THE END.
+</p>
+
+
+<hr class="med">
+
+<p class="ctr">
+  BUY THESE TITLES<br>
+  where<br>
+  YOU BOUGHT THIS BOOK!
+</p>
+<br>
+<div class="list">
+<p class="listctr">
+MYSTERY
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Strange Murders at Greystones
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Elsie N. Wright</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Guilt
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Henry James Forman</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Stretelli Case
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Edgar Wallace</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Silinski, Master Criminal
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Edgar Wallace</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Great Hold-up Mystery
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Wilfred Usher</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Uncanny House
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Mary L. Pendered</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Secret of Sheen
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By John Laurence</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Long Shadows
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Camilla Hope</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By Foul Means
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Patrick Leyton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Phantom Rickshaw
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dreamy Hollow
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Summer C. Britton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Diamond Cross Mystery
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Chester K. Steele</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Mansion of Mystery
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Chester K. Steele</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Mosaic Earring
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Nell Martin</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Golf Course Mystery
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Chester K. Steele</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Million Dollar Suitcase
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By MacGowan and Newbury</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+City of the Dreadful Night
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Murders in the Rue Morgue
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Edgar Allan Poe</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Golden Bowl
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Archie Joscelyn</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Monk of Hambleton
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Armstrong Livingston</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="listctr">
+HISTORY
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Old West
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Geo. Fred Ruxton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Gold Hunters
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By J. D. Borthwick</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="listctr">
+WESTERN
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don Coyote
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Whitman Chambers</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="listctr">
+BIOGRAPHY
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Face to Face with Our Presidents
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Joe Mitchell Chapple</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="listctr">
+ROMANCE
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Girl He Left Behind
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Helen Beecher Long</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sins of the Children
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Cosmo Hamilton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bed Rock
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Jack Bethea</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Doubloons and The Girl
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By John Maxwell Forbes</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quadrille Court
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Cecil Adair</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Lovely Malincourt
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Helen Mathers</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sem's Moroccan Love
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Arthur Kay</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Justice of the King
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Hamilton Drummond</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Star of Hollywood
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Edward Stilgebauer</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some Honeymoon
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Charles Everett Hall</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Children of the Whirlwind
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Leroy Scott</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Who Cares
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Cosmo Hamilton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Man Who Lived in a Shoe
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Henry James Forman</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Enchanted Garden
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Henry James Forman</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cap'n Abe Storekeeper
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By James A. Cooper</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unforbidden Fruit
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Warner Fabian</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mary Regan
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Leroy Scott</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Blindness of Virtue
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Cosmo Hamilton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dancing Desire
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Petronilla Clayton</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why Marry
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Farguson Johnson</i>
+</p>
+
+<br>
+<p class="listctr">
+ADVENTURE
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Letters of Marque
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under the Deodars
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Autumn Trails
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Emma-Lindsay Squier</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Soldiers Three
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tales of the Fish Patrol
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Jack London</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When God Laughs
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Jack London</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the Highest Hill
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By H. M. Stephenson</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+South Sea Tales
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Jack London</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Wilbur Crane's Handicap
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By John Maxwell Forbes</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Light That Failed
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Rudyard Kipling</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rainbow Island
+<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>By Mark Caywood</i>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="ctrsmall">
+INTERNATIONAL FICTION LIBRARY<br>
+Cleveland&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chicago&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;New York
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Superwomen, by Albert Payson Terhune
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+</body>
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+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Superwomen, by Albert Payson Terhune
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: Superwomen
+
+Author: Albert Payson Terhune
+
+Release Date: April 1, 2012 [EBook #39339]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SUPERWOMEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SUPERWOMEN
+
+
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+
+
+
+INTERNATIONAL FICTION LIBRARY
+CLEVELAND, O.        NEW YORK, N.Y.
+
+Copyright, MCMXVI
+By Moffat Yard & Company
+
+_Printed in the United States of America by_
+THE COMMERCIAL BOOKBINDING CO.
+CLEVELAND
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note: The headings for Chapters 8, 11, and 12 have been
+retained as roman numerals, as printed. Words printed in bold type are
+indicated by a tilde: ~bold~.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+Find the Woman.
+
+You will discover her in almost every generation, in almost every
+country, in almost every big city--the Super-Woman. She is not the
+typical adventuress; she is not a genius. The reason for her strange
+power is occult. When psycho-vivisectionists have thought they had
+segregated the cause--the formula--what you will--in one particular
+Super-Woman or group of Super-Women, straightway some new member of
+the clan has arisen who wields equal power with her notable sisters,
+but who has none of the traits that made them irresistible. And the
+seekers of formulas are again at sea.
+
+What makes the Super-Woman? Is it beauty? Cleopatra and Rachel were
+homely. Is it daintiness? Marguerite de Valois washed her hands but
+twice a week. Is it wit? Pompadour and La Valliere were avowedly
+stupid in conversation. Is it youth? Diane de Poictiers and Ninon de
+l'Enclos were wildly adored at sixty. Is it the subtle quality of
+femininity? George Sand, who numbered her admirers by the score--poor
+Chopin in their foremost rank--was not only ugly, but disgustingly
+mannish. So was Semiramis.
+
+The nameless charm is found almost as often in the masculine,
+"advanced" woman as in the ultrafeminine damsel.
+
+Here are stories of Super-Women who conquered at will. Some of them
+smashed thrones; some were content with wholesale heart-smashing.
+Wherein lay their secret? Or, rather, their secrets? For seldom did
+two of them follow the same plan of campaign.
+
+ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
+
+  "Sunnybank,"
+    Pompton Lakes,
+      New Jersey
+  1916
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+LOLA MONTEZ                   1
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS            19
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+PEG WOFFINGTON               41
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+HELEN OF TROY                62
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+MADAME JUMEL                 89
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR         115
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+CLEOPATRA                   135
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+GEORGE SAND                 156
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+MADAME DU BARRY             175
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+LADY BLESSINGTON            204
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+MADAME RECAMIER             230
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+LADY HAMILTON               250
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+LOLA MONTEZ
+
+THE DANCER WHO KICKED OVER A THRONE
+
+
+Her Majesty's Theatre in London, one night in 1843, was jammed from
+pit to roof. Lumley the astute manager, had whispered that he had a
+"find." His whisper had been judiciously pitched in a key that enabled
+it to penetrate St. James Street clubs, Park Lane boudoirs, even City
+counting-rooms.
+
+The managerial whisper had been augmented by a "private view," to
+which many journalists and a few influential men about town had been
+bidden. These lucky guests had shifted the pitch from whisper to paean.
+By word of mouth and by ardent quill the song of praise had spread.
+One of the latter forms of tribute had run much in this
+rural-newspaper form:
+
+"A brilliant ~divertissement~ is promised by Mr. Lumley for the
+forthcoming performance of 'The Tarantula,' at Her Majesty's. Thursday
+evening will mark the British debut of the mysterious and bewitchingly
+beautiful Castilian dancer, Lola Montez.
+
+"Through the delicate veins of this lovely daughter of dreamy
+Andalusia sparkles the ~sang azur~ which is the birthright of the
+hidalgo families alone. In her is embodied not alone the haughty
+lineage of centuries of noble ancestry, but all the fire and mystic
+charm that are the precious heritage of the Southland.
+
+"At a private view, yesterday, at which your correspondent had the
+honor to be an invited guest, this peerless priestess of
+Terpsichore----"
+
+And so on for well-nigh a column of adjective-starred panegyric, which
+waxed more impassioned as the dictionary's supply of unrepeated
+superlatives waned. This was before the day of the recognized press
+agent. Folk had a way of believing what they read. Hence the
+gratifyingly packed theater to witness the mysterious Spaniard's
+debut.
+
+Royalty itself, surrounded by tired gentlemen in waiting who wanted to
+sit down and could not, occupied one stage box. In the front of
+another, lolled Lord Ranelagh, arbiter of London fashion and accepted
+authority on all matters of taste--whether in dress, dancers, or
+duels. Ranelagh, recently come back from a tour of the East, divided
+with royalty the reverent attention of the stalls.
+
+The pit whistled and clapped in merry impatience for the appearance of
+the danseuse. The West End section of the house waited in equal, if
+more subdued eagerness, and prepared to follow every possible
+expression of Ranelagh's large-toothed, side-whiskered visage as a
+signal for its own approval or censure of the much-advertised Lola's
+performance.
+
+The first scene of the opera passed almost unnoticed. Then the stage
+was cleared and a tense hush gripped the house. A fanfare of cornets;
+and from the wings a supple, dark girl bounded.
+
+A whirlwind of welcome from pit and gallery greeted her. She struck a
+sensuous pose in the stage's exact center. The cornetists laid aside
+their instruments.
+
+Guitars and mandolins set up a throbby string overture. Lola drew a
+deep breath, flashed a vivid Spanish smile on the audience at large,
+and took the first languid step of her dance.
+
+Then it was that the dutiful signal seekers cast covert looks once
+more at Lord Ranelagh. That ordinarily stolid nobleman was leaning far
+forward in his stage box, mouth and eyes wide, staring with
+incredulous amaze at the posturing Andalusian. Before her first step
+was complete, Ranelagh's astonishment burst the shackles of silence.
+
+"Gad!" he roared, his excited voice smashing through the soft music
+and penetrating to every cranny. "Gad! It's little Betty James!"
+
+He broke into a Homeric guffaw. A toady who sat beside him hissed
+sharply. The hiss and the guffaw were cues quite strong enough for the
+rest of the house. A sizzling, swishing chorus of hisses went up from
+the stalls, was caught by the pit, and tossed aloft in swelling
+crescendo to the gallery, where it was intensified to treble volume.
+
+Lola's artistically made-up face had gone white under its rouge and
+pearl powder at Ranelagh's shout. Now it flamed crimson. The girl
+danced on; she was gallant, a thoroughbred to the core--even though
+she chanced to be thoroughbred Irish instead of thoroughbred
+Spanish--and she would not be hissed from the stage.
+
+But now "boos" mingled with the hisses. And Ranelagh's immoderate
+laughter was caught up by scores of people who did not in the least
+know at what they were laughing.
+
+The storm was too heavy to weather. Lumley growled an order. Down
+swooped the curtain, leaving the crowd booing on one side of it, and
+Lola raging on the other.
+
+Which ended the one and only English theatrical experience of Lola
+Montez, the dreamy Andalusian dancer from County Limerick, Ireland.
+That night at Almack's, Lord Ranelagh told a somewhat lengthy story--a
+story whose details he had picked up in the East--which was repeated
+with interesting variations next day on Rotten Row, in a dozen clubs,
+in a hundred drawing rooms. There is the gist of the tale:
+
+Some quarter century before the night of Lola's London ~premiere~--and
+~derniere~--an Irish girl, Eliza Oliver by name, had caught the errant
+fancy of a great man. The man chanced to be Lord Byron, at that time
+loafing about the Continent and trying, outwardly at least, to live up
+to the mental image of himself that was just then enshrined in the
+hearts of several thousand demure English schoolmaids.
+
+Byron soon tired of Miss Oliver--it is doubtful whether he ever saw
+her daughter--and the Irish beauty soon afterward married a fellow
+countryman of her own--Sir Edward Gilbert, an army captain.
+
+The couple's acquaintances being overmuch given to prattling about
+things best forgotten, Gilbert exchanged to a regiment in India,
+taking along his wife and her little girl. The child had meantime been
+christened Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna; which, for practical purposes,
+was blue-penciled down to "Betty."
+
+Seven years afterward, Gilbert died. His widow promptly married
+Captain Craigie, a solid, worthy, Scotch comrade-at-arms of her
+late husband's. Craigie generously assumed all post-Byronic
+responsibilities, along with the marriage vows. And, at his expense,
+Betty was sent to Scotland--later to Paris--to be educated.
+
+At sixteen the girl was a beauty--and a witch as well. She and her
+mother spent a season at Bath, a resort that still retained in those
+days some shreds of its former glory. And there--among a score of
+younger and poorer admirers--two men sued for Betty's hand.
+
+One was Captain James, a likable, susceptible, not over-clever army
+officer, home on furlough from India. The other was a judge, very old,
+very gouty, very rich.
+
+And Betty's mother chose the judge, out of all the train of suitors,
+as her son-in-law-elect. Years had taught worldly wisdom to the
+once-gay Eliza.
+
+Betty listened in horror to the old man's mumbled vows. Then, at top
+speed, she fled to Captain James. She told James that her mother was
+seeking to sacrifice her on the altar of wealth. James, like a true
+early-Victorian hero, rose manfully to the occasion.
+
+He and Betty eloped, were married by a registrar, and took the next
+out-bound ship for India.
+
+It was a day of long and slow voyages. Betty beguiled the time on
+shipboard by a course of behavior such as would have prevented the
+most charitable fellow passenger from mistaking her for a returning
+missionary.
+
+There were many Anglo-Indians--officers and civilians--aboard. And
+Betty's flirtations, with all and sundry, speedily became the scandal
+of the ship. By the time the vessel docked in India, there were dozens
+of women ready to spread abroad the bride's fame in her new home land.
+
+English society in India was, and is, in many respects like that of a
+provincial town. In the official and army set, one member's business
+is everybody's business.
+
+Nor did Betty take any pains to erase the impressions made by her
+volunteer advance agents. Like a blazing star, she burst upon the
+horizon of India army life. Gloriously beautiful, willful, capricious,
+brilliant, she speedily had a horde of men at her feet--and a still
+larger number of women at her throat.
+
+Her flirtations were the talk of mess-room and bungalow. Heartlessly,
+she danced on hearts. There was some subtle quality about her that
+drove men mad with infatuation.
+
+And her husband? He looked on in horrified wonder. Then he argued and
+even threatened. At last he shut up and took to drink. Betty wrote
+contemptuously to a friend, concerning this last phase:
+
+"He spends his time in drinking, and then in sleeping like a gorged
+boa-constrictor."
+
+James was liked by the English out there, and his friends fiercely
+resented the domestic treatment that was turning a popular and
+promising officer into a sodden beast.
+
+One morning James rode away over the hills and neglected to come back.
+His wife never again heard of him. And at his exit from the scene, the
+storm broke; a storm of resentment that swept Betty James out beyond
+even the uttermost fringe of Anglo-Indian society.
+
+She hunted up her generous old step-father, Craigie, and induced him
+to give her a check for a thousand pounds, to get rid of her forever.
+She realized another thousand on her votive offerings of jewelry; and,
+with this capital, she took the dust of India from her pretty
+slippers.
+
+Here ends Lord Ranelagh's scurrilous narrative, told at Almack's.
+
+On her way back to England, Betty broke her journey at Spain,
+remaining there long enough to acquire three valuable assets--a
+Spanish accent, a semi-tolerable knowledge of Spanish dancing, and the
+ultra-Spanish name of Lola Montez, by which--through mere courtesy to
+her wishes--let us hereafter call her. Then she burst upon the British
+public--only to retire amid a salvo of hisses and catcalls.
+
+With the premature fall of the curtain at Her Majesty's Theater,
+begins the Odyssey of Lola Montez.
+
+She went from London to Germany, where she danced for a time, to but
+scant applause, at second-rate theaters, and at last could get no more
+engagements.
+
+Thence she drifted to Brussels, where, according to her own later
+statement, she was "reduced to singing in the streets to keep from
+starving." Contemporary malice gives a less creditable version of her
+means of livelihood in the Belgian capital. It was a period of her
+life--the black hour before the garish dawn--of which she never
+afterward would talk.
+
+But before long she was on the stage again; this time at Warsaw,
+during a revolution. She danced badly and was hissed. But the
+experience gave her an idea.
+
+She went straightway to Paris, where, by posing as an exiled Polish
+patriot, she secured an engagement at the Porte St. Martin Theater. It
+was her last hope.
+
+The "Polish patriot" story brought a goodly crowd to Lola's first
+performance in Paris. But, after a single dance, she heard the
+horribly familiar sound of hisses.
+
+And at the first hiss, her Irish spirit blazed into a crazy rage; a
+rage that was the turning point of her career.
+
+Glaring first at the spectators like an angry cat, Lola next glared
+around the stage for a weapon wherewith to wreak her fury upon them.
+But the stage was bare.
+
+Frantic, she kicked off her slippers, and then tore loose her
+heavy-buckled garters. With these intimate missiles she proceeded to
+pelt the grinning occupants of the front row, accompanying the volley
+with a high-pitched, venomous Billingsgate tirade in three languages.
+
+That was enough. On the instant the hisses were drowned in a salvo of
+applause that shook the rafters, Lola Montez had "arrived." Paris
+grabbed her to its big, childish, fickle heart.
+
+She was a spitfire and she couldn't dance. But she had given the
+Parisians a genuine thrill. She was a success. Two slippers and two
+garters, hurled with feminine rage and feminine inaccuracy into the
+faces of a line of bored theatergoers, had achieved more for the fair
+artillerist than the most exquisite dancing could have hoped to.
+
+Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not
+now have dimmed her fame.
+
+Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat
+shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity
+sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.
+
+But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French
+adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer,
+challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola,
+accepted the challenge--and was borne off the field of honor with a
+bullet through his brain.
+
+Lola sought to improve the occasion by swathing herself somberly and
+right becomingly in crape, and by vowing a vendetta against the
+slayer. But before she could profit by the excellent advertisement,
+Dumas chanced to say something to a friend--who repeated it to another
+friend, who repeated it to all Paris--that set the superstitious,
+mid-century Frenchmen to looking askance at Lola and to avoiding her
+gaze. Said Monte Cristo's creator:
+
+"She has the evil eye. She will bring a curse upon any man who loves
+her."
+
+And by that (perhaps) senseless speech, Dumas drove Lola Montez from
+Paris. But she took with her all her new-born prestige as a danseuse.
+She took it first to Berlin. There she was bidden to dance at a court
+reception tendered by King Frederick William, of Prussia.
+
+The rooms of the palace, on the night of the reception, were
+stiflingly hot. Lola asked for a glass of water. A much-belaced and
+bechained chamberlain--to whom the request was repeated by a
+footman--sent word to Lola that she was there to dance for the king
+and not to order her fellow-servants around.
+
+The net result of this answer was another Irish rage. Lola, regardless
+of her pompous surroundings, rushed up to the offending chamberlain
+and loudly made known her exact opinion of him. She added that she was
+tired of dealing with understrappers, and that, unless the king
+himself would bring her a glass of water, there would be no dreamy
+Spanish dance at the palace that night.
+
+The scandalized officials moved forward in a body to hustle the
+lesemajeste perpetrator out of the sacred precincts. But the rumpus
+had reached the ears of King Frederick William himself, at the far end
+of the big room. His majesty came forward in person to learn the cause
+of the disturbance. He saw a marvelously beautiful woman in a
+marvelously abusive rage.
+
+To the monarch's amused queries, the chamberlain bleated out the awful,
+sacrilegious, ~schrecklich~ tale of Lola's demand. The king did not
+order her loaded with chains and haled to the donjon keep. Instead, he
+gave a laughing order--this gracious and gentle sovereign who had so
+keen an eye for beauty.
+
+A moment later a lackey brought the king a glass of water. First
+gallantly touching the goblet to his own lips, his majesty handed it
+with a deep obeisance to Lola.
+
+Except for the advertisement it gave her, she could gain no real
+advantage from this odd introduction to a king. For, next day, she
+received a secret, but overwhelmingly official hint that an instant
+departure not only from Berlin, but from Prussia, too, would be one of
+the wisest moves in her whole career. She went.
+
+To Bavaria, and to greatness.
+
+Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer, was billed at a Munich theater. She
+danced there but three times. For, on the third evening, the royal box
+was occupied by a drowsy-eyed sexagenarian whose uniform coat was
+ablaze with decorations.
+
+The old gentleman was Ludwig I. ~Dei gratia~, King of Bavaria, a
+ruler who up to this time had been beloved of his subjects; and whose
+worst vice, in his people's eyes, was that he encouraged art rather
+than arms.
+
+Ludwig watched breathlessly while Lola danced. Afterward he sent for
+her to come to the royal box and be presented to him. She never danced
+again in Bavaria.
+
+For next day Ludwig introduced her at court as "my very good friend."
+Lola dazzled Munich with her jewels and her equipages. The king
+presented her with a huge and hideous mansion. He stretched the laws
+by having her declared a Bavarian subject. And, having done that, he
+bestowed upon her the titles of "Baroness von Rosenthal and Countess
+von Landfeld." Next, he granted her an annuity of twenty thousand
+florins. Things were coming Lola's way, and coming fast.
+
+The Bavarians did not dislike her--at first. When Ludwig forced his
+queen to receive her and to pin upon the dancer-emeritus' breast the
+Order of St. Theresa, there was, to be sure, a shocked murmur. But it
+soon died down. Had Lola been content with her luck, she might have
+continued indefinitely in her new and delightfully comfortable mode of
+life.
+
+But, according to Lola's theory, a mortal who is content with success
+would be content with failure. And she strove to play a greater role
+than the fat one assigned to her by the love-sick old king.
+
+She had read of Pompadour and other royal favorites whose vagrom whims
+swayed the destinies of Europe. She sought to be a world power; the
+power behind the throne; the woman who could mold the politics of a
+dynasty. And she laid her plans accordingly.
+
+It was not even a dream, this new ambition of Lola's. It was a
+comic-opera fantasy. Bavaria, at best, was only a little German state
+with no special voice in the congress of nations. And Lola herself had
+no more aptitude for politics than she had for dancing. Nor did she
+stop to consider that Germans in 1846 were much more likely to
+tolerate a fair foreigner's meddling with their puppet king's domestic
+affairs than with matters of public welfare.
+
+But Lola Montez ever did the bulk of her sane thinking when it was too
+late. So she proceeded to put her idiotic plans into operation.
+
+First, she cajoled King Ludwig into dismissing in a body his perfectly
+capable and well-liked ministry. As delighted with that success as is
+the village cut-up when he pulls a chair from under the portly
+constable--and with even less wholesome fear of the result to
+herself--Lola next persuaded the king to change his whole policy of
+state. Then things began to happen.
+
+One morning Lola awoke in her ugly and costly mansion to find the
+street in front of the door blocked by a highly unfriendly mob, whose
+immediate ambition seemed to be the destruction of the house and
+herself. This was the signal for one more Irish rage, the last on
+public record.
+
+Lola, throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, snatched up a loaded
+pistol, and, pushing aside her screaming servants, ran out on the
+front steps.
+
+At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the
+steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing
+mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was
+content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles.
+
+The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine
+for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling
+them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal
+bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd
+and rescued the angry woman.
+
+But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely
+unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the
+avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same
+avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to
+knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her
+twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian
+frontier with stern instructions never to return.
+
+Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on
+her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from
+power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a
+noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish
+girl with a variegated past.
+
+The Ludwig scandal preceded Lola wherever she tried to go. The
+divinity that hedges a king was everywhere on guard against her. The
+gate to practically every country in Europe was slammed in her face.
+Folk fell to repeating Dumas' "evil-eye" words, and to applying them
+to discrowned old Ludwig. Lola Montez was not wanted anywhere;
+certainly nowhere east of the Atlantic.
+
+So she came to New York. Here there were no kings, to bar her out lest
+they share Ludwig's fate. And Americans knew little and cared less
+about the evil eye. If Lola Montez could make good on the stage,
+America was willing to welcome her: If not, it had no further general
+interest in her.
+
+Moreover, she was well past thirty; at an age when the first glory of
+a woman's siren charms may reasonably be supposed to be slightly
+blurred. New Yorkers were curious to see her, on account of her
+history; but that was their only interest in her.
+
+She danced at the old Broadway Theater. People thronged the theater
+for the first few performances. Then, having gazed their fill on the
+Bavarian throne's wrecker and finding she could not dance, they stayed
+away; and Lola ended her engagement at the Broadway to the hackneyed
+"beggarly array of empty benches."
+
+An enterprising manager--P. T. Barnum, if I remember aright--raked up
+the Byron story and starred Lola in a dramatization of Lord Byron's
+poem "Mazeppa." But people here had already looked at her, and the
+production was a failure. Next she appeared in one or two miserably
+written plays, based on her own European adventures. These, too,
+failed. She then wrote a beauty book that had a small sale, and wrote
+also a drearily stupid volume of humor, designed as a mock "Guide to
+Courtship."
+
+On her way to America, Lola had stopped in England long enough to
+captivate and marry a British army officer, Heald by name. But she
+soon left him, and arrived in this country without visible matrimonial
+ties.
+
+New York having tired of her, Lola went West. She created a brief, but
+lively, furore among the gold-boom towns along the Pacific coast; not
+so much by reason of her story as for the wondrous charm that was
+still hers. She gave lectures in California, and then made an
+Australian tour.
+
+Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San
+Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One
+of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper
+owner, of San Francisco.
+
+But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands.
+Back she came to New York. And--to the wonder of all, and the
+incredulity of most--she there announced that, though she had been a
+great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to
+penance.
+
+Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday
+she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among
+women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had
+on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day
+in their behalf.
+
+Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces.
+She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty
+and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough
+money to bury her.
+
+Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez;
+Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and
+worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the
+great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.
+
+Her neglected grave--in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the
+way--bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired
+woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering
+reads:
+
+    ~Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.~
+
+One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have
+possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could
+have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+NINON DE L'ENCLOS
+
+PREMIERE SIREN OF TWO CENTURIES
+
+
+This story opens with the account of a deathbed scene; somewhat
+different from any other you may have read. It is brought in to throw
+a light on what heredity and careful instruction can do in molding a
+young mind. But don't necessarily skip it for that reason.
+
+One day in 1630, the Sieur de L'Enclos lay dying in his great, dreary
+bedroom in his great, dreary Touraine castle. There was no especial
+tragedy about the closing of his life. He was elderly, very rich, and
+possessed of a record for having used, to the full, every minute of a
+long and exciting life.
+
+Beside his bed stood a fifteen-year-old girl, his only daughter, Anne;
+affectionately nicknamed by him--and later by all Europe and still
+later by all history--"Ninon." She was something below medium height,
+plump, with a peachblow complexion, huge dark eyes, and a crown of
+red-gold hair. Ninon and her father had been chums, kindred spirits,
+from the girl's babyhood.
+
+The dying noble opened his eyes. They rested lovingly on the daughter
+who had bent down to hear the whispered sounds his white lips were
+striving to frame. Then, with a mighty effort, De L'Enclos breathed
+his solemn last words of counsel to the girl--counsel intended to
+guide her through the future that he knew must lie before so rich and
+so beautiful a damsel. This was his message to her:
+
+"Ninon--little girl of mine--in dying I have but one single regret. I
+regret that I did not--get more fun out of life. I warn
+you--daughter--do not make the terrible mistake that I have made.
+Live--live so that at the last you will not have the same cause for
+sorrow!"
+
+So saying, the Sieur de L'Enclos bade an exemplary farewell to earth
+and to its lost opportunities of fun. To judge from his career as well
+as from his last words, one may venture the optimistic belief that he
+had not thrown away as many such priceless chances as he had led his
+daughter to believe.
+
+Ninon, then, at fifteen, was left alone in the world. And her actions
+in this sad state conformed to those of the customary helpless
+orphan--about as closely as had her father's death speech to the
+customary "last words." With a shrewdness miraculous in so young a
+girl, she juggled her Touraine property in a series of deals that
+resulted in its sale at a little more than double its actual value.
+Rich beyond all fear of want, she settled in Paris.
+
+It was not there or then that her love life set in. That had begun
+long before. As a mere child she had flashed upon her little world of
+Touraine as a wonder girl. The superwoman charm was hers from the
+first. And she retained it in all its mysterious power through the
+seventeenth century and into the eighteenth; men vying for her love
+when she was ninety.
+
+A full year before her father died, she had met the youthful Prince de
+Marsillac, and had, at a glance, wholly captivated his semi-royal
+fancy. It was Ninon's first love affair--with a prince. She was
+dazzled by it just a little, she whom monarchs later could not dazzle.
+She was only fourteen. And in Touraine a princely admirer was a
+novelty.
+
+At Marsillac's boyish supplication, Ninon consented to elope with him.
+Off they started. And back to their respective homes they were brought
+in dire disgrace. There was all sorts of a scandal in the
+neighborhood. The princeling was soundly spanked and packed off to
+school. The Sieur de L'Enclos came in for grave popular disapproval by
+laughingly refusing to mete out the same stern penalties to Ninon.
+
+To Paris, then, at sixteen, went the orphaned Ninon. Laughing at
+convention and at the threats of her shocked relatives, she set up
+housekeeping on her own account, managing the affairs of her Rive
+Gauche mansion with the ease of a fifty-year-old grande dame.
+
+On Paris burst the new star. In a month the city was crazy over her.
+Not her beauty alone, nor her wit, nor her peculiar elegance, nor her
+incredibly high spirits.--Not any or all of these, but an
+all-compelling magnetism drew men to her in shoals and swarms.
+
+By reason of her birth and breeding she took at once her place in the
+court society of the day. Before she was twenty, she was setting the
+fashions for feminine Paris, and was receiving in her salon the
+stateliest ladies of the court, in equal numbers with their far less
+stately husbands.
+
+Frankly, she declared herself a votary, not of love, but of loves. For
+constancy she had no use whatsoever. One admirer who had won a
+temporary lease of her gay heart swore he would kill himself unless
+Ninon would swear to love him to eternity.
+
+And as she loved him ardently, she made the rash vow. When at the end
+of ninety days she gave him his dismissal, he reproached her wildly
+and bitterly for her broken pledge.
+
+"You swore you would love me to eternity!" he raged. "And now----"
+
+"And now," she explained, as one might soothe a cranky child, "I have
+kept my vow. I have loved you for three endless months. That is an
+eternity--for love!"
+
+And three months remained, to the end, Ninon's record for fidelity to
+any one man; which was, perhaps, as well, for the waiting list was as
+long as that of a hyper-fashionable club.
+
+And now we come to a story that I do not ask you to believe, although
+all France unquestionably and unquestioningly believed it. Whether
+Ninon herself at first coined it as a joke, or whether it was a hoax
+that she herself credited, it is certain that she grew at last to have
+firm faith in it.
+
+One night--so Ninon always declared--when she was about twenty, she
+returned home late from a ball at the Hotel St. Evremond. As she stood
+before the mirror of her boudoir, after her maid had left her for the
+night, she became aware of a shadowy reflection behind her.
+
+Turning, she saw a man clad all in black, his face hidden by the low
+brim of his hat and by his cloak's folds. What little was visible of
+his countenance was ghastly pale. Ninon, ever fearless, did not cry
+out for help. Instead, she approached the black-shrouded stranger and
+demanded to know his business and how he had penetrated to her
+close-barred room.
+
+The man in black, by way of answer, drew one sable-gloved hand from
+beneath his cloak. In his fingers he grasped a large phial, wherein
+sparkled and glowed a strange, pinkish liquid.
+
+"Life is short," said the visitor, as Ninon still looked in amazed
+inquiry from his half-hidden face to the rose-colored phial he
+carried. "Life is short, but youth is far shorter. When youth is gone,
+love is gone. Love is the goal of life. Without youth, there is no
+love. Without love, life is a desert. The gifts of youth and beauty
+are yours. Would you make them long-lasting, instead of transient
+blessings that shall too soon become mere memories?"
+
+As Ninon, dumb with wonder, hesitated to reply, he continued:
+
+"The admiration of men melts like summer snow at the first touch of
+age in a woman. Their admiration is now yours. Would you hold it? One
+drop a day from this phial, in your bath, will keep you young, will
+keep you beautiful, will retain for you the love of men."
+
+He set the flask on her dressing table and turned to go.
+
+"You will see me again," he said very slowly and distinctly, "just
+three days before your death."
+
+And he vanished.
+
+To a generation that has substituted science for superstition, this
+tale of the Man in Black reads like stark nonsense. Perhaps it is. But
+no one in the seventeenth century thought so. It was an age rife with
+demon legends; legends of favors granted to mortals in return for a
+residuary mortgage on their souls; and all that sort of thing. The
+tale of Faust was still almost brand-new. Compared with many of the
+traditions that then passed for solid fact, the incident of Ninon and
+the Man in Black was almost commonplace.
+
+We laugh at such things; probably with due justification. Yet was
+Ninon's adventure more inexplicable than some of the absolutely
+authenticated cases of Cagliostro's magic? As, for a single example,
+when on a certain date Cagliostro announced in Paris: "The Empress
+Maria Theresa of Austria died this morning." This was long before the
+time of telegraphy or even of railroads. It was a journey of several
+days from Paris to Vienna. Dispatches, reaching the French court a
+week later, announced the unforeseen death of Maria Theresa at the
+very hour named by Cagliostro.
+
+Ninon may have invented the Man in Black. Or he may have been one of
+the many quacks who hung on the fringes of courts and made capital out
+of the superstitious folly of the rich. Or perhaps----
+
+At all events, seventy years later, Ninon had either a most remarkable
+encounter with the same man, or else, in her dying moments, she took
+odd trouble to substantiate a silly lie that was nearly three-quarters
+of a century old. Finish the story and then form your own theories.
+
+Paris was alive in those days with titled women whose antecedents were
+doubtful and about whose characters there could unluckily be no doubt.
+They moved in the best society--or, rather, in the highest. Most of
+them made a living by one form or another of graft. And always there
+was an exclusive class of women who would not receive them.
+
+Ninon quickly proved she had neither lot nor parcel with these titled
+adventuresses. From first to last she accepted not a sou, not a jewel,
+not a favor--political or otherwise--from the grands seigneurs who
+delighted to do her honor. From first to last, too, she accepted as
+her due the friendship of the most respectable and respected members
+of her own sex.
+
+She was never an adventuress, never a grafter, never a climber. She
+loved for love's own sake. And if the men to whom in lightning
+succession she gave her resilient heart chanced often to be among the
+foremost of the realm, it was only because the qualities that made
+them what they were made them also the type of man Ninon preferred.
+
+She never benefited in any material way from their adoration. The
+nearest approach was when Richelieu, the grim old iron cardinal, bent
+his ecclesiastical and consumptive body before her altar. She used her
+power over Richelieu freely, but never for herself; always to soften
+the punishment of some luckless man or woman who had fallen under the
+rod of his eminence's displeasure.
+
+Thereby, and through Richelieu's love for her, Ninon clashed with no
+less a personage than the Queen of France herself.
+
+When Anne of Austria came from Spain to be the bride of Louis XIII of
+France, Richelieu fell in love with the pretty young queen. Anne had
+not wit enough to appreciate the cardinal's genius or to fear his
+possible hate. So--seeing in him only a homely and emaciated little
+man, whose pretensions she considered laughable--the queen hit on a
+scheme of ridding herself forever of Richelieu's love sighs.
+
+She pretended to listen to his courtship, then told him coyly that his
+austerity and lack of human weakness and of humor made her afraid of
+him. The enamored Richelieu insisted that he could be as human and as
+fun loving as any other man. Anne bade him prove it by dressing as a
+circus clown and dancing a saraband for her. She said she would hide
+behind the curtains of a room in the palace and watch him do it. Then,
+were she convinced that he could really unbend and could she overcome
+her fear of his lofty dignity, she would come forth and tell him so.
+
+The all-powerful Richelieu--the man of blood, whom even the haughtiest
+nobles feared--so far lost every remnant of sanity as to do as the
+queen bade him. As a harlequin, he capered and leaped about the empty
+room, his eyes ever on the curtain at its far end.
+
+Suddenly, in the midst of his idiotic performance, the curtain was
+dashed aside; a howl of laughter swept the room; and the queen stood
+revealed to his gaze. Clustered around her and reeling with mirth were
+a score of courtiers; men and women both.
+
+From that day Richelieu was Anne's sworn foe. He wrecked her repute
+with the king, and for a long time managed to have her kept a prisoner
+in the palace. In a thousand ways he made her life a torment.
+
+And now, through the grim cardinal's love for Ninon de L'Enclos, Anne
+thought she saw a way of striking back at her enemy. She sent for
+Ninon, chided her for her mode of living, and ended by ordering her
+sharply to retire at once to a convent. Ninon simply smiled at the
+command, curtsied to the queen, and said demurely:
+
+"I will gladly go to any convent your majesty may designate--just as
+soon as I become as unattractive to men as is the woman who wants to
+send me there."
+
+She left the royal presence. And so great was the power of the girl's
+beauty in the hearts of those in France's high places, Anne did not
+dare put her command into effect. The tale of the conversation spread
+like the prehistorically bromidic "wildfire," and Ninon won new
+laurels thereby.
+
+The Duke of St. Evremond, at that time one of the greatest men in
+Europe, offered her his heart and his princely fortune. She replied
+that his heart was a precious gift which she would prize forever--or
+for a month or two at the very least; but that she had no use whatever
+for his fortune, as she had all the money she needed and more would be
+only a burden.
+
+And the duke--veteran of many a love affair where fortunes had counted
+for far more than hearts--made the quaint, historic reply:
+
+    "~Mademoiselle, tu es un honnete homme!~" ("Mademoiselle, you are
+    an honest man!")
+
+Three generations of Sevignes--father, son, and grandson--in turn
+loved Ninon during her seventy-five years of heartbreaking. Love for
+her seemed a hereditary trait in the Sevigne family.
+
+But it was the old Duke of St. Evremond, of all her numberless wooers,
+for whom Ninon cared most. Though their love was soon dead, they
+remained loyal and devoted friends to the day of the duke's death.
+Their correspondence--prettily formal, yet with an undercurrent of
+true affection--is still extant. And through life Ninon ran always to
+the duke with every sorrow or perplexity; notably when, at the age of
+sixty, she discovered her first wrinkle, an all but invisible crease
+between her brows. In horror she related to St. Evremond the fearful
+tragedy. With a laugh he banished her dread.
+
+"That is no wrinkle, ma petite," he reassured her. "Love placed it
+there to nestle in."
+
+The mighty Prince de Conde, the left-handedly royal D'Estrees, La
+Rochefoucauld (the Machiavelli of France,) and many another of like
+rank and attainment were proud to count themselves Ninon's worshipers.
+To no one did she show more favor than to another. King of France or
+Scarron, the humpback poet--so long as they could amuse her, Ninon
+gave no thought to their titles or wealth or name. To her, one was as
+good as another. To none did she give fidelity. Nearly all of them she
+treated outrageously. Yet of them all, only one was ever driven away
+by her caprices before she was fully ready to dismiss him.
+
+That sole exception was the gallant Comte de Fiesque, who, for a brief
+space of time, held her wandering heart and thoughts. Ninon as a rule
+was not quarrelsome. But she and De Fiesque were as flint and steel.
+Their affair was one fierce series of spats and disputes that blazed
+out at last in a pyrotechnic row.
+
+As a result of this climax quarrel, De Fiesque scuttled away in red
+wrath, vowing that he was forever and ever done with so ill-tempered
+and cranky a woman as Ninon de L'Enclos.
+
+Ninon was aghast. Paris was aghast. France was aghast. The love world
+at large was aghast. For the first time in her whole hectic life,
+Ninon de L'Enclos had been deserted--actually deserted! And by a
+nobody like De Fiesque! She who had snubbed a king, had tired of
+Condez, had yawned daintily in the half-monarchical face of D'Estrees
+himself!
+
+It was unbelievable. For an instant her fame as a peerless and
+all-conquering Wonder Woman threatened to go into partial eclipse. But
+only for an instant.
+
+De Fiesque, placed during a little hour on a pinnacle of flaring
+originality, began to receive tenderly reproachful letters from Ninon,
+beseeching him to come back to her, saying she had been wrong in their
+dispute, begging his forgiveness--Ninon, to whom princes had knelt
+trembling!--promising all sorts of meek, womanly behavior if only he
+would cure her heartbreak by a word of love.
+
+These letters of hers to her deserter would have moved an equestrian
+statute to maudlin tears. But De Fiesque's pride had been too deeply
+cut by that last quarrel, to let him relent. Besides, he was vastly
+enjoying his novel position as the only man on earth to whom Ninon de
+L'Enclos had made such an appeal. So while his fellow courtiers
+alternately envied him and longed to kick him, they wondered what
+might be the secret of his fascination over Ninon.
+
+Thus, for a few days, matters stood. Then Ninon hit on a master
+stroke. The thing that had first attracted De Fiesque to her had been
+the glory of her red-gold hair. He had loved to bury his face in its
+shimmering, soft masses, to run its silk strands through his fingers.
+Incidentally, in the course of their epoch-marking quarrel, he had
+called Ninon supremely vain and selfish.
+
+Now she cut off all her wonderful hair; cut it off, wrapped it up, and
+sent it, without a word of explanation, to De Fiesque. He understood.
+She had made this supreme sacrifice for him--for the man who had
+deserted her. To him she was offering this chief beauty of hers.
+
+De Fiesque's pride vanished. Through the streets he ran, bareheaded,
+to Ninon's house. Into her presence he dashed and flung himself at her
+feet, imploring forgiveness for his brutality and vowing that he loved
+her alone in all the world.
+
+But the rest of the dialogue did not at all work out along any
+recognized lines of lovers' reconciliations. Ninon patiently heard to
+an end De Fiesque's blubbered protestations of devotion. Then, very
+calmly and triumphantly, she pointed to the door.
+
+The interview was over. So was the affair. Ninon de L'Enclos was
+vindicated. No lover had ever permanently deserted her. There was no
+man so stubborn that she could not lure him back to her. The De
+Fiesque incident was closed. All that remained for Ninon to do was to
+introduce among Paris women a temporary fashion of wearing the hair
+short. Which she promptly did. And thus she suffered not at all by her
+ruse.
+
+Some two centuries later, George Sand, who had read of the incident,
+tried the same trick to win back Alfred de Musset. In her case, it was
+a right dismal failure. De Musset, too, was entirely cognizant of the
+story of Ninon's shorn hair. And even without her hair, Ninon was
+lovely; while, even with hers, George Sand was hideous.
+
+Queen Christina of Sweden came to France. Ninon delighted the
+eccentric Swede. Christina made a confidante and familiar friend of
+her. She begged Ninon to return with her to Sweden, promising her a
+title and estates and a high place at court.
+
+Ninon called unexpectedly at Christina's Paris apartments one morning
+to talk over the plan. She entered the queen's drawing-room
+unannounced. There on the floor lay a man, one of the Swedish
+officials in Christina's suite. He was dead--murdered--and was lying
+as he had fallen when he had been stricken down.
+
+Above him stood Christina, at her side the assassin who had struck the
+blow. The queen turned to Ninon and explained. The official had
+displeased her majesty by some undiplomatic act; and taking justice
+into her own hands, Christina had ordered another member of her suite
+to murder the offender. She was as unconcerned over the killing as if
+she had ordered a rabid dog to be shot.
+
+Ninon fled in panic fear from the apartment. Nor ever again could she
+be induced to come into the presence of the royal murderess. Thus
+ended the Swedish project.
+
+Though the confidential friendship of one queen was thus taken
+forcibly from Ninon, she had later the satisfaction of helping on the
+cause of another and uncrowned queen. It is her one recorded
+experience in dabbling with politics, and the role she played therein
+is interesting.
+
+King Louis XIV.--son of that Anne of Austria who had hated Ninon--had
+reached the age when life began at times to drag. The "~Grand
+Monarque~" had still fewer reasons than those of Ninon's father to
+deplore the missing of any good times. But youth had fled from him at
+last. He found himself, in middle age, a sour-faced, undersized man,
+with a huge periwig, a huger outjutting beak of a nose, and wearing
+egregiously high boot heels to eke out his height. People--a very few
+of them and at a safe distance--were beginning to laugh at his
+pretensions as a lady-killer. Nature, too, was proving herself less a
+tender mother than a Gorgonlike stepmother, by racking him with
+dyspepsia, bad nerves, and gout.
+
+These causes led him to turn temporarily to what he termed "the higher
+life." In other words, by his whim, the court took to wearing somber
+garments, changing its scandalous conversation for pious reflections
+and its unprintable novels for works on philosophy. Whereat, yawns of
+boredom assailed high Heaven.
+
+In the course of his brief penitence, Louis frowned majestically upon
+his tempest-tempered favorite, Madame de Montespan. And she--tactless
+or over-sure of her position--scowled back, harshly derided the new
+order of affairs, and waxed more evil-tempered than ever.
+
+In Madame de Montespan's household was a certain Madame de Maintenon,
+widow of the humpbacked little Scarron, who had once sued for Ninon de
+L'Enclos' favor. Strangely enough, his widow and Ninon were close
+friends. And at this court crisis. Ninon made the term "friendship"
+mean something.
+
+She herself had plainly shown that she had no interest in the king.
+Now she set to work to make the king feel an interest in Madame de
+Maintenon, whom Louis in his long period of gayety had always
+disliked. Ninon taught the widow how and when to throw herself in the
+king's way, and how to treat him. She coached her friend as a stage
+director coaches a promising but raw actor.
+
+As a result, when Louis came, smarting, from a squabble with the fiery
+De Montespan, he would find himself, by the merest chance, in the
+presence of De Maintenon, whose grave gentleness and attitude of awed
+devotion served as balm to his quarrel-jarred nerves.
+
+He took to seeking out the wise and gentle widow--of his own accord,
+as he thought--and spending more and more time in her company. And De
+Maintenon, carefully coached by Ninon, the queen of heart students,
+managed to awaken in the deadened royal brain a flicker of admiration
+that slowly warmed into love.
+
+At that point Ninon's genius achieved its most brilliant stroke. Under
+her instructions the widow gave the king's advances just the right
+sort of treatment. She made it clear to Louis that she scorned to be a
+royal favorite.
+
+As a result, one midnight, there was a secret wedding in the palace
+chapel; King Louis XIV. becoming the legal, if unacknowledged, husband
+of the penniless humpback's meek widow; Ninon, it is said, being one
+of the ceremony's few witnesses.
+
+Ninon had "played politics" just once--and with far-reaching results
+to history; as De Maintenon's future influence over her husband was to
+prove. Among the results, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes is
+laid at De Maintenon's door, an act that partly depopulated France and
+partly populated America.
+
+By this time Ninon had become something more than a winner of hearts
+and a setter of fashions. She found herself a social arbiter as well.
+Without an introduction to the illustrious Ninon de L'Enclos and a
+word of indorsement from her, no young man could hope to make his way
+in Paris society. Noblemen in the country, sending their sons to Paris
+for a career, moved heaven and earth to obtain for them letters of
+introduction to Ninon.
+
+Her lightest expression of opinion was everywhere quoted as inspired.
+With a smile or a frown she could make or unmake men's futures at
+court. Had she so chosen, she might have become, with this amazing
+amount of power, a most unbearable tyrant. Instead, she used her power
+wisely and kindly. Charitable to a fault, her tact and her money and
+her boundless influence were always making the way easy for some one
+or other.
+
+For instance, in her old age--or rather in what would have passed for
+old age in any other woman--she took an interest in a wizened,
+monkey-like boy of the people. She set him on the path to advancement
+and supplied him with the money for his education. To his dying day,
+the little man remembered her with a veneration most people would have
+bestowed on a saint; even though he used the education she had given
+him to help in tearing down the monarchy whose nobles had been his
+benefactress' slaves. He is known to fame as Voltaire.
+
+Years came and went. They merged into decades and quarter centuries.
+The men who once had loved Ninon de L'Enclos grew old and died, and
+their places were taken by sons and then by grandsons. Dynasties
+changed. The world rolled on. New times brought new customs.
+
+But Ninon remained unchanged. Still beautiful, still vibrant with all
+her early gay charm, she remained to outward appearances what she had
+been for the past fifty years. The grandsons of her girlhood suitors
+were as madly in love with her as had been their grandsires. In love,
+in society, in fashion, she was still the unquestioned sovereign.
+
+Throughout Europe, there was now no one who doubted the unadorned
+truth of the story concerning the Man in Black; for it seemed that no
+mortal agency could have kept any woman so perennially young. As the
+years passed, folk fell to speculating on how many drops of the
+precious rose-colored liquid might still remain in the phial. And, in
+scared voices, they repeated the prophecy of the man in black:
+
+    "~You shall see me once again three days before your death.~"
+
+Perhaps, now that you know Ninon better, you may laugh less
+contemptuously at the tale of the Man in Black; or, at the least,
+credit her with believing it. Throughout her life, she never changed
+the story in any way; nor could the shrewdest cross-examining lead her
+to contradict herself about any of its most minute details. A haunting
+fear of the Man in Black's promised return was always in her mind,
+even during her gayest days and nights.
+
+As late as her ninetieth year men made vehement love to her. At an age
+when most women are withered crones, she still broke hearts. Men
+fought duels by the dozen for her favor. In her old age a youth blew
+out his brains on her account.
+
+During her later years a great sorrow came to her. Through no
+conscious fault of her own, she was enmeshed in what was probably the
+most horrible tragedy of its sort in history. This tragedy cannot even
+be touched on here. In no book written in the English language can you
+find its complete details. It is enough to say that the nameless
+horror of it wrecked Ninon's health and her mind, leaving her for the
+time a mental and physical wreck.
+
+Slowly she recovered her health, her brain, and her unquenchable
+spirits. Her beauty had never been impaired. And once more she ruled
+as queen of hearts. Now, too, she blossomed forth into literature,
+becoming with ease a famous author. Her essays were quoted, imitated,
+lauded to the skies.
+
+Nor is there the slightest reason to doubt that she was their author.
+Always bluntly honest to a fault, the woman who would not accept rank
+or money was not likely to accept the literary ideas of others and
+pass them off as her own. Also, the style of her published work was
+identical with her private letters.
+
+It is odd, and possibly--or possibly not--significant, that of the
+world's superwomen, more have leaned toward literature than toward any
+other one pursuit. The gift of writing comes nearer to being their one
+common trait than do beauty and all the other hackneyed siren charms.
+The power that enables such women to win hearts appears to manifest
+itself by use of the pen.
+
+To instance a very few of the hundreds of heart-breakers who were also
+authors, letter writers, and so forth, of greater or less note, one
+has but to recall George Sand, Adah Menken, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Ninon
+de L'Enclos, Lola Montez, Madame de Sevigne, Madame Recamier, Madame
+Roland, and Marie Stuart.
+
+By 1706 there was scarce a man or woman left alive who remembered
+Ninon when, as a girl, she had come first to Paris. Youths who had
+worshiped her as a middle-aged woman were now aged men. She herself
+was ninety.
+
+To say that she was still a girl in looks and actions is a gross
+exaggeration, of course; not the firmest believers in the Man in Black
+claimed that. But, at ninety, she was still beautiful, still alluring
+and adorable, as men continued to learn. Younger women--women young
+enough to be her grandchildren--were neglected for her sake. It is
+said that on her ninetieth birthday she received a fervent declaration
+of love from a noble who had met her but a few days earlier.
+
+Then came the end. On one day, in 1706, Ninon de L'Enclos was in
+blooming health; on the next she was dying. She wrote a single line to
+one of her friends and dispatched it by a messenger.
+
+The letter did not find the woman to whom it was addressed until
+nearly a week later. Three days from the time she wrote it, Ninon
+died. The friend, opening the letter, read, scrawled in a fear-shaken
+hand, this sentence:
+
+    "~I have just seen the man in black again!~"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+PEG WOFFINGTON
+
+IRISH HEART CONJURER
+
+
+A throng of people--barefoot peasants, modish idlers, tradesfolk,
+riffraff--stood in a Dublin courtyard one day in 1727, providing the
+much-admired "sea of upturned faces." All eyes were raised, all necks
+were back bent. Every one was looking aloft to where a taut wire was
+stretched between two post tops.
+
+Along the wire walked a harlequin, taking mincing dance steps and
+balancing across his shoulders a pole from whose extremities dangled
+two huge baskets. To make the feat the more interesting by adding a
+spice of possible peril, announcement had been made that each basket
+contained a live child.
+
+The chance of a triple tragedy in the event of a misstep made the
+tight-wire walk a right diverting spectacle, and thrilling withal, to
+the good folk of Dublin. But half way between the two extremity posts,
+still a new element of interest was added.
+
+For, at that point, the top suddenly popped off one of the baskets,
+and a big-eyed, laughing face beamed down, over the edge, at the
+crowd. The face of a seven-year-old child--a girl. A roar of applause
+followed upon the youngster's unrehearsed appearance.
+
+Thus did Peg Woffington, a queen of her century's actresses and
+consummate heart conjurer, make her professional debut.
+
+Peg--her full first name, which nobody dreamed of using, was
+Margaret--was the daughter of an Irish bricklayer who had one point in
+common with certain modernists in that he was rabidly opposed to all
+doctors.
+
+And the medical guild had in due time its revenge on the sacrilegious
+brick artist. For once, when Woffington fell ill, he fiercely refused
+to have a physician summoned. And he rapidly grew better. As her
+husband was convalescing, Mrs. Woffington sought to make assurance
+doubly certain by calling in a doctor. The pill juggler looked at the
+invalid and pronounced him out of danger. Next day Woffington died.
+
+Peg was just learning to walk at the time of her lamented father's
+tilt with the cult of AEsculapius. She and her baby sister, Mary, at
+once set about helping to earn their own living, by toddling on either
+side of their mother when the widow hawked watercress through the
+streets, and shrilly piping in duet the virtues of her wares.
+
+To Dublin, when Peg was seven, came one Madame Violante, with a troupe
+of tumblers and rope dancers. Peg was apprenticed to Madame Violante.
+But her term of service as a baby acrobat was short. Her employer had
+better use for her.
+
+It was Madame Violante who originated the ever-since-popular custom of
+producing famous plays and operas, with child actors filling all the
+roles. Her "Liliputian Troupe" scored a big success in Dublin and the
+provinces. Much of this success was due to Peg, who almost invariably
+was cast for old-woman parts, and who "doubled in the brass" by doing
+quaint little step dances between the acts.
+
+It was cruelly hard work for a growing child; nor was the early
+eighteenth-century theater the very best sort of nursery and moral
+training school for little girls. But apart from other and less
+creditable lessons acquired, she learned stage presence and
+practically every art and trick of the profession.
+
+From the "Liliputian Troupe," Peg graduated into the more lucrative
+and equally moral pursuit of theater orange vender. In slack seasons,
+when no cargo of oranges chanced to have landed recently from the
+Americas, she acted, off and on; playing, at twelve, mature roles in
+provincial theater comedies, and exhibiting a rollicking humor that
+carried her audiences by assaut. At seventeen, she was playing--at
+seven dollars and fifty cents a week--~Ophelia~ and other exacting
+parts.
+
+Incidentally, on both sides of the footlight candles--as actress and
+as orange girl in the pit--she had long since made herself the toast
+of the Dublin beaux. She was pretty--though not strikingly so. She had
+a ready, and occasionally flaying, Irish wit. She had, too, the magic,
+if still undeveloped, fascination of the super-woman. As to her
+morals--they were the morals of any and every other girl of her
+environment and upbringing. She was quite as good as she knew how to
+be. There was not a grain of real vice in her whole cosmos.
+
+But there was a blazing ambition; an ambition that was cramped and
+choked in the miserable, makeshift provincial playhouses. She burned
+to be a famous actress. There was no chance for her in Ireland. So she
+came to London.
+
+It was a case of burning her bridges behind her. For she carried a
+worn purse that held seventeen shillings. And the not-overnew dress
+she wore was her sole wardrobe. These were her tangible assets. On
+this capital and on genius and pluck and ambition and good looks and
+the charm that was daily growing more and more irresistible, Peg
+relied to keep her going.
+
+To manager after manager she trudged. Not one would find work for her.
+In all, she made nineteen applications. And she scored just precisely
+nineteen rank failures.
+
+Finally, half starved and wholly discouraged, she succeeded in
+interesting the manager of the Covent Garden Theater. And he gave her,
+or sold her, the chance she sought--the chance to appear before a
+London audience.
+
+Her first appearance on the metropolitan stage was all that was needed
+to prove her worth. At once she caught the public fancy. Soon she
+found herself the most popular actress in England.
+
+An air of mingled sadness and gayety in her stage work, an audacity
+and fresh youthfulness--and the mystic charm--carried her straight to
+the front. At this period she touched nothing but comedy--at which she
+had no peer--and preferably played male roles. Masculine attire set
+forth her stunning figure, and she played devil-may-care, boyish parts
+as could no other woman.
+
+One night, after the first act of "The Constant Couple," wherein, clad
+in small-clothes and hose, she was playing ~Sir Harry Wildair~, Peg ran
+laughing and triumphant into the greenroom. There she chanced to find
+her bitterest friend and rival, Mistress Kitty Clive, a clever but
+somewhat homely actress. Said Peg in delight:
+
+"They applauded me to the echoes! Faith, I believe half the men in the
+house thought I was really a boy."
+
+"Perhaps," sneered envious Kitty. "But it is certain that at least
+half of them knew you weren't."
+
+Peg stopped short in her gay laugh and eyed Kitty's plain visage
+quizzically.
+
+"Mistress Clive," observed Peg, in irrelevant reflection, "did you
+ever stop to consider how much utterly useless modesty an ugly woman
+is responsible for unloading upon this poor world of ours?"
+
+Kitty did not again cross swords with Peg. Indeed, after the first
+encounter, few people did.
+
+The fops, the wits, the macaronis, the bloods, the Corinthians--all
+had discovered Peg long before this time. She was their darling, their
+idol. As this poor article is too brief in scope to contain a
+transcript of London's Social and Club Register of the day, most of
+Peg's minor conquests must be passed over without a word. One or two
+alone stand out as worth a few sentences.
+
+Macklin, matinee favorite and really great actor, fell heels over head
+in love with her. So did Hallam, the doctor-author. Macklin, having no
+hope of winning Peg's favor, was content to watch over her and to
+guard her like a faithful bulldog. Hallam was not so humble.
+
+Peg did not inherit her father's hatred for doctors, for she flirted
+lazily with Hallam and amused herself with his admiration. In time she
+tired of him and frankly told him so.
+
+Hallam, lacking the game, sought the name. Furious at his dismissal,
+he was still eager to be considered a successful wooer of the famous
+actress. So he took to boasting loudly at White's and the Cocoa Tree
+that Peg cared for him alone, and that she had written him reams of
+burningly ardent love letters.
+
+Peg heard of the boast and was foolish enough to run to the devoted
+Macklin with the story, entreating him to punish the braggart.
+
+Macklin did not wait to write a challenge, or even go home for his
+sword, which he did not happen to be wearing that day. Snatching up
+his cane, he rushed to a near-by coffeehouse where he knew Hallam was
+likely to be found at that hour. There he discovered the author-doctor
+drinking with a circle of friends, to whom he was descanting upon
+Peg's worship of himself.
+
+Macklin sprang at Hallam, seized him by the throat, and caned him
+unmercifully. Hallam writhed free and whipped out his sword. Macklin,
+forgetting that he himself was wielding a cane and not a sword,
+parried Hallam's first thrust and lunged for the doctor's face.
+
+The ferrule of the cane pierced Hallam's left eyeball and penetrated
+to his brain, killing him instantly--an odd climax to one of history's
+oddest duels.
+
+Macklin was placed on trial for his life. But he was promptly
+acquitted. And Peg's renown glowed afresh, because, through her, a man
+had died.
+
+A pamphlet, written by still another vehement admirer, contains a
+description of Peg Woffington, written about the time of Hallam's
+taking off. Part of this word picture is worth repeating verbatim. You
+will note that, though contemporary, it is in the past tense. Here it
+is:
+
+    Her eyes were black as jet, and, while they beamed with ineffable
+    luster, at the same time revealed all the sentiments of fair
+    possessor. Her eyebrows were full and arched, and had a peculiar
+    property of inspiring love or striking terror. Her cheeks were
+    vermilioned with nature's best rouge, and outvied all the labored
+    works of art.
+
+    Her nose was somewhat of the aquiline, and gave her a look full of
+    majesty and dignity. Her lips were of the color of coral and the
+    softness of down and her mouth displayed such beauties as would
+    thaw the very bosom of an anchorite. Her teeth were white and
+    even. Her hair was of a bright auburn color. Her whole form was
+    beauteous to excess.
+
+In the heyday of her glory, Peg went "to drink a dish of tea" with a
+party of friends one afternoon. Among the guests was a slender little
+commercial man, a wine merchant, in fact; shrewd, stingy, and smug.
+How such a character as his could have awakened the very faintest
+response in impulsive, big-hearted Peg's is one of the innumerable
+mysteries of hearts.
+
+But at first glance she loved the little man; loved him as never
+before she had loved, and as she would never love again. She had met
+the love of her life.
+
+She asked to have him introduced. The little vintner, tickled that the
+great Mistress Woffington should have deigned to notice an unknown
+nonentity, was duly brought up and presented.
+
+Peg, her head swimming, did not at once catch his name and bade him
+repeat it. Obediently, the dapper youth replied:
+
+"David Garrick, madam."
+
+In the hour that ensued, Peg led Garrick to talk about himself--a
+never-difficult task. He told her that he hated his trade and that he
+was not making money thereby. Peg, appraising the man's appearance as
+well as a woman newly in love could hope to, saw that, though short,
+he was graceful and strikingly handsome. Also, that he had a marvelous
+voice.
+
+Abruptly, she broke in on his soliloquy by suggesting that he go on
+the stage. Garrick stared. She spoke of the glories of a star's life.
+Garrick yawned. She mentioned that successful actors drew large
+salaries. Garrick sat up and began to listen. When she went on to
+speak of the fabulous receipts that awaited a star, Garrick feverishly
+consented to her plan.
+
+Peg set to work, using to the straining point all her boundless
+theatrical influence. She got Garrick a chance. She coached him in the
+rudiments of acting. She found that the little wine seller had a
+Heaven-sent gift for the stage. So did the managers. So, in short
+order, did the public.
+
+Garrick's success was as instantaneous as had been Peg's own. Peg
+rejoiced unspeakably in his triumph. So did he. The lofty motives that
+actuated Garrick's stage work may be guessed at from this entry in his
+diary October 20, 1741:
+
+    Last night played Richard the Third to the surprise of all. I
+    shall make nearly three hundred pounds a year as an actor, and
+    that is what I really dote on.
+
+But he made infinitely more than the prophesied one thousand, five
+hundred dollars a year. For he speedily became an actor manager. His
+business training and his notorious stinginess were splendid assets.
+Money flowed in, beyond his wildest dreams of avarice. And he held on
+to it all.
+
+Peg was inordinately proud of his achievements. So was Garrick. Peg
+loved him to distraction. He graciously consented to be loved. Indeed,
+it is probable that he cared for Peg as much as he could care for
+anybody except David Garrick. A swarm of women fell in love with him
+when he made his stage success. In spite of this, he still loved Peg.
+Even if not exclusively.
+
+Then Peg and Garrick appeared for the time as co-stars. And, with him,
+she returned to the scene of her early struggles at Dublin. At the
+Smock Alley Theater there, the two acted in repertoire.
+
+The pair were an enormous hit. So much so that they were forced, by
+popular clamor, to play straight through the summer. It was one of the
+hottest summers on record, but great crowds jammed the theater at each
+performance. An epidemic swept Dublin. A good many of the playgoers
+caught the infection at the playhouse and died; which caused the
+epidemic to receive the sinister nickname, "the Garrick fever."
+
+Peg was no less popular than was her colleague. Together they toured
+Ireland, then came back to London, as openly avowed lovers. They were
+engaged to be married; but the marriage was from time to time
+postponed. Always at Garrick's suggestion.
+
+Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a suitor for Peg's favor at this time,
+was the author--among half a bookful of odes, sonnets, and so forth,
+to her charms--of "Lovely Peggy," a popular song "hit" of the day, a
+stanza of which runs:
+
+    Once more I'll tune the vocal shell,
+    To hills and dales my passion tell,
+    A flame which time can never quell,
+          That burns for lovely Peggy.
+    Ye greater bards the lyre should hit,
+    To say what subject is more fit,
+    Than to record the sparkling wit
+         And bloom of lovely Peggy.
+
+But Sir Charles wooed her in vain. She had thoughts for no one else
+but Garrick. One day, reproached by the poet with her greater regard
+for his rival, and not wishing to cause needless pain to the loser,
+Peg sought to evade the charge by saying that she had not seen Garrick
+for an age.
+
+"Nay," contradicted the luckless Sir Charles, "I know you saw him only
+yesterday."
+
+"Well," she retorted, "and is not that an age?"
+
+She and Garrick had a singular rule for maintaining their antemarital
+establishment. It was arranged--by Garrick--that each should bear the
+monthly expenses alternately. When it was Peg's turn, it was
+noticeable that much better food was provided and that many more
+dinner guests were invited to the house than during the alternate
+months when Garrick was running the place.
+
+Once, during a Garrick month, a crowd of people dropped in
+unexpectedly to tea. Garrick eyed them with scarce-disguised
+hostility. Peg was delighted to see them. But no more so than if their
+call had come on her month for paying the bills, for she was lavishly
+hospitable, and was always generous--even prodigal to a fault; traits
+that caused her thrifty lover much pain.
+
+To-day, as usual, Peg brewed the tea. Glancing at his own new-filled
+cup, as Macbeth might have glared at the imaginary Banquo, Garrick
+groaned aloud:
+
+"Peg, you've made this tea so strong it's as red as blood. Zounds,
+ma'am, d'ye think 'tis to be bought at a penny the pound that you
+squander it so?"
+
+It has ever been the fashion of romantic chroniclers, in writing of
+this strange union, to paint Peg as a suffering saint and Garrick as a
+crank. The latter picture is flawless. The former, unluckily, is not.
+
+For, though Peg loved the actor manager and--temporarily--loved no one
+else, yet it was not in her superwoman nature to rest meekly content
+with the attentions of one man. Even though that man chanced to be the
+celebrated Davy Garrick. Running through the warp of her love was a
+woof of flirtations.
+
+For one instance, Lord Darnley, a rich and notorious Piccadilly
+gallant, proclaimed himself her adorer. Flattered at so famous a
+nobleman's love, Peg flirted outrageously with Darnley. She even
+denied to him that she cared for Garrick.
+
+Once Darnley found Garrick's wig in Peg's boudoir and railed at her
+infidelity to himself. Peg explained that she had borrowed the actor's
+wig and had brought it home in order to practice in it a masculine
+role she was soon to play at the Drury Lane.
+
+Garrick, in jealous wrath, protested against her affair with Darnley.
+So she swore to Garrick that she had dismissed his rival--and gayly
+continued to meet Darnley on the sly. In time, Garrick found her out
+and the discovery led to their separation. Afterward, in remorse, Peg
+is said to have dropped Darnley. But then, as usual, it was too late
+for her renunciation to do any good except to punish herself.
+
+Time after time Garrick had set back the date of the wedding. When at
+last the Darnley crisis came, Peg asked him frankly if he meant to
+keep his pledge or not. He replied gloomily that he did. And he went
+out and bought a wedding ring. He sighed in utter misery as he slipped
+the gold loop on her finger. Out flashed Peg's Irish temper.
+
+"If you had ten times the wealth and repute and ability that the world
+credits you with," she declared, "I would not become your wife after
+this silent confession."
+
+Almost at once she repented her rash words of release. But Garrick
+held her to them. He considered himself freed. And they parted. Peg
+sent back all Garrick's presents. He refused to return hers--they
+included a pair of diamond shoe buckles she had given him--on the
+tender plea that they would serve him as reminders of her.
+
+Peg wrote an angry letter, pointing out very clearly the wide gulf
+between sentiment and graft, and telling Garrick on exactly which side
+of that gulf his action in regard to the presents placed him. Garrick
+retaliated by blackening her name on every occasion. She made no reply
+to any of his dirty slurs; nor spoke of him save in praise.
+
+Thus ended the great love of Peg's life. But there were a host of
+minor loves to help take its place. Next came Spanger Berry, a fiery
+Irish actor who, to revenge Peg's supposed wrongs, did his level best
+on the stage to crowd Garrick out of several of the latter's favorite
+roles. He did not wholly succeed in this loverly attempt, but he
+caused Garrick many an hour of uneasiness, and wounded him severely by
+causing a drop in the actor manager's box-office receipts.
+
+Then came a succession. To quote a biographer who wrote while Peg's
+name was yet fresh:
+
+    An infatuated swain swore that if she did not return his love,
+    he would hang, drown, or shoot himself; and in order not to be
+    responsible for his suicide, she consented to listen to his
+    sighs. Then there came along a gentleman with money who won her
+    affection. Another next presented and outbid the former. Another
+    offered, and she received him in her train.
+
+    A fifth appeared, and was well received. A sixth declared his
+    suit, and his suit was not rejected. In a word, a multitude of
+    love's votaries paid their adorations to the shrine of their fair
+    saint, and their fair saint was not cruel.
+
+Then, according to the same chronicler and another, came into Peg's
+life "a personage." There is no hint as to his identity. Whether she
+was true to him or not is debatable. But she soon discovered that he
+had grown tired of her. It was borne to her ears that he was paying
+court to an heiress; intending to break with Peg, by degrees, if his
+suit were successful.
+
+The heiress gave a masked ball in honor of her birthday. Peg gained
+admittance, in male costume, to the affair, and contrived to become
+her rival's partner in a minuet.
+
+    "When she straightway poured so many and such vile stories anent
+    the gentleman's character into the lady's ears that the latter
+    fainted and the ball broke up in confusion."
+
+But Peg had gained her aim, by hopelessly discrediting with the
+heiress the recreant lover. The match was broken off. Peg felt herself
+right cozily revenged.
+
+The next wooer was a "person." Not a "personage." He was Owen
+McSwinney, a buffoon. He was the premier clown of his day and a local
+celebrity.
+
+McSwinny was fairly well to do. And, when he died soon afterward, it
+was found that he had left his whole estate--some two hundred pounds a
+year--to Peg.
+
+It was not long after this that Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in his
+early prime, engaged Peg at four hundred pounds a season, to play at
+his theater. Sheridan was fervid in his admiration of the Irish
+beauty. Perhaps this fact, as well as the marked success she scored in
+his plays, led "The Rivals'" author to double her salary after the
+first season.
+
+Yearly she grew more popular with her audiences. Having won a
+matchless reputation as a comedian, she turned for a time to tragic
+characters, and won thereby a wholly new renown as one of England's
+foremost tragedians. But comedy was her forte. And to it she returned.
+
+Peg always vowed she hated the society of her own sex; a lucky thing
+for her, since she was not received by ladies of quality, as were many
+of her fellow actresses, and since her sharp tongue and the fact that
+men went wild over her made her hated by these fellow actresses. But
+her popularity with men endured, and she wasted few tears over women's
+dislikes. Few superwomen have been popular with their own sex.
+
+Peg was elected president of the famed Beefsteak Club, and she always
+presided at the board in man's attire.
+
+All this time she had been supporting her mother in a luxury undreamed
+of in the days of the medicophobic bricklayer. And she had educated
+and jealously safeguarded her younger sister, Mary.
+
+Mary became engaged to Captain George Cholmondeley, son of the Earl of
+Cholmondeley; a glittering match for a bricklayer's daughter. The earl
+was justly indignant and posted away to Peg to break off the affair,
+if need be, by bribing her and the entire tribe of Woffington.
+
+Peg met the irate old fellow with the full battery of her charm. In a
+trice she had him bewildered, then half relenting. Feebly he tried to
+bluster. Peg cut him short with:
+
+"My lord, I'm the one to complain; not you. For now I'll have two
+beggars, instead of one, to feed."
+
+It was a true forecast, for the earl, despite Peg's blandishments,
+withheld for a time his check book. And in the interim she gave the
+new-wed pair a house to live in and the money to run it.
+
+And now for the last "big scene" of Peg's stage career: For some time
+she had been ailing. But she kept on with her acting.
+
+On the evening of May 17, 1757, when she was at the very acme of her
+career, she played Rosalind at Covent Garden. Throughout the comedy
+she was at her scintillant best. The house was hers. Wave after wave
+of frantic applause greeted her, as, still in Rosalind's male
+habiliments, she stepped before the curtain, flushed and smiling, to
+deliver the epilogue.
+
+Gayly stretching out her arms to pit and stalls, she began the
+familiar lines. With a gesture of infinite coquetry she continued:
+
+    "I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me;
+    complexions that liked me--that liked me----"
+
+She faltered, whitened under her make-up, skipped three full lines,
+and came to the "tag:"
+
+    "----when I make curtsy--bid me--bid me--farewell!"
+
+The last line haltingly spoken, she threw her hands high in air and
+screamed in a voice of abject terror:
+
+"Oh, God! Oh, God!"
+
+It was a prayer, not an oath. Reeling, the actress staggered to the
+wings, and there fell, swooning, leaving the packed house behind her
+in an uproar of confusion.
+
+Kindly arms bore her from the stage she was never more to tread. Next
+day, all London knew that Mistress Peg Woffington had been stricken
+with paralysis and that from the neck down she was dead. Only the
+keen-witted brain lived, to realize the wreck of the beautiful body.
+
+Sorrowing crowds blocked the street in front of her house for days,
+momentarily expecting news of her death. But Peg did not die. She did
+not die until three tedious years had passed.
+
+Little by little she partly regained the use of her body. But she was
+feeble. Her rich beauty was wiped out as an acid-soaked sponge might
+efface a portrait.
+
+Out of the gay life that had been the breath of her nostrils, feeble
+as an old woman, plain of face and halting of speech--she nevertheless
+retained enough of the wondrous ancient charm to enslave another
+adorer.
+
+The newest--and last--wooer was Colonel Caesar, of the Guards. On
+learning that Peg in her stricken state had infatuated the gallant
+colonel, a coffeehouse wit sized up the situation by cruelly quoting:
+
+    "Aut Caesar, aut nullus."
+
+It was a vile thing to say. And Caesar hunted up the humorist, so runs
+the story, and thrashed him within an inch of his life.
+
+Some time later, Tate Wilkinson, an "impersonator" of that era--yes,
+there were pests on the earth, even in those days--was scheduled to
+give a series of humorous impersonations of famous actors and
+actresses at the Drury Lane; then managed and partly owned by David
+Garrick.
+
+Peg feared she might be held up to ridicule by the mimicry. The fear
+preyed on her mind, to a pathetic extent. Colonel Caesar went to the
+theater and there informed Garrick that if he permitted Wilkinson to
+impersonate Mistress Woffington, the colonel would first give him a
+public caning and would then call him out.
+
+The impersonation of Peg had been mysteriously lost from the
+imitator's repertoire when the performance was given.
+
+Peg died in 1760, at the age of forty. She left more than five
+thousand pounds. She left it to charity. And, as a testimonial to her,
+a range of low-roofed, wistaria-covered cottages was built for the
+exclusive use of the poor. The dwellings were known as "The Margaret
+Woffington Cottages."
+
+Samson's costume would start a panic on modern Broadway, yet it was
+doubtless deemed correct in his time. Queen Elizabeth's table manners
+would cause her speedy ejectment from any civilized restaurant, yet
+she was sixteenth century's model for etiquette. George Washington's
+spelling would not pass muster in a primary school, though in 1776 he
+was regarded as a man of high education. While as for Lady Godiva--
+
+New times, new ways. Won't you remember that, in dealing with Peg
+Woffington? She was a product--and a fine product--of her generation
+and surroundings. Think of her only as an unfortunate, warm-hearted,
+beautiful girl, whom men adored almost as much for her lovable
+qualities as for her siren fascinations.
+
+She merits a pedestal in the temple of superwomen. If I have failed to
+establish her right to it, the fault is mine, not hers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+HELEN OF TROY
+
+MODEL FOR ALL THE SIRENS OF THE CENTURIES
+
+
+Some wise folk say she never existed. But, for that matter, some wise
+folk also say that her press agent, Homer, never existed, and that his
+"Iliad" and "Odyssey" were compilations of lesser men's writings. As
+well say that Napoleon was a "compilation" of his marshals.
+
+Some aver that she indeed walked the earth, a Wonder Woman, and that
+her charm perhaps stirred up strife among nations, but that her fame
+kept on growing after she was dead, until--even as hundreds of jokes
+were attributed to Joe Miller that Joe never perpetrated or even
+heard--people got to making her the heroine of a myriad impossible
+deeds and adventures that no one woman or no ten women could have
+achieved.
+
+Still others declare that she and her story were allegorical, standing
+for feminine charm and for its fatal power; that she embodied the
+Greek idea of superwoman perfection. The same sort of people gravely
+tell us that Hercules and Croesus and William Tell were "solar
+myths"--whatever that may mean--and their descendants will put the
+myth brand, ten thousand years hence, on Napoleon, Roosevelt, John L.
+Sullivan, and Lydia Pinkham.
+
+While common sense may balk at the tale of Helen of Troy, common sense
+would as readily balk at a narrative of the high cost of living or of
+the All-Europe War. And what is common sense among friends? I am going
+to tell Helen's story as if it were gospel truth. For all I know, it
+may be. I am not going to draw on a dull imagination for any of it,
+but to take it entirely from a dozen of the olden authorities, from
+Homer down. After all, since we believe in Santa Claus, why not in
+Helen of Troy?
+
+(I cannot help feeling a little thrill of pride in this preamble. In
+spots, it is almost scholarly. And so to the story.)
+
+She was the daughter of Tyndareus of Argos, one of the horde of
+kinglets who split up the Greek archipelago among them. She lived
+three thousand years ago. And so adorable was she that some one
+started a rumor that she was not the daughter of Tyndareus, but of
+great Jove himself. This kind of talk passed as complimentary in those
+benighted days. Wherefore, Helen's parents did not start a suit for
+criminal libel against the flatterer, but heaped honors on him.
+
+By the time Helen reached young womanhood, she was the wonder of all
+Greece. She was tall, slender, and red-haired. In a day of almost
+universal dowdiness, she knew how to wear her clothes--although she
+did not use that knowledge to any prodigal extent; clothes, in balmy
+prehistoric Greece, being used for adornment rather than as coverings.
+
+Her wit and her subtle magnetism vied with her good looks. Suitors
+came from one end of the archipelago to the other to visit the palace
+of Tyndareus and to pay court to the Wonder Girl. They were a goodly
+throng, these suitors; kings one and all, even though most of their
+kingdoms were smaller than Delaware. Here are a few names culled from
+the endless list:
+
+Ulysses, craftiest of Greeks, a short-legged man, with the upper body
+of a giant; Agamemnon, overlord of all Greece, titular King of Mycenae,
+a hot-tempered, long-winded potentate; Menelaus of Sparta, Agamemnon's
+brother, an honest, not overbright, kind-hearted chap, who loved sport
+better than statesmanship; Nestor, the wisest of men, (yet old enough
+to have known better than to come a-courting, for already his hair and
+beard were white); the two Ajaxes, thickheads both, one of whom was
+later to crown a silly life by defying Jove's lightning to mortal
+combat; Diomed, champion heavyweight battler of his century; Achilles,
+fiery demigod and prehistoric matinee hero; these and many another.
+
+Now, in that benighted age, kings had a way of gratifying personal
+grudges by declaring war on their fellow sovereigns. Tyndareus was a
+shrewd old fellow. Also, he was fond of his glorious daughter, and he
+wanted to save her and her future husband from possible misfortune.
+So, before he allowed Helen to make her choice he bound each and all
+of the suitors to the following solemn oath: That they would not only
+abide peacefully by Helen's decision, but would pledge themselves to
+fight to the death in behalf of the contest's winner if, at any future
+time, his domestic peace should be threatened, or his wife stolen from
+him.
+
+This pledge was not as fanciful as it may seem. For, cave-man tactics
+of "wooing by capture" were still more or less in vogue. A man who
+fell in love with another's wife was wont to kidnap her and to defy
+her bereft spouse to get her back.
+
+Thus, Tyndareus was not only preventing civil war in Greece, but he
+was making it prohibitively perilous for any outsider to try to win
+Helen. Such a wooer would find himself at odds with practically every
+country in the whole archipelago. Yes, decidedly Tyndareus knew what
+he was about. He was assuring his daughter--as far as was humanly
+possible--a safe married life.
+
+All the royal suitors--being very much in love--were in a condition to
+promise anything. They bound themselves, right willingly, to the oath
+Tyndareus exacted; even Nestor, who, as I think I said, was old and
+wise enough to have known better. It is a supreme tribute to Helen's
+glory that the wisest man alive should have behaved just as foolishly
+over her as did the osseous-brained Ajax Telemon.
+
+The oath being taken, Helen's choice was made known. And, out of the
+ruck of greater and richer and handsomer men, she chose the plodding
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+
+There were black looks, there were highly unstoical gusts of
+anger--but the disappointed suitors made the best of their bad luck.
+After consoling themselves by getting gloriously drunk at the marriage
+feast, they called it a day, and went home; not one of them realizing
+how fearfully his lovelorn oath was one day to bind him. And the
+golden Helen departed for the prim little, grim little kingdom of
+Sparta with her liege lord, Menelaus.
+
+The years drifted on, lazily, happily, in humdrum fashion. If Menelaus
+were not inspiring as a husband, he was at least pleasanter to live
+with than a cleverer man might have been. He and Helen had one child,
+a daughter, Hermione.
+
+Placid years make sweet living, but poor telling. So let us get along
+to the day when heralds from the port of Pylos brought news of a
+strange prince's arrival on the Spartan shores. The messengers knew
+not who the stranger might be, nor whence he came. But, from his
+retinue and dress and bearing, they judged him worthy to be a guest of
+honor. So a gorgeous guard was sent to escort him to the palace, and
+great preparations were made there to receive him.
+
+The event seems to warrant a more Homeric wealth of language than I
+can compass, but it would be hard not to drop into semi-stately--not
+to say semi-Homeric and wholly plagiaristic--diction over it. So bear
+with me. It won't last long.
+
+Adown the dry white road that ran to Pylos through the plain, a dust
+cloud was advancing; shields of bronze and weapons gleaming through
+it, here and there, with glimpses of purple robes. In the palace,
+tables were set out, with fair linen on them. Meats were brought
+forth, with rare wine from the Ismarian vineyards to the north. A
+votive heifer was driven in, lowing, from the fields, for the guest
+sacrifice. Her horns were soon sheathed with gold; then the ax-man
+felled and killed her with a single blow. She was quartered, and her
+fat was laid on the fire, along with barley grain. And the savor of
+the sacrifice rose, grateful, to high Olympus.
+
+Now, through the yellow dust cloud, chariots were to be seen. A hardy
+band of mariners plodded beside the wheels and behind. They were
+bronzed and clear-eyed, these sea rovers, beguiling the journey with
+gay speech and with deep, mighty laughs. And they shouted, instead of
+speaking as do landfolk.
+
+In the foremost chariot rode two men. One was King Diocles of Pherae.
+The other was the goodliest man mortal eye ever looked upon. A mane of
+fine-spun golden hair fell over the shoulders of his Sidonian robe;
+his face was like the sunshine, and his eyes were filled with the
+gladness of living. He was Paris, son of King Priam, and a prince of
+Troy. And his right hand gripped a shadow-casting spear.
+
+In the banquet hall, when the visitors and their host were seated,
+appeared Helen, the wife of Menelaus, with her little daughter,
+Hermione. When the cries of hunger and of thirst had died down, Helen
+addressed the strangers, asking no direct question--since to question
+a guest were discourteous--but saying that mayhap they would deign to
+explain who they were, and why they had come hither.
+
+Then arose Paris, standing by the board, facing the golden Helen. And
+he spoke winged words:
+
+It was prophesied at his birth, he began, that he would one day be the
+ruin of Troy. To prevent his living to fulfill his ordained fate, his
+father, King Priam--weeping at the deed's black necessity--had him
+borne to the lonely top of Mount Ida, there to die of exposure, or at
+the fangs of wild beasts. But a great she-bear, roaming the mountain
+crest, found the babe and brought him down to her cave, and there laid
+him among her own soft-coated young. Here he was found one day by
+herdsmen, among whom he grew up.
+
+In time he owned a herd. The best-loved of his cattle was a white
+bull, called The Star. Now it came to pass that King Priam, urged on
+by a dream, sent his slaves to Mount Ida's slopes to secure the finest
+bull that grazed there, for a sacrifice to Neptune. The slaves came
+upon The Star and drove him away with them. Paris gave chase, but in
+vain. Then he hastened to the city of Troy to beg redress from the
+king. And as he entered the outer gates of Priam's palace, his own
+sister, Cassandra, recognized him.
+
+Cassandra was a prophetess. Apollo had loved her, and, as a love gift,
+had endowed her with a gift of foretelling all things. But when she
+rejected his suit, he willed that while she might still retain the
+gift of prophecy, her forecasts should never be believed. So now her
+words were laughed to scorn.
+
+But Priam questioned the mountaineer. And, by the resemblance the
+youth bore to his father, and the ring that he still wore around his
+neck, where it had been placed when he had been taken up into the
+mountain as an infant, the king at last knew him. Great was his joy.
+
+And so, elevated to his rightful princely station, Paris passed the
+next few years, no longer in the harsh toil and on the poor fare of a
+herder, but as a king's son; wholly forgetting OEnone, the forest
+girl of Mount Ida whom he had wooed and won and deserted, and whom he
+to-day mentioned merely in the pride of a past conquest.
+
+Now, breaking in upon Paris' somewhat long-winded story of his life,
+let us come to the real reason of his presence in Sparta. The Goddess
+of Strife had tried to enliven things in peaceful Olympus by tossing
+down in front of Venus and Juno and Minerva a golden apple. On the
+apple's rind was graven the inscription:
+
+    "~For the most beautiful.~"
+
+Straightway, the three goddesses, who had been tolerably good friends,
+fell to quarreling as to which should have the apple of gold. And they
+compromised by leaving the decision to Paris. Every member of the trio
+tried secretly to bribe him; Juno offering him power, Minerva offering
+him wisdom, Venus promising him love--the love of the fairest woman on
+earth. Being very young and very human, Paris chose Love; casting
+aside all hope of power and of wisdom to gain it. And Venus bade him
+sail forth in search of the Wonder Woman she had promised him. He had
+departed on this Quest of the Golden Girl, and fate had led him to
+Helen.
+
+I am not going to touch on the mythological part of Helen's career,
+more than I can help. But I protest most solemnly that the foregoing
+tale of Paris and the three goddesses is not mythology, but absolute
+truth. It may never have happened; indeed, it could not have happened,
+but it is truth, none the less. If you doubt that a silly apple could
+cause such strife among three erstwhile friendly deities and stir up
+unending enmity and discord and hatred, just remember that the apple
+was of ~gold~. Wait until the family estate is divided among the
+heirs--the heirs who have hitherto been such good friends--and watch
+what the Golden Apple of Discord can do to breed hate and dissensions.
+
+Those old Greeks were wise, even in their myths. They knew human
+nature. And human nature's sole change since their day is the
+substitution of conventionality for simplicity. At heart, there is no
+difference.
+
+Take, too, Paris' choice of love, rather than of wisdom or of power.
+When we read about that, as children, we said smugly: "What a fool
+Paris was!" Then, as we grew older--Well, if Paris was a fool, just
+note in what goodly company he stands. His compeers in the same divine
+idiocy are such immortals as Mark Antony, Marie Stuart, Francis I.,
+almost the whole Bourbon dynasty, Sappho, Cleopatra, Solomon, and a
+sheaf of other shimmeringly splendid sinners. They were monomaniacs,
+all of them, and they sold their birthright of decency for a mess of
+ambrosia; too blinded to know or care how much they were losing, and
+for how barren a price. Wherein, their particular brand of insanity
+gives them full right and privilege to claim, kinship with the
+Gadarene swine of Holy Writ.
+
+Well, then, Paris had quested forth to find and win the most beautiful
+of women. And he found her--at the banquet board of her spouse,
+Menelaus, King of Sparta.
+
+Long he abode, an honored and trusted guest in his host's palace. And
+Menelaus suspected nothing, not even that a man of godlike beauty and
+comfortable dearth of morals was a dangerous visitor in the home of a
+plodding, middle-aged husband.
+
+One night--while Menelaus snored peacefully in preparation for a boar
+hunt he had planned for the next day--Paris and Helen stole forth
+together in the darkness and sped, hand in hand, to Pylos, where the
+lover's ship was in waiting. In his own arms, Paris bore his inamorata
+from shore to deck. Away across the wine-hued AEgean fled the lovers,
+to Troy. There they were wed; regardless of the fact that Helen had
+left a perfectly good husband alive in Greece. The laws against
+bigamy--if there were any at that day--do not seem to have been very
+rigidly enforced; nor do those laws' fracturers appear to have lost
+caste thereby.
+
+Mind you, Helen was no love-sick girl to be swept off her feet by an
+impetuous wooer with spun-gold hair and a Romeo manner. When Paris
+stole her from Menelaus and married her, she was forty years old. But,
+like Ninon de Lenclos and Diane de Poictiers and other of the world's
+true super-women, age had no power to mar her. Father Time could not
+pass a face like hers without pausing to kiss it; but the kiss was
+very tender and loving, and it left in its wake no wrinkles or
+telltale lines. Helen was ageless.
+
+Ilium worshipped beauty, even as did Greece. And the Trojans, from old
+Priam down, hailed their new princess with rapture; all save
+Cassandra, that daughter of Priam who was blest by the gift of
+prophecy and cursed by the incredulity of all who heard her. At sight
+of Helen, Cassandra shrieked aloud:
+
+"Trojans, you nurse to your hearts a snake that shall sting you to
+death! You cherish a firebrand that shall burn our city to the dust!"
+
+And she fell, writhing and foaming, at Helen's feet. But folk laughed
+at the forecast, and the cheers of welcome drowned the wail of the
+seeress.
+
+So did Argive Helen come to her husband's people. And thus did her
+beauty win all hearts. Paris adored her wildly, uncontrollably, to the
+hour of his death. Her passing infatuation for him soon cooled into
+contemptuous toleration. And for the second time in her life she
+learned that a husband is merely what is left of a lover after the
+nerve has been extracted.
+
+Meantime, Greece was humming like a kicked hornet's nest. Menelaus
+learned of his wife's flight, and with whom she had fled. He went,
+heart-broken, to his brother Agamemnon for help in avenging his
+wrongs. Agamemnon not only reminded him of the other suitors' promise
+to defend the honor of the man whom Helen should marry, but
+volunteered, as overlord of Greece, to force them to keep their vows.
+
+Now, this offer was none too easy to carry out. It is one thing to
+make the maddest pledge, under the drunkenness of love. It is quite
+another thing to fulfill that pledge when love is dead. The swain who
+at twenty declares to a girl: "If ever you want me, say the word, and
+I swear I will come to you, from the ends of the earth!" would be
+horribly embarrassed if, as a sedate husband and father at forty, that
+same half-forgotten sweetheart should hold him to his calf-love oath.
+
+So it was with Helen's suitors-emeritus. Long ago they had loved her.
+She had married some one else. And, during the past twenty years,
+other interests in their lives had crowded out her memory. If they
+thought of her at all, it was, now and then, to court domestic
+tempests by mentally or verbally comparing her golden loveliness and
+eternal youth with their own wives' dumpy, or slatlike, matronly
+aspect.
+
+For they had wives, most of them, by this time, wives and children.
+Just stop for an instant, husbands all, and figure to yourselves what
+would happen if you should come home to-morrow night and break to your
+wives the tidings that you were about to go to war--for the sake of
+another woman! A woman, moreover, whom you had once adored, and whose
+memory had ever stood, wistful, winsome, wraithlike, between your
+wives and you.
+
+So, when Agamemnon's fiat went forth that those long-dead promises
+were to be redeemed at once, there were home scenes throughout Greece
+whose bare recital would forever have crushed the spirit of Mormonism.
+War must have seemed almost a relief to some of those luckless
+husbands after they had finished listening to their wives' remarks on
+the subject. For, of all overdue debts in this world of varied
+indebtedness, the hardest by a million-fold to pay are the sight
+drafts of defunct sentiment.
+
+These olden heroes were not especially heroic in the crisis that
+threatened them, and none but a single man will be unduly harsh with
+them for their reluctance. One after another, they sought to dodge the
+fulfillment of their pledges.
+
+Ulysses, for example, after an interview with his embarrassingly
+faithful wife, Penelope--she has always reminded me of Mrs.
+Micawber--harnessed oxen to a plow and proceeded to give the
+impression that he had suddenly gone crazy, by plowing furrows in the
+salt sands of the seashore. Those whose minds had fled were supposed
+to be directly under divine protection, and naturally such people were
+never called upon to fight or to meet any other obligation.
+
+Truly, Ulysses was living up to his reputation as the craftiest of the
+Greeks. Yet his craft was put to naught by the wisdom of old
+Nestor--one of the few suitors who had not tried to crawl out of his
+agreement. Nestor placed Ulysses' baby son, Telemachus, on the
+seashore, in the path of the advancing oxen. Ulysses turned the beasts
+aside to keep them from trampling the child to death. Whereat, it was
+decided that Ulysses was not insane--at least, not too insane to do
+his share of fighting--and he was enrolled as one of the chiefs of the
+Grecian host.
+
+Having been caught, Ulysses set out, morbidly, to get even with
+Destiny by catching others. And he, as well as Nestor, began to strip
+away the subterfuges of the reluctant kings. Achilles, for instance,
+tried to escape military service by dressing as a girl and hiding
+among the women of his household. Ulysses, disguised as a peddler,
+visited these women, carrying a basket full of feminine gewgaws. At
+the bottom of the basket lay a magnificent sword. While the women were
+examining the jewelry and clothing in the peddler's stock, Achilles
+caught sight of the sword. For the first time, he showed interest in
+the intruder's visit. Paying no heed to the rest of the wares, he
+picked up the sword and fell to examining it with a professional
+interest. At once, Ulysses recognized him not only as a man, but as a
+warrior; and the sulky Achilles was forced to join the expedition.
+
+Day and night, throughout Greece, the smiths' hammers clinked, and the
+smithy fires roared. Weapons were forged; armor was repaired; army
+equipments were set to rights. The woods and hilltops reechoed to ax
+blows, as great trees were felled for ship timber. At last, twelve
+hundred ships lay at anchor, waiting to bear the avenging host to
+Troy.
+
+All this preparation was a matter of many months, and for a long time
+no hint of it reached Troy. Then--first in vague rumor, and soon in
+form not to be doubted--came news of the Greeks' preparation for war.
+
+By this time, Helen had ceased to be a novelty in Troy. And now men
+cursed her, beneath their breath, as a sorceress who was to bring war
+and destruction upon them. Women hated her as the cause of their men's
+possible death in battle. But Priam, and the noblest blest of his
+sons--Hector--were still her stanch champions. And, with such backing,
+her position in the city was at least outwardly assured.
+
+Then came a minor tragedy, a foreshadowing of the wholesale misfortunes
+that were to follow. I have said that when Paris was still a herdsman
+on Mount Ida, he had met and loved a forest maid, OEnone, and, on
+learning that he was a prince, he had promptly deserted her, leaving
+her to grief and loneliness. OEnone had borne Paris a son--although
+this was unknown to him. In the years since she had last seen the
+fickle prince, this son had grown up. He was known as "Corythus."
+When word reached OEnone of Helen's arrival in Troy, she sent her
+unfortunate rival a message. She wrote the message on birch bark and
+dispatched it, by Corythus, to the city.
+
+Corythus arrived at the palace, and was led to Helen's bower, where he
+begged the princess to dismiss her maids, as he was the bearer of a
+word for her ears alone. Helen, obeying, received from him the folded
+birch bark and opened it. She read:
+
+    O thou that dost scan these lines, hast thou forgotten quite thine
+    ancient sin, thy palace, thy husband and child--even as Paris hath
+    forgotten me? Thou shalt not forget. For I send thee my curse,
+    with which I shall scourge thee till I die. Soon Paris must look
+    into the eyes of death. And little in that hour will he care for
+    thy sweet lips, thy singing voice, thine arms of ivory, thy
+    gold-red hair. Nay, remembering that thou hast cost his life, he
+    will bid the folk that hate thee have their joy, and give thee to
+    the mountain beasts to tear, or burn thy body on a tower of Troy!
+    My son--and his--beareth this word to thee.
+
+As she finished reading, Helen fell, in a swoon, at Corythus' feet.
+The youth was alarmed, and dropped on his knees beside her, lifting
+her head. And at that moment Paris entered the room.
+
+Seeing a stranger kneeling beside Helen, he went wild with jealous
+rage. Whipping out his sword, he sprang upon Corythus, and buried the
+blade in the lad's neck. Then he turned, to plunge the weapon into
+Helen's breast. But, as he turned, he saw the birch-bark message on
+the floor and stooped to pick it up. Reading it, he realized what he
+had done, and whom, in his jealous frenzy, he had killed. He flung
+himself, wailing, forth from the palace and into the night.
+
+Three days later, Corythus was laid on his funeral pyre in the market
+place of Troy. As Paris was advancing with the lighted torch, OEnone
+appeared. She leaped upon the pyre and shrieked down at her recreant
+lover:
+
+"I hear the prayer that thou some day shall make in vain! Thou shalt
+die, and leave thy love behind thee, for another. And little shall she
+love thy memory! But"--turning upon the onlookers--"O ye foolish
+people--see! What death is coming on you from across the waters?"
+
+At the shrieked words, all turned and looked seaward. Bearing down on
+the coast, in a driving rain, oar blades flashing, sails straining at
+their rigging, came the long-dreaded Greek fleet.
+
+The Trojan war had begun.
+
+For a highly sporting and poetical and altogether deathless account of
+that contest, I commend you to Homer's "Iliad." This is the story of
+Argive Helen, not an uncensored bulletin from the trenches.
+
+For ten years the conflict waged, with varying fortunes. Again and
+again, as the tide of battle rolled up to the city's very walls, Helen
+stood on the ramparts and watched her former husband and the other men
+who had sworn eternal love for her, fighting and dying for her
+worthless sake.
+
+Once, as she stood thus, she found at her side the group of aged men
+who were Priam's counselors. Gray-bearded they were, and feeble, and
+long past the time when love can set the pulse a-flutter, and they
+hated Helen with a mighty loathing for the disaster she had brought
+upon their dear fatherland. Even now, they had come forth upon the
+ramparts to berate her with her sin.
+
+Helen turned and faced them. The afternoon sun poured down upon her
+white-clad form and upon her wonder face with its crown of ruddy hair.
+And, at sight of her, these ancient moralists forgot why they had come
+hither. With one voice, cried they aloud that the love of so glorious
+a woman were well worth the loss of Troy--aye, of all the world.
+
+A hundred commentators have said that this tribute of the graybeards
+is the most supreme compliment ever paid to mortal woman's charms.
+
+Paris was at last challenged by Menelaus to mortal combat. He accepted
+the challenge, but later fled, in terror, from the man he had wronged.
+Soon afterward, he led a sortie one night against the Greeks. A man on
+the outskirts of the Grecian camp gave the alarm and let fly an arrow
+at the advancing Trojans. The shaft struck Paris, inflicting a mortal
+wound.
+
+The dying man was borne back into the city, and to the palace where
+the thoroughly disillusioned Helen awaited him. Since his cowardice in
+fleeing from Menelaus, she had taken no pains to hide her contempt for
+him. Now, as he lay dying, she looked down without emotion on the
+sharer of her crime. And Paris, seeing her bend over him, spoke the
+pitiful farewell that Andrew Lang's verse has made sublime, and that,
+even in mere prose, cannot lose all its beauty. His voice weak, his
+eyes glazing, he said:
+
+"Long ago, dear, we were glad--we who never more shall be together.
+Will you kiss me, once? It is ten weary years since you have smiled on
+me. But, Helen, say farewell with your old smile!"
+
+Helen, something of her dead tenderness coming back to her, kissed
+him. And, with her kiss, his life went out.
+
+The torch was set to the unlucky prince's pyre. From the crowd around
+it sprang OEnone. She mounted the blazing pile of wood, and her body
+was consumed with that of the man who was not worth dying for.
+
+Helen, almost at once, married Paris' younger brother Deiphobus.
+
+One morning the Trojans awoke to find that all the Greeks had sailed
+away. Their huts stood abandoned on the beach, their ships were
+nowhere visible on the horizon. Coming back, rejoicing, to the city,
+the scouting party that brought this joyous news found a monstrous
+wooden horse. They thought that the Greeks had built it and left it
+there, to propitiate Neptune for a speedy and safe voyage back to
+their native chores.
+
+The Trojans bore the horse within the city's walls, to keep it as a
+memento of the great war.
+
+Helen, passing near the wooden beast that night, heard within it the
+clank of arms. She halted, and, in a low voice, spoke the names of
+some of her old suitors. Ulysses answered, bidding her open a
+concealed trapdoor in the horse's side. She obeyed. Out climbed a
+score of Greeks. Guided by Helen, they unbarred the city gates to the
+horde outside who had returned in their vessels. One of the greatest
+massacres of the ages followed. Babies were butchered as they slept,
+women were cut down as they ran from their beds, half-wakened men were
+slaughtered like sheep. Then the torch was applied, and all Troy was
+burned to ashes.
+
+Helen was saved from death by Ulysses, who took her to Menelaus and
+demanded kindly treatment for her, pleading in her behalf that she had
+at the last betrayed the Trojans by setting free the Greeks within the
+wooden horse.
+
+There was no need for his mediation. No man could harbor wrath against
+the golden Helen. Menelaus, at the very first meeting of their eyes,
+forgave and forgot. He opened his arms and his heart to the woman who
+had wrecked his life and who had brought to death thousands of gallant
+men. Back to Greece he bore her; back to Sparta, where he installed
+her once more as his queen. He had first brought her hither in triumph
+as a mere slip of a girl, to people who had received her with pride.
+Now she came to Sparta again, a woman of over fifty, to a populace who
+cursed and reviled her. Widowed wives and weeping mothers spat at her
+as she passed them on the way to the palace.
+
+But none of this was as hard to bear as had been Agamemnon's parting
+words--spoken in her presence--to the Greek army on the shores of
+Ilium. Though his brother was minded to forgive, Agamemnon was not.
+And to the assembled host he had shouted:
+
+"O ye who overlong have borne the yoke, behold this woman, the very
+fountain of your sorrows! For her ye left your dear homes long ago,
+but now the black ships rot from stern to prow, and who knows if ye
+shall see your own again? Aye, and if homes ye win, ye yet may
+find--ye that the winds waft and the waters bear--that you are quite
+gone out of mind. Your fathers, dear and old, died dishonored there;
+your children deem ye dead, and will not share their lands with you;
+on mainland or on isle, strange men are wooing now the women you
+wedded. For love doth lightly beguile a woman's heart.
+
+"These sorrows hath Helen brought on you. So fall upon her
+straightway, that she die, and clothe her beauty in a cloak of stone!"
+
+The crowd had armed itself with stones as Agamemnon began to speak.
+But, as he denounced her, they were looking at her upturned face. And
+from their nerveless hands the stones fell to earth. They found her
+too beautiful for death.
+
+Agamemnon, looking at her, cried:
+
+"Hath no man, then, avenged his wrongs by slaying thee? Is there none
+to shed thy blood for all that thou hast slain? To wreak on thee the
+wrongs that thou hast wrought? Nay, as mine own soul liveth, there is
+one. Before a ship takes sail, I will slay thee with mine own hand!"
+
+But, as he advanced toward her, sword in hand, her beauty seized him
+in its spell. He paused, irresolute, then turned away.
+
+For many years thereafter, Helen and Menelaus dwelt together at
+Sparta. And because the years were happy, both history and fable are
+silent about them, save that Menelaus was once more as slavishly
+enamored of his wife as in their first months together. Helen, too,
+was well content with this safe haven after her tempest-tossed
+decade--"Peace after war; port after stormy seas; rest after toil."
+
+The hatred of the people at large did not much distress her. Through
+the latticed windows of the palace filtered the growls of the
+populace, droning and futile as the roar of distant breakers. And even
+as breakers have no peril for landsmen, so, safe in her husband's
+home, Helen did not fear the grumbles of the folk he ruled.
+
+Then, in the fullness of his age, Menelaus died, and all at once the
+situation changed. Helen was no longer safe ashore, listening to the
+breakers; she was in their power. Her husband's protecting influence
+gone, she was at the mercy of his subjects; at the mercy of the
+merciless.
+
+The women of Sparta banded together and, in dangerous silence,
+advanced upon the palace. These were the mothers, the wives, the
+daughters, the sweethearts, of men who had left their white bones on
+the Trojan seacoast, that the golden Helen might again rest snug in
+the shelter of Menelaus' love. There was not a doubt as to the
+militants' purpose. And as they drew near the palace, Helen fled. One
+or two slaves, still faithful to her, smuggled the fugitive out
+through a rear gateway and through the forests toward the seashore.
+There, a handful of silver bought a fisher's boat and the service of
+his crew.
+
+And once more across the "wine-hued AEgean" fared the golden Helen, not
+this time in girlish light-heartedness to her husband's home, or, in
+guilty happiness, fleeing from that house by night with the man who
+had bewitched her, but a fugitive scourged forth from the only home
+she knew.
+
+Storm-driven, her boat at last was blown ashore on the island of
+Rhodes. There she found she had been running toward ill fortune just
+as rapidly as she had thought she was running away from it. The Queen
+of Rhodes had lost a husband in the Trojan war. And, like every other
+woman on earth, she had sworn the vengeance oath against Helen. So,
+the story goes, when the fugitive was brought before the Rhodian
+queen, the latter gave a single curt order. In obedience to that
+fierce command, Helen was led forth and hanged; her executioners being
+blindfolded, that they might not balk at destroying the world's
+loveliest creation.
+
+So perished the golden Helen. For her sin, she is known to fame as
+"Helen of Troy," not "Helen of Sparta," or even "Helen of Argos."
+Posterity has branded her, thus, with the name of the land she
+destroyed, instead of the land of her birth.
+
+Poets and dreamers of dreams, even in her own century, have said that
+Helen did not die; that loveliness such as hers could not be destroyed,
+any more than can the smile of the springtide or the laughter of the
+sea. They say she escaped the Rhodians and set sail once more upon
+her wanderings. From shore to shore she voyaged,--ageless, divine,
+immortal, as eternal as Love itself. Ever, where she went, men adored
+her and besought her to remain among them to bless or curse their
+lives. But, ever, women banded together to drive her forth again upon
+her endless wanderings.
+
+One legend tells of her sojourn in Egypt, and of her meeting, there,
+Ulysses, "sacker of cities." Penelope was dead, and Ulysses had
+recommenced his voyaging. He and Helen met, and the old, old love of
+nearly a half century earlier flared into new flame. And, as ever,
+Helen's love brought death in its wake. For the Sacker of Cities fell
+in battle within a few weeks after their reunion.
+
+Another and more popular legend is that Helen, in return for
+everlasting youth, formed a highly discreditable business partnership
+with Satan, whereby she was to serve as his lure for the damning of
+men's souls. Do you recall, in Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus," it was by
+promise of Helen's love that the devil won Faustus over to his
+bargain? There is a world of stark adoration in Faustus' greeting cry,
+as, for the first time, he beholds the enchantress:
+
+    "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships
+    And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
+    Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!"
+
+She granted him the kiss, but no immortality; instead, his meed was
+damnation, like that of her million other swains.
+
+Goethe, in the second part of his "Faust," makes her Marguerite's
+successor in Faust's love. And one poet after another has amplified
+the theory that she lives on through the ages, drawing men's souls
+from them.
+
+And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden
+Helen--typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at
+reason and at destruction--lives and shall live while men are men. She
+lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She
+lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch
+and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk
+robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her
+mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she
+passes, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them
+damn themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band
+together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness.
+
+Poor Helen! Or--is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to
+be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to
+herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very
+women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to
+new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable
+hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their
+placid lives.
+
+The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+MADAME JUMEL
+
+NEW YORK'S FIRST OFFICIAL HEART BREAKER
+
+
+Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side--on One Hundred and
+Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue--stands almost the sole
+American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial
+dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed
+gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the
+architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced.
+
+It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it
+originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful
+man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but
+futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman
+whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as
+Mrs. Burr.
+
+The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin,
+throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day
+the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and
+top-heavy flat houses--happy hunting ground for none-too-rich
+homeseekers--and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central
+trains.
+
+Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine,
+from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd
+at the Grand Central!
+
+So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts
+walk--the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who
+made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats
+were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such
+things.
+
+In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or
+indelicate for discussion--and a few things still were, in that
+ante-white-slave era--people were prone to refer to such doubtful
+topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was
+more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that
+called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence
+will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events.
+I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has
+used it to account for hiati--(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds
+more cultured, somehow--) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all,
+if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by
+well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for
+complete comfort.
+
+And so to the story.
+
+Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a
+woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was
+not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger
+before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's
+father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly
+diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the
+Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see
+the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the
+biography.
+
+In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode
+Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the
+solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the
+rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No
+one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling
+one at that.
+
+In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And
+at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but
+one of the cleverest and--so declared the pious--one of the very
+worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to
+acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to
+all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty
+Bowen--her commonly used name--the benefit of the doubt?
+
+We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an
+exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the
+nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless,
+high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen
+over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural
+admirers.
+
+Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her
+life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New
+York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century
+later, would have been called a "rounder."
+
+How this middle-aged Lothario chanced to meet the Rhode Island belle,
+no one knows. But meet her he did. He was the first man of the world
+who had come into Betty's rustic life. By contrast with the local
+swains, he was irresistible. Or so she found him. At all events, she
+did not resist. She eloped with him, and Rhode Island knew her no
+more. Her real career as a heart breaker had set in.
+
+To New York, Colonel Croix brought his inamorata. There he installed
+her in a stately country house at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth
+Avenue, on the spot where, afterward, A. T. Stewart's white marble
+domicile used to excite the out-of-towners' awe, and where now a trust
+company's building stands.
+
+Betty wore amazingly costly clothes, paying for a single dress far
+more than for her year's wardrobe in Rhode Island. Croix festooned
+jewelry, Christmas-tree-like, over her neck, hair, and hands. She
+blossomed like the rose. Croix, inordinately proud of his conquest,
+also brought shoals of his friends to call, which was a mistake; for
+Betty had no leanings toward monopolies.
+
+Like the hackneyed, but ever-useful, meteor, Betty flashed upon stark
+young eighteenth-century New York. The city--so far as its male
+population was concerned--threw up both hands in blissful surrender.
+
+Croix's friends--some of them rounders like himself, some of them fat,
+solid, but beauty-loving financiers--formed a court of beauty around
+the fair newcomer. Betty's consummate charm drew to this court other
+and loftier men, too.
+
+For example, one of her foremost adorers was a brilliant, magnetic
+young statesman whose birth was perhaps as unblest as her own, but
+whose self-made name was already beginning to ring through America. He
+was Alexander Hamilton. He had a high-born and attractive wife of his
+own, and an adoring nestful of children. But Hamilton believed in
+monopolies no more than did Betty, and he became her adorer.
+
+Another of the higher type of men who came a-courting Betty was a
+statesman of almost equal fame--a little fellow, scarce five feet four
+inches tall and slight of build, whose strikingly handsome face was
+lighted by enormous black eyes almost snake-like in their mesmeric
+power--particularly over women. He was Aaron Burr.
+
+Burr was a lady-killer of the first order. He was not a man of bad
+morals. He was simply a man of no morals at all. But he was also a man
+of no fear, and a genius withal. He knelt, not in submission, but in
+ironic admiration before Betty. And she, like fifty other women, was
+swayed by his hypnotic eyes and his wondrous love eloquence.
+
+At the house of which Croix had made Betty the chatelaine, Burr and
+Hamilton often met, but never at the wish of either. For they hated
+every bone in each other's bodies.
+
+They had been at loggerheads as mere lads, when together they had
+served on General Washington's staff during the Revolutionary War.
+Afterward, in social and political life, they had clashed, and clashed
+fiercely. Now, as rivals for the interest of the volatile Betty, their
+smoldering hate flamed forth lurid and deathless.
+
+And thenceforth, fanned by new political and other causes, that death
+hate grew. It came to a head seven years later, when, in the gray of a
+chilly morning, the lifelong rivals faced each other, pistol in hand,
+in the fields beyond Weehawken Heights; and when, at the first volley,
+Hamilton sprang high in air, then crashed to the earth, mortally
+wounded.
+
+Yes, in her time Betty had--directly or indirectly--much to answer
+for.
+
+George Washington Bowen, in after years, swore that he was the son of
+Betty and of the Father of his Country. This the Jumels have fiercely
+denied.
+
+Among the business-men guests Croix brought to see Betty was an
+enormously rich old French wine merchant, Stephen Jumel by name. This
+was in 1804--the year of Hamilton's death. Jumel was fifty; Betty was
+thirty-five. Jumel was passing rich; Betty had shrewdness enough to
+realize that her own fortunes, under her present circumstances,
+depended solely on her looks and her charm. As beauty is not eternal
+and as charm sometimes fails to outlive it, the super-woman deemed it
+wise to accept the infatuated wine merchant's offer of marriage.
+
+Indeed, she is said to have angled with Napoleonic strategy for that
+same offer, and to have won it only after a sharp struggle of wits.
+Jumel was no fit opponent for her, then or ever after. From the first,
+they appear to have had but a single will between them--and that was
+hers.
+
+On April 17, 1804, Betty and Jumel were married in St. Peter's Church
+in Barclay Street. The wedding's record still stands in the parish
+archives. So does the statement made on that occasion by Betty--a
+statement charmingly at variance with all other records of her origin.
+For in the church register she wrote that she was born in 1777 and was
+the daughter of Phoebe and John Bowen--the latter a drowned sea
+captain.
+
+New York, having a somewhat tenacious memory, eyed the bride
+askance--or so she fancied. And, like many a later American, she
+sought to cover any possible reputation scars by a European veneer.
+She persuaded her husband to sell out some of his New York interest
+and to take her to Paris to live. Which, ever obedient, he did.
+
+Napoleon I. was at the heyday of his glory. About him was a court
+circle that did not look overclosely into peoples' antecedents.
+Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, had started life as a tavern waiter;
+Napoleon himself was the son of a poor Corsican lawyer and had never
+been able to learn to speak French without a barbarous accent. As for
+his sister, Pauline, if "a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,"
+Pauline's spouse, Prince Borghese, had not a ghost of a chance of
+skipping into the king row. Nor was Napoleon's first wife, Josephine,
+of flawless repute. Altogether, it was a coterie unlikely to ask many
+questions about Betty's early history.
+
+The fascinations of Madame Jumel and the vast wealth of Monsieur Jumel
+were not to be withstood. Speedily the husband and wife were in the
+turgid center of things; part and parcel of imperial court life.
+
+As Betty had charmed level-headed New York, there is no need to
+describe in windy detail what she did to Paris. Her conquests
+there--like the stars of the Milky Way--shine indistinct and blurred
+because of their sheer numbers. But through the silvery blur gleams
+forth the name of Lafayette. The old marquis was delighted, at sight,
+with the lovely young American; and he eagerly offered to act as her
+sponsor at court. Which he did, to the amusement of many and to the
+indefinite advancement of Betty's social hopes.
+
+The great Napoleon glanced in no slightest disfavor on Lafayette's
+social protegee. He willingly set the seal of imperial approval on the
+court's verdict. The emperor was Stephen Jumel's idol. Himself a
+self-made man, the old merchant worshiped this self-made demigod, the
+model and unattainable example of every self-making man since his day.
+
+Jumel's hero-worship took a practical form. He placed his resources at
+the emperor's service, and once tactlessly, but generously, offered
+his own wealth and his New York home as solace and refuge in the
+increasingly probable event of the emperor's mislaying his crown. To
+which Napoleon replied--speaking, as ever, to the gallery:
+
+"Whatever reverses Fortune may inflict on me, Duty will chain me to
+France. It would be unworthy my greatness and an insult to my empire
+for me to seek asylum across the seas."
+
+Yet, when the inevitable Day dawned, the fugitive emperor made plans
+to do that very thing. And Jumel met him more than halfway by crossing
+from New York to Havre on his own yacht--the Elizabeth, named for his
+wife--and seeking to bear away his fallen idol to safety. The plan, of
+course, fell through, and Napoleon in consequence was almost the only
+Bonaparte who did not sooner or later come to New York.
+
+Imperial friendship and a gloriously extravagant--and extravagantly
+glorious--wife are things to brag of. They are splendid
+advertisements. But they are not on the free list. In fact, they rip
+hideous breaches in the solidest wall of wealth. They played havoc
+with Papa Jumel's supposedly boundless fortune. One morning in Paris,
+the Jumels awoke to find themselves nastily close to bankruptcy.
+
+The French court was emphatically no fitting place wherein to go
+bankrupt. The scared Jumels realized this. Back they scurried to New
+York; in that bourne of fast-made and faster-lost fortunes to face
+what the future might bring.
+
+And now, all praise to Betty Jumel, erstwhile queen of money wasters!
+Instead of repining, or blaming her husband for letting her break him,
+or flitting to some wooer whose wealth was still intact, she did the
+very last thing her past would have led any one to expect.
+
+She became, in effect, her husband's business partner. She displayed a
+genius for finance. It must have been stark genius, for her personal
+experience in the credit side of the money ledger was nil. More
+through his wife's aid than through his own sound business acumen,
+Papa Jumel began to win back the ground Betty had so industriously
+helped him to lose.
+
+One daring and lucky venture followed another. In an incredibly short
+time the Jumels were again numbered among the very richest people in
+America. Once more Betty launched on a career of luxury; but now and
+ever after she kept just within her abundant resources. Bankruptcy was
+a peril forever banished.
+
+Betty, you see, did not belong to the type of fool who runs his head
+twice into the same hornet's nest. There really was no need for such
+monotony. There were plenty of hornets' nests.
+
+The first expenditure, to celebrate the new fortune, was the buying of
+the big white house far away on the hillock above the Harlem River; a
+long, long coach drive, up the Broad Way, from the city's fashionable
+residence district to the south of Duane Street. Remember, this was a
+full twenty years before the Southern merchant made his historic
+speech: "When I come to New York on business, I never think of
+stopping at the Astor House. It's much too far uptown for a busy man."
+
+The house Betty made her husband buy had been built years earlier by
+Colonel Roger Morris, after he married Mary Phillipse, the colonial
+belle, whose father owned most of Westchester County and lived in a
+manor house there among his vassals like a feudal lord.
+
+To this abode moved the Jumels. Thither they brought a retinue of
+servants whose numbers amazed the thrifty New Yorkers. Here, too, were
+deposited such furniture as New York had seldom seen--a marvelously
+hideous marble-top table given to Papa Jumel by the Sultan of Turkey;
+a set of chairs that had been Napoleon's; a truly gaudy and cumbrous
+gold clock, which had been one of the emperor's gifts to Betty;
+tapestry and pictures that had once belonged to the Empress Josephine;
+dining-room furniture that had graced the ~salle a manger~ of King
+Charles X. of France; a massive, glittering chandelier, the gift of
+General Moreau, who had vied with the emperor for Betty's smiles.
+
+Above all these and the rest of her home's rich furnishings, Betty
+treasured two other gifts from Napoleon--odd ~gages d'amour~ for
+such a man to have given such a woman. They were the battered army
+chest and army cot used by him throughout the wonderful Italian
+campaign that had first established his fame.
+
+The world was scoured by Jumel's merchant ships to secure rare plants
+and trees for the hundred-and-fifty-acre park surrounding the mansion.
+Cedars from Mount Lebanon, cypresses from Greece, exotic flowers from
+South America, roses from Provence--these were but a few of the
+innumerable exotics that filled the grounds. (The "park," to-day, is a
+wilderness of dingy, apartment-lined streets).
+
+Once established in their new home, the Jumels began to entertain on a
+scale that dwarfed even the much-vaunted hospitality of the
+ante-bellum South. And the people who, of yore, had looked obliquely
+and frostily on Betty Bowen, now clamored and schemed and besought for
+invitations to her dinners. Well they might; for not only America's
+great folk delighted to honor the mansion by their presence, but every
+titled foreigner who touched our shores became a guest there.
+
+Hither came Joseph Bonaparte--kicked off the ready-made throne to
+which his emperor brother had vainly sought to fit the incompetent
+meager form and more meager intellect--and here he was entertained
+with royal honor, as if he had been still a sovereign instead of
+merely a crownless puppet no longer upheld by the mightiest of human
+hands. Here he was "Your Majesty," and people backed out of the room
+in which he chanced to be, stood until he gave them gracious leave to
+sit, and otherwise showered upon him the adoring servility that the
+freeborn are prone to lavish upon the representatives of monarchy.
+
+Bonaparte after Bonaparte visited the Jumels. The name, "Bonaparte,"
+was still one wherewith to conjure, and that fact by itself made its
+thick-headed and impecunious bearers welcome in almost every land they
+might choose to visit. They graciously accepted the Jumel house's
+hospitality and the veneration of their fellow guests; still more
+graciously they borrowed money--which they never returned--of Papa
+Jumel; and most graciously of all they made ardent and heavy love to
+Betty.
+
+To the Jumel mansion came finally the last and least esteemed of the
+Bonaparte visitors; a squat, puffy-eyed princeling--pallid, crafty
+shadow of the Austerlitz Man--who had left France and jail one jump
+ahead of the police, had served as special constable in London to pick
+up enough money for food, and now for similar reason was teaching
+school in Bordentown, New Jersey.
+
+He was Louis Napoleon, alleged nephew of Napoleon I. I say "alleged"
+on the authority of Victor Hugo's famous sneer that Louis was "neither
+the nephew of his uncle, the son of his father, nor the father of his
+son." It was Hugo, too, who, when Louis became emperor of the French,
+under the title of Napoleon III., dubbed him "Napoleon the Little."
+For which witticism, Monsieur Hugo was promptly banished from France.
+
+Louis was the son of Napoleon's younger brother of the same name and
+of his wife--and step-niece--Hortense Beauharnais. The son had not a
+single Bonapartist feature nor trait. He strongly resembled, however,
+a certain dashing Dutch admiral, one Flahaut, on whom Hortense had
+been credited with bestowing a more than neighborly interest. It is
+not libelous, in view of many proven facts--indeed, it is scarce
+gossip--to say that Hortense, like her mother, the Empress Josephine,
+had had the foible of loving not wisely, but too often.
+
+In any event, whoever may have been his father, Louis Napoleon was
+kindly received by the Jumels; not as a prince, but as a guest of
+honor. And Papa Jumel lent him much hard-earned American money. Among
+all the Bonapartes, Louis was the least promising of the Jumels'
+beneficiaries. And of them all, he alone was to make any return for
+their goodness to him.
+
+The Prince de Joinville--here to investigate, and if necessary buy
+off, Eleazer Williams' claim to be the "lost Dauphin"--stayed at the
+mansion and paid charming attentions to Betty. So did the polished old
+scoundrel, Talleyrand, whom Napoleon had daintily described as "a silk
+stocking filled with muck."
+
+Less lofty of birth, but worth all the Bonapartes put together in
+point of genius, was a young American poet who vastly admired Betty,
+and who, on her invitation, spent weeks at a time at the mansion. He
+was Fitz-Greene Halleck; and, seated on the porch of the Jumel house,
+he wrote a poem that a million schoolboys were soon to spout--"Marco
+Bozzaris."
+
+One morning in 1830, Papa Jumel set out for New York on a business
+call to his bankers. He rode forth from the long, winding
+driveway--several flat houses and stores and streets cut across that
+driveway's course to-day--in the lumbering and costly family coach.
+
+An hour later he was brought home dying. The coach had upset on the
+frost-rutted road a few miles to the south. Jumel had fallen out--on
+his head.
+
+Papa Jumel was in the late seventies at the time of his death. His
+widow was either fifty-three or sixty-one--all depending on whether
+you believe her own statement or the homely Rhode Island facts. What
+does it matter? She was one of the super-women who do not grow old.
+
+Scarce was her worthy spouse stretched comfortably in his last sleep,
+when suitors thronged the house. And it was not alone because the
+Widow Jumel was one of the richest women in America. She still held
+her ancient sway over men's hearts; still made sentimental mush of
+men's brains.
+
+Gossip, silenced of late years, sprang eagerly and happily to life.
+Once more did New York ring with Betty's daring flirtations. But she
+cared little for people's talk. She was rich enough, famous enough,
+clever enough, still beautiful enough to be a law unto herself. The
+very folk who gossiped so scandalously about her were most eager to
+catch her eye in public or to secure an invitation to the great
+mansion on the Harlem.
+
+As to men, she had never yet in all her fifty-three--or was it
+sixty-one?--years, met her match at heart smashing. But she was to
+meet him. And soon.
+
+Will you let me go back for a space and sketch, in a mere mouthful of
+words, the haps and mishaps of one of Betty's earlier admirers?
+
+Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States when he shot
+Hamilton. The bullet that killed Hamilton rebounded and killed Burr's
+political future; for Hamilton was a national favorite and Burr was
+not.
+
+Burr served out his term as vice president amid a whirlwind of
+national hatred. Then he went West, a bitterly disappointed and
+vengeful man, and embarked on an incredibly audacious scheme whereby
+he was to wrench free the great West and Southwest from the rest of
+the Union and install himself as emperor of that vast region, under
+the title of "Aaron I."
+
+The scheme failed, and Burr was hauled before the bar of justice on
+charges of high treason. Through some lucky fate or other, he was
+acquitted, but he was secretly advised to leave America. He followed
+the advice. And when he wanted to come back to the United States, he
+found every port closed against him. So he starved for a time in
+obscure European lodging.
+
+His heart had been broken, years earlier, by the death of the only
+woman he ever truly loved. She was not one of the hundreds who made
+fools of themselves over him. She was not his wife, who had died so
+long before. She was his only daughter, Theodosia; the only holy
+influence in his tempestuous life.
+
+And Theodosia had been lost at sea. No authentic word of her, or of
+the ship that carried her, has ever been received. Burr had spent
+every day for months pacing the Battery sea wall, straining those
+uncanny black eyes of his for glimpses of her ship. He had spent every
+dollar he could lay hands on in sending for news of her. And then he
+had given up hope. This had been long before.
+
+His daughter dead, his political hopes blasted, his country's gates
+barred against him, he dragged out a miserable life in Europe. Then,
+after years of absence, he slipped into the United States in disguise.
+
+The first news of his return came in a New York newspaper announcement
+that "Colonel Aaron Burr has opened law offices on the second floor of
+23 Nassau Street." The government made no move to deport him. Clients
+by the dozen flocked to take advantage of his brilliant legal
+intellect. Poverty, in a breath, gave place to prosperity.
+
+This was in the spring of 1833, a scant three years after Papa Jumel's
+sudden demise. Tidings came to Betty that her old adorer, after so
+long a lapse of time, was back in New York. And across the gap of
+years came memories of his mesmeric eyes, his wonderful voice--the
+eyes and voice no woman could resist--the inspired manner of his
+love-making. And Betty went to him.
+
+Throughout his love-starred life it was Burr's solemn declaration that
+never once did he take a single step out of his path to win any woman;
+that all his myriad conquests came to him unsought. Probably this was
+true. There are worse ways of bagging any form of game than by "still
+hunting." Perhaps there are few better.
+
+At all events, down Broadway in her France-built coach rolled Betty
+Jumel--tall, blond, statuesque as in the Betty Bowen days when Peter
+Croix had "bought a book for his friends to read." She called on Burr,
+ostensibly to consult him about a legal matter involving a real-estate
+deal. But Burr understood. Burr always understood.
+
+He saw, too, that Betty was still fair to look upon and that she had
+lost little of her charm. By common report he knew she was egregiously
+rich. He himself was wizened, white of hair, and seventy-eight years
+old. Poverty, griefs, bitter disappointments had sadly broken him.
+Save for his eyes and voice and brain, there was little about him to
+remind Betty of the all-conquering and dapper little Lothario of forty
+years back. Yet, as he listened and looked, she loved him. Yes, there
+is a goodly assortment of hornets' nests wherein a fool may run his
+head without visiting the same nest twice.
+
+A few days after her call at his office, Betty gave one of her
+renowned dinner parties. It was "in honor of Colonel Burr." The guest
+of honor carried all before him that evening. The people who had come
+to stare at him as an escaped arch-criminal went home wholly enslaved
+by his magnetic charm. Aaron Burr had come to his own again.
+
+In saying good night to his hostess, Burr lingered after the other
+guests had trundled off cityward in their carriages. Then, taking his
+leave with bared head, there in the moonlight on the steps of the
+Jumel mansion, he dropped lightly to one knee and raised Betty's hand
+to his lips.
+
+"Madam," he breathed, the merciful moonlight making him for the moment
+his young and irresistible self again, "madam, I give you my hand. My
+heart has long been yours."
+
+It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought--or affected to
+think--it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift
+campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing
+law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he
+drew the siege lines closer to the citadel.
+
+At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common
+sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back.
+But he did. He came back the very next day--July 1, 1833. And with him
+in the carriage was another old man--the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who
+had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first
+wife.
+
+To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame
+Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room.
+Wondering, she obeyed.
+
+"Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to
+marry you. Pray get ready at once!"
+
+Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the
+clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate
+eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love
+pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill
+at argument that had made him master of men and women alike--all were
+brought into play.
+
+An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful
+and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts.
+But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality.
+Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was
+won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all
+Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well.
+
+At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and
+let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was
+won. He knew it.
+
+A little later Betty reappeared at the head of the stairs. She was
+resplendent in a gown of thick, stiff, dove-colored satin, and she
+glittered with a thousand jewels. Burr, lightly as a boy, ran up the
+stairs to meet her. Without a word she took his proffered arm.
+Together they walked to where the clergyman, stationed by Burr,
+awaited them. And they were married--super-woman and super-man. I know
+of no other instance in the History of Love where two such consummate
+heart breakers became man and wife.
+
+It would be pleasant to record that the magnetic old couple walked
+hand and hand into the sunset; that their last years were spent
+together in the light of the afterglow. Here was a husband after
+Betty's own heart. Here was a wife to excite the envy of all Burr's
+friends, to rehabilitate him socially and financially. It seemed an
+ideal union.
+
+But the new-wed pair did none of the things that any optimist would
+predict, that any astute student of human nature would set down in a
+novel about them. Before the honeymoon was over, they were quarreling
+like cat and dog. About money, of course. Burr sold some stock for his
+wife, and neglected to turn over the proceeds to her. She asked for
+the money. He curtly replied:
+
+"Madam, this time you are married to a ~man~. A man who will henceforth
+take charge of all your business affairs."
+
+Betty's temper had never, at best, threatened to rob the patient
+Griselda of her laurels. Men had been her slaves, not her masters. She
+had no fancy for changing the lifelong conditions. So, in a blaze of
+anger, she not only demanded her money, but hinted very strongly that
+Colonel Burr was little better than a common fortune hunter.
+
+Burr ordered her to go to her room and stay there until she could
+remember the respect due from a wife to her husband. She made a hot
+retort to the effect that the house was hers, and that, but for her
+wealth, Burr was a mere outcast and beggar.
+
+Burr, without a word, turned and left the house. This was just ten
+days after the wedding. He went to New York and took up his abode in
+his former Duane Street lodgings. Betty, scared and penitent, went
+after him. There was a reconciliation, and he came back.
+
+But soon there was another squabble about money. And Betty, in another
+tantrum, went to a lawyer and brought suit to take the control of her
+fortune out of her husband's hands. Again Burr left his new home,
+vowing he would never return.
+
+The poor old fellow, once more cast upon his own resources, and
+self-deprived of the luxuries his wife's money had brought him, fell
+ill. When Betty, in another contrite fit, went to plead with him to
+come back, she found him delirious. She had him carried out to the
+mansion, and for weeks nursed him right tenderly.
+
+But when he came again to his senses, Burr would not speak to his
+wife. The moment he was able to get out of bed, he left the house.
+Betty never saw him again. Not very long afterward he died, in a
+Staten Island hotel--alone, unmourned, he who had been the darling of
+women.
+
+Did Betty mourn her husband emeritus? Not noticeably. She was not of
+the type that mourns. Before Burr was fairly under the sod, she was
+flirting gayly and was demanding and receiving the same admiration
+that had always been hers. She sought to make people forget that she
+had ever been Mrs. Burr, and she asked them to call her, once more,
+"Madame Jumel." She dazzled New York with a mammoth flower fete in the
+summer of 1837; and once more, heedless of people's opinions, ruled as
+queen of New York's little social realm.
+
+And so the years sped on, until the super-woman of other days could no
+longer fight off that incurable disease, old age. American men no
+longer vied for her favors. She decided that American men's taste for
+beauty had been swallowed up by commercialism. And she went again to
+Paris, where, she remembered, men had never ceased to sue for her
+love.
+
+This was in 1853. Louis Napoleon had just made himself "Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French." He had a way, in the days of his power, of
+forgetting those who had befriended him when he was down-at-the-heel
+exile, and of snubbing former friends who were so foolish as to claim
+present notice on the ground of past favors.
+
+But he made a notable exception in the case of Madame Jumel. He
+received her with open arms, gave a court ball in honor of her return
+to Paris, and in every way treated her almost as if she had been a
+visiting sovereign. One likes to think his overworked recording angel
+put all this down in large letters on the credit side of Napoleon the
+Little's celestial ledger page. Heaven knows there was plenty of blank
+space on that side of the page for any such entries.
+
+But on Betty herself the effect of all this adoration was decidedly
+startling. Treated like a queen, she grew to believe she was a queen.
+The razor-keen wits that had stood by her so gallantly for
+three-quarters of a century or more were dulling. Her mind began
+wandering helplessly in the realms of fancy. An odd phase of her
+mental decay was that she took to babbling incessantly of Aaron
+Burr--whose name she had not spoken in years--and she seemed to forget
+that she had ever met a man named Jumel.
+
+She came back to the old house on the hill, overlooking the Harlem.
+The stream was no longer as pastoral and deserted as in earlier days,
+and houses and cottages had begun to spring up all around the confines
+of the mansion's grounds. New York was slowly creeping northward.
+
+But it is to be doubted that Betty realized the change. She was a
+queen; no less a queen because she ruled an imaginary kingdom.
+
+She declared that her position as a sovereign demanded a body of
+household troops. So she hired a bodyguard of twenty soldiers, dressed
+them in gay uniforms, and placed them on duty around the house. She
+increased her staff of servants to an amazing degree. She assumed
+regal airs. Every visitor was announced as if entering the presence of
+royalty. Betty no longer "received callers." Instead, she "held
+audiences." Yearly she journeyed in state to Saratoga, with a retinue
+of fifty servants and "officers of the household."
+
+Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The
+once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to amass began to
+shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than
+a million dollars of it was left after she died.
+
+New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied
+because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her
+dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship.
+
+And in the mansion on the hill, on July 16, 1865, she fell asleep. A
+score of New York's foremost men were her honorary pallbearers. And
+all society made, for the last time, the long journey to Harlem to
+honor her memory.
+
+So died Betty Bowen--Betty Jumel--Betty Burr--whatever you prefer to
+call her. She was New York's first and greatest official heart
+breaker. She was doubly fortunate, too, in missing the average
+old-super-woman's realization of having outgrown her wonder-charm. For
+when her life book of beauty and power and magnetism closed, Delusion
+tenderly took up the tale. And through a fairyland of imagined
+admiration and regal rank, Betty tottered happily to the very end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR
+
+THE "ACTRESS HEART QUEEN"
+
+
+She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.
+
+He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all
+spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the
+strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.
+
+(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand--a
+four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)
+
+Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's
+attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling
+interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.
+
+She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's
+super-women, she sprang from the masses. Her childhood was spent in
+beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At
+fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was
+acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.
+
+As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared
+to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was
+one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had
+divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.
+
+It was at Lille, while she was still in her apprenticeship as an
+actress, that Adrienne met a young baron; a captain in the local
+garrison. He loved her, and he was her first love. It was not the
+custom of the early eighteenth century for a French noble to propose
+marriage to a former laundress who was playing utility parts in a
+third-rate road show. Probably there was no precedent for it. And such
+a proposal would have been a waste of windy words, at best. For
+neither the king nor the man's parents would have allowed it to lead
+to marriage.
+
+Yet--or perhaps because of it--the baron asked Adrienne Lecouvreur to
+be his wife. She was in the seventh paradise of first love. It was all
+turning out the way it did in plays. And plays were, thus far,
+Adrienne's chief guidebook of life. So the prettily staged engagement
+began; with roseate light effects.
+
+Before Adrienne had time for disillusionment, the baron died. In the
+first grief--she was at an age when every tragedy is absolutely
+permanent and irrevocable--the luckless girl tried to kill herself.
+Her kindly fellow actors took turns in watching her and in abstracting
+unobtrusively any lethal weapons that might chance to be within her
+reach. And at last Youth came to the rescue; permanent heartbreak
+being too mighty a feat for sixteen.
+
+Adrienne fell to referring to the baron's death as her life tragedy,
+not yet realizing that the affair was but an insignificant curtain
+raiser.
+
+By and by another nobleman crossed her horizon. He was Philippe le
+Ray. And for the moment he fascinated Adrienne. Once more there was a
+hope--or she thought there was--of a marriage into the aristocracy.
+Then, just as everything seemed to be along smoothly, she threw away
+her possible chances with both hands.
+
+Into the road company came a new recruit, Clavel by name. You will not
+find him in the shining records of the French stage, nor under the
+"Cs" in any encyclopedia. His name has been picked in history's museum
+solely from the fact that he jilted Adrienne Lecouvreur.
+
+Philippe le Ray was promptly shelved for the new love. And with him
+Adrienne sacrificed all her supposed chances of wealth, rank, and
+ease; for the sake of a penniless actor, and for love.
+
+She became engaged to Clavel. They planned to marry as soon as their
+joint earnings would permit, and to tour France as co-stars. Or, if
+the public preferred, with Clavel as star, and with Adrienne as an
+adoringly humble member of the cast.
+
+Early in the affair, Clavel found a better-paying position in another
+company. Adrienne urged him to accept it, for the temporary parting
+promised to bring nearer the day of their marriage. And Clavel, to
+please her, took the offer.
+
+So, again, Adrienne found herself alone. But it was a loneliness that
+vibrated with hope. It was at this time that she chose for herself a
+motto, which thereafter emblazoned her letters and lingerie.
+
+It was, "~Que Faire Au Monde Sans Aimer?~" ("What is living without
+loving?") She was soon to learn the grim answer to the challenge-query
+she so gayly hurled at fate.
+
+Clavel's letters grew few. They waned in warmth. Odd rumors with which
+the theater world has ever been rife began to reach Adrienne. And at
+last she wrote her absent lover a missive that has been numbered by
+~cognoscenti~ among the great love letters of the ages. Here it is,
+in part--a halting translation:
+
+    I scarce know what to believe, from your neglect. But be certain
+    always that I love you for yourself a hundred times more dearly
+    than on my own account. Oh, love me, dear, as I shall forever love
+    you! That is all I ask from life.
+
+    But don't promise to, unless you can keep your word. Your welfare
+    is far more precious to me than my own. So always follow the
+    course that seems most pleasant to you. If ever I lose you and you
+    are still happy, I shall have the joy of knowing I have not been a
+    bar to your happiness.
+
+The worthy Clavel took Adrienne at her word. He proceeded to "follow
+the course that seemed most pleasant to him"--by breaking the
+engagement and marrying a lesser woman who had a dot of several
+thousand francs. He explained his action by saying that he must look
+out for his own future, and that Adrienne had no prospects of success
+on the stage.
+
+And thus the thrifty actor passes out of history. Thus, too, he lost a
+future chance to handle the funds of Europe's richest actress, and of
+starring as her husband. Peace to his puny soul!
+
+Adrienne Lecouvreur no longer clamored to die. She was older
+now--nearly twenty. And the latest blow hardened instead of crushing
+her. By this time the girlish chrysalis had been shed and a gloriously
+beautiful woman had emerged. Already she was hailed as the "Actress
+Heart Queen." Men were straining the vocabulary of imbecility to coin
+phrases for her.
+
+And for the first and last time in her career, Adrienne resolved to
+capitalize her charms. It was the one adventuress-moment in all her
+story. And the Hand that ever guided her course picked her up and set
+her back, very hard and very promptly, in the destined path of tragedy
+from which she had tried to stray.
+
+Stinging and heart-dead from Clavel's desertion, she listened to the
+vows of the Comte de Klinglin. He was rich; he was a soldier of note;
+and Adrienne was no longer the world-innocent child of her first
+engagement days. She played her cards with the skill of a perfect
+actress. From mere flirtation, the count advanced to the point of
+worshiping her.
+
+De Klinglin besought her to marry him. And with seeming reluctance,
+she yielded. She even pointed out a way by which they might evade
+royal and family law by emigrating for a time to some other country,
+and then, by judicious bribery, arranging a return and a
+reinstatement. De Klinglin entered eagerly into the plan.
+
+Then, on the very eve of their proposed wedding, the count deserted
+her and married an heiress. Decidedly, the Hand was guiding Adrienne
+against every effort or desire of her own.
+
+This latest blow to pride and to new-born ambition was the turning
+point in Adrienne Lecouvreur's road. It changed her from a
+professional beauty into an inspired actress.
+
+She threw herself into her work with a tragic intensity bred of her
+own sorrows. She turned her back on social distractions, and on
+everything that came between her and success. Her acting as well as
+her beauty became the talk of the provinces. Word of her prowess
+drifted to Paris, the Mecca of eighteenth-century actor-folk. A Paris
+manager came to see her act, and he at once engaged her.
+
+In 1717, when she was twenty-three, she burst unheralded upon the
+French metropolis. In a night, Paris was at her feet. Almost at once,
+she was made a leading woman of the ~Comedie Francaise~; where, for
+thirteen years, she reigned, undisputed sovereign of the French stage.
+
+Never before had such acting been witnessed or even imagined. It was a
+revelation. Up to this time French actors had mouthed their words
+noisily and grandiloquently, reciting the Alexandrine or otherwise
+metrical lines--wherein practically all the classic plays of the
+period, except some of Moliere's, were written--in a singsong chant
+that played sad havoc with the sense.
+
+Incidentally, the costuming--as you may see from contemporary
+cuts--was a nightmare. And when a character on the stage was not
+declaiming or dramatically listening, he usually stood stock-still in
+a statuesque attitude, staring into blank space, with the look of an
+automaton.
+
+All this seems ridiculous to us; but it had come straight down as an
+almost inviolable "classic tradition" from the ancient Greek drama,
+which had been more a series of declamations than a vital play.
+
+Yes, Adrienne Lecouvreur was a revelation to Paris. On the stage her
+voice was as soft and musical as it was penetrating. Instead of
+intoning a pompous monologue, she spoke her lines as people in real
+life spoke. Her emotions were keenly human. Every syllable and every
+shade of voice meant something.
+
+Without sacrificing the poetry of the rhymed couplets, she put the
+breath of life and of conversational meaning into them. She dressed
+the characters she played in the way such persons might reasonably
+have been supposed to dress. She made them a joy to the eye instead of
+an insult to the intelligence. And when she was not speaking, she was
+forever acting; introducing a million bits of byplay to replace the
+old statuesque poses.
+
+She had lived. And she put the breath of that life into her work. This
+seems simple enough to us in these days of stage realism. But it was a
+wonder-breeding novelty to France. Adrienne revolutionized acting,
+diction, and costuming. Paris acclaimed her as a genius; which abused
+term was for once well applied.
+
+Men of rank clamored for introductions to her. They plotted, and
+sighed, and bribed, and killed one another for her favor. But for them
+all she had one stereotyped answer; an answer that waxed historic
+through many firm repetitions:
+
+"Love is a folly which I detest!"
+
+Which, in conjunction with her motto, "What is living without loving?"
+throws a sidelight on Adrienne's ideas of life at the moment.
+
+Not only did she revolutionize the stage, but she was the first
+actress to be taken up by society. Not only the foremost men in
+France, but their wives as well, threw open to her the magic doors of
+the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
+
+Old Philippe the Regent was misgoverning France just then; and to say
+that his court was morally rotten would be gross flattery. The
+unapproachable Lecouvreur was thus a freak, as well as a delight. Like
+the good, old, overworked "breath of mountain air in a slum," this
+loveless genius swept through the palaces of Paris and Versailles. A
+hundred nobles longed for her favor. Not one could boast that he had
+so much as kissed her lips. Here is her picture, sketched from the
+~Mercure~, of 1719:
+
+    Without being tall, she is exquisitely formed and has an air of
+    distinction. No one on earth has greater charm. Her eyes speak as
+    eloquently as her lips, and often they supply the place of words.
+    In brief, I can compare her only to a flawless miniature. Her head
+    is well poised on shapely shoulders. Her eyes are full of fire;
+    her mouth is pretty; her nose slightly aquiline. Her face is
+    wonderfully adapted to express joy, tenderness, pity, fear,
+    sorrow.
+
+And Adrienne? Her opinion of all this adulation is summed up in one
+sentence from a letter she wrote:
+
+    I spend three-fourths of my time in doing what bores me.
+
+Among her maddest admirers was a wizened, monkey-faced youth who even
+then was writing anarchistic doctrines that one day were to help shake
+France's worm-eaten old monarchy to its fall.
+
+He was Francois Marie Arouet. But for reasons best known to himself,
+he preferred to be known simply as "Voltaire"--a name to which he had
+no right whatever, but by which alone history remembers him. Voltaire
+was Adrienne Lecouvreur's adoring slave. She treated him only as a
+dear friend; but she loved to hear his vitriolic anathemas on
+government, the aristocracy, and theology. He was in the midst of one
+of these harangues, at her rooms one evening, when the Chevalier de
+Rohan--bearer of the proudest name in all Europe--sauntered in. He
+eyed the monkey-like Voltaire in amused disfavor; then drawled, to no
+one in particular:
+
+"Who is this young man who talks so loud?"
+
+"A young man, sir," retorted Voltaire, "who is not forced to stagger
+along under a name far too great for him; but who manages to secure
+respect for the name he has."
+
+De Rohan's tasseled cane swung aloft. Adrienne tactfully prevented its
+fall by collapsing in a stage faint. But the incident did not close
+there. Next day Voltaire was set upon by ruffians in Rohan's pay, and
+beaten half to death.
+
+The victim did not complain. There was no justice for a commoner, in
+France at that time, against a member of the ~haute noblesse~. So
+Voltaire contented himself by going to a fencing master and practicing
+for a year or more in the use of the small-sword.
+
+At the end of that period, he challenged Rohan to mortal combat. Rohan
+professed to regard the challenge as a piece of insolence, and,
+through royal favor, had Voltaire, sent, by ~lettre de cachet~, to
+the Bastille. There was no chance for redress. And, on his release,
+Voltaire prudently let the feud drop.
+
+At the perihelion of Adrienne's Dianalike sway over French hearts, a
+new social lion arrived in Paris. He was Maurice, Comte de Saxe, born
+of a morganatic union between a German countess and Augustus the
+Strong, King of Poland. (Augustus, by the way, was the parent of no
+less than one hundred and sixty-three children--an interesting record
+even in those days of large families, and one that should have gone
+far toward earning for him the title of "Father of his Country.")
+
+Saxe came to Paris crowned with laurels won as a dashing military
+leader, as a fearless duelist, and as an irresistible heart breaker.
+He had won, by sheer bravery and strategic skill, the rank of Marshal.
+He was of the "man on horseback" type over whom crowds go wild.
+
+The new hero was a giant in stature, strikingly handsome, and so
+strong that in one hand he could crush a horseshoe into a shapeless
+lump. He was a paladin--Ajax, Don Juan, Tamerlane, Mark Antony,
+Baldur, all rolled into one. He was a glorious animal, high of spirits
+and of hopes, devoid of fear and of the finer feelings. A Greek
+god--or whatever you will. And about him hung the glamour of countless
+conquests on the battlefield and in love.
+
+That such a man should have turned Paris' head was inevitable. Equally
+natural was it that Paris women should make fools of themselves over
+him. But why so gross and unintellectual a wooer should have made the
+very slightest impression on a character like Adrienne Lecouvreur's
+must be relegated to the "mystery of choice" collection of riddles.
+
+Yet, at sight, she, who for years had scoffed at passion, and who had
+so often declared her heart was dead, felt that she had met the love
+of her life.
+
+She gave her revivified heart and her whole soul into Maurice de
+Saxe's keeping, forever and ever. There were no reservations. Hers was
+a love that could die only with her life. The former affairs were to
+her as half-forgotten dreams. Saxe, and Saxe alone, held her love;
+held it as no other man had been able to.
+
+Adrienne at first dazzled Saxe--as a tropic butterfly might dazzle a
+champion bulldog. The dazzle soon wore off; but it left behind a
+comfortable feeling of affection, of admiration, of gratified vanity
+that he alone had been chosen by her, out of all the world of suitors.
+
+With the deft hands of a sculptor, Adrienne Lecouvreur molded Saxe's
+rough nature. She refined him; taught him to replace the ways of the
+camp by those of civilization; made him less of a beast and more of a
+man; showed him how to think.
+
+All of which added to the man's popularity with other women; which was
+the sole reward Adrienne reaped for her educative efforts.
+
+Saxe was notoriously untrue to her. In his rages he berated her as a
+cabby might have scolded his drunken wife. He used his power over her
+to raise himself in others' esteem. In short, he was wholly selfish
+throughout, and he gruffly consented to accept Adrienne's worship as
+his just due.
+
+But Adrienne's love merely waxed stronger and brighter under such
+abominable treatment. She lived for Saxe alone.
+
+The Duchy of Courland lost its duke. His place was to be filled by
+election. And with the dukedom went the hand of a Russian princess,
+whose face Saxe unchivalrously compared to a Westphalia ham.
+
+Saxe's ambition awoke. In his veins ran royal blood. He wanted to be a
+duke and the husband of a princess. He entered as candidate in the
+contest. Lack of money, for judicious bribes to the free and
+incorruptible electors, stood in his way. He went, as ever in trouble,
+to Adrienne. And, as ever, she rose to the occasion.
+
+She knew that, as Duke of Courland, he could not see her again, or be
+within several hundred miles of her. She knew, too, that, by helping
+him with the dukedom, she was helping to give him to another woman. A
+lesser love than hers would have rebelled at either possibility.
+
+But Adrienne's love for Saxe was that which not only casts out fear,
+but casts out self along with it. She sold every piece of jewelry and
+every costly dress and stick of furniture in her possession, borrowed
+money right and left, and mortgaged her salary at the ~Comedie
+Francaise~.
+
+The net result was fifteen thousand dollars, which she gladly handed
+over to Saxe for the expenses of his campaign. With these sinews of
+war, Saxe hastened to Courland. There he remained for a year; working
+hard for his election; making love to the ham-faced princess; fighting
+like a Norse berserker in battle after battle.
+
+He was elected duke. But Russia refused to sanction the election. At
+the head of a handful of fellow adventurers, Saxe went on fighting;
+performing prodigies of personal valor and strength in conflicts
+against overwhelming odds. But at last he was hopelessly beaten in
+battle, and still more hopelessly outpointed in the game of politics.
+And back he came to Paris--a failure.
+
+Adrienne used every art and charm to make him forget his misfortunes
+and find happiness once more in her love. He treated her overtures as
+a surly schoolboy might treat those of an over-affectionate little
+sweetheart.
+
+He consented to be petted and comforted by the woman who adored him.
+But he wreaked in her the ill-temper bred of his defeat. For example,
+he professed to believe her untrue to him. He was furiously
+jealous--or pretended to be. And he accused her of the infidelity he
+had himself a thousand times practiced.
+
+Poor Adrienne, aghast at such insane charges, vainly protested her
+innocence and her utter love for him. One of her letters to Saxe,
+during this dark hour, has been preserved. It begins:
+
+    I am worn out with grief. I have wept this livelong night. It is
+    foolish of me; since I have nothing wherewith to reproach myself.
+    But I cannot endure severity from you. I am suspected, accused by
+    you. Oh, how can I convince you--you who alone can wound my heart?
+
+In the midst of this wretched misunderstanding came a crumb of comfort
+to the luckless woman--albeit the incident that caused it led also,
+indirectly, to her death.
+
+Francoise de Lorraine, Duchesse de Bouillon, fell violently in love
+with Saxe, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Saxe laughed in her
+face, and hinted that he cared too much for Adrienne Lecouvreur just
+then to be interested in any one else. It was not the truth, for his
+love for Adrienne had never served as an obstacle to any other of his
+myriad amours. But it served to rebuff the duchesse, who did not
+interest him, and to make Adrienne very, very happy when he repeated
+to her the conversation. As a by-product, it threw the duchesse into a
+frame of mind described by Congreve in his line about the Gehenna-like
+fury of a woman scorned.
+
+A few days after this--in July, 1729--Adrienne received an anonymous
+note asking her to be at a certain corner of the Luxembourg Gardens at
+eleven o'clock the following morning. Being quite without fear, and
+not at all without curiosity, she went.
+
+No, she was not set upon by masked assassins. She found awaiting her
+nothing more formidable than a pale and badly scared young man in
+clerical garb.
+
+The clerical youth introduced himself as the Abbe Bouret, a hanger-on
+of the Bouillon household. Bouret told Adrienne that the duchesse had
+bribed him heavily to send her rival a box of poisoned bonbons, with a
+note saying the candies were the gift of an unknown and humble
+admirer.
+
+The abbe had seen Adrienne a few nights earlier at the theater. So
+struck had he been by the gentleness and beauty of her face that he
+could not carry out his murderous commission. Hence the warning.
+
+Adrienne took the abbe, and the candy, too, straight to the police. A
+bonbon was fed to a street dog. The animal, screaming and writhing in
+agony, died within fifteen minutes. This seemed, even to the
+eighteenth-century Paris police, a fairly good proof of the duchesse's
+guilt.
+
+Naturally, they did not arrest her grace. But they put certain
+respectful queries to her. Strangely enough, the duchesse indignantly
+denied that she had tried to poison Adrienne.
+
+Bouret, cross-examined, stuck determinedly to his story. So, through
+the Bouillon influence, he was thrown into prison and was kept there
+in solitary confinement, in a damp and unlighted dungeon, with
+occasional torture, until he saw the error of his ways, and confessed
+that his charge had been a lie. Thus was the faultless Duchesse de
+Bouillon triumphantly cleared of an unjust accusation.
+
+The duchesse celebrated her vindication by attending the theater, one
+night when Adrienne Lecouvreur was playing in "Phedre." The duchesse
+sat in a stage box and mockingly applauded her rival.
+
+Adrienne paid no overt heed at first to her presence. But when she
+came to the scene in which ~Phedre~ expresses to ~OEnone~ her contempt
+for a certain class of women, Adrienne turned her back on the
+wondering ~OEnone~, strode to the footlights, and, her blazing eyes
+seizing and gripping the duchesse's, declaimed directly to her
+~Phedre's~ lines:
+
+    "I know my own faults; but I am not one of those brazen women who,
+    calm even in the exposure of their crimes, can face the world
+    without a blush."
+
+The duchesse shrank back as if she had been lashed across the face.
+Shielding her eyes with her hands, she ran, shuddering, from the
+theater.
+
+Scribe's play, "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and the opera of the same title,
+make much of this episode. So did eighteenth-century Paris. Folk
+openly declared that the Duchesse de Bouillon would not long rest
+impotent under so public an insult. And they were right.
+
+Whether the poison was sent in a bouquet, as contemporary writers
+declared, or in some other form, Adrienne was suddenly stricken by
+mortal illness.
+
+Less than half a century had passed since the dying King Charles had
+"lived a week in spite of the best physicians in England." And the
+science of medicine had crept forward but few hesitating steps in the
+past forty-five years. Poor, stricken Adrienne did not even need the
+best malpractice in France to help her to her grave.
+
+Doctors great and doctors greater--the quacks of the Rive Gauche
+and the higher-priced quacks of court and Faubourg--all stood in
+turn at the dying girl's bedside and consulted gravely in Latin;
+while Saxe raged at them and cursed them for a parcel of solemn
+nincompoops--which they were.
+
+After a time they all trooped away, these long-faced men of pill and
+potion. They confessed they could find no remedy. They could not so
+much as name the ailment. At least, they did not--aloud. For the
+memory of the first poison scandal and its revealer's fate was still
+fresh in men's minds.
+
+And after the doctors came the priest; a priest hastily summoned by
+the infidel Voltaire, who had been crying outside the death-chamber
+door.
+
+The priest was among the most bigoted of his kind. In his eyes, the
+victim was not the reigning beauty of Paris, but a sinning creature
+who had defied God's laws by going on the stage.
+
+Theology in those days barred actors and actresses from the blessings
+of the Church.
+
+Yet, bigoted as was this particular priest, he was not wholly
+heartless. The weeping little monkey-like man crouched on the stairs
+outside the door may have touched his heart; for Voltaire could be
+wondrous eloquent and persuasive. Or the red-eyed, raging giant on his
+knees at the bedside may have appealed to his pity; almost as much as
+did the lovely white face lying so still there among the pillows. At
+all events, the good priest consented to strain a point.
+
+If Adrienne would adjure her allegiance to the stage and banish all
+earthly thoughts, he would absolve her and would grant her the rite of
+Extreme Unction.
+
+"Do you place your hope in the God of the Universe?" he intoned.
+
+Slowly the great dark eyes--already wide with the Eternal
+Mystery--turned from the priest to the sobbing giant who knelt at the
+opposite side of her bed. Adrienne Lecouvreur stretched out her arms
+toward Saxe, for the last of many thousand times. Pointing at her
+weeping lover, she whispered to the priest:
+
+"~There~ is my Universe, my Hope, my ~God~!"
+
+The good priest scuttled away in pious horror. Adrienne Lecouvreur
+sank back upon the pillows, dead--and unabsolved.
+
+That night--acting on a strong hint from the Bouillon family, who had
+heard that Voltaire intended to demand an autopsy--the police carried
+Adrienne's body away in a cab, and buried it in a bed of quick-lime.
+
+For nearly two long months, Maurice, Comte de Saxe, scarcely looked at
+another woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+CLEOPATRA
+
+"THE SERPENT OF OLD NILE"
+
+
+Some thirty-five years ago, in the north Jersey village of Pompton,
+the township undertaker's barn burned down. It was a spectacular
+midnight fire. All the natives turned out to view it. Dominie Jansen
+even hinted, I remember, that it was a visitation on the community for
+some of his neighbors' sins. Whereat, Lem Saulsbury took the
+pledge--for the eighth time that year.
+
+Well, the next week, when the Pompton ~Clarion~ appeared, no mention
+was made of the fire--the only event of intense human interest, by the
+way, since Joel Binswanger, the official local sot, six months earlier
+had, at the village tavern, swallowed a half-pint flask of carbolic
+acid--set aside for cleaning the brasses--under the conviction that it
+was applejack. Joel had complained of a rough throat and an unwonted
+taste in his mouth for days afterward. The Clarion editor, taken to
+task for printing nothing about the fire, excused the omission by
+saying;
+
+"What'd 'a been the use of writing the story? Everybody knows about
+it."
+
+That's all there is to the anecdote. Yes, I've heard better, myself.
+I've even heard the same one better told. It serves, though, as a
+fitting preamble to my story about Cleopatra.
+
+"Everybody knows about it."
+
+Who can say anything about her that you have not heard? Perhaps I can.
+Probably not. Will you be patient with me, and, even as tourists visit
+European shrines to verify their Baedekers, read this story to verify
+what you have always known? Cleopatra cannot be omitted from any
+super-woman series. And I will make her as interesting as I know how.
+
+Personally, I believe the Pomptonians would far rather have read about
+that barn blaze, which they had seen, than about the conflagration of
+a whole foreign metropolis.
+
+At sixteen--in 52 B.C.--Cleopatra's known career as a heartbreaker
+began; although there are rumors of more than one still earlier
+affair, with Egyptian nobles as their heroes.
+
+She was the daughter of Ptolemy Auletes--Ptolemy the Piper--cordially
+hated ruler of Egypt. Cleopatra and her baby brother, young Ptolemy,
+nominally shared the throne for a time. They were both children. They
+ruled much as the baby "drives" when he holds the reins of the horse
+at whose head is the hostler's guiding hand. All manner of
+adventurers--both native and Greek--were the real rulers.
+
+One of these factions drove Cleopatra from the throne and from her
+capital at Alexandria, leaving the "triple Uraeus crown," with its
+mystic lotus adornments, on the head of baby Ptolemy alone.
+
+The crown was the only fragment of actual kingship the child
+possessed. The power and the graft lay in the hands of a trio of
+industriously grasping Greek adventurers.
+
+Cleopatra, meantime, out in the cold, schemed to regain her place on
+the double throne, and, even at that early age, amused herself in the
+interim by planning the tortures she would wreak on little Ptolemy
+when her turn should come.
+
+While she was casting about for means to outwit the Greeks, and
+seeking means to buy up a mercenary army of invasion, she learned that
+Julius Caesar, an elderly Roman of vast repute as a conqueror, had come
+to Alexandria at the head of a few legions, on a mission of diplomacy.
+
+Cleopatra may have known little of men's strength, but already she was
+a profound student of their weaknesses.
+
+She began to ask questions about Caesar. Brushing away (as immaterial
+if true), her scared native attendants' statements that he had the
+body of an elephant, the head of a tiger, and the claws of a dragon,
+and that he fed on prisoners served raw, she pumped one or two exiled
+Romans and gleaned an inkling of the conqueror's history.
+
+With the details of Caesar's Gallic invasion, his crushing of Pompey,
+and his bullying of semihostile fellow Romans, she did not in the
+least concern herself. What most interested Cleopatra were the
+following domestic revelations:
+
+He had been married at least four times, and three of his wives were
+still living. Cossutia, the wife of his youth, he had divorced by law
+because he had been captivated by the charms of one Cornelia, whom he
+had forthwith married, and who had died before he had had time to name
+her successor.
+
+Next in order he had wed Pompeia; and, on the barest rumor of
+indiscretion on her part, had announced dramatically: "Caesar's wife
+must be above suspicion!" and had divorced her to marry his present
+spouse, Calpurnia.
+
+The interstices between these unions had been garnished with many a
+love episode. Adamant as he was toward men, Caesar was far from being
+an anchorite where women were concerned; and he had the repute of
+being unswervingly loyal to the woman whom he, at the time, chanced to
+love.
+
+This scurrilous information was quite enough for Cleopatra. She had
+her plans accordingly. She would see Caesar. More to the point, she
+would be seen by Caesar. But how? Caesar was in Alexandria, the
+stronghold of her enemies. It would mean capture and subsequent death
+for Cleopatra to be found in the city. Yet she planned not only to
+enter Alexandria, but to make her first appearance before Caesar in a
+way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest
+from the very start.
+
+Julius Caesar sat in the great audience hall of the Alexandria palace,
+whose use he had commandeered as his temporary headquarters. Behind
+him stood his guards; heavy armored, tanned of face; short, thick
+swords at hip. Before his dais trailed a procession of folk who hated
+him as starkly as they feared him.
+
+They were Egyptians with favors to ask, and they bore gifts to indorse
+their pleas. They were Greeks who sought to outwit the barbarian
+victor, or to trick him into the granting of concessions. One by one
+the suppliants crawled past, each crying out an appeal or a grievance.
+Nearly every one made a peace offering, until the mass of gifts was
+stacked high on the stone floor of the audience hall.
+
+Presently entered two black porters, (strapping Nubian giants), who
+bore lightly between them a roll of rare Persian carpet. They halted,
+laid down their burden on the floor at Caesar's feet, fell on their
+knees in obeisance, and--waited. On the floor lay the roll of
+priceless weave, no one coming forward to make the rich gift an excuse
+for the urging of some boon.
+
+Caesar grew inquisitive. He leaned forward to examine the tight-folded,
+shimmering rug more carefully. As he did so, the folds were suddenly
+flung aside, and a girl leaped to her feet from among them. Thus had
+Cleopatra entered Alexandria. Thus had she penetrated to Caesar's
+presence. Thus, too, by her craft and daring, had she won the
+attention of the man whose daring and craft had conquered the world.
+
+Caesar stared in delighted interest. He saw, standing gracefully--and
+wholly undraped--before him, a slender, red-haired girl, snub-nosed
+and of no special beauty. But, at a glance, this man who saw
+everything, saw, too, that she possessed an unnameable fascination--a
+magnetism--that was greater by far than that of any other woman he had
+known in all his fifty-eight years.
+
+It was Julius Caesar's first introduction to a super-woman; to the
+super-woman of super-women; to a woman beside whose snub-nosed, plain
+face, under its shock of red hair, the memory of the Roman beauties
+who had so often charmed his idle hours grew dim and confused.
+
+Cleopatra, on her part, saw nothing so impressive as an
+elephant-tiger-dragon monster. She beheld a thin, undersized man,
+nearly sixty years old, hawk-nosed, inscrutable of eye, on whose thin
+gray locks, to mask his fast-growing baldness, rested a chaplet of
+laurel leaves.
+
+This was the hero whose cunning and whose war genius had caused
+sceptered men to grovel at his feet, and had made stubborn republican
+Rome his cringing servant. But he was also the man whose weakness was
+an attractive woman. And on this weakness Cleopatra at once proceeded
+to play.
+
+Yet she speedily found that Caesar's was but a surface weakness, and
+that beneath it lay iron. Gladly he consented to save her from her
+foes, and even in a measure to let her punish such of those foes as
+were of no use to him. But as for making her the undisputed Queen of
+Egypt and setting her triumphantly and independently on the throne of
+her ancestors, at Rome's expense--he had not the remotest idea of
+doing that.
+
+Nor could all her most bewildering blandishments wring such a foolish
+concession from him. He made love to her--ardent love; but he did not
+let love interfere in any way with politics.
+
+Instead of carrying her to the throne, through seas of her enemies'
+blood, he carried Cleopatra back to Rome with him and, to the scandal
+of the whole city, installed her in a huge marble villa there.
+
+And there, no secret being made of Caesar's infatuation for her,
+Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until Caesar's
+death. There, too, Caesar's son, Caesarion, was born; and with the boy's
+birth came to Cleopatra the hope that Caesar would will to him all his
+vast estates and other wealth; which would have been some slight
+compensation for the nonrestoring of her throne.
+
+While Cleopatra abode in Rome, more than one man of world-fame bowed
+in homage before her. For example, Lepidus--fat, stupid, inordinately
+rich, fit dupe for cleverer politicians. Marcus Antonius, too,
+--Caesar's protege, and at this time a swaggering, lovable, dissolute
+soldier-demagogue, whose fortunes were so undissolubly fastened to
+Caesar's that he, the winner of a horde of women, dared not lift his
+eyes to the woman Caesar loved.
+
+Among the rest--Marcus Brutus, snarling Casca, and the others--came
+one more guest to the villa--a hard-faced, cold-eyed youth whom
+Cleopatra hated. For he was Caius Octavius, Caesar's nephew and
+presumptive heir; the man who was, years hence, to be the Emperor
+Augustus.
+
+At length, one day, Rome's streets surged with hysterical mobs and
+factions. And news came to the villa that Caesar had been assassinated
+at the Forum. Speedily an angry crowd besieged Cleopatra's house.
+
+Now that the all-feared Caesar no longer lived to protect her, the
+people were keen to wreak punishment on this foreign sorceress who had
+enmeshed the murdered man's brain, and had made him squander upon her
+so much of the public wealth that might better have gone into Roman
+pockets. Rome's new government, too, at once ordered her expulsion
+from the city.
+
+Cleopatra, avoiding the mob and dodging arrest, fled from Rome with
+her son, her fortune, and her few faithful serfs. One more hope was
+gone. For, instead of leaving his money to Caesarion, Caesar, in his
+will, had made the cold-eyed youth, Caius Octavius, his heir.
+
+Back to the East went Cleopatra, her sun of success temporarily in
+shadow. In semi-empty, if regal, state, she queened it for a time, her
+title barren, her real power in Egypt practically confined to her
+brain and to her charm. Nominal Queen of Egypt, she was still merely
+holding the reins, while iron-handed Rome strode at the horse's head.
+
+From afar, she heard from time to time the tidings from Rome. The men
+who had slain Caesar had themselves been overthrown. In their place
+Rome--and all the world--was ruled by a triumvirate made up of three
+men she well remembered--Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus.
+
+The next news was that Antony and Octavius had painlessly extracted
+Lepidus from the combination, and were about to divide the government
+of the whole known world between themselves. Antony, to whom first
+choice was given, selected the eastern half for his share, leaving the
+west to Octavius.
+
+Then came word that Antony was on his way toward Egypt; thither bound
+in order to investigate certain grave charges made by her subjects
+against Cleopatra herself.
+
+Once more were the queen's throne and her life itself in peril. And
+once more she called upon her matchless power over men to meet and
+overcome the new menace. When Antony drew near to the capital,
+Cleopatra set forth to meet him; not with such an army as she might
+perchance have scraped together to oppose the invader, but relying
+solely on her own charms.
+
+Antony by this time was well past his first youth. Here is Plutarch's
+word picture of him:
+
+    He was of a noble presence. He had a goodly, thick beard, a broad
+    forehead, and a crooked nose. And there appeared such a manly look
+    in his countenance as is seen in the statues of Hercules.... And
+    it is incredible what marvelous love he won.
+
+Yes, and it is incredible into what messes that same "marvelous love,"
+first and last, dragged him. He had a wondrous genius for war and for
+statesmanship; but ever, just as those qualities lifted him to
+eminence, some woman would drag him down. For instance, as a young
+man, his budding political hopes were wrecked by Flavia, a charmer who
+enslaved him. Later, Rome turned a deaf ear to the tales of his
+military glory because he chose to escort openly along the Appian Way
+a frail beauty named Cytheria, in a chariot drawn by four lions. In
+rapid succession he--like his idol, Caesar--married four wives.
+
+Flavia was the first--she who blasted his early statesmanship
+ambitions; next Antonia, from whom he soon separated; third, Fulvia, a
+shrew who made his home life a burden, and whose temper drove him far
+from her--not that he really needed such incentive.
+
+But Fulvia loved him, as did all women. For when Cicero lay dead, she
+went to the orator's bier and thrust a bodkin through the once magic
+tongue; thus punishing the tongue, she explained, for its calumnies
+against her beloved husband.
+
+Fulvia was not exactly a cozy-corner wife, as you, perhaps, have
+observed; yet, when she died, Antony was heartily sorry. He said so.
+At the time, he was far away from Rome and home--he had not taken
+Fulvia to Egypt with him--and was basking in Cleopatra's wiles. On a
+visit to Rome he next married Octavia, sister of Octavius. It was a
+state match. He speedily deserted her and hurried back to Egypt.
+
+Antony--true lover and false husband, hero and fool, rake and
+statesman--had fifty sides to his character--and a woman was on every
+side. In times of peace he wallowed in the wildest dissipation, and
+spent vast fortunes without a second thought. In war, he was the idol
+of his men, carousing with them, sharing their hard fare and harder
+life, never losing their adoring respect, always the hero for whom
+they would blithely die.
+
+And so back to the story.
+
+Up the River Cydnus sailed Antony, bent on restoring order to Egypt
+and punishing the cruel Cleopatra. And down the River Cydnus to meet
+him came Cleopatra.
+
+The barge, wherein lay the queen, had sails of purple and gold. It was
+propelled by oars of pure silver. Around the recumbent Cleopatra were
+beautiful attendants, clad--or unclad--as Nymphs, Graces, Cupids. She
+herself wore, on her left ankle, a jeweled band in which was set a
+sacred scarab. That was the full extent of her costume.
+
+At a single look, Antony forgot forever the punitive object of his
+journey to Egypt; forgot that he was ruler of half the world, and that
+he had the cleverness and power to oust Octavius from the other half,
+and to rule it all. He forgot everything, except that he loved her,
+and was content to be her helpless and happy slave; that she was the
+supreme love of his thousand loves; that the world was well lost for
+such love as hers.
+
+From that moment the old-time magnetic statesman and general, Marcus
+Antonius--with his shrewd plans for world conquest--was dead. In his
+place lived Mark Antony, prince of lovers; a man whose sole thought
+and aim in life consisted in worshipping at the bare feet of a
+red-haired, snub-nosed Egyptian woman.
+
+Caesar had loved Cleopatra--and won. Mark Antony loved her--and lost;
+lost everything--except perfect happiness. But for her, Antony might
+have striven night and day, with brain, will, and body, using his
+friends as sacrifices, employing a statesmanship that was black
+treachery, drenching all Europe in blood. But for Cleopatra, he might
+have done all this. He might, as a result, have ousted Octavius and
+made himself, for the minute, master of all the world--as a price for
+his years of racking toil--before some patriotic assassin got a chance
+to kill him.
+
+Thanks to Cleopatra's malign influence, the old warrior spent his last
+years, instead, in a golden Fool's Paradise, whose joys have become
+historic. Wherefore, the schoolbooks hold up Antony as a horrible
+example of what a man may throw away, through folly.
+
+I have tried, in the preceding few paragraphs, to reenforce the
+school-books' teachings; to show that it is better to toil than to
+trifle, to sweat and suffer than to saunter through Arcady, to die
+dead-tired than to die divinely happy. I am sure I make the point
+clear. If I do not, the fault is not mine; and the sad, sad example of
+Antony has gone for naught.
+
+They had a wonderful time there, in the Lotus Land, these two
+super-lovers. Each had had a host of earlier "affairs." But these now
+served merely as do the many rough "detail sketches" that work up at
+last into the perfected picture.
+
+It was no heavy-tragedy romance. The two mature lovers had a saving
+sense of fun that sent them on larks worthy of high-school revelers.
+By night, they would go in disguise through the city, to revel
+unrecognized at some peasant wedding or orgy.
+
+Once, the incognito Antony, on such an expedition, got a sound
+thrashing and a broken head from taking too prominent a part on a slum
+festivity. And Cleopatra never let him hear the last of it. That the
+all-conquering Marcus Antonius should have been beaten up by a crowd
+of Egyptian ~fellaheen~, who trembled at the very mention of his
+name, struck her as the joke of the century.
+
+She had a right lively sense of humor, had this "Serpent of Old Nile,"
+as Antony playfully nicknamed her. And probably this sense of humor
+was one of the strongest fetters that bound to her the love veteran,
+who was sick of a succession of statelily humorless Roman beauties.
+
+Cleopatra was forever playing practical jokes on her lover. Once, for
+example, as she and Antony sat fishing off their anchored barge in the
+Alexandria harbor, Antony wagered that he would make the first catch.
+Cleopatra took the bet. A moment afterward Antony felt a mighty tug at
+his line. With the zest of a born fisherman, he "drew in."
+
+He brought to the surface, suspended from his hook, an enormous
+fish--dried, boned, and salted! Cleopatra had privily sent one of her
+divers over the far side of the barge to swim down and fasten the
+salted fish to her sweetheart's line.
+
+Again, the talk ran to the unbelievable cost of some of the feasts the
+ancient Persian monarchs had been wont to give, and the wholesale
+quantity of priceless wines drunk at those banquets. Whereat,
+Cleopatra offered to wager that she could drink ten million sesterces
+($450,000) worth of wine at a single sitting.
+
+Antony loudly assured her that the thing was impossible. Even so
+redoubtable a tankard man as himself could not hope to drink
+one-hundredth that value of wine in the most protracted debauch. She
+insisted. The wager was made.
+
+Calling for a goblet of "slaves' wine"--a species of vinegar--the
+queen dropped into it the largest pearl of Egypt's royal treasury, a
+gem appraised at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The treasure
+dissolved under the vinegar's sharp acid; and Cleopatra--to a gasp of
+horror from the more frugal onlookers--drained the goblet.
+
+Such banquets staggered Egypt's resources. So did other jolly
+extravagances. Rumors of Antony's strange infatuation reached Rome.
+Rome was used to Antony's love affairs, and Rome knew Cleopatra of
+old.
+
+So Rome merely grinned and shrugged its shoulders. But when the big
+revenues that Antony had promised to wring from the conquered country
+failed to arrive, Rome--sorely wounded in the pocketbook--began to
+protest.
+
+Antony's friends at home pointed out to him what capital the crafty
+Octavius would try to make of this new-born dissatisfaction against
+his colleague. In a momentary gleam of sanity, Antony left the weeping
+Cleopatra and hastened back to Rome to face his enemies.
+
+There, all too briefly, the man's old genius flamed up. He appeased
+the populace, won his former ascendency over the disapproving Senate,
+blocked Octavius' plot to hurl him from power, and sealed his campaign
+of inspired diplomacy by marrying his rival's sister, Octavia.
+
+At a stroke, Antony had won back all he had lost Octavius was
+checkmated, the people were enthusiastic, and once more Antony had
+world rulership within his easy reach.
+
+But in busy, iron-hard Rome, he fell to remembering the lazy sunshine
+of Egypt. The primly gentle Octavia was hopelessly insipid by contrast
+with the glowing super-woman. Memory tugged, ever harder and harder.
+
+Even if this story were fiction, instead of prosy fact, you would
+foresee just what was bound to happen. Back to Egypt, on some flimsy
+pretext, fled Antony. He turned his back on Rome, on his wife, on
+Octavius, on friend, on foe, on future. He was to see none of them
+again. Nor was there to be a second outflash of his old genius. The
+rest was--Cleopatra.
+
+The reunited lovers flew from bliss to bliss, from one mad
+extravagance to another. Statecraft, regal dignity--common sense--all
+went by the board.
+
+At Rome, the effect of Antony's whirlwind reinstatement campaign
+gradually wore off. Revenues did not flow in from Egypt. But all sorts
+of wild stories did. And the wilder they were, the truer they were.
+Rome at large did not bother its brutal head over Antony's morals. But
+all Rome stormed and howled over the fact that the boundlessly rich
+kingdom of Egypt was bringing in practically no more money to the
+coffers of Rome. It was as if men who had invested a fortune in a
+thirty-story office building should find that the superintendent was
+holding back all the rents and losing tenants every day.
+
+Octavius was quick to take advantage of all this. Personally, he hated
+Antony, and he was bitterly resentful of his sister's desertion.
+Politically, he wanted to be lord of the world--as later he was--under
+the title of "Emperor Augustus;" and poor, enfeebled Antony alone
+stood in his way.
+
+On the plea that a new money-getter was needed for Rome in Antony's
+place, Octavius easily roused public feeling into a clamor that Egypt
+be invaded, Antony overthrown, and Cleopatra put to death. Octavius,
+as master of Rome, headed the punitive army of invasion.
+
+Again, on news of his foes' approach, Antony's spirit--but this time
+not his genius--flickered back to a ghost of its old flame. By
+messenger, he sent Octavius a very sporting offer: namely, that waste
+of lives be avoided by Octavius and Antony meeting in single combat,
+to the death; "winner take all."
+
+But Octavius was a politician, not a d'Artagnan; which is why he at
+last became Emperor of Rome and ruler of the known earth. He had not
+those cold, light eyes and thin lips for nothing. He was a strategist
+rather than a gladiator. Back to the challenger came this terse reply:
+
+"Can Antony find no readier mode of death than at the sword of
+Octavius?"
+
+On moved the invaders. And Antony took enough time from Cleopatra's
+side to make halfhearted preparations to resist. The first clash of
+any importance was the sea fight off Actium. There Fortune was
+inclined for the time to smile once again on her old prime favorite.
+All along the line, Antony's warships were driving back and breaking
+the formation of Octavius'. Then, at the crucial moment of the fight,
+Cleopatra, who, in a royal galley, was watching the conflict, ordered
+her galley put about and headed for the distant shore. To this day no
+one knows whether her fatal order was the result of a whim or of
+sudden cowardice or of both.
+
+Her galley swept away from the battle. Antony, seeing it depart,
+feared Cleopatra might have been wounded by a stray arrow. At once he
+forgot that the issue of the day depended solely on him. He realized
+only that the woman he worshipped might be injured. And he ordered his
+own galley to put off in pursuit of Cleopatra's.
+
+The captains of Antony's other ships, seeing their leader apparently
+running away, were seized with panic terror, and followed. The fight
+became a rout. Antony's fleet was annihilated.
+
+With that strangely won battle, the last real obstacle between
+Octavius and complete victory was down. Steadily the conqueror
+advanced on Alexandria. Cleopatra saw how things were going. She knew
+that Antony was forever broken, and that, as a protector against the
+oncoming Romans, he was helpless. So she thriftily shifted her
+allegiance to Octavius; sending him word that she was his admiring
+slave, and that she craved a personal interview.
+
+It was the same old siren trick. At sight, when she was sixteen, she
+had won Caesar's heart; at sight, when she was twenty-eight, she had
+won Antony's heart and soul. On sight, now, at thirty-eight, she hoped
+to make of Octavius a second Antony. But Caesar had had black eyes, and
+Antony's eyes were a soft brown; whereas the eyes of Octavius were
+pale gray and fire-less. Had Cleopatra bothered to study physiognomy,
+she might have sought some more hopeful plan than to enslave such a
+man as this new invader.
+
+Octavius, cold and heartless as he was, would not trust himself to
+meet the super-woman; which was, perhaps, the highest of the billion
+tributes that were, soon or late, paid to Cleopatra's charms.
+
+Instead, Octavius sent her a courteous message, assuring her of his
+respect and infinite admiration, and saying that he would see that she
+was treated with every consideration due her rank. To his friends,
+however, he loudly boasted that she should walk barefoot through Rome,
+bound by gold chains to his chariot axle. And word of this boast came
+to Cleopatra. The game was up.
+
+She walled herself into the huge Royal Mausoleum and had word sent
+forth that she was dead. Antony, himself in hiding from the advancing
+Romans, heard and believed. Nothing was left. He had blithely thrown
+away the world for love. And now, after ten years of glorious
+happiness, the woman for whom he had been so glad to sacrifice
+everything, was dead.
+
+His foes were hastening to seize him. There was but one course for a
+true Roman in such a plight to follow. The example of Brutus, of Cato,
+of a hundred other iron patriots, rose before him. And their example
+Antony followed.
+
+He drove his sword through his body and fell dying, just as news came
+to him that Cleopatra lived. With almost his last breath, Antony
+ordered his slaves to carry him to the queen. The doors and lower
+windows of the mausoleum were bricked up. There was no time to send
+for masons to break an opening in them, if the dying man would reach
+Cleopatra alive. So he was lifted by ropes to an upper window of the
+tomb, and was then swung into the room where Cleopatra awaited him.
+
+And in the arms of the woman who had wrecked him, and who at the
+last--though, mercifully, he never knew it--had sought to betray him,
+Mark Antony died. Perhaps it was an ignoble death, and an anticlimax.
+Perhaps it was a fit end for the life of this man, who had ever been
+the adored of women; and the death he himself would have chosen. Fate
+seldom makes a blunder in setting her scenes.
+
+So perished Mark Antony; to whose life and death, before you judge
+him, I beg you to apply the words of a country preacher I once heard.
+The preacher was discanting on the Biblical personage "out of whom
+were cast seven devils."
+
+"Brethren," said the exhorter, "a man must be far above the ordinary,
+to contain seven devils. In the average man's petty nature there isn't
+room even for a single half-size devil, to say nothing of seven
+full-grown ones."
+
+Cleopatra had long since made up her mind to die sooner than walk in
+chains through the streets where once she had swept as Caesar's
+peerless sweetheart. But she was part Greek and part Egyptian--both
+soft nations, lacking in the stern qualities of Rome. She had no taste
+for naked steel. She was content to die, but she wanted to die without
+pain.
+
+On certain of her slaves she practiced the effects of various Oriental
+poisons. Some of these slaves died in agony, some in mere discomfort.
+One of them died with a smile on his lips--a slave on whom had been
+inflicted the bite of the tiny gray Nile-mud asp.
+
+Cleopatra's question was answered. She put an asp to her breast. The
+serpent fixed its fangs in her white flesh.
+
+And Cleopatra--model and synonym for a worldful of super-women--was
+very comfortably spared the shame of walking chained and barefoot in a
+Roman Triumph.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+THE HOPELESSLY UGLY SIREN
+
+
+A very famous woman discovered once that men are not paragons of
+fidelity. Or, finding that one man was not, she decided that all men
+were alike. And to Jules Sandeau, who had deceived her, she exclaimed,
+in fine, melodrama frenzy:
+
+"My heart is a grave!"
+
+"From the number of its occupants," drawled Sandeau, "I should rather
+call it a cemetery."
+
+The woman, too angry to grasp the meaning of the ungallant speech,
+raged on:
+
+"But I will be avenged. I shall write the tragedy of my love--in
+romance form--and--"
+
+"Why not in city-directory form?" suggested the man.
+
+And the loverly conversation ended in hysterics.
+
+The woman was Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin Dudevant. History,
+literature, and the annals of superwomen know her as George Sand.
+
+As one may glean from her verbal tilt with Sandeau, she was not a
+recluse or a misanthropist. In fact, she numbered her ardent wooers by
+the dozen. Her love life began at a convent school when she was little
+more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list
+of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a
+city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a
+cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it
+embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin,
+Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many
+demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote:
+
+    I am sick of great men. I would far rather see them in Plutarch
+    than in real life. In Plutarch or in marble or in bronze, their
+    human side would not disgust me so.
+
+And the personality, the appearance, the Venusberg charm of this heart
+monopolist? One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that
+launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic
+paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental
+vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts. Here is Balzac's
+description of her. It is found in a letter written to Madame Hanska
+in 1838, when George Sand was at the acme of her super-woman career:
+
+    I found her in her dressing gown, smoking an after-dinner cigar,
+    beside the fire in an immense room. She wore very pretty yellow
+    slippers with fringes, coquettish stockings, and red trousers.
+    Physically, she has acquired a double chin, like a well-fed
+    priest. She has not a single white hair, in spite of her terrible
+    misfortunes. Her beautiful eyes are as sparkling as ever.
+
+    When she is sunk in thought, she looks just as stupid as
+    formerly--as I told her--for her expression lies wholly in her
+    eyes. She goes to bed at six in the morning and rises at noon. (I
+    go to bed at six in the evening and rise at midnight; but, of
+    course, I am conforming myself to her habits.) She smokes to
+    excess and plays, perhaps, too much the grande dame.
+
+Carlyle, still less merciful, snarls forth the following wholly
+Carlylean epitome of George Sand's looks:
+
+"She has the face of a horse!"
+
+Another contemporary writer declares:
+
+"Her hair is as black and shiny as ebony; her swarthy face is red and
+heavy; her expression fierce and defiant, yet dull."
+
+So much for the verity of traditional siren dreams I So much, too, for
+the theory that beauty or daintiness or feminity has anything to do
+with the nameless charm of the world's super-women.
+
+George Sand came, honestly, if left-handedly, by her cardiac prowess.
+For she was a great-great-granddaughter of Adrienne Lecouvreur and
+Marshal Saxe; two of history's stellar heart breakers--a fact of which
+she made much.
+
+Her father was a French army officer--Lieutenant Dupin--and as a mere
+baby his only daughter, Aurore, was acclaimed "daughter of the
+regiment." Decked out in a tiny uniform, the ugly duckling ran wild in
+the army posts where her father was stationed, and joined right
+boisterously in the soldiers' rough sports.
+
+Later, she was sent to a convent. From her own description of this
+particular retreat, it was a place that crushed out all normal and
+childish ideas and filled the growing mind with a morbid melancholy.
+Yet it was there that love first found the girl.
+
+The victim--or victor--was one Stephane de Grandsaigne, professor of
+physiology. Under his tuition she developed a queer craving for
+dissection--a fad she followed, in psychic form, through life. The
+love scenes between herself and her adored professor were usually
+enacted while they were together dissecting a leg or an arm or probing
+the mysteries of retina and cornea.
+
+It was a semigruesome, unromantic episode, and it ended with
+suddenness when the pupil was sent out into the world. There a husband
+was found for her. He was Casimir Dudevant, a man she liked well
+enough and who was mildly fond of her. They lived together for a time
+in modified content. Two children were born to them.
+
+By and by, Casimir took to drink. Many people refused to blame him.
+Indeed, there are present-day students of George Sand's life who can
+find a host of excuses for his bibulous failings. But once, coming
+home from a spree, Casimir forgot to take his wife's lofty reproaches
+with his wonted good nature.
+
+In a flash of drunken anger, he struck her. And she left him.
+
+The high spirit of her act of independence is marred just a little by
+the fact that she chanced to be in love with another man. This other
+man was Aurelian de Seze, a ponderous country magistrate. The affair
+was brief. Presently the two had parted. And George Sand, penniless,
+went to Paris to make a living by literature.
+
+She obtained hack work of a sort, lived in the typical drafty garret
+so dear to unrecognized genius, and earned for a time only fifteen
+francs--three dollars--a month. It was the customary nadir, wherein
+one gathers equipment for success.
+
+Then she met Jules Sandeau. He was a lawyer who dabbled in literature.
+He fell in love with the lonely woman and she with him. They formed a
+literary partnership. Together they wrote novels and began to achieve
+a certain measure of good luck. Their novels were signed "George
+Sand." Why, no one knows. It was a pen name devised by the feminine
+member of the novelistic firm.
+
+But before long Sandeau was left far behind in the race for fame. His
+more or less fair partner wrote a novel on her own account. It was
+"Indiana." Like Byron, she woke one morning to find herself famous.
+The book had lifted her forever out of obscurity and need.
+
+At about the same period, she entered Sandeau's study one day just in
+time to see him kiss another woman. The other woman chanced to be
+their laundress, who, presumably, was more kissable, if less
+inspiring, than was the newly acclaimed celebrity on whom Sandeau had
+been lavishing his fickle affections.
+
+There was a scene, unequaled for violence in any of their joint
+novels. And in the course of it occurred the repartee recorded at the
+beginning of this story. As an upshot, Sandeau followed Dudevant, de
+Seze, Grandsaigne, and the rest into the limbo of George Sand's
+discarded lovers; where he was soon to be joined by many another and
+far greater man.
+
+Her faith in men shattered for at lest the fourth time, George Sand
+forswore fidelity and resolved to make others suffer; even as she
+liked to imagine she herself had suffered. The literary world was by
+this time cheering itself hoarse over her. And literary giants were
+vying for her love.
+
+Out of the swarm, she selected Prosper Merimee. The author of "Carmen"
+was then in his prime as a lion of the salons. To him George Sand gave
+her heart irrevocably and forever. Through youth and maturity they
+worshiped each other--for eight consecutive days. On the ninth day,
+George Sand informed "Carmen's" creator that he was far too cynical to
+be her ideal any longer. Merimee retorted that her "pose of divine
+exaltation" was better suited to an angel than to an ugly woman who
+continually smoked cigars and who swore as pyrotechnically as one of
+her father's most loquacious troopers. So the romance ended.
+
+Followed a bevy of loves well-nigh as brief, most of whose heroes'
+names are emblazoned on the book backs of the world's libraries. And
+after this populous interregnum, came Alfred de Musset.
+
+De Musset was a mere boy. But his wonderful poetry had already
+awakened Europe to ecstacy. He was the beau-ideal of a million
+youthful lovers and their sweethearts; even as, a generation earlier,
+Byron had been.
+
+It was in 1833 that he and George Sand met. De Musset had seen her
+from afar and had begged for an introduction. She was six years older
+than he, and the prettiest girls in France were pleading wistfully for
+his smile. But, at sight, he loved the horse-faced, almost middle-aged
+swearer of strange oaths and smoker of strong cigars. Hence his plea
+to be introduced.
+
+Sainte-Beuve, to whom he made the request, wrote, asking leave to
+bring him to one of George Sand's "at homes." The same day she
+returned a most positive refusal, writing:
+
+    I do not want you to introduce De Musset to me. He is a fop, and
+    we would not suit each other. Instead, bring Dumas; in whose art I
+    have found a soul, if only the soul of a commercial traveler.
+
+But de Musset, unrebuffed, succeeded in his ambition. He managed to
+secure an introduction to her at a banquet given by the ~Revue des
+Deux Mondes~ editors. And almost at once his love was reciprocated.
+Then began a union that was alternately the interest, the scandal, and
+the laughing-stock of a continent.
+
+Each of the lovers was a genius; each had been pedestaled by the
+world; each was supposed to live on a rarified plane far above the
+heads or the ken of mere earth folk. The love affair of two such
+immortals might reasonably be expected--was expected--to be akin to
+the noble romances of poetry.
+
+As a matter of fact, its three-year course was one long series of
+babyish spats, of ridiculous scenes, and of behavior worthier the
+inmates of a mad-house or a kindergarten than of the decade's two
+master intellects.
+
+George Sand expected De Musset to live on the heights of bloodless
+idealism. When he did so, she berated him as heartless. When he failed
+to, she denounced him as an animal. She was never content with
+whatever course he might follow. Yet she was madly in love with him.
+
+During their brief separations, she avalanched him with letters; some
+furious, some imploring, some wildly affectionate, some drearily
+commonplace. Here is an extract from one, displaying a fair sample of
+her warmer moods:
+
+    It is nothing to you to have tamed the pride of such a woman as I,
+    and to have stretched me a suppliant at your feet? It is nothing
+    to you that I am dying of love?--torment of my life that you are!
+
+    He found himself unable to avoid accepting some of the numberless
+    hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. He could modulate
+    from one love affair to another as fleetly and as gracefully as
+    from one key to its remote neighbor.
+
+Here, too, is the account given by a later chronicler of the
+composer's meeting with George Sand:
+
+    One evening, as he was entering a house where a literary reception
+    was in progress, Chopin fancied he was pursued by a violet-scented
+    phantom. In superstitious fear, he would have left the house at
+    once, but friends who were with him laughed away his dread and
+    described the phenomenon as the fancy of a sick man's brain.
+
+    He entered the crowded salon and was forthwith presented to the
+    guest of honor, a swarthy and strange-looking woman--the premiere
+    novelist, Madame Dudevant--George Sand.
+
+In his diary that same night Chopin wrote of his new acquaintance:
+
+    I do not like her face. There is something in it that repels me.
+
+Yet within a day or so he was her adorer.
+
+For a time all went as well as any love story could with such a
+heroine. She gloried in her power to build up for the moment her
+lover's waning strength. Her friends' praise of the feat was as music
+to her. But she was not the type of woman who can forever wait
+patiently upon a fretful convalescent's whims. Her self-sacrifice was
+a flash, not a steady flame.
+
+And in time she girded at the restraints of playing nurse and vitality
+giver. Then, instead of boasting as before, she waxed complaining. She
+told the world at large how exacting and cross and tiresome Chopin
+was.
+
+She once referred to him publicly as "that detestable invalid." She
+announced that she was his ever-patient comrade and nurse. There is no
+authority but hers to bear out the claim of patience. And so the
+once-beautiful relationship dragged out its weary length until George
+Sand could endure the strain no longer.
+
+She deserted Chopin.
+
+Not content with this final blow to the invalid who had loved her for
+years, she continued to vilify him. Among her complaints was one that
+has since passed, in slightly altered form, into a good old reliable
+vaudeville wheeze. She wrote:
+
+    We never addressed a single reproach to each other except once.
+    And that was from the first to the last time we met.
+
+George Sand's desertion was Chopin's deathblow. He never rallied from
+it. He tried to mask his heartbreak by going about as before and
+appearing often in public. But even this was soon denied to him--not
+only by collapsed health, but from the danger of meeting his former
+divinity at the houses he chanced to visit or on the streets. One such
+lesson was enough for him. It was in a friend's crowded drawing-room.
+A historian describes the encounter:
+
+    Thinking herself unobserved, George Sand walked up to Chopin and
+    held out her hand.
+
+    "Frederic!" she murmured, in a voice audible to him alone.
+
+    He saw her familiar form standing before him. She was repentant,
+    subdued, and seeking reconciliation. His handsome face grew deadly
+    pale, and without a word he left the room.
+
+The end came soon afterward. Chopin's mortal illness struck him down.
+Dying, he sent for his lost love. Perhaps the message never reached
+her; perhaps she thought it a trick--she had tried something of the
+sort on de Musset; perhaps she did not realize that the time was so
+short.
+
+At all events, she paid no heed to the frantic appeal that she come at
+once to the dying composer.
+
+Hour after hour, Chopin waited for her, his ears strained for the
+sound of her heavy tread. At last he grew to realize that she would
+not obey the summons, that he would never again see her.
+
+As hope fled, Chopin broke down and cried piteously.
+
+"She promised I should die in no arms but hers!" he sobbed over and
+over.
+
+And that night he died--no less than seven different women claiming
+later to have taken his recreant sweetheart's place at his deathbed.
+
+George Sand was conscience-stricken. She wrote and proclaimed long and
+more or less plausible reasons to account for her failure to go to
+Chopin. But no one who really knew her was convinced of her excuses'
+truth. And so ended one more of her heart stories.
+
+De Musset, by the way refused to admit her to his rooms when he
+himself lay dying--a grisly joke that Paris appreciated.
+
+Back to her work, as once before, George Sand fled for forgetfulness.
+And her fame grew. She was the most prolific woman writer, by the way,
+in literature's history; writing, in all, twenty plays and more than
+one hundred novels.
+
+An Englishman (name buried) courted her at about this time. Still
+miserable over Chopin's death--and far more so over the way people
+were talking about her treatment of him--she was decidedly waspish to
+the trans-Channel admirer. Seeking to win her interest, in a literary
+discussion, he opened one conversation by inquiring:
+
+"Madame Dudevant, what is your favorite novel?"
+
+"'Olympia,'" she answered, without a second of hesitance.
+
+"'Olympia?'" the Englishman repeated, vainly ransacking his memory. "I
+don't think I recall any book of that name."
+
+"Of course you don't," she snapped. "I haven't written it yet."
+
+And perhaps--or perhaps not--his British brain some day unraveled the
+meaning of cryptic retort.
+
+For her infidelities George Sand felt no compunction. She wrote
+frankly concerning them:
+
+    I have never imposed constancy upon myself. When I have felt that
+    love is dead, I have said so without shame or remorse, and have
+    obeyed Providence that was leading me elsewhere.
+
+By her marriage with Dudevant, she had had a son and a daughter. The
+daughter, Solange, inherited much of her mother's lawlessness, with
+none of the latter's inspiration. And now George Sand was to see how
+her own nature worked in another of the same blood.
+
+She arranged a splendid marriage for Solange, a marriage with a man of
+rank and money. And on the very eve of the wedding Solange proceeded
+to elope with a poor sculptor, Clesinger by name.
+
+The mother was equal to the emergency. She ran after the fugitives,
+caught them, bullied Clesinger into marrying Solange, hushed all
+scandal, and installed the young couple in a Paris flat, settling on
+them the bulk of her property. In revenge, Clesinger permanently
+estranged Solange from her mother.
+
+Soon afterward George Sand's sway over men's hearts ceased. Whether
+she was weary of love, or whether love was weary of her, the old
+fascination deserted her. No more as lovers, but as profound admirers
+of her intellect, great men still flocked about her--Matthew Arnold,
+Flaubert, Feuillet, and a host of others. But it was now her brain
+alone they worshiped.
+
+By many years George Sand outlived her charm, dying in 1876 at the age
+of seventy-two, her grandchildren about her--a smugly proper, if sadly
+anticlimactic, ending to a career in which anticlimax had been almost
+as infrequent as propriety.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+MADAME DU BARRY
+
+THE SEVEN-MILLION-DOLLAR SIREN.
+
+
+She came from the same neighborhood that had produced Joan of Arc. She
+even claimed relationship to the long-dead Maid. But at that point all
+likeness between the two comes to a very abrupt end.
+
+She is known to history as "Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier,
+Comtesse du Barry." The parish register of her birthplace describes
+her, less flamboyantly, as "Marie Jeanne, natural daughter of Anne
+Becu, known as Quantigny; born Aug., A.D. 1746."
+
+There are many details in Marie Jeanne du Barry's story that I am
+going to omit--at my own request; not only because they are
+unwriteable, but because their sordid vulgarity is also drearily
+stupid. I apologize in advance for the omissions. But even after the
+process of weeding out, I think there will be quite enough left to
+hold the interest.
+
+When Marie was six, Anne Becu drifted to Paris--the Mecca of her
+trade. And soon afterward, an admirer of Anne's, one Dumonceau, was
+coaxed into lavishing two dollars and forty cents a month on Marie's
+education. Dumonceau had been one of Anne's wooers in the village
+days, and it has been suggested that his interest in little Marie was
+prompted by more than mere kindness--in fact, that he and the infant
+were "more than kin and less than kind."
+
+In any case, the monthly two dollars and forty cents paid Marie's
+expenses in a convent school, where she spent the next ten years. This
+Sainte-Aurore convent, in the Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve, was a
+philanthropic refuge "for all young persons of honest parentage who
+are in circumstances where they run the risk of ruin."
+
+The rules of the Sainte-Aurore were far stricter and icier than those
+of the most investigatable of modern orphanages. Among the punishments
+inflicted on these little wards of God were starvation, beatings, and
+imprisonment in cold and stone-floored dark cells--for the very
+mildest transgressions.
+
+Three dire sins, calling always for instant retribution, were: "To
+laugh, to sing, and to speak above a whisper." For such hideous and
+unnatural crimes as laughter, song, and ordinary speech, these poor
+loveless babies were treated like the vilest criminals. One hopes,
+morbidly, that the theologians who abolished Hell left at least one
+warm corner of it in commission, for the framers and enforcers of
+those gentle rules.
+
+All the foregoing is not sentimental mush, but is mentioned to show
+how dire must have been a pupil's sin that the convent authorities
+could not cope with.
+
+And such a sin--no one knows what it was--Marie committed when she was
+sixteen. For which she was expelled in black disgrace from her happy
+childhood home at Sainte-Aurore, and turned loose upon the world.
+
+Her mother's loving arms were open, ready to receive and succor the
+disgraced girl, and to start her afresh in life--as only a mother can.
+So, to keep Marie from feeling unduly dependent upon a poor working
+woman like herself, she taught her her own trade--the oldest on earth.
+
+With a little basket of cheap jewelry--which served the same purpose
+as a present-day beggar's stock of lead pencils--Marie went the rounds
+of the streets. Her career was cut out for her by her mother's fond
+forethought. And in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a
+thousand, a girl thus launched would have ended in the gutter. But
+Marie was the thousandth woman--a true super-woman, in every sense of
+the word. The filth of the streets could not smirch her--outwardly.
+And luck was waiting around the corner for her.
+
+A rich and eccentric old woman of fashion--Madame Legrade--had a craze
+for amateur theatricals. Catching sight of Marie one day, she was
+struck by the girl's beauty, and hired her, partly as a companion and
+partly as a comedian for her private theatre.
+
+At Madame Legrade's, Marie got her first view of semidecent society.
+And, being adaptable, she picked up a smattering of manners and of
+grammatical speech; only a smattering, but all she cared to acquire.
+There, too, she met such men as the withered old wit, de Richelieu,
+and the Prince de Soubise; and the Duc de Brissac, whose son was one
+day to be the one real love of her life. Here, too, she met a genius
+whom she describes in her "Memoirs" as "a cunning fox; witty ... very
+ugly and very thin." He was Grimm, the fairytale man.
+
+Marie was in clover. But the fortune was too good to last. And because
+a far more glittering fortune was awaiting her just around the corner,
+Destiny soon joggled the girl out of her snug berth. Madame Legrade
+had two sons. Both of them fell crazily in love with Marie. It is not
+on record that she told them she would rather be the poor working girl
+that she was. And Madame Legrade, in horror, ordered her out of the
+house.
+
+Back to her dear, old loving mother, as before, went Marie. And once
+more mother love came to the rescue. Anne Becu had recently married a
+lackey of some great house. She was now "Madame Racon." Marie adopted
+her stepfather's name--the first to which she had ever possessed even
+a semilegal claim--and permitted her mother to get her a job in the
+millinery shop of Madame Labille. This shop was of a sort extremely
+common in that day. It sold not only hats for woman, but sword knots
+and shoe buckles for men. It employed only girls of extreme beauty.
+And it was a favorite lounging place for men about town. Altogether,
+there was no startling change in Marie's vocation from the era when
+she had hawked artificial jewelry.
+
+Her presence drew scores of young dandies to the shop. And she might
+readily have had her pick of the lot. But during a momentary weakness
+of intellect, she plunged into a love affair with a handsome young
+pastry cook, Nicolas Mothon. The other and more ambitious girls guyed
+her right unmercifully for her plebeian tastes. But it was terribly
+serious with Marie. Mathon was the first man to whom she had lost her
+heart. Many years later she wrote:
+
+    When I call to memory all the men who have adored me, I must say
+    it was not poor Nicolas who pleased me least. For I, too, have
+    known what first love can mean.
+
+But she forgot what "first love can mean" as readily as she had
+learned it. For soon she threw over Nicolas for a man of wealth, named
+De la Vauvenardiere; and she abandoned the latter for a suitor named
+Duval; and ousted Duval from her affection for Lamet, the court
+hairdresser.
+
+No, in choosing Lamet, she was not lowering her standard. A court
+hairdresser was far more than a mere barber. He was a functionary of
+vast importance, the confidant of the great, the counselor of the
+unwary, a man of substance and position, the only tradesman in all
+France who was permitted by court edict to wear a sword.
+
+Marie was envied as Lamet's sweetheart; until he went broke,
+overnight, and had to flee to England to dodge a debtor's cell.
+
+Then came the Cosse incident; at least, then it began. Cosse--or Louis
+Hercule Timoleon de Cosse-Brissac--was the Duc de Brissac's son. He
+met Marie in the street one day, so runs the story, followed her to
+the shop, and there, under the pretext of buying a sword knot, fell
+into talk with her. He loved her at first sight, and she loved him.
+Theirs was not such a love as either had hitherto known. It was the
+genuine article.
+
+Cosse was young and good looking and afflicted with republican ideas.
+He did not see in Marie the vender of cheap jewelry and cheaper
+affections, nor the girl who used her millinery job as a mask. To him,
+she was an angel. And--so far as concerned him--she was.
+
+They were young, and they dreamed. Cosse was unlike any man Marie had
+known. His love was utterly unlike any love she had known or heard of.
+Altogether, it was a pretty little romance, on both sides. And if we
+smile at it, let the smile be kindly, with nothing of the leer about
+it. For there was nothing to provoke a leer--at least, not then.
+
+This Cosse affair's early stages are so intertangled with romance,
+legend, court rumor, and later inventions, that I hasten to forstall
+corrections, from readers wiser than I, by confessing that all I know
+of it, or can learn from supposedly reliable sources, is that Marie
+and Cosse parted somewhat suddenly; and the causes variously given are
+that his father put a stop to the romance and that Cosse learned
+something of Marie's real character. It is gravely declared that he
+wanted to marry her, and that his indignant ducal parent not only
+opened his eyes to the bride elect's past, but threatened to throw
+Cosse into the Bastille by means of a ~lettre de cachet~. As I said, I
+vouch for none of these reasons for the break between the two lovers.
+It is all surmise. But what follows is not.
+
+The next man to lose his head and heart to Marie was a young nobleman
+whose repute may be guessed from the fact that--even in dissolute
+eighteenth-century Paris--he was known, not as a roue, but as "~The
+Roue~." He had come to Paris a few years earlier, leaving a wife
+somewhere on the way.
+
+He had squandered his patrimony en route, and reached the capital
+penniless. But he quickly caught the fancy of Madame Malouse, who had
+influence at court. She arranged that he should have practically the
+sole monopoly of supplying the French navy with all its various forms
+of merchandise. This meant fat profits, and he fattened them still
+further by running a select gambling house.
+
+He was Jean, Vicomte du Barry.
+
+Jean met and fell victim to Marie. Realizing what a cash attraction
+her beauty and charm could be made, he installed her as presiding
+genius of his gambling house, as a lure to draw youthful nobles to the
+place. Marie--or Madame Lange, as, for no known reason, she had begun
+to call herself--was the bright star at the Chance Goddess' shine. And
+the money poured fast into the crooked games whereby the house made
+Jean rich.
+
+For a time there was wholesale prosperity all around, with plenty more
+of it to come. Before I go on, may I quote a contemporary writer's
+word picture of Marie, as she appeared at this time?
+
+    Her hair is long, silky, curling like a child's, and blond with a
+    natural ash tint.... Her eyebrows and lashes are dark and curly.
+    Behind them the blue eyes, which one seldom sees quite open, look
+    out with coquettish, sidelong glances.... Her nose is small and
+    finely cut, and her mouth is a perfect cupid's bow.... Her neck,
+    her arms, and her feet and hands remind one of ancient Greek
+    statuary; while her complexion is that of a rose leaf steeped in
+    milk.... She carries with her a delicious atmosphere of
+    intoxication, victorious, amorous youth.
+
+Voltaire once exclaimed, before a portrait of her:
+
+"The original was made for the gods!"
+
+Even as the cherry tree was posthumously invented for Washington and,
+perhaps, the apple for William Tell and the egg for Columbus, so
+around Marie in after years sprang up countless tales of her youth.
+Some may have been true. Some were palpable lies. To which does the
+ensuing anecdote belong?
+
+In the spring of 1768, during her sojourn as "come-on" for the du
+Barry gambling hell, Marie noticed, three days in succession, that she
+was closely followed on the street by "a young man of a sober cast of
+countenance and elegant attire." Now, to be followed was no novelty to
+Marie. And more than one man of "elegant attire" had sued in vain for
+her favor. Yet this youth made no advances. He simply followed her
+wherever she went. And in his absence his face haunted her strangely.
+So, on the fourth day, as she turned suddenly in the street and saw
+him close behind her, she asked, with affected indignation:
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+The man bowed low, with no shadow of hesitancy, made this cryptic
+answer to her query:
+
+"Mademoiselle, will you grant me the first reasonable request I may
+make of you when you are Queen of France?"
+
+Thinking he was a crank--as perhaps he was--she sought to humor him,
+and replied:
+
+"Certainly, monsieur. I promise."
+
+"You take me for a madman," he returned, with a second grave bow. "But
+I am not insane. Adieu, mademoiselle. There will be nothing more
+extraordinary than your elevation--except your end."
+
+He spoke and vanished, either into the street crowd or into thin air.
+
+You may recall the story of the "Man in Black's" midnight visit to
+Ninon de l'Enclos, with a gift to the essence of youth and the warning
+of her death? This was a well-believed and oft-repeated narrative in
+Marie's day. It is highly possible that she built from it her recital
+of the adventure of the "elegantly attired" stranger.
+
+At all events, she told Jean du Barry about it. Whether or not he
+believed it, is no concern of yours or mine. But it assuredly gave him
+an idea; the supreme idea of his rotten life. He saw a one-in-fifty
+chance of making more money through Marie than she could have earned
+for him in a century as divinity of his gambling rooms. And, remote as
+were the scheme's prospects for success, he resolved to make a
+gambler's cast at the venture.
+
+Louis XV., King of France, had been ruled for nearly twenty years by
+the Marquise de Pompadour, who had squandered royal revenues, had made
+and unmade men's career by a nod or a shake of her pretty head, and
+had played at ducks and drakes with international politics. And now
+Madame de Pompadour was dead. Many a younger and prettier face had
+caught Louis' doddering fancy, since her death. But no other
+~maitresse en titre~ had ruled him and France since then.
+
+Briefly, Jean coveted the vacant office for Marie.
+
+Not for her own sake. Jean did not care for her happiness or welfare,
+or for the happiness or welfare of any mortal on earth except of one
+Jean, Vicomte du Barry. But he foresaw that with Marie as the royal
+favorite, he himself, as her sponsor, could reap a harvest such as is
+not the guerdon of one man in a million.
+
+He set to work at his self-appointed task with the same rare vigor and
+cunning that had so long enabled him to elude the hangman and to live
+on better men's money. The first step was to engage the help of Lebel,
+the king's ~valet de chambre~.
+
+Lebel was nominally a servant, but, in a sense, he was mightier than
+any prime minister. For Louis relied implicitly on the valet's taste
+in feminine beauty. It was Lebel, for instance, who had first brought
+Madame du Pompadour to the king's notice. He had done the same good
+turn to many another aspiring damsel. And now, heavily bribed by Jean
+du Barry, he consented to see if Marie was worth mentioning to Louis.
+
+At sight of Marie, the connoisseur valet realized to the full her
+super-woman charm. He recognized her as the thousandth woman--even the
+millionth.
+
+Yet Lebel was ever cautious about raising false hopes. So, not knowing
+that Jean had gone over the whole plan with Marie, he asked her if she
+would honor him by attending a little informal dinner he was soon to
+give, in his apartment, at the Versailles palace; a dinner in honor of
+"the Baron de Gonesse."
+
+Marie, with sweet innocence, accepted the invitation; then timidly
+asked Lebel if she might sit beside him at the dinner, as all the
+others would be strangers to her. The bare thought of his presuming to
+sit down in the presence of the king--otherwise "the Baron de
+Gonesse"--so filled Lebel with horror that he forgot his role of
+diplomacy and blurted out:
+
+"~I?~ Sit at the table with ~him~? I--I shall be unexpectedly called
+from the room, as usual, just as dinner is served. And I shall not
+return until it is over."
+
+When Marie--carefully coached as to behavior, repartee, and so forth,
+by the ever-thoughtful Jean--arrived at Lebel's apartments in the
+palace, on the night of the dinner, she found, to her disgust, that
+the king was nowhere in sight--not even disguised as "the Baron de
+Gonesse"--and that her fellow guests were merely a group of Versailles
+officials.
+
+Not being versed in palace secrets, she did not know that Louis was
+seated in a dark closet behind a film-curtained window, looking into
+the brightly lighted dining room and noting everything that went on,
+nor that cunningly arranged speaking tubes brought every whispered or
+loud-spoken word to him.
+
+Finding the king was not to be one of the guests, the girl
+philosophically choked back her chagrin and set herself to get every
+atom of fun out of the evening that she could. She ate much, drank
+more, and behaved pretty quite like a gloriously lovely street gamin.
+There was no use in wasting on these understrappers the fine speeches
+and the courtesy she had been learning for the king's benefit. So she
+let herself go. And the dinner was lively, to say the very least. In
+fact, it was the gayest, most deliciously amusing dinner ever held in
+those sedate rooms--thanks to Marie.
+
+Louis, in paroxysms of laughter, looked on until the sound of his
+guffaws betrayed his royal presence. Then he came out of hiding.
+
+Marie, for an instant, was thunder-struck at what she had done. She
+feared she had ruined her chances by the boisterous gayety of the past
+hour or so. Then--for her brain was as quick as her talk was dull--she
+saw the fight was not lost, but won, and she knew how she had won it.
+
+Louis XV. was fifty-eight years old. He lived in France's most
+artificial period. No one dared be natural; least of all in the
+presence of the king. All his life he had been treated to honeyed
+words, profound reverence, the most polished and adroit courtesy.
+People--women especially--had never dared be ~human~ when he was
+around.
+
+Marie saw that it was the novelty of her behavior which had aroused
+the king's bored interest. And from that moment her course was taken.
+She did not cringe at his feet, or pretend innocence, or assume
+~grande-dame~ airs. She was ~herself~, Marie Becu, the slangy,
+light-hearted, feather-brained daughter of the streets; respecting
+nothing, fearing nothing, confused by nothing--as ready to shriek
+gutter oaths at her king as at her footman. And, of course, she was
+also Marie Becu, the super-woman whose magnetism and beauty were
+utterly irresistible.
+
+The combination was too much for Louis. He succumbed. What else was
+there for him to do? After the myriad poses of the women he had known,
+Marie's naturalness was like a bracing breeze sweeping through a
+hothouse; a slum breeze, if you like, but none the less a breeze, and
+delightfully welcome to the jaded old monarch.
+
+Louis fell in love with Marie. It was not a mere infatuation of an
+hour, like most of his affairs. He fell completely and foolishly in
+love with her. And he never fell out of love with her as long as he
+lived.
+
+Lebel was in despair. He had hoped Marie might amuse the king. He had
+had no shadow of an idea that the affair would go further. By reason
+of his privileges as an old servant, he actually ventured to
+remonstrate with Louis.
+
+"Sire," he protested, "she is not even legitimate. The birth records
+attest that."
+
+"Then," laughed the king, "let the right authorities make her so."
+
+Accordingly, messengers were sent posthaste to her babyhood home, and
+a new birth certificate was drawn up; also a certificate attesting to
+her mother's legal marriage to a wholly mythical Monsieur de Gomard de
+Vaubernier and to several other statements that made Marie's
+legitimacy as solid as Gibraltar.
+
+"Also," pleaded the valet, "she is neither a wife nor a woman of
+title."
+
+"We can arrange both those trifles," the king assured him.
+
+And, with charming simplicity, the thing was done. Jean sent for his
+worthless elder brother, Guillaume, Comte du Barry, who was at that
+time an army captain. And on September 1, 1768, Marie and Guillaume
+were duly married. The lucky bridegroom received enough money to pay
+all his debts and to make him rich. Then he obligingly deserted his
+new-made wife at the church door, according to program, and wandered
+away to spend his fortune as might best please him. Thereby, Marie
+Becu became Madame la Comtesse du Barry, without having her cur of a
+husband to bother about.
+
+A list of her possessions and their values--duly set down in the
+marriage contract, which is still on file--shows the state of Marie's
+finances at this time. I copy it for the benefit of those who may be
+interested to learn of a useful life's by-products. At twenty-two--in
+1768--so says the contract, Marie was the sole owner of:
+
+    One diamond necklace, worth sixteen hundred dollars; an aigret and
+    a pair of earings in clusters, worth sixteen hundred dollars;
+    thirty dresses and petticoats, worth six hundred dollars; lace,
+    dress trimmings, caps, et cetera, worth twelve hundred dollars;
+    six dozen shirts of fine linen, twelve complete morning dresses,
+    and other articles of linen, et cetera, worth four hundred
+    dollars.
+
+One obstacle alone now barred Marie's road to supremacy. According to
+unbreakable royal etiquette, three things were indispensable to the
+woman who aspired to become a French king's ~maitresse en titre~--she
+must be legitimate, she must be of noble rank, and she must have been
+presented at court.
+
+The first two conditions, Marie had fulfilled. The third was a poser.
+In order to be presented at court, some reputable woman of the old
+nobility must act as sponsor. And not one decent woman of high rank
+would sink to acting as sponsor for Marie. Moreover, the king declared
+he did not care whether she were presented or not, and he would take
+no step to help her in the matter.
+
+Without this presentation, she could not appear publicly at court, she
+could not sway overt political influence, she could not have a suite
+of rooms at the palace. Between a presentation and no presentation lay
+all the difference between uncrowned queen and a light o' love. And no
+one would sponsor Marie.
+
+Jean du Barry, at last, solved the problem, as he had solved all the
+rest.
+
+He had able assistance. For, a court clique had been formed to back
+Marie's pretentions. The clique was headed by such men as the old Duc
+de Richelieu and the much younger Duc d'Aiguillon. The latter was
+violently in love with Marie, and there is no reason to think that his
+love was hopeless. But the rest of the clique cared not a straw about
+her. To them, the whole thing was a master move in politics. With
+Marie in control of the king, and themselves in control of Marie, they
+foresaw an era of unlimited power.
+
+The Duc de Choiseul, prime minister of France, was the sworn enemy of
+this clique, which formed the "opposition." And Choiseul swore to move
+heaven and earth to prevent Marie's presentation, for he knew it would
+lead to his own political ruin; as it did.
+
+Jean du Barry hunted around until he discovered somewhere in Navarre a
+crotchety and impoverished old widow, the dowager Comtesse de Bearn.
+She was a scion of the ancient nobility, the decayed and dying branch
+of a once mighty tree. She was not only poor to the verge of
+starvation, but she had a passion for lawsuits. She had just lost a
+suit, and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
+
+The good-hearted Jean, through the clique's help, arranged to have the
+case reopened and the decision reversed. This was before our own day
+of an incorruptible judiciary. He also promised her a gift of twenty
+thousand dollars in gold. All this in return for the trifling service
+of journeying up to Paris and thence to Versailles, to act as sponsor
+for the lovely Madame du Barry, who had wilfully declared that she
+would be presented under no less auspices than those of the
+illustrious Comtesse de Bearn.
+
+The old comtesse accepted the offer with all the shrinking reluctance
+a hungry dog shows at the proffer of a bone. She came up to Paris, at
+the expense of the clique, and was immured in Jean's house, with the
+gambler's sister, Chon (Fanchon) du Barry as her jailer and
+entertainer.
+
+Choiseul, through his spies, learned of the plot, and he tried in
+every way to kidnap the old lady or to out-bribe the du Barrys.
+
+Meanwhile, coached by Jean, the fair Marie was making King Louis' life
+miserable by throwing herself at his feet, in season and out of
+season, and beseeching him to silence her enemies forever by allowing
+her to be presented. When these tactics failed, she would let loose
+upon the poor king a flood of gutter language, roundly abusing him,
+turning the air blue with her profanity, and in other ways showing her
+inalienable right to a place in court circles.
+
+Louis would promise nothing. The turmoil alternately bored and amused
+him. At last--April 21, 1769--on his return from the hunt, after an
+unusually good day's sport, the king casually remarked to all
+concerned:
+
+"The presentation of Madame la Comtesse du Barry will occur at
+to-morrow evening's levee."
+
+The traditional and well-thumbed bombshell exploding among them would
+have created no more stir in court circles than did this yawned
+announcement. Choiseul and his followers were in despair. Jean ran
+around in circles, making preparations for the triumph. Marie
+rehearsed for the hundredth time the complicated forms of etiquette
+the occasion called for.
+
+The Choiseul faction tried one thing after another to block the
+ceremony. They kidnapped Marie's hairdresser, stole the coach in which
+she was to make the trip from her Paris house to Versailles, arranged
+a holdup on the road, and so forth. Thanks to Jean's wit and clique's
+power, a new hairdresser and coach were provided in the nick of time.
+And the Versailles road was so heavily guarded that a regiment of
+cavalry could scarce have dared intercept the carriage.
+
+According to one story, Choiseul even got a message past all the
+carefully reared barriers to Madame de Bearn, prevailing on her to
+plead agonized illness and to keep to her bed on the evening set for
+the presentation. Whereupon, so runs the yarn, a character actor from
+the Comedie Francaise was paid to "make up" as Madame de Bearn and to
+perform her functions of sponsor. This may or may not be true. It
+forms the central theme of De Vere Stacpoole's novel, "The
+Presentation."
+
+On the great night, the court was assembled, tensely waiting for Marie
+to arrive. At the appointed time--no Madame du Barry appeared. The
+minutes grew into an hour; people began to whisper and fidget; the
+Choiseul party looked blissful; the clique could not hide its worry.
+Louis stood, frowning, between the suspense stricken D'Aiguillon and
+Richelieu. At last he turned from them and stared moodily out of a
+window. Then, moving back into the room, he opened his lips to declare
+the levee at an end. As he started to speak, an usher announced:
+
+"Madame la Comtesse de Bearn! Madame la Comtesse du Barry!"
+
+And Marie entered, with her sponsor--or with some one who looked
+sufficiently like Madame de Bearn to deceive any one.
+
+According to one version, Marie was late because at the last instant
+another Choiseul obstacle had to be cleared away. According to
+another, she was purposely late to enhance the dramatic interest of
+her arrival. Here is an account of the presentation:
+
+    Madame du Barry, with her chaperon, advanced to where the king
+    stood between their graces, the Ducs of Richelieu and Aigullon.
+    The formal words were spoken, and Madame du Barry sank to the
+    ground before the king in a profound curtsy. He raised her right
+    hand courteously, his lips twitching with laughter....
+
+    She was decked in jewels, priced at nineteen thousand dollars, the
+    gift of the king. She was garbed in one of the triumphant gowns
+    that the women of the hour termed a "fighting dress." So radiant
+    an apparition was she, so dazzling at the first minute of
+    surprise, that even her enemies could not libel her beauty. After
+    she was presented to the king, she was duly presented to Mesdames,
+    to the Dauphin, to the Children of France.
+
+Marie had won. For the next five years she was the real Queen of
+France. And, during that time, she cost the French nation, in cold
+cash, something over seven million dollars.
+
+She was not at all on the style of the Pompadour, who had yearned to
+meddle in politics. Marie cared nothing for politics, except to help
+out her army of friends and dependents. She had no ambitions. She had
+not even craved on her own account to be the king's ~maitresse en
+titre~. All she wanted was to have a good time. And she had it. The
+pleasure was all hers. The French people did the paying; until, years
+later, they exacted bloody settlement of the score.
+
+Pompadour had worn out her life trying to "amuse the unamusable," to
+find novelties that would entertain the king. Marie did nothing of the
+sort. Instead, she demanded that the king amuse her. Pompadour had
+sought to sway the destinies of nations. Marie was quite happy if she
+could spend the revenues of her own nation.
+
+She treated Louis in a way that caused the court to gasp with horror.
+She scolded him shrilly; petted him, in public, as if he had been her
+peasant spouse; and always addressed him as "France." He enjoyed it.
+It was a novelty.
+
+Once, when she was giving an informal breakfast with a dozen or more
+nobles as guests, she ordered the king to make the coffee. Amused, he
+obeyed. She took one sip of the royal-brewed beverage, then tossed the
+cup into the fireplace, exclaiming:
+
+"France, your coffee is as insipid as your talk!"
+
+All political matters she turned over to d'Aiguillon, who was the
+clique's spokesman. To please him, and to "get even" for old scores,
+she caused the ruin of Choiseul.
+
+The mode of Choiseul's downfall is interesting as a side light on
+court intrigue. The clique taught Marie how to poison the king's
+ever-suspicious mind against the prime minister, and she did so with
+great success. Thanks to her, Louis was held to believe that Choiseul,
+feeling his power over the monarch slipping, was planning a war scare
+with Spain, so that he could prove his seeming worth to the kingdom of
+France by dispelling the cloud.
+
+The clique--having access, through a spy, to all of Choiseul's
+correspondence--resorted to a fairly ingenious trick. At Marie's
+suggestion, Choiseul's secretary was summoned to the palace. He was in
+the clique's pay. Before the king, he was questioned as to what he
+knew about Choiseul's affairs.
+
+The man, with an air of mystery, answered that he knew nothing of
+them, but that he would give his majesty one hint--let the king
+request Choiseul to write a letter to Spain, assuring that nation of
+France's peaceful intent. Should Choiseul do so without comment, it
+would show he was not plotting a war scare, as charged. But should he
+hesitate--well, what could that prove, instead?
+
+The plotters already knew that Choiseul had that very day sent a
+letter to Spain, proposing the mutual signing of a declaration of
+peace between the nations. The king requested his minister to send a
+letter that was almost identical with the one he had already written
+and dispatched. Naturally Choiseul hesitated. And the work was done.
+
+Yet, out of careless good nature--she would not have bothered to harm
+anybody, politically or otherwise, if she had had her own way--Marie
+insisted that the king settle a liberal pension on the fallen
+minister; this despite the fact that Choiseul and his sister, Madame
+de Grammont, had both worked with all their might and main to block
+her rise.
+
+She was good, too--as they all were--to her mother. She presented the
+horrible old woman with two or three estates and a generous income.
+She did the same for her titular husband, Guillaume, Comte du Barry.
+Her lightest fancy was enough to make or wreck any Frenchman.
+Everybody, high or low, was at her mercy. People of the bluest blood
+vied for chances to win her favor.
+
+The Chevalier de la Morliere dedicated his book on Fatalism to her.
+The Duc de Tresmes, calling on her, sent in a note: "The monkey of
+Madame la Comtesse begs an audience." The Dauphin--afterward Louis
+XVI.--and Marie Antoinette, the Dauphiness, were forced to abase
+themselves before this vulgarian woman whom they loathed. She reigned
+supreme.
+
+Extravagant as Pompadour had been, Marie was tenfold more so. She not
+only made the king gratify her every crazy whim, but she spent much
+time inventing crazy whims for him to gratify. If anything on sale was
+costly enough, she wanted it, whether it was pretty or hideous. All
+Marie demanded was that the article should be beyond the reach of any
+one else. In consequence, people who wanted to please her used to
+shower her with gifts more noteworthy for cost and for unusualness
+than for beauty. And one of these gifts chanced to be a jet-black and
+quaintly deformed ten-year-old slave boy, from Bengal. The slave's
+native name was unpronounceable, and the Prince of Conti--who had
+bought him from a sea captain and presented him to Marie--renamed him
+Louis Zamore.
+
+Marie was delighted with the boy--as soon as she heard the price paid
+for him, and that he was the only one of his species in France. She
+dressed him in outlandish Eastern garb, and she used to tease him into
+screeching rages, as a mischievous child might tease a monkey. The
+slave child grew to detest his lovely owner. Remember Louis Zamore,
+please. He will come back into the story.
+
+Here is a correct, but incomplete, list of Marie's personal
+expenditures during the five years of her reign as brevet queen of
+France:
+
+    To goldsmiths and jewelers, four Hundred and twenty-four thousand
+    dollars; to merchants of silks, laces, linens, millinery, one
+    hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred dollars; for
+    furniture, pictures, vases, et cetera, twenty-three thousand five
+    hundred dollars; to gilders, sculptors, workers in marble,
+    seventy-five thousand dollars. On her estate at Luciennes--whose
+    chateau was built in three months by the architect Ledoux, whom
+    she thrust into the Academy for doing it--she spent sixty-five
+    thousand dollars.
+
+ZThe heirs of one firm of creditors were, as late as 1836, still
+claiming the sum of one hundred and thirty thousand dollars from her
+estate. She had "state dresses, hooped dresses, dresses sur ~la
+consideration, robes de toilette~;" dresses costing two hundred
+dollars, four hundred dollars, six hundred dollars, and one thousand
+dollars; dresses with a base of silver strewn with clusters of
+feathers; dresses striped with big bars of gold; mosaic dresses shot
+with gold and adorned with myrtle; and riding habits of white Indian
+silk that cost twelve hundred dollars.
+
+She had dresses whose elaborate embroidery alone cost twenty-one
+hundred dollars. Her dressing gowns had lace on them worth five
+hundred dollars and eight hundred dollars. She had cuffs of lace
+costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, point-lace caps valued at
+three hundred dollars, and ~point Argentan~ costumes at eighteen
+hundred dollars. She ordered gold ornaments and trinkets of all sorts
+galore. Roettiers, the goldsmith, received an order from her for a
+toilet set of solid gold--for which she had a sudden whim. The
+government advanced twelve thousand ounces of gold for it.
+
+Boehmer, the Paris jeweler, knowing of her love for ultra-costly
+things, made up for her a huge diamond necklace, of a heterogeneous
+mass of many-carat diamonds, arranged with regard to show and wholly
+without a thought of good taste. The necklace was so big and so
+expensive that Marie declared at once she must have it. Louis
+willingly consented to buy it for her; but he died before the purchase
+was made, and Boehmer was left with the ugly treasure loop on his
+hands. Long afterward he tried to sell it to Marie Antoinette. And
+from that transaction rose the mystery of "The Queen's Necklace,"
+which did much to hasten the French Revolution.
+
+In the spring of 1774, as King Louis and Marie were driving toward
+Versailles, they saw a pretty girl in a wayside field, gathering grass
+for her cow. Louis greeted the girl with a fatherly smile. The girl
+looked back at him with perfect indifference.
+
+Piqued at such unwonted contempt for his royal self, the king got out
+of his carriage, waddled across to where the girl stood, and kissed
+her. The reason she had seemed indifferent was because she was dazed.
+The reason she was dazed was that she was in the early stages of
+smallpox.
+
+Louis caught the infection and died a few days later.
+
+The first act of Louis XVI.--the king's grandson and successor--was to
+order Marie to a convent. Later he softened the decree by allowing her
+to live at Luciennes, or anywhere else outside a ten-mile radius from
+Paris.
+
+Then it was that the fallen favorite met Cosse once more. And their
+old-time love story recommenced, this time on a less platonic footing.
+She kept her title of "Comtesse," and had enough money--as she paid
+few of her debts--to live in luxury; still beautiful, still loved,
+still moderately young.
+
+The Revolution burst forth. Marie enrolled herself as a stanch
+loyalist. Hearing that the king and queen were pressed for funds, she
+wrote to Marie Antoinette:
+
+    Luciennes is yours, madame. All that I possess comes to me from
+    the royal family; I am too grateful ever to forget it. The late
+    king, with a sort of presentiment, forced me to accept a thousand
+    precious objects. I have had the honor of making you an inventory
+    of these treasures--I offer them to you with eagerness. You have
+    so many expenses to meet, and benefits without number to bestow.
+    Permit me, I entreat you, to render unto Caesar that which is
+    Caesar's.
+
+When the king and queen were beheaded, she secretly wore black for
+them. Also, she made a trip to England, where she tried to sell some
+of her jewels to help the royalist cause. All these things were duly
+repeated to the revolutionary government by Louis Zamore, her
+Bengalese servant.
+
+One evening she was expecting a visit from Cosse. But midnight came,
+and he had not appeared.
+
+"Go down the road," she ordered Zamore, who had just returned from an
+errand to Paris, "and see if you can catch sight of him."
+
+"I can show him to you--or part of him--without troubling to do that,"
+retorted Zamore, with sudden insolence.
+
+Whipping one hand from behind his back, he tossed on the floor at
+Marie's feet the head of her lover. Cosse had been guillotined that
+day. Zamore, in return for certain information to the government, had
+received the head as a gift.
+
+The information he had given led to Marie's arrest on the following
+charges:
+
+"Having wasted the treasures of the state, conspiring with the enemies
+of the Republic, and having, in London, worn mourning for the late
+King."
+
+Marie was sentenced to death, on December 7, 1793, and was beheaded
+the same day. Almost alone of all the Frenchwomen thus put to death,
+she turned coward at the last. The strain of peasant blood came to the
+fore. And where aristocrats rode smiling to the scaffold, Marie du
+Barry behaved like a panic-stricken child. She fell on her knees and
+begged for her life. She told where every article of value she
+possessed was buried, in her garden. If she thought thus to buy back
+her life, she did not understand the souls of such men as her captors.
+
+They heard her to the end, jotting down the directions for finding her
+treasure. Then she was put into the tumbril, and was started on her
+way to the scaffold. The journey led past the old millinery shop where
+she had once worked. As she caught sight of its sign, she screamed
+out, twice.
+
+The crowd had long ago grown accustomed to the sight of death. Now
+they seemed to awaken to the fact that they were about to kill a
+woman, a wondrous beautiful woman, at that. A sigh of pity ran through
+the throng. The driver in charge of the tumbril, fearing a riot and a
+rescue, whipped up the horses and drove on with his load. There were
+others besides Madame du Barry in the death wagon.
+
+The cart reached the scaffold at four-thirty in the afternoon. Marie
+was the first to mount the steps to the guillotine.
+
+Says De Goncourt, her biographer:
+
+"They heard her on the steps of the scaffold, lost and desperate, mad
+with anguish and terror, struggling, imploring, begging for mercy,
+crying, 'Help! Help!' like a woman being assassinated by robbers."
+
+Then fell the ax edge. And Marie's seven-million-dollar debt to the
+people of France was paid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+"THE MOST GORGEOUS LADY BLESSINGTON"
+
+
+She was the ugly duckling of a family of seven beautiful children--the
+children of queer old "Shiver-the-Frills" Power, of Tipperary. Her
+name was Marguerite. Her father picked out a pretty name for the
+homely girl and then considered his duty done.
+
+Marguerite was a great trial to everybody; to her good-looking
+brothers and lovely sisters; to Shiver-the-Frills, who was bitterly
+chagrined that his record for beauteous offspring should have been
+marred by so hideous an exception; to the family governess, who
+wouldn't even take the trouble to teach her to read; to the neighbors,
+whose joy in beauty she offended. Altogether, Marguerite was taught to
+consider herself a mistake. It is a lesson that children learn with
+pitiful readiness. Perhaps the mystic "Unpardonable Sin" consists in
+teaching them such a damnable doctrine.
+
+Her father's baptismal name was not really Shiver-the-Frills, though
+nobody ever spoke of him by any other term. He had been christened
+Edmund, and he was a squireen of the Tipperary village of Knockbrit.
+He was a local magistrate, and he fulfilled his magisterial office
+almost as well as a mad dog might have done.
+
+He had an insane temper. He did not confine this to his home--where he
+beat his children and servants most unmercifully--but aired it on the
+bench as well. Notably when, in a rage, he lawlessly commandeered a
+troop of dragoons and galloped over Tipperary and Waterford Counties
+with them, hunting down and killing peasants who had stirred his anger
+to maniac heat by some petty uprising.
+
+He was a dandy--fop--macaroni--toff--whatever you choose, too; in a
+tarnished and down-at-heel way. And from his habit of eternally
+shaking out his dirty shirt ruffles and lace wristbands, in order to
+keep them from hanging limply, he was called "Shiver-the-Frills."
+
+Marguerite's home life was one unbroken hell. Starvation,
+shabby-genteel rags, beatings, and full-flavored curses were her daily
+portion. A kind-hearted neighbor, Miss Anne Dwyer, took pity on the
+poor, abused little ugly duckling and taught her to read and write.
+But for this, she would have grown up too ignorant to pass the very
+simplest literacy test.
+
+And an odd use the child proceeded to make of her smattering of
+education. Before she could spell correctly, she began to write
+stories. These she would read aloud by the peat smolder, on winter
+evenings, to her awed brothers and sisters, who looked on such an
+accomplishment as little short of super-natural.
+
+Wonderful stories she wrote, all about princesses who had all the
+clothes they could wear and who could afford three square meals, with
+real butter, every single day of their lives; and about princes who
+never swore at or beat children or flew into crazy rages or even
+fluttered dirty ruffles.
+
+The girl's gift at story writing gave her a higher place in the family
+esteem than she had ever enjoyed before. So did another miracle which
+came to pass when Marguerite was about twelve. She grew pretty. The
+ugly duckling, in less than a single year, developed from repulsive
+homeliness into a striking beauty. In fact, by the time she was
+fourteen, she was far and away the loveliest of all the "exquisite
+Power sisters."
+
+Then began her career of super-woman. For, with dawning beauty, came
+an access of the elusive charm that sets Marguerite's type apart from
+the rest of womankind. And men were swift to recognize her claim to
+their worship. The swains whom Shiver-the-Frills allowed to visit his
+tumble-down mansion paid court to her instead of to her sisters. The
+fame of her reached the near-by garrison town of Clonmel, and brought
+a host of young redcoat officers swarming to the Knockbrit house.
+
+Of these officers, two soon put themselves far in the van of all other
+contestants. They were Captain Murray and Captain Maurice St. Leger
+Farmer. Murray was a jolly, happy-go-lucky, penniless chap, lovable
+and ardent. The kindest thing one can say about Captain Farmer is that
+he was more than half insane.
+
+Marguerite met Captain Murray's courtship more than halfway. But
+Shiver-the-Frills told the sighing, but impecunious, swain to keep
+off, and ordered Marguerite to marry Farmer, who had a snug fortune.
+Marguerite very naturally objected. Shiver-the-Frills flew into a
+ready-made rage and frightened the poor youngster almost to death by
+his threats of what should befall her if she did not change her mind.
+
+So, cowed into submission, she meekly agreed to marry Farmer. And
+marry him she did, in 1805, when she was but fifteen.
+
+It was an early marrying age, even in that era of early marriages.
+Many years had passed since Sheridan's metrical toast "to the maiden
+of bashful fifteen." And, as now, a girl of fifteen was deemed too
+young for wedlock. But all this did not deter old Shiver-the-Frills
+from a laudable firmness in getting rid of the daughter he hated. So
+he married her off--to a man who ought to have been in an insane
+asylum; in an asylum for the criminally insane, at that.
+
+If Marguerite's life at Knockbrit had been unhappy, her new life was
+positive torture. Farmer's temper was worse than Shiver-the-Frills.
+And he added habitual drunkenness to his other allurements.
+
+There is no profit in going into full details of Marguerite's horrible
+sojourn with him. One of his milder amusements was to pinch her until
+the blood spurted from her white flesh. He flogged her as he never
+dared flog his dogs. And he used to lock her for days in an unheated
+room, in winter, with nothing to eat or drink.
+
+Marguerite stood it as long as she could. Then she ran away. You can
+imagine how insufferable she had found Farmer, when I say she went
+back by choice to her father's house.
+
+Shiver-the-Frills greeted the unhappy girl with one of his dear old
+rages. His rage was not leveled at the cur who had so vilely misused
+her, but against the young wife who had committed the crime of
+deserting her husband.
+
+Not being of the breed that uses bare fingers to test the efficiency
+of buzz-saws, I neither express, nor so much as dare to cherish in
+secret, any opinion whatsoever on the theme of Woman's Rights. But it
+is a wholly safe and noncontroversial thing to say that the fate of
+woman at large, and especially of husband-deserters, to-day, is
+paradise by comparison with what it was a century ago. For leaving a
+husband who had not refused to harbor her, Marguerite became in a
+measure an outcast. She could not divorce Farmer; she could not make
+him support her, unless she would return to him. She was eyed askance
+by the elect. Her own family felt that she was smirched.
+
+Shiver-the-Frills cursed her roundly, and is said to have assumed the
+heavy-father role by ordering her to leave his ramshackle old house.
+Without money, without protector, without reputation, she was cast
+adrift.
+
+There was no question of alimony, of legal redress, of freedom; the
+laws were all on Farmer's side. So was public opinion. Strange to say,
+no public benefactor even took the trouble to horsewhip the husband.
+He was not even ostracized from his own circle for his treatment to
+his girl wife.
+
+Remember, this was in the earliest years of the nineteenth century,
+and in a country where many people still regarded wife-beating as a
+healthful indoor sport. Less than three decades had elapsed since a
+man immortalized by Thackeray had made the proud boast that, during
+the first year of his married life, he had never, when sober, struck
+his wife in anger. Nor was it so very long after the Lord Chief
+Justice of England handed down an official decision that a man might
+legally "punish his wife with a rod no thicker than his lordship's
+thumb." Whereat, one woman inquired anxiously whether his lordship
+chanced to suffer from gouty swelling of the hands. Oh, it was a merry
+time and a merry land--for women--this "Merrie England of the good old
+days!"
+
+Marguerite vanished from home, from friends, from family. And a blank
+space follows. In the lives of scores of super-women--of Lola Montez,
+Marie de Chevreuse, Lady Hamilton, Adah Menken, Peg Woffington,
+Adrienne Lecouvreur, even of Cleopatra--there was somewhere a
+hiatus,--a "dark spot" that they would never afterward consent to
+illumine. And such a line of asterisks sheared its way across
+Marguerite's page at this point.
+
+She is next heard of as leading a charmingly un-nun-like existence at
+Cahair, and, two years later, at Dublin. At the Irish metropolis, she
+enamored the great Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose portrait of her is one
+of his most famous paintings, and one that is familiar to nearly
+everybody. The picture was painted in 1809 when Marguerite was just
+twenty and in the early prime of her beauty.
+
+She had ever a knack of enslaving army men, and her next wooer--in
+fact, Lawrence's lucky rival--was an Irish captain, one Jenkins. She
+and Jenkins fell very seriously in love with each other. There was
+nothing at all platonic in their relations.
+
+Jenkins was eager to marry Marguerite. And when he found he could not
+do so, because of the trifling obstacle that her husband was alive, he
+sought a chance to put Captain Maurice St. Leger Farmer out of the
+road. But he was a square sort of chap, in his way, this lovelorn
+Jenkins. He balked at the idea of murder, and a duel would have put
+him in peril of losing Marguerite by dying. So he let Farmer severely
+alone, and contented himself by waiting impatiently until the drunken
+husband-emeritus should see fit to die.
+
+And, until that happy hour should come, he declared that Marguerite
+was at least his wife in the eyes of Heaven. Startingly novel mode of
+gluing together the fragments of a fractured commandment! But the
+strange part of the affair is that Captain Jenkins' eminently
+respectable family consented to take the same view of the case and
+publicly welcomed Marguerite as the captain's legal wife.
+
+And so, for a time, life went on. Marguerite was as nearly respectable
+as the laws of her time gave her the right to be. Jenkins was all
+devotion. She was moderately well received in local society, and she
+kept on winning the hearts of all the men who ventured within her
+sway.
+
+Then into her life swirled Charles John Gardiner, Earl of Blessington,
+one of the most eccentric and thoroughly delightful figures of his
+day.
+
+Blessington was an Irish peer, a widower, a man of fashion. He had a
+once-enormous rent roll, that had been sadly honeycombed by his mad
+extravagances, but that still totaled one hundred and fifty thousand
+dollars a year.
+
+What chance had the worthy, but humble, Captain Jenkins against this
+golden-tinged whirlwind wooer? And the answer to that conundrum is the
+same that serves for the question concerning the hackneyed snowball in
+the Inferno. Blessington swept Marguerite off her feet, bore her away
+from the protesting captain and installed her in a mansion of her own.
+
+Then, too late, came the happy event for which Jenkins and Marguerite
+had so optimistically been looking. In October, 1817, Captain Maurice
+St. Leger Farmer joined some boon companions in an all-night orgy in
+the upper room of a pothouse. Farmer waxed so much drunker than usual
+that he mistook the long window of the loom for the door. Bidding his
+friends good-by, he strolled out of the window into space. Being a
+heavier-than-air body, in spite of the spirits that buoyed him up, he
+drifted downward into the courtyard below, breaking his miserable
+neck.
+
+Marguerite was free. Jenkins hastened to her and besought her to marry
+him, offering her an honorable name and a place in the world, and
+pointing out to her how much better off she would be in the long run
+as Mrs. Captain Jenkins than as the brevet bride of a dissolute earl.
+
+But Blessington had by this time become the helpless thrall of
+Marguerite's charm. As soon as he heard of Farmer's death, he whisked
+her off to church and married her. And, by way of doing all things
+handsomely, he soothed the disconsolate Jenkins' feelings with a
+fifty-thousand-dollar check; thereby securing firm title to the good
+will and fixtures of the previous tenant of his wife's heart.
+
+The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest.
+And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken
+sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance
+Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so
+well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid
+results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to
+her delight, all through life.
+
+Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite,
+he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One
+of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own
+estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love
+for amateur theatricals.
+
+At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and
+their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have
+been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to
+every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for
+miles to witness one of them.
+
+For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and
+written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of
+these rules by the first, which read:
+
+    Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words
+    of the author, in case his own invention fails him.
+
+One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for
+stage dialogue.
+
+But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country
+house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to
+taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips.
+She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.
+
+There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the
+capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London
+season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.
+
+She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains,
+and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She
+had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in
+everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring
+themselves to hate her.
+
+She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in
+his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a
+lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the
+merciless pace began to tell on him.
+
+Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice,
+long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's
+lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they
+went, and London mourned them.
+
+They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish nobleman," says one
+biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels
+with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances
+of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of
+travel."
+
+They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and
+for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern
+pork-king might envy.
+
+One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:
+
+"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"
+
+One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box
+confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off
+posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who
+was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite
+was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the
+most noted--or notorious--men-about-town in all Europe.
+
+He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero.
+He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet,
+hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete--could
+ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,--and so on, through the whole list of
+sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could
+paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an
+amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to
+win fame as the premier man of fashion of the period. A once
+celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero.
+Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to
+his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington--who should have been wise
+enough to see what was coming--was no exception.
+
+Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along
+with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This
+meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment
+under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his
+military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his
+senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the
+love of her life.
+
+The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found
+England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had
+parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's
+beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the
+Blessington party of tourists.
+
+D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek god
+returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And--so far as one
+knows--that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the
+D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose
+her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over
+women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But
+Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living
+charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory
+fashion, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his
+powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.
+
+Still, the time passed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved
+his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his
+yacht--a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of.
+Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at
+a fancy figure.
+
+There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the
+Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa--on the white-elephant
+yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.
+
+They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady
+Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the
+once over," and passed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted
+with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two
+and a half years.
+
+The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere--which
+cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price
+was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to
+herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the
+place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according
+to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last
+the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most
+delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique,
+if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited
+Herculaneum, it was with the archaeologist, Sir William Gell, as guide.
+When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman
+such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or
+the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was
+under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer
+Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her
+love.
+
+From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met
+Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her
+charms.
+
+By this time--nay, long before this time--people had begun to talk,
+and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the butt
+of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an
+effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing
+this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He
+promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry
+Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living
+child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to
+him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and
+there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.
+
+The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris.
+Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant,
+and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she
+was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to
+bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen
+receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room
+was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until
+everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:
+
+    The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of
+    two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every
+    feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of
+    a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with
+    white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the
+    columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk
+    curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal
+    the recess altogether.... A silvered sofa has been made to fit the
+    side of the room opposite the fireplace.
+
+    Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to
+    correspond.... The salle de bain is draped with white muslin
+    trimmed with lace.... The bath is of white marble, inserted in the
+    floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting
+    of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is
+    suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.
+
+It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829;
+perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.
+
+Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his
+estate--which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand
+dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was
+seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town
+house in London.
+
+All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons.
+When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and
+the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in
+Kensington--Albert Hall now stands on its site--for Marguerite could
+not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.
+
+She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen
+gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first
+pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the
+Genoa days. The ~New Monthly Magazine~ first printed serially this
+capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as
+"Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books,
+this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.
+
+She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to
+supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of
+Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a
+descriptive verse written by her under each picture--straight hack
+work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her
+pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day--or in any day, for
+that matter.
+
+Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess,"
+and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I
+think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored
+me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their
+truthful depiction of the social life of her times.
+
+She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as
+~Friendship's Offering~, ~The Amulet~, ~Keepsakes~, and others of like
+mushiness of name and matter.
+
+Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the
+best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent
+the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the
+sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had
+blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with
+Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.
+
+It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine
+as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and
+Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except--perhaps he was not fooled.
+Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.
+
+And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party
+any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the
+gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay
+stayed on.
+
+There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek
+God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to
+be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still
+"the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as
+adorable as in her teens.
+
+Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent
+presence--and more than one of them made desperate love to their
+hostess--were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain
+Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another
+genius.
+
+Disraeli--one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield--was
+at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally
+brilliant novelist. There is a story--I don't vouch for it--that,
+piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged
+himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau,"
+in his "Henrietta Temple."
+
+Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke
+of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes."
+Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to
+persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the
+picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:
+
+"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"
+
+To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were
+the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by
+every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a
+similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even
+start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother.
+Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work
+than any other author our country has produced.
+
+During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an
+invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called
+almost every day. He fairly raved over her.
+
+"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever
+known!" he wrote.
+
+Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one
+of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it
+would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an
+English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.
+
+Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a
+job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of
+Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III.,
+Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked
+around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made
+clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a
+while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for
+loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to
+the Bonaparte cause.
+
+Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money,
+and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman
+outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out
+of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite
+Blessington's.
+
+Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a
+thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a
+few minutes how he repaid their generosity.
+
+While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius
+for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be
+only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about
+five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was
+a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could
+people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current
+on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?
+
+The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an
+answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.
+
+They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of
+Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more
+money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough.
+Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the
+all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious
+Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down,
+the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to
+keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope
+to pay.
+
+Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position,
+D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated
+panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping
+Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now
+stood her in fine stead.
+
+They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them,
+they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than
+five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone.
+D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five
+thousand from overtrustful personal friends.
+
+Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his
+"Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay,
+before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the
+earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate.
+He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting
+brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the
+bottomless gulf of extravagance.
+
+Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never
+going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a
+crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and
+prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to
+Marguerite and D'Orsay.
+
+Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of
+egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring
+streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the
+house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore
+House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby
+people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred
+Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.
+
+On Sunday alone--when the civil arm of the law rests--did the
+much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which
+had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they
+entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the
+drawing-room in the guise of a guest.
+
+Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great
+ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped
+by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the
+man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a
+half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in
+the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined
+him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.
+
+Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne,
+in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for
+debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear
+land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like
+sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray
+water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They
+would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for
+the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had
+known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a
+penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives,
+fifty times more bitter than death.
+
+It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself
+among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she
+was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in
+France.
+
+She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of
+poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already
+there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the
+Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he assuredly could do
+no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a
+flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady
+Blessington."
+
+Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did
+nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarrassed and not at all
+over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made
+them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have
+had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was
+wont to make.
+
+Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors
+had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art
+treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer,
+and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of
+the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.
+
+Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her
+beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had
+squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot,"
+(ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street,
+while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.)
+She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And
+now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.
+
+A younger and stronger woman might readily have succumbed under such a
+crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face
+it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.
+
+D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in
+her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that
+mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay
+was laid there at her side.
+
+Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony.
+Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a
+creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+MADAME RECAMIER
+
+THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL
+
+
+Paris--the hopelessly mixed, ~sans-culotte~-philosopher new Paris
+society of 1793--took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on
+the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.
+
+The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty.
+Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few
+hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December.
+The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to
+look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned
+to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the
+day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic
+murder dreams.
+
+The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter
+of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes--a
+mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and
+steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.
+
+The groom was Jacques Recamier--by profession a powerful banker, by
+choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons.
+Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their
+house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.
+
+As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after
+the "civil ceremony"--so runs the story--a passing man halted and
+gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every
+line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name.
+And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the
+inspiration for the wonderful "~Jeune fille~" picture that made
+him immortal.
+
+The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had
+the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by
+the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a
+cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous
+of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine--around which they
+had lately gathered, gloating--spattered on their clothes and unwashed
+faces.
+
+In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried
+by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked ~sans-culottes~.
+And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that
+vile gathering--a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly
+marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.
+
+Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations,
+strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from
+the ~halls~.
+
+Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that
+April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers--and fellow
+beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of
+dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat--for whose shrunken
+chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was
+sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.
+
+An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the
+little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid
+superstitions.
+
+Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a
+contemporary?
+
+"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and
+transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist;
+coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein
+float rose leaves."
+
+Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the
+seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had
+received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in
+her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed
+away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully.
+Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against
+her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever
+breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)
+
+Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame
+Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly
+declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the
+theme:
+
+"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection
+was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his
+name."
+
+Says Turquan:
+
+"She was Recamier's daughter."
+
+And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a
+love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had
+condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the
+day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.
+
+Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but
+worshiped her. Not a day had passed but he had come to see her. He had
+loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy godfather.
+She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."
+
+Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable
+danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch
+executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard
+was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the
+rotten Paris of that day.
+
+So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard
+the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a
+meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a
+retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter
+she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over
+her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a
+total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.
+
+These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early
+marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had
+fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his
+flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.
+
+Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the
+more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society reassembled on its
+peak, after the years of guillotine-aided class leveling. And, in this
+heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says
+Sainte-Beuve:
+
+"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and
+very ardent."
+
+To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal
+ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured
+forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no
+response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting,
+and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such
+encouragement was really needed.
+
+Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose
+Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this
+series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of
+super-women--Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges,
+Countess Potocka, and the rest--and his name is more often seen in all
+history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient
+if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.
+
+Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a
+young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman.
+Now in his days of power and--for him--leisure, he amply made up for
+such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black
+eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right
+ardent love to her.
+
+Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually
+lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his
+cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic
+young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.
+
+She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been
+written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells
+another story.
+
+Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras,
+where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire
+of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow
+sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the
+late Mrs. Caesar.
+
+To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who
+had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and
+he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time
+to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.
+
+Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon--whom she did not even
+pretend to love--by saying that the young man had a great future.
+Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged,
+mutinous Army of Italy.
+
+Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the
+world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home
+the hero and idol of the hour--to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that
+Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She
+wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon
+shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he
+treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was
+stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found.
+Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.
+
+"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this
+moment?"
+
+"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of
+Dantzig.
+
+"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or
+both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of
+company she can find at such short notice."
+
+Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to
+overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans'
+ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well--aristocrats
+of the noblesse--who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the
+Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings--all flocked to
+the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.
+
+Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy--or frosty--virtue were the
+talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out
+this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should
+make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?
+
+Other women--women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years
+earlier, save as a dependent--were making fools of themselves over the
+Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred
+frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect
+in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make
+lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.
+
+She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but
+took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her
+seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war
+campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to
+keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon,
+thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could
+fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear.
+Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff
+from his charmer.
+
+It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a
+big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with
+much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier
+as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.
+
+This was a master stroke--a ~tour de force~--a knock-out--anything you
+will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers throughout the empire were
+yelping for slices of the state finances. And the post of lady in
+waiting was one for which nearly any woman of the court would gladly
+have parted with all she no longer possessed.
+
+Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be
+administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier
+coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in
+waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not
+mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated
+absence.
+
+It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.
+
+In a burst of babyish fury, he--the ruler of France and the arbiter of
+Europe's fate--crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.
+
+He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge
+of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or ~les
+majeste~ or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the
+strength of it, he banished her from Paris.
+
+It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half
+of Europe by a single convolution of his demigod brain; or could
+screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his
+thin hair.
+
+From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console
+his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to
+build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one.
+Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he amassed enough
+money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.
+
+To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and
+then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman
+friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a
+tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and
+facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.
+
+This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile
+conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been
+banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that
+when she once said to an ill-favored man:
+
+"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers
+laughed--at her, not at her victim.
+
+In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and
+man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame
+Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After
+the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them,
+remarking airily:
+
+"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."
+
+"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted
+courtesy.
+
+The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave
+of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no
+secret of his devotion.
+
+In those days the title of prince-royal carried real weight, and the
+gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made
+Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame
+Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk
+of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the
+prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his
+royal-blooded self.
+
+It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a
+hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic
+union he proposed--he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.
+
+The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his
+amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to
+let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose--or an annulment
+of their marriage, which would have been still simpler--and marry
+Prince Augustus.
+
+Always impersonal and adoring in his attitude toward Jeanne, Recamier
+now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and
+becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a
+father than in a husband.
+
+But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning
+her back on the wealth and title of a princess in order to remain with
+the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For,
+again, physical reasons intervened.
+
+Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another
+ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother,
+until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest,
+Jeanne--after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation--gave a
+decided refusal.
+
+General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her
+out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom
+court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to
+carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed
+and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so
+unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in
+France mad with chagrin.
+
+Benjamin Constant, too--cunning statesman of the old school--loved
+her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain
+fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that
+mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the
+rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as
+a friend.
+
+Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself
+on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of
+statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been
+laid to her influence.
+
+Another exile--General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war
+and love--now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed.
+He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court
+to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism
+chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he
+found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too,
+departed, hopeless.
+
+The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He
+was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of
+Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after
+conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter
+brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.
+
+When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms
+and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for
+the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And--though it has been denied
+by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason--almost
+at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's
+enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.
+
+Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was
+set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one
+another to join the alliance against him.
+
+The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.
+
+As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers
+returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had
+banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in
+something of their old style there.
+
+Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of
+kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of
+newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling
+over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.
+
+The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly
+about--they would have run up a tree, two years earlier--and bragging
+of Napoleon's fall.
+
+There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had
+once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow
+campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too,
+was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none
+the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the
+victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians,
+not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the
+Allies.
+
+Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among
+them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak
+of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor
+of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.
+
+The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive
+libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret
+of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British
+morality.
+
+Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a
+friend:
+
+"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on
+his knees before me in sinful adulation."
+
+I fear he would have roused crass horror in the bosom of the
+mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and
+Cleopatra," exclaimed:
+
+"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious
+queen!"
+
+The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man
+of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons--but for a very brief
+time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests
+being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.
+
+Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country.
+Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out
+of her house.
+
+By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the
+omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris--which adored
+Jeanne and hated the English hero--went wild with delight. Jeanne's
+popularity from that moment was boundless.
+
+Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat
+hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his
+ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.
+
+Canova, the premier sculptor of his day--he who later paid such
+assiduous court to Elizabeth Paterson--fell in love with Jeanne. So
+indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her
+knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.
+
+When the busts were done, Canova--who was constantly receiving and
+rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts--showed her
+his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity.
+She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do
+her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection
+and left the studio.
+
+The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her
+acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers
+to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.
+
+Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received
+shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the
+love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have
+noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the
+host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth
+of devotion lavished on him.
+
+And so it was with Jeanne Recamier--although the affair from first to
+last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had
+rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe
+out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike
+author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother
+read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."
+
+Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for
+transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to
+the next had won for him the sobriquet "~L'Inconstant~." He had
+traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had
+hobnobbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of
+introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during
+the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's
+tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.
+
+Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and
+earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke,
+sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as
+a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in
+jail--Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.
+
+From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a
+crazily passionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of
+mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.
+
+When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in
+marriage. She refused--for reasons best known to herself and her
+physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives,
+faithful and utterly devoted lovers.
+
+Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad
+foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to
+cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded
+his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross,
+bringing out its cleaner, nobler traits.
+
+"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing
+more beautiful nor more good than you."
+
+When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty.
+Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne
+looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.
+
+Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she
+refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature
+years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when
+she was seventy.
+
+The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not
+interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."
+
+The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for
+years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's
+eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut
+himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him,
+became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.
+
+His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of
+life left in his heart--his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a
+frightened child to a tender mother.
+
+Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful
+Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her
+blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its
+sweetness.
+
+Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man
+she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which
+had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million
+whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the
+gleaming past.
+
+The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a
+baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the
+world, lingered on for several years longer.
+
+When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned
+Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It
+broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she
+followed her lover to the grave.
+
+Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose
+very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and
+flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any
+way resembles hers.
+
+Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for
+the men who loved them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+LADY HAMILTON
+
+PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES
+
+
+She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha
+the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione,
+the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible
+the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of
+all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or
+otherwise--probably otherwise--of all their authors. Because, at a
+period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose
+from nursemaid to title.
+
+Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did
+not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's
+crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady
+of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed
+askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose
+momentarily as a lady's maid.
+
+Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me
+work up by degrees to the happening itself.
+
+She was a Lancashire lass, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she
+dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why.
+Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact,
+she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with
+the legal right to one.
+
+Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her
+mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs.
+Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen.
+She had already learned to read--a rare accomplishment in those days
+for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she
+greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as
+well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as
+quickly as a Chinaman.
+
+There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so
+in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of
+asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in sex-problem
+fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.
+
+Emma reappeared from the asterisk cloud in London, where she was
+nursemaid in the house of a Doctor Budd, one of the physicians at St.
+Bartholomew's Hospital. Doctor Budd's housemaid at that time, by the
+way, later became a Drury Lane star, under the name of "Mrs. Powell."
+And in that bright afterday she and the even more apotheosized Emma
+renewed their below-stairs friendship.
+
+For some reason Emma left Doctor Budd's service rather suddenly and
+found a job as helper in the shop of a St. James' Market mercer. She
+was sixteen, and she was gloriously beautiful. Her figure was superb.
+Already she had a subtle charm of her own which drew to her feet
+crowds of footmen, shopboys, apprentices, and such small deer. There
+is no record that they one and all were sent away disconsolate.
+
+During her brief career as helper to the St. James' Market mercer,
+Emma chanced to attract the notice of a woman of quality who one day
+entered the shop. And forthwith she was hired as lady's maid. The girl
+had picked up a smattering of education. She had scraped from her pink
+tongue the rough Lancashire bur-r-r. She had learned to speak
+correctly, to ape the behavior of the solid folk whose servant she had
+been. Now, from her new employer, she was to learn at firsthand how
+people in the world of fashion comported themselves. And,
+chameleonlike, she took on the color of her gay surroundings.
+
+Soon she could lisp such choice and fashionable expletives as "Scrape
+me raw!" and "Oh, lay me bleeding!" and could talk and walk and
+posture as did her mistress. Trashy novels by the dozen fell into her
+hands from her mistress' table. Emma devoured them, gluttonously and
+absorbed their precepts as the human system absorbs alcohol fumes.
+
+Please don't for one moment get the idea that there was anything
+profitable to a young girl in the novels of the latter eighteenth
+century. Perhaps you have in mind such dreary sterling works as
+"Pamela," "Clarissa Harlow," "Sir Charles Grandison," and others that
+were crammed into your miserably protesting brain in the Literature
+Courses. Those were the rare--the very rare--exceptions to a large and
+lurid list, which included such choice classics as "Moll Flanders,"
+"Roxana"--both of them by the same Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe,"
+and whose other novels would send a present-day publisher to States
+prison--"Peregrine Pickle," "Fanny Hill," "The Delicate Distress,"
+"Roderick Random," and the rest of a rank-flavored multitude.
+
+Emma reveled in the joys of the local "circulating library," too; one
+of those places that loaned books of a sort to cause even the kindly
+Sheridan to thunder his famous dictum:
+
+"A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical
+knowledge. It blossoms through the year. And, depend on't, they who
+are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last."
+
+Much reading filled Emma with wonderful new ideas of life.
+Incidentally, it made her neglect her work, and she was discharged.
+Her next step was to become barmaid in a tavern. While she was there,
+a young admirer of hers was seized by the navy press gang. Emma went
+to the captain of the ship to beg for her swain's release. The captain
+was John Willett Payn, afterward a rear admiral. Payne granted the
+lovely girl's plea. He not only gave her what she asked, but his own
+admiration as well. Her story as a heart winner had begun.
+
+In fiction, the gallant captain would soon have tired of his lively
+sweetheart and cast her aside. But Emma was not a lowly sweetheart.
+She was a super-woman. She showed how much stranger than fiction truth
+may be by deserting Payne for a richer man. First, however, she had
+wheedled the captain into hiring tutors and music masters for her, and
+she profited vastly by their teachings.
+
+Her new flame was a sporting baronet, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, of
+Up Park, Sussex. Sir Harry was an all-round athlete and a reckless
+horseman. He taught Emma to ride--"a beggar on horseback?"--and she
+became the most daring equestrienne of the century. He taught her to
+spend money, too. And so splendidly did she learn her lesson that
+inside of a year Sir Harry was bankrupt.
+
+Perhaps ~all~ rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very good
+reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't. The
+rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the
+exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble
+rodent.
+
+There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the
+bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly
+consideration, she left him.
+
+She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend;
+equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm,
+but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black
+hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.
+
+And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack,
+Graham by name.
+
+Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine--from Doctor Faustus down,
+the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised
+as a means of exchanging age for youth--and he vowed that it would
+make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an
+example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said,
+had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had
+become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis."
+Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out
+Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in
+gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which
+Emma posed:
+
+    He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which,
+    in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman,
+    nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as
+    Hygeia, goddess of health.
+
+Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to
+suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to
+behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and
+sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed
+through the shimmer of rose-colored light.
+
+And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was
+slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him,
+and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He
+was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage
+of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained
+to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no
+less than thirty-nine pictures of her.
+
+"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is
+superior to all womankind."
+
+The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure.
+Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth.
+Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels,
+but racing abreast.
+
+Soon, out of the ruck and forging far ahead, appeared Charles Francis
+Greville, wit, art connoisseur, and nephew and heir of the famed
+antiquary diplomat, Sir William Hamilton. Greville cut out all rivals,
+Romney among the rest, and won Emma for his own.
+
+Theirs was an odd love affair. For here, too, Emma gave full rein to
+her craving for education. And she showed for the first time just why
+she was so eager to be highly educated. It was not for mere learning's
+sake, but to enhance the charm that gave her a hold over men. She
+cared nothing for any but the showy accomplishments. She already had a
+fair groundwork in English and ordinary school studies. She made
+Greville get her the best teachers in singing, in dancing, in acting.
+Perhaps she looked forward to a stage triumph, but more likely to
+outshining the colorless bread-and-butter women of her day.
+
+Never did pupil better repay the pains of her teachers. Her voice
+presently rivaled that of many a prima donna. Her dancing was a
+delight. It was she who conceived the celebrated "shawl dance" that
+was the rage throughout Europe for years thereafter, and that still is
+used, in very slightly modified form, by ~premieres danseuses~.
+But acting was Emma's forte. Says a contemporary writer:
+
+    With a common piece of stuff she could so arrange and clothe
+    herself as to offer the most appropriate representations of a
+    Jewess, a Roman matron, a Helen, Penelope, or Aspasia. No character
+    seemed foreign to her, and the grace she was in the habit of
+    displaying under such representations excited the admiration of
+    all who were fortunate enough to be present on such occasions.
+    Siddons could not surpass the grandeur of her style or O'Neil be
+    more melting in the utterance of deep pathos.
+
+In this heyday of her prosperity, Emma hunted up her aged and
+disreputable mother, bestowed on her the name "Mrs. Cadogan," and
+settled a rich pension on her. At about the same time, too, Emma bade
+a cheery farewell to the serviceable name of Lyon and took to calling
+herself Emma Harte.
+
+Then Greville went broke.
+
+In his new-found poverty, he hit on a plan of life foreign to all his
+old ideas.
+
+He decided to ask his rich old uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to pay his
+debts and settle a little annuity on him. With this sum as a means of
+livelihood, he intended to marry Emma, and, with her and their three
+children, settle down in some cheap suburb.
+
+How this appealed to Emma history forgets to say. Judging by both past
+and future, it is not unjust to suppose that she may have been making
+ready once more to emulate the ship-deserting rat. But this time she
+did not need to. The ship was about to desert her--for a
+consideration.
+
+Greville, full of his new hopes, went to Sir William Hamilton and laid
+the plan before him. His nephew's derelictions from the straight and
+narrow path had long distressed the virtuous old diplomat. And in
+Greville's financial troubles Sir William thought he saw a fine chance
+to break off his nephew's discreditable affair with Emma.
+
+He offered to set Greville on his feet again if that luckless youth
+would drop Emma's acquaintance. The enamored Greville refused. Sir
+William insisted, raising his offer of financial aid, and pointing
+out, with tearful eloquence, the family disgrace that a marriage to a
+woman of Emma's desolute character must cause. It was all quite like a
+scene from a modern problem play. But Fate, her tongue in her cheek,
+was preparing to put a twist on the end of the scene worthy of the
+most cynical French vaudeville writer.
+
+Greville resented his uncle's rash judgment of his adored Emma, and
+begged him to come and see her for himself, hoping that Emma's wonder
+charm might soften the old man's virtue-incrusted heart. Reluctantly,
+Sir William consented to one brief interview with the wicked siren.
+
+At sight of Emma, Sir William's heart melted to mushiness. He fell
+crazily in love with the woman he had come to dispossess. There was
+another long and stormy scene between uncle and nephew; after which
+Greville, for an enormous lump sum, transferred to Sir William
+Hamilton all right and title and good will to the adorable Emma Harte.
+And Sir William and Emma departed thence, arm in arm, leaving Greville
+a sadder but a richer man. What became of the three children I don't
+know. By the way, Emma had taught them to call her "aunt," not
+"mother."
+
+Will you let me quote a deadly dry line or two from an encyclopedia,
+to prove to you how important a personage Sir William was, and how
+true is the axiom about "no fool like an old fool"?
+
+    Hamilton, Sir William, British diplomatist and antiquary
+    (1730-1803), student of art, philosophy and literature. From 1764
+    to 1800 English ambassador to the Court of Naples. Trustee of
+    British Museum, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice president of the
+    Society of Antiquaries, distinguished member of the Dilettante
+    Club, author of several books. Sir Joshua Reynolds, his intimate
+    friend, painted his portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery.
+
+Sir William, who was home on leave of absence when he met Emma, took
+her back with him to Italy. But before they sailed she had prevailed
+on him to marry her.
+
+It was easy. He was old.
+
+The marriage was kept secret until, in 1791, she led her husband back
+to England on another leave of absence and up to the altar of St.
+George's Church, where, on September 6th of that year, they were
+married all over again; this time with every atom of publicity Emma
+could compass. She was then twenty-seven; her husband was sixty-one.
+
+In state they returned to the court of Naples--the most corrupt,
+licentious, false, utterly abominable court in all Europe. If you will
+glance at the annals of the courts of that period you will find this
+statement is as true as it is sweeping. On her earlier visit, as the
+supposed brevet bride of the ambassador, Emma had been warmly received
+by Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples and sister to Marie Antoinette of
+France. Emma and Marie Caroline were kindred spirits--which is perhaps
+the unkindest thing I could say about either of them--and they quickly
+formed a lasting friendship for each other.
+
+Emma was glad to get back to Naples. Apart from her marriage, her
+visit to England had not been a success. A certain element in London
+society, attracted by her beauty, her voice, and her talent as an
+actress, had taken her up. But Queen Charlotte had refused her a
+presentation at the British court, and the more reputable element of
+the nobility had followed royal example and given her a wide berth.
+English society under George III. was severely respectable--at least
+in the matter of externals; a quality it was soon to mislay, under
+George IV. Hence Emma's joy at returning to a court where
+respectability was a term to be found only in the dictionary.
+
+The King of Naples was a fool. His wife was the little kingdom's
+ruler. Emma, Lady Hamilton, became her chief adviser. Writes one
+historian:
+
+    It is not too much to say of these two women that for years they
+    wielded the destinies of Naples, and seriously affected the
+    character of the wars that ended with the peace of Europe in 1815,
+    when both were dead.... Both were endowed with powers of mind far
+    above the average of their sex; both exhibited energy and
+    understanding that inspired them to bold and decisive, if not
+    always laudable, deeds; both were as remarkable for their personal
+    beauty as for their self-reliance, their knowledge of men, and
+    their determination to make the most of their information. To say
+    that Marie Caroline loved Lady Hamilton is to misstate a fact;
+    there was no love in the royal composition; but her ungovernable
+    and undying hatred of the French inclined her, no doubt, in the
+    first instance toward the wife of the English ambassador, and the
+    subsequent devotion of the favorite secured an attachment that is
+    confessed and reiterated through whole pages of a vehement and
+    overstrained correspondence.
+
+Naples, just then, was between two fires. There was fear of a French
+invasion--which arrived on schedule time--and there was also danger
+that England would ruin Neopolitan commerce. Emma's white hands were
+at once plunged, wrist-deep, into the political dough; and a sorry
+mess she proceeded to make of it. For example, the King of Spain wrote
+a confidential letter to his brother, the King of Naples, accusing the
+English government of all sorts of public and private crimes and
+telling of Spain's secret alliance with France. The king showed it to
+his wife, who in turn showed it to Lady Hamilton. Emma stole and
+secretly sent the letter to the British cabinet. The result was a
+bloody war between England and Spain.
+
+About two years after Emma's marriage, an English warship, the
+~Agamemnon~, touched at Naples, and her captain called to pay his
+respects to the British ambassador and to deliver a letter from the
+admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. After a few minutes' talk with the
+captain, Sir William insisted that the latter should meet Lady
+Hamilton.
+
+He bustled into the drawing-room to prepare Emma for the visitor's
+arrival, saying excitedly to her:
+
+"I am bringing you a little man who cannot boast of being very
+handsome, but who, I pronounce, will one day astonish the world. I
+know it from the very words of conversation I have had with him."
+
+On the heels of Sir William's announcement, the "little man" came into
+the room. At first glance, he scarcely seemed to justify Hamilton's
+enthusiasm. He was clad in a full-laced uniform. His lank, unpowdered
+hair was tied in a stiff Hessian queue of extraordinary length.
+Old-fashioned, flaring waistcoat flaps added to the general oddity of
+his figure.
+
+Sir William introduced him as "Captain Horatio Nelson."
+
+Lady Hamilton lavished on the queer guest no especial cordiality. It
+is not known that she gave him a second thought. Nelson, little more
+impressed by the super-woman, wrote to his wife in England an account
+of the call, saying of Lady Hamilton--whose story, of course, he and
+everybody knew:
+
+"She is a young woman of amiable manners, who does honor to the
+station to which she has been raised."
+
+Yet Nelson had unwittingly met the woman who was to tarnish the pure
+glory of his fame; and Emma had met the man but for whom she would
+to-day be forgotten. So little does Fate forecast her dramas that, at
+the first meeting, neither of the two immortal lovers seems to have
+felt any attraction for the other.
+
+Not for five busy years did Nelson and Emma Hamilton see each other
+again.
+
+Then Nelson came back to Naples, this time in triumph--a
+world-renowned hero, the champion of the seas, Britain's idol. He had
+become an admiral, a peer of England, a scourge of his country's foes.
+Back to Naples he came. Part of him; not all--for victorious warfare
+had set cruel marks on him. He had left his right eye at Calvi in
+1794, and his right arm at Teneriffe in 1797. He was more odd looking
+than ever, but he was an acclaimed hero. And Naples in general and
+Emma Hamilton in particular welcomed him with rapture.
+
+He was in search of the French fleet, and he wanted the King of Naples
+to let him reprovision his ships in the Neapolitan harbor. Now, France
+and Naples just then happened to be at peace. And, by their treaty, no
+more than two English warships at a time could enter any Neapolitan or
+Sicilian port. The king's council declared the treaty must stand. Lady
+Hamilton decided otherwise.
+
+She used all her power with the queen to have the treaty set aside. As
+a result Marie Caroline issued an order directing "all governors of
+the two Sicilies to water, victual, and aid" Nelson's fleet. This
+order made it possible for Nelson to go forth reprovisioned--and to
+crush the French in the Battle of the Nile.
+
+In the first rumor of this battle that reached Naples, Nelson was
+reported killed. Soon afterward he appeared, alive and well, in the
+harbor. Here is his letter to his wife, telling how Lady Hamilton
+received him on his return. Nelson, by the way, had been married for
+nearly twelve years. He and his wife were devoted to each other.
+Judging from this letter, he was lamentably ignorant of women or was
+incredibly sure of Lady Nelson's love and trust. Or else his courage
+was greater than that of mortal husband. He wrote:
+
+    Sir William and Lady Hamilton came out to sea to meet me. They, my
+    most respectable friends, had nearly been laid up and seriously
+    ill, first from anxiety and then from joy. It was imprudently told
+    Lady Hamilton, in a moment, that I was alive; and the effect was
+    like a shot. She fell, apparently dead, and is not yet perfectly
+    recovered from severe bruises. Alongside came my honored friends.
+    The scene in the boat was terribly affecting. Up flew her
+    ladyship, and, exclaiming: "Oh, God, is it possible?" she fell
+    into my arm, more dead than alive. Tears, however, soon set
+    matters to rights; when alongside came the king.... I hope, some
+    day, to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton. She
+    is one of the very best women in the world; she is an honor to her
+    sex. Her kindness, with Sir William's, to me, is more than I can
+    express. I am in their house, and I may tell you, it required all
+    the kindness of my friends to set me up. Lady Hamilton intends
+    writing to you. May God Almighty bless you, and give us in due
+    time a happy meeting!
+
+France sought revenge for the help given to Nelson's fleet, and
+declared war on Naples. The Neapolitans, in fury at being dragged into
+such a needless conflict, rose against their dear king and adored
+queen--especially against their adored queen--and threatened to kill
+them. By Lady Hamilton's aid the royal family reached Nelson's
+flagship and took refuge there from the mob. Sir William and Lady
+Hamilton went along. The populace looted the British embassy and stole
+everything of value Sir William owned--about one hundred and
+ninety-five thousand dollars' worth of property in all. Thus, Hamilton
+was the third man who had lost a fortune through Emma.
+
+Meanwhile, Nelson had sailed to Palermo, taking the fugitives along.
+There he made his home with the Hamiltons. And scandal awoke, even in
+that easy-going crowd. Nor did the scandal die down to any appreciable
+extent on the birth of Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia, a year or so
+later.
+
+Sir William's conduct in the matter is still a puzzle. He felt, or
+professed to feel, that there was no occasion for jealousy. And so for
+a long time the trio shared the same house.
+
+One of the courtiers who had fled with the king and queen to Palermo
+was Prince Caraccioli, Nelson's close friend and Lady Hamilton's
+bitter enemy. Caraccioli asked leave to go back to Naples to look
+after his endangered property. As soon as he reached the city, he
+threw in his lot with the rebels and was made admiral of their navy.
+
+Presently, by the aid of England's fleet, the royal family returned.
+The rebellion was put down, and the king and queen were once more
+seated firmly on their thrones. The rebel leaders were seized and
+brought to trial. Nelson is said to have promised immunity to
+Caraccioli if he would surrender. Relying on his friend's pledge,
+Caraccioli surrendered. At Emma's request Nelson had the overtrustful
+man hanged from the yardarm of his own flagship.
+
+This is the darkest smear on Nelson's character, a smear that even his
+most blatant admirers have never been able to wipe away. It is not in
+keeping with anything else in his life. But by this time he belonged
+to Lady Hamilton, body and soul.
+
+She, by the way, had managed to acquire from her friend, the Queen of
+Naples, a nice tendency toward blood-thirstiness; as witness the
+following sweet anecdote by Pryne Lockhart Gordon, who tells of dining
+with the Hamiltons at Palermo, in company with a Turkish officer:
+
+    In the course of conversation, the officer boasted that with the
+    sword he wore he had put to death a number of French prisoners.
+    "Look," he said, "there is their blood remaining on it." When the
+    speech was translated to her, Lady Hamilton's eyes beamed with
+    delight. "Oh, let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!"
+    she exclaimed. Taking the sword in her hands, which were covered
+    with jewels, she looked at it, then kissed the incrusted blood on
+    the blade, and passed it on to Nelson. Only one who was a witness
+    to the spectacle can imagine how disgusting it was.
+
+Enshrined once more at Naples, hailed as savior of the realm,
+acclaimed for her share in the Nile victory, the confidante of
+royalty--it would be pleasant to say good-by here to Emma Lyon,
+ex-nursemaid, ex-barmaid, ex-lady's maid, nameless offspring of a
+Lancashire inn slavey. It was the climax of a wonderful life. But
+there was anticlimax aplenty to follow.
+
+Nelson went home to England to receive the plaudits of his fellow
+countrymen and to settle accounts with his wife. Home, too, came the
+Hamiltons, Sir William having been recalled.
+
+Lady Nelson was not at the dock to meet her hero husband. Bad news
+traveled fast, even before we boosted it along by wire and then by
+wireless. Lady Nelson had heard. And Lady Nelson was waiting at home.
+Thither, blithely enough, fared the man in whose praise a million
+Englishmen were cheering themselves hoarse--and in whose
+silver-buckled shoes perhaps no married Englishman would just then
+have cared or dared to stand. But Nelson was a hero. He went home.
+
+I once had a collie puppy that had never chanced to be at close
+quarters with a cat. I was privileged to see him when he made his
+first gleefully fearless attack upon one, ignorant of the potential
+anguish tucked away behind a feline's velvety paws. Somehow--with no
+disrespect to a great man--I always think of that poor,
+about-to-be-disillusioned puppy when I try to visualize the picture of
+Nelson's home-coming.
+
+Just what happened no one knows. But whatever it was, it did not teach
+Nelson the wisdom of husbandly reticence. For, a few weeks later, he
+remarked at breakfast:
+
+"I have just received another letter from dear Lady Hamilton."
+
+"I am sick of hearing of 'dear' Lady Hamilton!" flared the
+long-suffering wife. "You can choose between us. You must give up her
+or me."
+
+"Take care, Fanny!" warned Nelson. "I love you dearly. But I cannot
+forget all I owe to dear Lady Hamilton."
+
+"This is the end, then," announced Lady Nelson, and she left the
+house.
+
+Only once again did she and her husband meet.
+
+Nelson cast off all pretense at concealment after his wife left him.
+His affair with Lady Hamilton became public property. Their daughter,
+Horatia, was openly acclaimed by him as his heiress. The English were
+in a quandary. They loved Nelson; they hated the woman who had dragged
+his name into the filth. They could not snub her without making him
+unhappy; they could not honor him without causing her to shine by
+reflected glory. It was unpleasant all around.
+
+In 1805 the deadlock was broken. Nelson was again to fight the French.
+He told Lady Hamilton and many others that this campaign was to end in
+his death. He ordered his coffin made ready for him. Then he sailed
+against the French fleet, met it off Cape Trafalgar, and annihilated
+it. In the thick of the fight a musket ball gave him his death wound.
+He was carried below, and there, the battle raging around him, he
+laboriously wrote a codicil to his will, entreating his king and
+country to repay his services by settling a pension on Lady Hamilton.
+Then to his next-in-command he panted:
+
+"I am going fast. Come nearer. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my
+hair and all other things belonging to me. Take care of my dear Lady
+Hamilton--poor Lady Hamilton! Thank God I have done my duty!"
+
+And so he died, this knightly little demigod--true lover, false
+husband--who had fouled his snowy escutcheon for a worthless woman.
+
+Now comes the inevitable anticlimax.
+
+All England turned with loathing from Lady Hamilton. Her husband was
+dead. Lovers stood aloof. Folk who had received her for Nelson's sake
+barred their doors against her. She had followed the popular custom of
+living in luxury on nothing a year. Now her creditors swarmed upon
+her.
+
+Her house was sold for debt. Next she lived in Bond Street lodgings,
+growing poorer day by day until she was condemned to the debtor's
+prison. A kind-hearted--or hopeful--alderman bought her out of jail. A
+former coachman of hers, whose wages were still unpaid, threatened her
+with arrest for debt. She fled to Calais.
+
+There she lived in an attic, saved from absolute starvation by a
+fellow Englishwoman, a Mrs. Hunter. Her youth and charm had fled. The
+power that had lured Nelson and Greville and Hamilton to ruin was
+gone.
+
+In 1815 she died. She was buried in a pine box, with an old black silk
+petticoat for a pall. No clergyman could be found to take charge of
+her funeral. So the burial service was read by a fellow debt exile--a
+half-pay Irish army captain.
+
+One wonders--perhaps morbidly--if Nelson's possible punishment in
+another world might not have been the knowledge of what befell his
+"dear" Lady Hamilton in her latter days.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+  BUY THESE TITLES
+  where
+  YOU BOUGHT THIS BOOK!
+
+
+MYSTERY
+
+  Strange Murders at Greystones
+  _By Elsie N. Wright_
+
+  Guilt
+  _By Henry James Forman_
+
+  The Stretelli Case
+  _By Edgar Wallace_
+
+  Silinski, Master Criminal
+  _By Edgar Wallace_
+
+  The Great Hold-up Mystery
+  _By Wilfred Usher_
+
+  The Uncanny House
+  _By Mary L. Pendered_
+
+  The Secret of Sheen
+  _By John Laurence_
+
+  Long Shadows
+  _By Camilla Hope_
+
+  By Foul Means
+  _By Patrick Leyton_
+
+  The Phantom Rickshaw
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  Dreamy Hollow
+  _By Summer C. Britton_
+
+  The Diamond Cross Mystery
+  _By Chester K. Steele_
+
+  The Mansion of Mystery
+  _By Chester K. Steele_
+
+  The Mosaic Earring
+  _By Nell Martin_
+
+  The Golf Course Mystery
+  _By Chester K. Steele_
+
+  The Million Dollar Suitcase
+  _By MacGowan and Newbury_
+
+  City of the Dreadful Night
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  The Murders in the Rue Morgue
+  _By Edgar Allan Poe_
+
+  The Golden Bowl
+  _By Archie Joscelyn_
+
+  The Monk of Hambleton
+  _By Armstrong Livingston_
+
+
+HISTORY
+
+  In the Old West
+  _By Geo. Fred Ruxton_
+
+  The Gold Hunters
+  _By J. D. Borthwick_
+
+
+WESTERN
+
+  Don Coyote
+  _By Whitman Chambers_
+
+
+BIOGRAPHY
+
+  Face to Face with Our Presidents
+  _By Joe Mitchell Chapple_
+
+
+ROMANCE
+
+  The Girl He Left Behind
+  _By Helen Beecher Long_
+
+  Sins of the Children
+  _By Cosmo Hamilton_
+
+  Bed Rock
+  _By Jack Bethea_
+
+  Doubloons and The Girl
+  _By John Maxwell Forbes_
+
+  Quadrille Court
+  _By Cecil Adair_
+
+  The Lovely Malincourt
+  _By Helen Mathers_
+
+  Sem's Moroccan Love
+  _By Arthur Kay_
+
+  The Justice of the King
+  _By Hamilton Drummond_
+
+  The Star of Hollywood
+  _By Edward Stilgebauer_
+
+  Some Honeymoon
+  _By Charles Everett Hall_
+
+  Children of the Whirlwind
+  _By Leroy Scott_
+
+  Who Cares
+  _By Cosmo Hamilton_
+
+  The Man Who Lived in a Shoe
+  _By Henry James Forman_
+
+  The Enchanted Garden
+  _By Henry James Forman_
+
+  Cap'n Abe Storekeeper
+  _By James A. Cooper_
+
+  Unforbidden Fruit
+  _By Warner Fabian_
+
+  Mary Regan
+  _By Leroy Scott_
+
+  The Blindness of Virtue
+  _By Cosmo Hamilton_
+
+  Dancing Desire
+  _By Petronilla Clayton_
+
+  Why Marry
+  _By Farguson Johnson_
+
+
+ADVENTURE
+
+  Letters of Marque
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  Under the Deodars
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  On Autumn Trails
+  _By Emma-Lindsay Squier_
+
+  Soldiers Three
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  Tales of the Fish Patrol
+  _By Jack London_
+
+  When God Laughs
+  _By Jack London_
+
+  On the Highest Hill
+  _By H. M. Stephenson_
+
+  South Sea Tales
+  _By Jack London_
+
+  Wilbur Crane's Handicap
+  _By John Maxwell Forbes_
+
+  The Light That Failed
+  _By Rudyard Kipling_
+
+  Rainbow Island
+  _By Mark Caywood_
+
+
+  INTERNATIONAL FICTION LIBRARY
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