From these reflections I was roused by the appearance of a waiter, with a
letter for me. The envelope contained a slip cut from a German newspaper,
and these lines of writing, signed by Frau Meyer:--
"You are either a very just, or a very obstinate young man. In either
case, it will do you no harm to read what I enclose. I am not such a
scandal-mongering old woman as you seem to think. The concealment of the
names will not puzzle you. Please return the slip. It belongs to our
excellent host, and forms part of his collection of literary
curiosities."
Such was the introduction to my reading. I translate it from the German
newspaper into English as literally as I can.
The Editor's few prefatory words were at the top of the column, bearing
the date of September 1828.
"We have received, in strictest confidence, extracts from letters written
by a lady to a once-beloved female friend. The extracts are dated and
numbered, and are literally presented in this column--excepting the
obviously necessary precaution of suppressing names, places, and days of
the month. Taken in connection with a certain inquiry which is just now
occupying the public mind, these fragments may throw some faint glimmer
of light on events which are at present involved in darkness."
_Number I._ 1809.--"Yes, dearest Julie, I have run the grand risk. Only
yesterday, I was married to Doctor ----. The people at the church were
our only witnesses.
"My father declares that I have degraded his noble blood by marrying a
medical man. He forbade my mother to attend the ceremony. Poor simple
soul! She asked me if I loved my young doctor, and was quite satisfied
when I said Yes. As for my father's objections, my husband is a man of
high promise in his profession. In his country--I think I told you in my
last letter that he was a Frenchman--a famous physician is ennobled by
the State. I shall leave no stone unturned, my dear, to push my husband
forward. And when he is made a Baron, we shall see what my father will
say to us then."
_Number II._ 1810.--"We have removed, my Julie, to this detestably dull
old German town, for no earthly reason but that the University is famous
as a medical school.
"My husband informs me, in his sweetest manner, that he will hesitate at
no sacrifice of our ordinary comforts to increase his professional
knowledge. If you could see how the ladies dress in this lost hole of a
place, if you could hear the twaddle they talk, you would pity me. I have
but one consolation--a lovely baby, Julie, a girl: I had almost said an
angel. Were you as fond of your first child, I wonder, as I am of mine?
And did you utterly forget your husband, when the little darling was
first put into your arms? Write and tell me."
_Number III._ 1811.--"I have hardly patience to take up my pen But I
shall do something desperate, if I don't relieve my overburdened mind in
some way.
"After I wrote to you last year, I succeeded in getting my husband away
from the detestable University. But he persisted in hanging about
Germany, and conferring with moldy old doctors (whom he calls "Princes of
Science"!) instead of returning to Paris, taking a handsome house, and
making his way to the top of the tree with my help. I am the very woman
to give brilliant parties, and to push my husband's interests with
powerful people of all degrees. No; I really must not dwell on it. When I
think of what has happened since, it will drive me mad.
"Six weeks ago, a sort of medical congress was announced to be at the
University. Something in the proposed discussion was to be made the
subject of a prize-essay. The doctor's professional interest in this
matter decided him on trying for the prize--and the result is our return
to the hateful old town and its society.
"Of course, my husband resumes his professional studies; of course, I am
thrown once more among the dowdy gossiping women. But that is far from
being the worst of it. Among the people in the School of Chemistry here,
there is a new man, who entered the University shortly after we left it
last year. This devil--it is the only right word for him--has bewitched
my weak husband; and, for all I can see to the contrary, has ruined our
prospects in life.
"He is a Hungarian. Small, dirty, lean as a skeleton, with hands like
claws, eyes like a wild beast's, and the most hideously false smile you
ever saw in a human face. What his history is, nobody knows. The people
at the medical school call him the most extraordinary experimental
chemist living. His ideas astonish the Professors themselves. The
students have named him 'The new Paracelsus.'
"I ventured to ask him, one day, if he believed he could make gold. He
looked at me with his frightful grin, and said, "Yes, and diamonds too,
with time and money to help me." He not only believes in The
Philosopher's Stone; he says he is on the trace of some explosive
compound so terrifically destructive in its effect, that it will make war
impossible. He declares that he will annihilate time and space by means
of electricity; and that he will develop steam as a motive power, until
travelers can rush over the whole habitable globe at the rate of a mile
in a minute.
"Why do I trouble you with these ravings? My dear, this boastful
adventurer has made himself master of my husband, has talked him out of
his senses, has reduced my influence over him to nothing. Do you think I
am exaggerating? Hear how it has ended. My husband absolutely refuses to
leave this place. He cares no longer even to try for the prize. The idea
of medical practice has become distasteful to him, and he has decided on
devoting his life to discovery in chemical science.
"And this is the man whom I married with the sincerest belief in the
brilliant social career that was before him! For this contemptible
creature I have sacrificed my position in the world, and alienated my
father from me for ever. I may look forward to being the wife of a poor
Professor, who shows experiments to stupid lads in a school. And the
friends in Paris, who, to my certain knowledge, are now waiting to give
him introductions to the Imperial Court itself, may transfer their
services to some other man.
"No words can tell you what I feel at this complete collapse of all my
hopes and plans. The one consideration of my child is all that restrains
me from leaving my husband, never to see him again. As it is, I must live
a life of deceit, and feign respect and regard for a man whom I despise
with my whole heart.
"Power--oh, if I had the power to make the fury that consumes me felt!
The curse of our sex is its helplessness. Every day, Julie, the
conviction grows on me that I shall end badly. Who among us knows the
capacity for wickedness that lies dormant in our natures, until the fatal
event comes and calls it forth?
"No! I am letting you see too much of my tortured soul. Let me close my
letter, and play with my child."
_Number IV._ 1812.--"My heartfelt congratulations, dearest, on your
return to Germany, after your pleasant visit to the United States. And
more congratulations yet on the large addition to your income, due to
your husband's intelligence and spirit of enterprise on American ground.
Ah, you have married a Man! Happy woman! I am married to a Machine.
"Why have I left your kind letters from America without reply? My Julie,
I have constantly thought of you; but the life I lead is slowly crushing
my energies. Over and over again, I have taken up my pen; and over and
over again, I have laid it aside, recoiling from the thought of myself
and my existence; too miserable (perhaps too proud) to tell you what a
wretched creature I am, and what thoughts come to me sometimes in the
wakeful hours of the night.
"After this confession, you wonder, perhaps, why I write to you now.
"I really believe it is because I have been threatened with legal
proceedings by my creditors, and have just come victoriously out of a
hard struggle to appease them for the time. This little fight has roused
me from my apathy; it has rallied my spirits, and made me feel like my
old self again. I am no longer content with silently loving my dearest
friend; I open my heart and write to her.
"'Oh, dear, how sad that she should be in debt!' I can hear you say
this, and sigh to yourself--you who have never known what it was to be in
want of money since you were born. Shall I tell you what my husband earns
at the University? No: I feel the blood rushing into my face at the bare
idea of revealing it.
"Let me do the Professor justice. My Animated Mummy has reached the
height of his ambition at last--he is Professor of Chemistry, and is
perfectly happy for the rest of his life. My dear, he is as lean, and
almost as dirty, as the wretch who first perverted him. Do you remember
my once writing to you about a mysterious Hungarian, whom we found in the
University? A few years since, this man died by suicide, as mysteriously
as he had lived. They found him in the laboratory, with a strange
inscription traced in chalk on the wall by which he lay dead. These were
the words:--'After giving it a fair trial, I find that life is not worth
living for. I have decided to destroy myself with a poison of my own
discovery. My chemical papers and preparations are hereby bequeathed to
my friend Doctor ----, and my body is presented as a free gift to the
anatomy school. Let a committee of surgeons and analysts examine my
remains. I defy them to discover a trace of the drug that has killed me.'
And they did try, Julie--and discovered nothing. I wonder whether the
suicide has left the receipt for that poison, among his other precious
legacies, to his 'friend Doctor ----.'
"Why do I trouble you with these nauseous details? Because they are in no
small degree answerable for my debts. My husband devotes all his leisure
hours to continuing the detestable experiments begun by the Hungarian;
and my yearly dress-money for myself and my child has been reduced one
half, to pay the chemical expenses.
"Ought I, in this hard case, to have diminished my expenditure to the
level of my reduced income?
"If you say Yes, I answer that human endurance has its limits. I can
support the martyrdom of my life; the loss of my dearest illusions and
hopes; the mean enmity of our neighbors; the foul-mouthed jealousy of the
women; and, more than all, the exasperating patience of a husband who
never resents the hardest things I can say to him, and who persists in
loving and admiring me as if we were only married last week. But I cannot
see my child in a stuff frock, on promenade days in the Palace Gardens,
when other people's children are wearing silk. And plain as my own dress
may be, I must and will have the best material that is made. When the
wife of the military commandant (a woman sprung from the people) goes out
in an Indian shawl with Brussels lace in her bonnet, am I to meet her and
return her bow, in a camelot cloak and a beaver hat? No! When I lose my
self-respect let me lose my life too. My husband may sink as low as he
pleases. I always have stood above him, and I always will!
"And so I am in debt, and my creditors threaten me. What does it matter?
I have pacified them, for the time, with some small installments of
money, and a large expenditure of smiles.
"I wish you could see my darling little Minna; she is the loveliest and
sweetest child in the world--my pride at all times, and my salvation in
my desperate moods. There are moments when I feel inclined to set fire to
the hateful University, and destroy all the moldy old creatures who
inhabit it. I take Minna out and buy her a little present, and see her
eyes sparkle and her color rise, and feel her innocent kisses, and
become, for awhile, quite a good woman again. Yesterday, her father--no,
I shall work myself up into a fury if I tell you about it. Let me only
say that Minna saved me as usual. I took her to the jeweler's and bought
her a pair of pearl earrings. If you could have heard her, if you could
have seen her, when the little angel first looked at herself in the
glass! I wonder when I shall pay for the earrings?
"Ah, Julie, if I only had such an income as yours, I would make my power
felt in this place. The insolent women should fawn on me and fear me. I
would have my own house and establishment in the country, to purify me
after the atmosphere of the Professor's drugs. I would--well! well! never
mind what else I would have.
"Talking of power, have you read the account of the execution last year
of that wonderful criminal, Anna Maria Zwanziger? Wherever she went, the
path of this terrific woman is strewed with the dead whom she has
poisoned. She appears to have lived to destroy her fellow-creatures, and
to have met her doom with the most undaunted courage. What a career! and
what an end! (1)
"The foolish people in Wurzburg are at a loss to find motives for some of
the murders she committed, and try to get out of the difficulty by
declaring that she must have been a homicidal maniac. That is not _my_
explanation. I can understand the murderess becoming morally intoxicated
with the sense of her own tremendous power. A mere human creature--only a
woman, Julie!--armed with the means of secretly dealing death with her,
wherever she goes--meeting with strangers who displease her, looking at
them quietly, and saying to herself, "I doom you to die, before you are a
day older"--is there no explanation, here, of some of Zwanziger's
poisonings which are incomprehensible to commonplace minds?
"I put this view, in talking of the trial, to the military commandant a
few days since. His vulgar wife answered me before he could speak.
'Madame Fontaine,' said this spitfire, 'my husband and I don't feel
_your_ sympathy with poisoners!' Take that as a specimen of the ladies of
Wurzburg--and let me close this unmercifully long letter. I think you
will acknowledge, my dear, that, when I do write, I place a flattering
trust in my friend's patient remembrance of me."
There the newspaper extracts came to an end.
As a picture of a perverted mind, struggling between good and evil, and
slowly losing ground under the stealthy influence of temptation, the
letters certainly possessed a melancholy interest for any thoughtful
reader. But (not being a spiteful woman) I failed to see, in these
extracts, the connection which Frau Meyer had attempted to establish
between the wickedness of Madame Fontaine and the disappearance of her
husband's medicine chest.
At the same time, I must acknowledge that a vague impression of distrust
_was_ left on my mind by what I had read. I felt a certain sense of
embarrassment at the prospect of renewing my relations with the widow, on
my return to Frankfort; and I was also conscious of a decided increase of
anxiety to hear what had been Mr. Keller's reception of Madame Fontaine's
letter. Add to this, that my brotherly interest in Minna was sensibly
strengthened--and the effect on me of the extracts in the newspaper is
truly stated, so far as I can remember it at this distant time.
On the evening of the next day, I was back again at Frankfort.
(1) The terrible career of Anna Maria Zwanziger, sentenced to death at
Bamberg in the year 1811, will be found related in Lady Duff-Gordon's
translation of Feuerbach's "Criminal Trials."