CHAPTER VIII

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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.