He met the Countess d'Agoult in the brilliant whirl of his artistic
success. She was beautiful, accomplished, though her contemporaries
declare she was not of a truthful nature. She was born Marie Sophie de
Flavigny, at Frankfort-on-Main in 1805. Her father was the Vicomte de
Flavigny, who had married the daughter of Simon Moritz Bethmann, a rich
banker, originally from Amsterdam and a reformed Hebrew. She had
literary ability, was proud of having once seen Goethe, and in 1827 she
married Comte Charles d'Agoult. But social sedition was in the air. The
misunderstood woman--no new thing--was the fashion. George Sand was
changing her lovers with every new book she wrote, and Madame, the
Countess d'Agoult--to whom Chopin dedicated his first group of
Etudes--began to write, began to yearn for fame and adventures. Liszt
appeared. He seems to have been the pursued. Anyhow, they eloped. In
honour he couldn't desert the woman, and they made Geneva their
temporary home. She had in her own right 20,000 francs a year income; it
cost Liszt exactly 300,000 francs annually to keep up an establishment
such as the lady had been accustomed to--he earned this, a tidy amount,
for those days, by playing the piano all over Europe. Madame d'Agoult
bore him three children: Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel. The first named
married Emile Ollivier, Napoleon's war minister--still living at the
present writing--in 1857. She died in 1862. Cosima married Hans von
Buelow, her father's favourite pupil, in 1857; later she went off with
Richard Wagner, married him, to her father's despair--principally
because she had renounced her religion in so doing--and to-day is
Wagner's widow. Daniel Liszt, his father's hope, died December, 1859, at
the age of twenty. Liszt had legitimatised the birth of his children,
had educated them, had dowered his daughters, and they proved all three
a source of sorrow.
[Illustration: Blandine Ollivier