ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE (continued 3)

The interstices between these unions had been garnished with many a love episode. Adamant as he was toward men, Cæsar 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 Cæsar. More to the point, she would be seen by Cæsar. But how? Cæsar 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 Cæsar in a way designed to catch his attention and more than friendly interest from the very start.

Julius Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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.

Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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.

Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar's infatuation for her, Cleopatra remained for the next few years; indeed, until Cæsar's death. There, too, Cæsar's son, Cæsarion, was born; and with the boy's birth came to Cleopatra the hope that Cæsar 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, —Cæsar's protege, and at this time a swaggering, lovable, dissolute soldier-demagogue, whose fortunes were so undissolubly fastened to Cæsar's that he, the winner of a horde of women, dared not lift his eyes to the woman Cæsar 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, Cæsar'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 Cæsar had been assassinated at the Forum. Speedily an angry crowd besieged Cleopatra's house.

Now that the all-feared Cæsar 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 Cæsarion, Cæsar, 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 Cæsar 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, Cæsar—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.

Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar 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 Cæsar'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:

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 Cæsar that which is Cæsar'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.