ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE (continued 4)

Marguerite was free. Jenkins hastened to her and besought her to marry him, offering her an honorable name and a place in the world, and pointing out to her how much better off she would be in the long run as Mrs. Captain Jenkins than as the brevet bride of a dissolute earl.

But Blessington had by this time become the helpless thrall of Marguerite's charm. As soon as he heard of Farmer's death, he whisked her off to church and married her. And, by way of doing all things handsomely, he soothed the disconsolate Jenkins' feelings with a fifty-thousand-dollar check; thereby securing firm title to the good will and fixtures of the previous tenant of his wife's heart.

The earl took his new wife to his ancestral home, at Mountjoy Forest. And there the couple kept open house, spending money like drunken sailors, and having a wonderful time. It was the first chance Marguerite had ever had for spending any large amount of money. She so well improved her opportunities along this line, and got such splendid results therefrom, that she was nicknamed by a flowery Irish admirer "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington." And the name stuck to her, to her delight, all through life.

Blessington had always been extravagant. Now, goaded on by Marguerite, he proceeded to make the Prodigal Son look like Gaspard the Miser. One of his lesser expenditures was the building of a theater on his own estate, that he and Marguerite might satisfy to the full their love for amateur theatricals.

At this theater they and their friends were the only performers, and their friends were the only spectators. The performances must have been gems of histrionic and literary excellence, and a rare delight to every one concerned. It would have been worth walking barefoot for miles to witness one of them.

For the actors were bound by a list of hard-and-fast rules devised and written out by Lord Blessington himself. You may judge the rest of these rules by the first, which read:

Every gentleman shall be at liberty to avail himself of the words of the author, in case his own invention fails him.

One's heart warms to the genius who could frame that glorious rule for stage dialogue.

But Marguerite was of no mind to be mured up in an Irish country house, with perhaps an occasional trip to Dublin. She had begun to taste life, and she found the draft too sweet to be swallowed in sips. She made Blessington take a house in St. James' Square, in London.

There, for the next three years, she was the reigning beauty of the capital. Her salons were the most brilliant spots in the London season. Her loveliness made her and her home a center of admiration.

She had more than good looks; more, even, than charm. She had brains, and she had true Irish wit; a wit that flashed and never stung. She had, too, the knack of bringing out the best and brightest elements in everyone around her. So, while men adored her, women could not bring themselves to hate her.

She was in her element, there in London. But Blessington was not in his. He enjoyed it all; but he was no longer young, and he had led a lightning-rapid life. So, though he was ever a willing performer, the merciless pace began to tell on him.

Marguerite was quick to notice this. And she suggested that a nice, long, lazy tour of the Continent might brace him up. Marguerite's lightest suggestions were her husband's laws. So to the Continent they went, and London mourned them.

They set off in August, 1822. "No Irish nobleman," says one biographer, "and certainly no Irish king, ever set out on his travels with such a retinue of servants, with so many vehicles and appliances of all kinds to ease, to comfort, and the luxurious enjoyment of travel."

They planned to go by easy stages, stopping wherever they chose and for as long as the fancy held them. They traveled in a way a modern pork-king might envy.

One day in Paris, at the races, Lady Blessington exclaimed:

"There is the handsomest man I have ever seen!"

One of the throng of adorers hanging about the Blessington box confessed to knowing the stranger, and he was accordingly sent off posthaste to bring the "handsomest man" to the box. The personage who was so lucky as to draw forth this cry of admiration from Marguerite was at that time but eighteen years old. Yet already he was one of the most noted—or notorious—men-about-town in all Europe.

He was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count d'Orsay, a typical Ouida hero. He was six feet in height, with broad shoulders, small hands and feet, hazel eyes, and chestnut hair. He was an all-round athlete—could ride, fence, box, skate, shoot,—and so on, through the whole list of sports. He was a brilliant conversationalist. He could draw. He could paint. He was a sculptor. And at none of these things was he an amateur, but as good as most front-rank professionals. He was later to win fame as the premier man of fashion of the period. A once celebrated book, "The Complete Dandy," had d'Orsay for its hero. Everybody who came in touch with the youthful paragon fell victim to his magnetism, and even Lord Blessington—who should have been wise enough to see what was coming—was no exception.

Young D'Orsay, at Marguerite's instigation, was invited to go along with the Blessingtons on the rest of their travels. He accepted. This meant his resignation from his regiment, which was at that moment under orders to leave France to invade Spain. He threw over his military career without a qualm. He had fallen in love at sight with "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," who was fourteen years his senior. And, at sight, she had fallen in love with him. It was the love of her life.

The party moved on to Genoa. Here they met Lord Byron, who had found England a chilly abiding place, after the disgraceful affair that had parted him from his wife. Byron was charmed by Lady Blessington's beauty and cleverness, and spent a great deal of time with the Blessington party of tourists.

D'Orsay he liked immensely, once referring to him as "a Greek god returned to earth." Marguerite he frankly adored. And—so far as one knows—that was all the good it did him. With a wonder youth of the D'Orsay type ever at her side, Lady Blessington was not likely to lose her sophisticated heart to a middle-aged, lame man, whose power over women was at this time largely confined to girls in their teens. But Byron was the greatest living poet, as well as the greatest living charlatan. And Marguerite consented to be amused, in desultory fashion, by his stereotyped form of heart siege; even though his powers of attack were no longer sufficient to storm the citadel.

Still, the time passed pleasantly enough at Genoa; and Byron salved his bruised vanity by wheedling Lord Blessington into buying his yacht—a boat that the poet had long and vainly tried to get rid of. Faring better with "my lord" than with "my lady," he sold the boat at a fancy figure.

There was a farewell banquet, at which he drank much. Then the Blessingtons and D'Orsay departed from Genoa—on the white-elephant yacht. And Byron stood on the quay and wept aloud as they sailed off.

They went to Rome. But the Eternal City somehow did not appeal to Lady Blessington. So they gave it what would now be vulgarly termed "the once over," and passed on to Naples. Here, Marguerite was delighted with everything. The trio took a Naples house, and lived there for two and a half years.

The mansion Lord Blessington rented was the Palazzo Belvidere—which cost him an enormous sum. But, like an automobile, the initial price was the smallest item of its expense. Marguerite, perhaps to atone to herself for the squalor of her rickety girlhood home, declared the place would not be fit to live in until it had been refitted according to her ideas. Her ideas cost a fortune to carry out. But when at last the work was done, she wrote that the palazzo was "one of the most delicious retreats in the world." She also hit on a thoroughly unique, if costly, scheme for sight-seeing. For example, when she visited Herculaneum, it was with the archæologist, Sir William Gell, as guide. When she went to museums and art galleries, she took along as showman such celebrities as Unwin, the painter, Westmacott, the sculptor, or the antiquary, Milligan. And when she visited the observatory, it was under the guidance of Sir John Herschel and the Italian astronomer Piazzi. More than one of these notables sighed hopelessly for her love.

From Naples the party went to Florence. Here Walter Savage Landor met Marguerite. And he was little behind Byron in his appreciation of her charms.

By this time—nay, long before this time—people had begun to talk, and to talk quite distinctly. Marguerite did not care to be the butt of international gossip, so she enlisted her husband's aid in an effort to silence the scandalous tongues. Blessington's mode of doing this was highly characteristic of the most eccentric man living. He promptly offered to make D'Orsay his heir, if the latter would marry Lord Blessington's fifteen-year-old-daughter, the earl's only living child by his first wife. D'Orsay did not object. It mattered little to him whom he married. The girl was sent for to come to Florence, and there she and D'Orsay were made man and wife.

The trio thus enlarged to a quartet, all hands next set off for Paris. Lady Blessington learned that the house of Marechal Ney was vacant, and she made her husband take it at a staggering rental. And again she was not satisfied until the place had been done over from top to bottom. The job was finished in three days, the army of workmen receiving triple pay for quadruple speed. Lady Blessington's own room was designed by her husband. He would not allow her to see it until everything was in readiness for her. This is her own description of it:

The bed, which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale-blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung; which, when drawn, conceal the recess altogether…. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace.

Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond…. The salle de bain is draped with white muslin trimmed with lace…. The bath is of white marble, inserted in the floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus.

It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829; perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place.

Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his estate—which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town house in London.

All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons. When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in Kensington—Albert Hall now stands on its site—for Marguerite could not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion.

She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the Genoa days. The New Monthly Magazine first printed serially this capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as "Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books, this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered.

She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a descriptive verse written by her under each picture—straight hack work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day—or in any day, for that matter.

Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess," and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their truthful depiction of the social life of her times.

She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as Friendship's Offering, The Amulet, Keepsakes, and others of like mushiness of name and matter.

Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.

It is one of the mysteries of the ages that so canny an old libertine as Lord Blessington should have been hood-winked by D'Orsay and Marguerite. There is no clew to it, except—perhaps he was not fooled. Perhaps he was too old, too sick, too indifferent to care.

And when D'Orsay's unhappy young wife, in 1838, refused to be a party any longer to the disgusting farce and divorced her husband, the gossip-whispers swelled to a screech. The wife departed; D'Orsay stayed on.

There is every reason to think Marguerite was true to her young "Greek God." But if so, it was not for lack of temptation or opportunity to be otherwise. In her late forties and early fifties, she was still "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington," still as lovely, as magnetic, as adorable as in her teens.

Among the men who delighted to honor her salons with their frequent presence—and more than one of them made desperate love to their hostess—were Bulwer, Dickens, Thackeray, Sir Robert Peel, Captain Marryat, Brougham, Landseer, Tom Moore, Disraeli, and many another genius.

Disraeli—one day to rule British politics as Lord Beaconsfield—was at that time merely a brilliant politician and an almost equally brilliant novelist. There is a story—I don't vouch for it—that, piqued at Marguerite's coldness toward himself, Disraeli revenged himself by portraying D'Orsay right mercilessly as "Count Mirabeau," in his "Henrietta Temple."

Landor was drawn by her lure into returning to England. The aged Duke of Wellington, too, was a guest at her more informal "at homes." Marguerite used such influence as she possessed over the duke to persuade him to let D'Orsay paint his portrait. So well did the picture turn out that the duke cried in delight:

"At last I've been painted as a gentleman!"

To the Blessington salons came an American, a man whose clothes were the hopeless envy of Broadway, and whose forehead curl was imitated by every Yankee dandy who could afford to buy enough pomatum to stick a similar curl to his own brow. He was N. P. Willis. You don't even start at the name. Yet that name used to thrill your grandmother. Willis was a writer; and gained more temporary fame for less good work than any other author our country has produced.

During a tour of England, he was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to call on Lady Blessington. And thereafter he called almost every day. He fairly raved over her.

"She is one of the most lovely and fascinating women I have ever known!" he wrote.

Then he wrote more; he wrote a story of something that happened at one of her soirees. He sent it to an American paper, never dreaming it would ever be seen in England. But the story was reprinted in an English magazine. And D'Orsay showed Willis the door.

Another visitor to Gore House was a pallid, puffy princeling, out of a job and out of a home. He was Louis Napoleon, reputed nephew of Napoleon the Great; and he was one day to reign as Napoleon III., Emperor of the French. In the meantime, exiled from France, he knocked around the world, morbidly wondering where his next suit of ready-made clothes was to come from. He even visited the United States, for a while, teaching school at Bordentown, New Jersey, and sponging for loans and dinners from the Jumels and other people kindly disposed to the Bonaparte cause.

Just now he was in England, living, when he could, on borrowed money, and sometimes earning a few shillings by serving as special policeman outside of big houses where dances or receptions were in progress. Out of the few English homes open to the prince was Marguerite Blessington's.

Marguerite and D'Orsay took him in, fed him, lent him money, and did a thousand kindnesses to the poor, outlawed fellow. You shall learn in a few minutes how he repaid their generosity.

While Marguerite had a talent for writing, she had a positive genius for spending money. And where talent and genius clash, there can be only one final result. Her talent, as I have said, brought her about five thousand dollars a year. Her income from her husband's estate was a yearly seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars more. But how could people like Marguerite and D'Orsay keep abreast of the social current on a beggarly twelve-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year?

The foregoing is a question, not a flight of rhetoric. It has an answer. And the answer is: they went into debt.

They threw away money; as apt pupils of the lamented Earl of Blessington might readily have been expected to. When they had no more money to pay with, they got credit. At first, this was easy enough. Tradesmen, high and low, deemed it an honor to be creditors of the all-popular Dowager Countess of Blessington, and of the illustrious Count D'Orsay. And even after the tradesmen's first zest died down, the couple were clever enough to arrange matters in such a way as to keep right on securing goods for which they knew they never could hope to pay.

Stripped of his glamour, his pretty tricks, and his social position, D'Orsay shows up as an unadulterated dead beat, a sublimated panhandler; while Marguerite's early experience in helping Shiver-the-Frills ward off bailiffs and suchlike gold-seekers now stood her in fine stead.

They were a grand pair. Their team-work was perfect. Between them, they succeeded in rolling up debts amounting to more than five-hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand dollars to tradesfolk alone. D'Orsay, in addition to this, managed to borrow about sixty-five thousand from overtrustful personal friends.

Thackeray is said to have drawn from them the inspiration of his "Vanity Fair" essay on "How to Live on Nothing a Year." D'Orsay, before consenting to let his wife divorce him, had stipulated that the earl's daughter pay him a huge lump sum out of the Blessington estate. He was also lucky at so-called games of chance, and his painting brought in a good revenue. But all this money was swallowed up in the bottomless gulf of extravagance.

Little by little, the tradesmen began to realize that they were never going to be paid, and they banded together to force matters to a crisis. In that era, debt was still punishable by imprisonment, and prison gates were almost ready to unbar in hospitable welcome to Marguerite and D'Orsay.

Like Dick Swiveller, who shut for himself, one by one, every avenue of egress, from his home, by means of unpaid-for purchases in neighboring streets, D'Orsay discovered that it was no longer safe to leave the house. Officers with warrants lurked at the area railings of Gore House. Tipstaves loitered on the front steps. All sorts of shabby people seemed eager to come into personal contact with Alfred Guillaume Gabriel, Count D'Orsay.

On Sunday alone—when the civil arm of the law rests—did the much-sought-after couple dare emerge from the once-joyous house which had grown to be their beleaguered castle. No longer could they entertain, as of yore, least a rascally warrant-server slip into the drawing-room in the guise of a guest.

Finally, the net tightened to such an extent that D'Orsay had great ado to slip through its one gap; but slip through he did, and escaped by night to France. Marguerite's wit arranged for his escape. And the man who lately had disdained to take a week-end journey without a half-dozen servants and a half score trunks was forced to run away in the clothes he wore, and with single portmanteau. Marguerite joined him at Boulogne, little better equipped than he.

Oh, but there were heartbreaking sights, in those days, in Boulogne, in Calais, and in Havre! Englishmen who had fled their own country for debt used to haunt the French seaboard, as being nearer their own dear land than was Paris. They used to pace the esplanades or cower like sick dogs on the quays, straining their eyes across the tumbled gray water, to glimpse the far-off white cliffs of their homeland. They would flock to the pier, when the Channel packets came in, longing for the sight of a home face, dreading to be seen by some one who had known them in sunnier days. Sneered at by the thrifty French, denied a penny's worth of credit at the shops, they dragged out desolate lives, fifty times more bitter than death.

It was no part of Marguerite's scheme to enroll D'Orsay and herself among these hangdog exiles. She had ever built air-castles, and she was still building them. She had wonderful plans for a career in France.

She and D'Orsay had done much for Louis Napoleon in his days of poverty. And now Louis Napoleon was President of France, and already there were rumors that he would soon make himself emperor. He was the Man of the Hour. And in his heyday of prosperity he assuredly could do no less than find a high government office for D'Orsay and pour a flood of golden coin into the lap of "the most gorgeous Lady Blessington."

Let me save you from suspense by telling you that Louis Napoleon did nothing of the sort. Indeed, he seemed much embarrassed and not at all over-joyed by the arrival of his old benefactors in Paris. He made them many glittering promises. But the Bank of Fools itself would have had too much sense to discount such promises as Louis Napoleon was wont to make.

Soon after their arrival in Paris, Marguerite learned that creditors had swooped down upon Gore House, seizing it and all the countless art treasures that filled it. House and contents went under the hammer, and brought a bare sixty thousand dollars; not enough to pay one of the D'Orsay-Blessington debts.

Marguerite was at the end of her career. She was sixty years old; her beauty was going; her money was gone. She had ruled hearts; she had squandered fortunes; she had gone through the "dark spot," (ninety-nine per cent of whose victims sink thence to the street, while the hundredth has the amazing luck to emerge as a Super-Woman.) She had listened to the love vows of men whose names are immortal. And now she was old and fat and banished. Hope was dead.

A younger and stronger woman might readily have succumbed under such a crisis. Certainly, Marguerite Blessington was in no condition to face it. Soon after she arrived in Paris, she sickened and died.

D'Orsay had loved her with fairly good constancy, and he designed in her honor a double-grave mausoleum of quaint design. And under that mausoleum, at Chambourey, she was buried. Three years later, D'Orsay was laid there at her side.

Super-woman and super-man, they had loved as had Cleopatra and Antony. Only, in the latters' day, it was Rome's vengeance and not a creditor-warrant that cut short such golden romances.

CHAPTER XI

MADAME RECAMIER

THE FROZEN-HEARTED ANGEL

Paris—the hopelessly mixed, sans-culotte-philosopher new Paris society of 1793—took a holiday from red slaughter and reflection on the Rights of Man, and went to an odd wedding.

The wedding of a fifteen-year-old girl to a man of nearly fifty. Probably, even in that less bromidic day, there were not lacking a few hundred guests to commit the ancient wheeze anent May and December. The girl was a beauty of the type that it tightens one's throat to look at. And the man was an egregiously rich banker. So Paris deigned to be interested; interested even into momentary forgetfulness of the day's "List of the Condemned" and of Robespierre's newest patriotic murder dreams.

The girl bride was Jeanne Francoise Julie Adelaide Bernard, daughter of no less a dignitary than the Paris' receiver of taxes—a mild-mannered and handsome man, weak and stupid, with a handsome and steel-eyed wife, who was neither dull, weak, nor good.

The groom was Jacques Recamier—by profession a powerful banker, by choice a middle-class Lothario. His father had sold hats at Lyons. Recamier had been an intimate friend of the Bernards, forever at their house, since a year or so before Jeanne had been born.

As the wedding party stood on the steps of the Hotel de Ville, after the "civil ceremony"—so runs the story—a passing man halted and gazed long and closely at Jeanne, in dumb admiration, studying every line of her face and form. The gazer was a painter, Greuze by name. And from Jeanne Recamier, as he saw her that day, he drew the inspiration for the wonderful "Jeune fille" picture that made him immortal.

The wedding party filed into a line of waiting carriages. But scarce had the joyous cavalcade set out on its short journey when it was halted by the passage of a truly horrible procession that just then emerged from a cross street; a procession made up of scarecrow men and women, hideous of visage, clad in rags, blood from the guillotine—around which they had lately gathered, gloating—spattered on their clothes and unwashed faces.

In the midst of the howling and huzzaing throng was a chair, carried by supports on the shoulders of eight half-naked sans-culottes. And in this lofty chair crouched the most hideous figure in all that vile gathering—a dwarfish, weirdly dressed man, his face disgustingly marred by disease, his eyes glaring with the light of madness.

Around him gamboled the mob, screaming blessings and adulations, strewing his bearers' way with masses of wilted flowers, filched from the halls.

Thus did Doctor Jean Paul Marat make his triumphal return home that April day from the Convention, escorted by his worshipers—and fellow beasts. Thus did his obscene retinue block the wedding procession of dainty little Jeanne Recamier. Jean Paul Marat—for whose shrunken chest, at that very moment, poor, politics-crazed Charlotte Corday was sharpening the twenty-eight-cent case knife she had just bought.

An odd omen for the outset of married life; and vitally so to the little new-wed Recamier girl, who had been brought up amid superstitions.

Shall we glance at a short word picture of Jeanne, limned by a contemporary?

"She has orange-tinted eyes, but they are without fire; pretty and transparent teeth, but incapable of snapping; an ungainly waist; coarse hands and feet; and complexion that is a bowl of milk wherein float rose leaves."

Let me add to the sketch the established fact that, during the seventy-one years of her life, no man so such as boasted that he had received a caress or a love word from her. But don't lose interest in her, please, on that account. Dozens of men would blithely have tossed away their souls for the privilege of making that boast truthfully. Failing, they nicknamed her "the angel of the frozen heart." Against her, alone, perhaps of all super-women, no word of scandal was ever breathed. (Chiefly, it has been claimed, for physical reasons.)

Let me touch, as briefly as I can, on a story at which Madame Lenormand, her own cousin, broadly hints and which Turquan openly declares true. Says the former, among other and closer comments on the theme:

"Madame Recamier received from her husband but his name. His affection was paternal. He treated as a daughter the woman who carried his name."

Says Turquan:

"She was Recamier's daughter."

And so, by all testimony, she was. Years before, Recamier had had a love affair with Madame Bernard; an affair that the stupid Bernard had condoned, if he had known of its existence. Nor, said gossip of the day, was it Madame Bernard's sole indiscretion.

Jeanne had been born. From her earliest babyhood, Recamier had all but worshiped her. Not a day had passed but he had come to see her. He had loaded her with toys, jewelry, candy. He had been her fairy godfather. She had grown up calling him "Daddy Recamier."

Then came the Reign of Terror. Old Bernard's life was in considerable danger. In fact he used to go to the guillotine daily to watch executions, "that he might become used to his fate." Madame Bernard was no fit guardian for a young and incredibly lovely girl in the rotten Paris of that day.

So Recamier, rich and powerful, chose the surest means to safeguard the daughter who was all the world to him. He went through a meaningless "civil ceremony" with her; and installed her, with a retinue of servants, in one-half of his big house. Then and thereafter she was Madame Recamier in name alone; Recamier tenderly watching over her, giving her every luxury money could buy, and observing with a total absence of jealousy her innumerable conquests.

These conquests had begun, by the way, even before Jeanne's early marriage. When she was but thirteen, a young man named Humblot had fallen madly in love with her. To keep Jeanne from reciprocating his flame, she had been packed off to a convent school.

Shortly after the marriage, the Reign of Terror simmered down to the more peaceful if more corrupt Directory. Society reassembled on its peak, after the years of guillotine-aided class leveling. And, in this heterogeneous society, Jeanne blazed forth as a star. Says Sainte-Beuve:

"The world Madame Recamier traversed at this period was very mixed and very ardent."

To its adoration the girl bride lent an amused but wholly impersonal ear. Vaguely she used to wonder why men wept at her feet and poured forth their souls in noisy love for her. Their antics found no response in her own untouched heart. Yet she found them interesting, and therefore in a demure way she encouraged them. Not that such encouragement was really needed.

Presently, out of the chaos of social and political conditions, arose Napoleon Bonaparte. Yes, I know he appears unduly often in this series. But he appeared unduly often in the lives of a score of super-women—Madame Jumel, Elizabeth Paterson, Madamoiselle Georges, Countess Potocka, and the rest—and his name is more often seen in all history, written since 1790, than that of any other man. So be patient if he crops up oftener than the balance of power seems to call for.

Napoleon, first as dictator and then as emperor, ruled France. As a young man, he had been too poor and too busy to glance at any woman. Now in his days of power and—for him—leisure, he amply made up for such early defects. And presently his alternately pale and jet-black eyes fell upon Jeanne Recamier. Forthwith, he began to make right ardent love to her.

Napoleon, once and only once in all his strange career, had actually lost his level head through love and had been carried by it out of his cool, calculating self. That was when, as a lean, half-starved, hectic young officer of artillery, he had met Josephine Beauharnais.

She was a Creole widow, much older than he. Much slush has been written of her and her wrongs. History, from every source, tells another story.

Napoleon used to meet Josephine at the house of the director, Barras, where she held a somewhat equivocal position. Barras had begun to tire of her. Her teeth were bad; she was beginning to wrinkle and grow sallow; she was silly; she had absolutely nothing in common with the late Mrs. Cæsar.

To Napoleon, though, she was as a third-rate show to a country boy who had never before visited the theatre. She was divine. Barras saw; and he also saw a chance to rid himself of a burden and at the same time to attach to himself a growingly useful friend.

Barras persuaded Josephine to marry Napoleon—whom she did not even pretend to love—by saying that the young man had a great future. Then, as a wedding present, he gave Napoleon command of the ragged, mutinous Army of Italy.

Napoleon, after turning that army into such a fighting machine as the world had never before known, thrashed Italy and Austria and came home the hero and idol of the hour—to find, beyond all doubt or hope, that Josephine was unfaithful to him! He ordered her out of his house. She wept. Her family wept. Every one wept. Every one pleaded. Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and let her stay. But ever thereafter he treated her with mere friendly tolerance. His love for her was stone-dead. And he amused himself wherever amusement could be found. Also, when it suited his turn in after years he calmly divorced her.

"Lefebvre," said Napoleon, in Egypt, "what is Josephine doing at this moment?"

"Weeping for your return," promptly babbled the future Duke of Dantzig.

"Lefebvre," soulfully returned Napoleon, "you're a fool or a liar! Or both. She is riding a white horse in the Bois, in the worst kind of company she can find at such short notice."

Men of rank and wit were choking Madame Recamier's salon to overflowing. She was the inaccessible goal of a hundred Don Juans' ambitions. Grandees of the old and the new regime as well—aristocrats of the noblesse—who would not deign to visit the Tuileries while the Corsican adventurer held sway in that house of kings—all flocked to the Recamier home and vied with one another to do Jeanne honor.

Her beauty, her siren charm, her snowy—or frosty—virtue were the talk of France. What more natural than that Napoleon should seek out this new paragon; that sheer conceit as well as genuine love should make him burn to succeed where all the world had failed?

Other women—women whose houses he could not have entered, seven years earlier, save as a dependent—were making fools of themselves over the Man of Destiny. He had but to throw the handkerchief for a hundred frail beauties to scramble for its possession. Irresistible, perfect in power and in the serene knowledge of that power, he deigned to make lazy love to Jeanne Recamier.

She was not used to lazy love-making. She did not understand it, but took it for a mere new mannerism of the hypermanneristic emperor. Her seeming indifference had the same effect on Napoleon as might a war campaign that promised grave obstacles. It turned his idle fancy to keen pursuit. Madame Recamier failed to be impressed. Napoleon, thinking he must be mistaken in the idea that any living woman could fail to be dazzled by his attentions, made his meaning quite clear. Only to meet with a very good-humored but extremely definite rebuff from his charmer.

It was past his understanding. He stooped to bribes; offering to put a big share of the state finances through the Recamier bank, and, with much pomp and ceremony, announcing the appointment of Madame Recamier as one of the Empress Josephine's ladies in waiting.

This was a master stroke—a tour de force—a knock-out—anything you will. For, fat and curved-nosed bankers throughout the empire were yelping for slices of the state finances. And the post of lady in waiting was one for which nearly any woman of the court would gladly have parted with all she no longer possessed.

Then came a shock; a rough, jarring shock; a shock worthy to be administered by, instead of to, the Corsican himself. Madame Recamier coldly refused the glittering offers; declined to be a lady in waiting; and gave Napoleon to understand, in terms he could not mistake, that she wanted nothing from him except unadulterated absence.

It was probably the emperor's one heart rebuff.

In a burst of babyish fury, he—the ruler of France and the arbiter of Europe's fate—crawled so low as to seek revenge on a harmless woman.

He first wrecked the Recamier bank, driving old Recamier to the verge of ruin. Then he trumped up an asinine charge of treason or les majeste or something equally absurd, against Jeanne. And on the strength of it, he banished her from Paris.

It was a revenge well worthy the eccentric who could rule or ruin half of Europe by a single convolution of his demigod brain; or could screech in impotent fury at a valet for getting the wrong part in his thin hair.

From Paris went the Recamiers; the banker seeking gently to console his unhappy wife for the ruin she had so innocently wrought; and to build up for her, bit by bit, a new fortune to replace the lost one. Never by word or look did he blame her. And speedily he amassed enough money to supply her again with the luxuries she loved.

To Lyons, the old home of both of them, they went; thence to Rome, and then to Naples. In Italy, Jeanne met once more her dearest woman friend; a ludicrously homely woman with the temper of a wet cat and a tongue sharp enough to shave with; a complete foil, mentally and facially, for her bosom friend, Jeanne.

This miracle of homeliness was Madame de Stael, author and futile conspirator. For exercising the latter accomplishment, she had been banished, like Jeanne, from Paris. So ugly was Madame de Stael that when she once said to an ill-favored man:

"You abuse the masculine prerogative of homeliness," her hearers laughed—at her, not at her victim.

In Italy, too, Jeanne met Prince Augustus of Prussia, prince-royal and man of distinction and wealth. They met at a reception. Madame Recamier and Madame de Stael were seated side by side on a sofa. After the introductions, Prince Augustus seated himself between them, remarking airily:

"I find myself placed between Wit and Beauty."

"And possessing neither," commented Madame de Stael, with her wonted courtesy.

The prince, from that inauspicious start, became the infatuated slave of Madame Recamier. He worshiped the ground she trod. He made no secret of his devotion.

In those days the title of prince-royal carried real weight, and the gulf between prince and commoner was well-nigh unbridgeable. Love made Prince Augustus waive all this disparity. The fact that Madame Recamier was a mere commoner grew to mean nothing to him. At the risk of disgrace at home and of possible loss of rank and fortune, the prince entreated Jeanne to divorce Recamier and to marry his royal-blooded self.

It was a brilliant offer, one that ninety-nine commoners out of a hundred would have seized with alacrity; for it was not a morgantic union he proposed—he wanted to make Jeanne his princess.

The prince went to Recamier and frankly stated his wishes. To his amaze, instead of challenging the wooer, Recamier at once agreed to let Jeanne get the divorce, on any grounds she chose—or an annulment of their marriage, which would have been still simpler—and marry Prince Augustus.

Always impersonal and adoring in his attitude toward Jeanne, Recamier now urged her to secure her own best interests by giving him up and becoming the prince's wife; a sacrifice far easier to understand in a father than in a husband.

But Jeanne put aside the offer without a tremor of hesitation, turning her back on the wealth and title of a princess in order to remain with the bankrupt old commoner whom the world called her husband. For, again, physical reasons intervened.

Lucien Bonaparte, one of the emperor's several brothers, was another ardent wooer. He shone in reflected glory, as his brother's brother, until he seemed quite royal. But to him, as to all the rest, Jeanne—after a wholly harmless and pleasant flirtation—gave a decided refusal.

General Bernadotte, on a foreign mission for the emperor, sought her out. He was a military chief who had fought like a hero and on whom court honors had since fallen thick. He sought, soldier fashion, to carry Jeanne's icy defenses by storm; only to fail as all had failed and to go home grumbling that his majesty had done well to exile so unapproachable a beauty before she had a chance to drive every man in France mad with chagrin.

Benjamin Constant, too—cunning statesman of the old school—loved her. And in his strange, unfathomable mind she found a certain fascination; the more so when she discovered that she could twist that mind to her own purposes. So, instead of dismissing Constant like the rest, she made it clear that she did not love him and then kept him as a friend.

Strong use did she make of that friendship, too, in revenging herself on Napoleon for banishing her. Constant's mighty if tortuous acts of statescraft, just before and just after Napoleon's downfall, have been laid to her influence.

Another exile—General Moreau, Napoleon's oft-time rival in both war and love—now sought to win where his enemy had lost. And he failed. He was the same General Moreau who a few years earlier had paid court to Betty Jumel and had given her as a love gift a huge gilt-and-prism chandelier which later hung in the Jumel mansion in New York. But he found Jeanne as cold as Betty had been kind, and in time he, too, departed, hopeless.

The next victim was no less a personage than the King of Naples. He was Murat, ex-tavern waiter, peerless cavalry leader, and husband of Napoleon's shrew sister, Caroline Bonaparte. The emperor, after conquering the separate Italian states, had placed his ex-waiter brother-in-law on the Neapolitan throne.

When Jeanne reached Naples, Queen Caroline received her with open arms and invited her to be a guest at the palace. Murat's admiration for the lovely visitor was undisguisable. And—though it has been denied by one biographer that Jeanne was responsible for his treason—almost at once after her arrival, he began to intrigue with Napoleon's enemies. Form your own conclusions, as did folk of the time.

Soon afterward, weakened by the idiotic Russian campaign, Napoleon was set upon by a host of foes. Men who had licked his boots fell over one another to join the alliance against him.

The lion was wounded, and the dog pack was at his throat.

As soon as Napoleon had been hustled off into exile, the Recamiers returned to Paris, as did practically all the army of people he had banished. The banker's fortune was looking up, and they could live in something of their old style there.

Paris, in those first weeks of the "Restoration," was as full of kings, emperors, princes, and dukes as a subway rush-hour train of newspaper readers. One could hardly walk a block without stumbling over a monarch or a commander-in-chief or a princeling.

The heads of the allied armies were still there, strutting gallantly about—they would have run up a tree, two years earlier—and bragging of Napoleon's fall.

There was Alexander, Czar of Russia, gigantic and bearlike, who had once cringed to Napoleon, then frozen and starved him in the Moscow campaign, and now was one of the chiefs of the alliance. There, too, was Blucher, who had tumbled off his horse at Waterloo, but who, none the less, had done more than is placed to his credit to win the victory that forever crushed Napoleon. It was he and his Prussians, not Wellington and the English, who really won Waterloo for the Allies.

Other sovereigns, other generals, there were, too. And, foremost among them, a long, lean Irishman, with a bony face and a great hooked beak of a nose. He was Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, titular Victor of Waterloo and Man of the Hour.

The Duke of Wellington was not happily married. I think no retroactive libel law can attack me for saying this, for he himself made no secret of it. And he was far from being an exponent to stern British morality.

Indeed, one object of his affections, Miss Jenkins, wrote of him to a friend:

"It was all I could do to prevent His Grace from throwing himself on his knees before me in sinful adulation."

I fear he would have roused crass horror in the bosom of the mid-Victorian matron who, on seeing Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra," exclaimed:

"How different was Cleopatra's home life from that of our own gracious queen!"

The duke fell victim to Jeanne Recamier's charm. He, the official Man of the Hour, became a fixture at her salons—but for a very brief time. One day, when he was calling on her, a number of other guests being present, the duke made some would-be-witty remark about France.

Jeanne chose to interpret his words as a slur on her beloved country. Roused for once from her wonted gentleness, she ordered Wellington out of her house.

By the next day all Paris knew that Madame Recamier had shown the omnipotent Duke of Wellington the door. And all Paris—which adored Jeanne and hated the English hero—went wild with delight. Jeanne's popularity from that moment was boundless.

Soon afterward, Wellington found that stern duty called him, somewhat hastily, to London. Whither, to his disgust, the story of his ejectment from Madame Recamier's salon had preceded him.

Canova, the premier sculptor of his day—he who later paid such assiduous court to Elizabeth Paterson—fell in love with Jeanne. So indelibly was her wonder face stamped on his mind that, without her knowing it, he was able to make two busts of her.

When the busts were done, Canova—who was constantly receiving and rejecting offers of fabulous sums to make portrait busts—showed her his labors of love. But Jeanne's beauty went hand in hand with vanity. She thought the busts over which he had toiled so happily did not do her justice. And without a word she turned away from the inspection and left the studio.

The sharp blow to his pride was too much for Canova. He dropped her acquaintance forever; being perhaps the only one of Jeanne's adorers to break his allegiance to her before she gave the word.

Recamier died. Jeanne, rich and still gloriously beautiful, received shoals of proposals. She rejected them all. She had at last met the love of her life. In the lives of all these super-women, you will have noticed, there was some one man who stood out supreme above all the host of lesser lovers; idolized, placed on a lofty pedestal, a wealth of devotion lavished on him.

And so it was with Jeanne Recamier—although the affair from first to last was starkly platonic. She who had laughed at an emperor, who had rejected a prince's hand, who had turned the most famous man in Europe out of her house, lost her head and her heart to a cranky, bearlike author-adventurer, Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand. Your grandmother read and wept over his American novel, "Atala."

Chateaubriand was a heartbreaker. As a mere youth, his talent for transferring his allegiance with lightning speed from one woman to the next had won for him the sobriquet "L'Inconstant." He had traveled in the American wilderness, living among Indian tribes; had hobnobbed with George Washington, to whom he had brought letters of introduction; had been sent fleeing for his life from France during the Terror; had been a favorite of Napoleon's until the Corsican's tyranny disgusted him into turning conspirator.

Of late years he had wandered aimlessly about Europe, making love and earning a scant living as a painter and writer. Sometimes broke, sometimes flush, sometimes acclaimed as a genius, sometimes chased as a political criminal, sometimes in palaces, sometimes in jail—Chateaubriand at length met Jeanne Recamier.

From the first they loved each other. On neither side with it a crazily passionate adoration. Rather was it the full, calm devotion of mature hearts that seek safe harbor after many and battering storms.

When Recamier died, Chateaubriand formally asked Jeanne's hand in marriage. She refused—for reasons best known to herself and her physician. But they remained, for all the rest of their lives, faithful and utterly devoted lovers.

Chateaubriand was uncouth, morbid, vain, bristling with a myriad foibles and faults. Jeanne, very gently and tactfully, undertook to cure him of these defects. With tender hands she gradually remolded his wayward, eccentric nature, stripping away much of its dross, bringing out its cleaner, nobler traits.

"You have transformed my character," he wrote her. "I know nothing more beautiful nor more good than you."

When Recamier died, in 1830, Jeanne was a little over fifty. Chateaubriand was sixty-two. A mature couple, withal. Yet Jeanne looked scarce thirty, and Chateaubriand was still in his late prime.

Again and again he pleaded with Jeanne to marry him. Always she refused, just as she refused a host of others, even in her mature years. Indeed, she received and rejected a proposal of marriage when she was seventy.

The rest of this story is not especially romantic. Perhaps it may not interest you. For it has to do with "the breaking up of things."

The Recamier-Chateaubriand affair went on like an Indian summer, for years. Then, as old age reached out for him, Chateaubriand's eccentricities cropped out afresh. He fell into a melancholy, shut himself away from the world that was at last growing to honor him, became a recluse, and would see no one except Madame Recamier.

His melancholy deepened almost into mania. He had but one dream of life left in his heart—his love for Jeanne. To her he clung like a frightened child to a tender mother.

Then, in its saddest form, old age laid its cold hand across beautiful Jeanne's orange-tinted eyes, and she became totally blind. Even in her blindness she was still lovely, and her soul lost none of its sweetness.

Sightless, she still guarded and sought to amuse the cranky old man she so long had loved; bearing with his once-imperious temper, which had now rotted into mere whining discontent; humoring his million whims; talking softly to him, in his brighter moments, about the gleaming past.

The melancholy old man, lovingly tended and nursed and amused like a baby by the blind old woman who had been the reigning beauty of the world, lingered on for several years longer.

When at last he died, Jeanne mourned him as never had she mourned Recamier or any other. Chateaubriand's death broke her heart. It broke, too, her last tie to earth. And within a few months she followed her lover to the grave.

Thus, at seventy-two, died Jeanne Recamier, virgin heartbreaker, whose very name was for half a century the synonym for absolute beauty and flawless purity. I know of no other super-woman whose character in any way resembles hers.

Which was, perhaps, more unlucky for the other super-woman than for the men who loved them.

CHAPTER XII

LADY HAMILTON

PATRON SAINT OF DIME-NOVEL HEROINES

She was the mother of Gertrude the Governess, the granddam of Bertha the Beautiful Sewing-machine Girl, the earliest ancestorette of Ione, the Pride of the Mill; she was the impossibility that made possible the brain daughters of Laura Jean. She was the patron saint of all the dime-novel heroines; she was the model, consciously or otherwise—probably otherwise—of all their authors. Because, at a period when such things were undreamed of, even in fiction, she rose from nursemaid to title.

Even in the books and plays of that age, the born serving wench did not marry the heir. In the highest literary flights, Bridget's crowning reward was to wed Luke, the gamekeeper, and become landlady of The Bibulous Goat or The Doodlethorpe Arms. Goldsmith was eyed askance for even making the heroine of "She Stoops to Conquer" pose momentarily as a lady's maid.

Having thus tried to show how impossible was the happening, let me work up by degrees to the happening itself.

She was a Lancashire lass, Emma Lyon by name. In mature years she dropped the "Lyon" and called herself "Emma Harte." No one knows why. Lyon was not her name; neither was Harte, for that matter. In fact, she had no name; her careless parents having failed to supply her with the legal right to one.

Her father was a rural farm hand. He died while Emma was a baby. Her mother, an inn servant, moved later to Hawarden; and there a Mrs. Thomas hired Emma as nursemaid. This was in 1777. Emma was thirteen. She had already learned to read—a rare accomplishment in those days for the nameless brat of an inn drudge. And, as nursemaid, she greedily picked up stray morsels of her little charges' education, as well as the manners and language of her employers. She learned as quickly as a Chinaman.

There is a hiatus in the records, after Emma had served a year or so in the Thomas family. One biographer bridges the gap with a line of asterisks. Asterisks, in biographies as well as in sex-problem fiction, may indicate either a lapse of time or a lapse of morals.

Emma reappeared from the asterisk cloud in London, where she was nursemaid in the house of a Doctor Budd, one of the physicians at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Doctor Budd's housemaid at that time, by the way, later became a Drury Lane star, under the name of "Mrs. Powell." And in that bright afterday she and the even more apotheosized Emma renewed their below-stairs friendship.

For some reason Emma left Doctor Budd's service rather suddenly and found a job as helper in the shop of a St. James' Market mercer. She was sixteen, and she was gloriously beautiful. Her figure was superb. Already she had a subtle charm of her own which drew to her feet crowds of footmen, shopboys, apprentices, and such small deer. There is no record that they one and all were sent away disconsolate.

During her brief career as helper to the St. James' Market mercer, Emma chanced to attract the notice of a woman of quality who one day entered the shop. And forthwith she was hired as lady's maid. The girl had picked up a smattering of education. She had scraped from her pink tongue the rough Lancashire bur-r-r. She had learned to speak correctly, to ape the behavior of the solid folk whose servant she had been. Now, from her new employer, she was to learn at firsthand how people in the world of fashion comported themselves. And, chameleonlike, she took on the color of her gay surroundings.

Soon she could lisp such choice and fashionable expletives as "Scrape me raw!" and "Oh, lay me bleeding!" and could talk and walk and posture as did her mistress. Trashy novels by the dozen fell into her hands from her mistress' table. Emma devoured them, gluttonously and absorbed their precepts as the human system absorbs alcohol fumes.

Please don't for one moment get the idea that there was anything profitable to a young girl in the novels of the latter eighteenth century. Perhaps you have in mind such dreary sterling works as "Pamela," "Clarissa Harlow," "Sir Charles Grandison," and others that were crammed into your miserably protesting brain in the Literature Courses. Those were the rare—the very rare—exceptions to a large and lurid list, which included such choice classics as "Moll Flanders," "Roxana"—both of them by the same Defoe who wrote "Robinson Crusoe," and whose other novels would send a present-day publisher to States prison—"Peregrine Pickle," "Fanny Hill," "The Delicate Distress," "Roderick Random," and the rest of a rank-flavored multitude.

Emma reveled in the joys of the local "circulating library," too; one of those places that loaned books of a sort to cause even the kindly Sheridan to thunder his famous dictum:

"A circulating library in a town is an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. It blossoms through the year. And, depend on't, they who are so fond of handling the leaves will long for the fruit at last."

Much reading filled Emma with wonderful new ideas of life. Incidentally, it made her neglect her work, and she was discharged. Her next step was to become barmaid in a tavern. While she was there, a young admirer of hers was seized by the navy press gang. Emma went to the captain of the ship to beg for her swain's release. The captain was John Willett Payn, afterward a rear admiral. Payne granted the lovely girl's plea. He not only gave her what she asked, but his own admiration as well. Her story as a heart winner had begun.

In fiction, the gallant captain would soon have tired of his lively sweetheart and cast her aside. But Emma was not a lowly sweetheart. She was a super-woman. She showed how much stranger than fiction truth may be by deserting Payne for a richer man. First, however, she had wheedled the captain into hiring tutors and music masters for her, and she profited vastly by their teachings.

Her new flame was a sporting baronet, Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, of Up Park, Sussex. Sir Harry was an all-round athlete and a reckless horseman. He taught Emma to ride—"a beggar on horseback?"—and she became the most daring equestrienne of the century. He taught her to spend money, too. And so splendidly did she learn her lesson that inside of a year Sir Harry was bankrupt.

Perhaps all rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very good reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't. The rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble rodent.

There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly consideration, she left him.

She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend; equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm, but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.

And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack, Graham by name.

Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine—from Doctor Faustus down, the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised as a means of exchanging age for youth—and he vowed that it would make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said, had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis." Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which Emma posed:

He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which, in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman, nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as Hygeia, goddess of health.

Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed through the shimmer of rose-colored light.

And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him, and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no less than thirty-nine pictures of her.

"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is superior to all womankind."

The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure. Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth. Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels, but racing abreast.

Soon, out of the ruck and forging far ahead, appeared Charles Francis Greville, wit, art connoisseur, and nephew and heir of the famed antiquary diplomat, Sir William Hamilton. Greville cut out all rivals, Romney among the rest, and won Emma for his own.

Theirs was an odd love affair. For here, too, Emma gave full rein to her craving for education. And she showed for the first time just why she was so eager to be highly educated. It was not for mere learning's sake, but to enhance the charm that gave her a hold over men. She cared nothing for any but the showy accomplishments. She already had a fair groundwork in English and ordinary school studies. She made Greville get her the best teachers in singing, in dancing, in acting. Perhaps she looked forward to a stage triumph, but more likely to outshining the colorless bread-and-butter women of her day.

Never did pupil better repay the pains of her teachers. Her voice presently rivaled that of many a prima donna. Her dancing was a delight. It was she who conceived the celebrated "shawl dance" that was the rage throughout Europe for years thereafter, and that still is used, in very slightly modified form, by premieres danseuses. But acting was Emma's forte. Says a contemporary writer:

With a common piece of stuff she could so arrange and clothe herself as to offer the most appropriate representations of a Jewess, a Roman matron, a Helen, Penelope, or Aspasia. No character seemed foreign to her, and the grace she was in the habit of displaying under such representations excited the admiration of all who were fortunate enough to be present on such occasions. Siddons could not surpass the grandeur of her style or O'Neil be more melting in the utterance of deep pathos.

In this heyday of her prosperity, Emma hunted up her aged and disreputable mother, bestowed on her the name "Mrs. Cadogan," and settled a rich pension on her. At about the same time, too, Emma bade a cheery farewell to the serviceable name of Lyon and took to calling herself Emma Harte.

Then Greville went broke.

In his new-found poverty, he hit on a plan of life foreign to all his old ideas.

He decided to ask his rich old uncle, Sir William Hamilton, to pay his debts and settle a little annuity on him. With this sum as a means of livelihood, he intended to marry Emma, and, with her and their three children, settle down in some cheap suburb.

How this appealed to Emma history forgets to say. Judging by both past and future, it is not unjust to suppose that she may have been making ready once more to emulate the ship-deserting rat. But this time she did not need to. The ship was about to desert her—for a consideration.

Greville, full of his new hopes, went to Sir William Hamilton and laid the plan before him. His nephew's derelictions from the straight and narrow path had long distressed the virtuous old diplomat. And in Greville's financial troubles Sir William thought he saw a fine chance to break off his nephew's discreditable affair with Emma.

He offered to set Greville on his feet again if that luckless youth would drop Emma's acquaintance. The enamored Greville refused. Sir William insisted, raising his offer of financial aid, and pointing out, with tearful eloquence, the family disgrace that a marriage to a woman of Emma's desolute character must cause. It was all quite like a scene from a modern problem play. But Fate, her tongue in her cheek, was preparing to put a twist on the end of the scene worthy of the most cynical French vaudeville writer.

Greville resented his uncle's rash judgment of his adored Emma, and begged him to come and see her for himself, hoping that Emma's wonder charm might soften the old man's virtue-incrusted heart. Reluctantly, Sir William consented to one brief interview with the wicked siren.

At sight of Emma, Sir William's heart melted to mushiness. He fell crazily in love with the woman he had come to dispossess. There was another long and stormy scene between uncle and nephew; after which Greville, for an enormous lump sum, transferred to Sir William Hamilton all right and title and good will to the adorable Emma Harte. And Sir William and Emma departed thence, arm in arm, leaving Greville a sadder but a richer man. What became of the three children I don't know. By the way, Emma had taught them to call her "aunt," not "mother."

Will you let me quote a deadly dry line or two from an encyclopedia, to prove to you how important a personage Sir William was, and how true is the axiom about "no fool like an old fool"?

Hamilton, Sir William, British diplomatist and antiquary (1730-1803), student of art, philosophy and literature. From 1764 to 1800 English ambassador to the Court of Naples. Trustee of British Museum, Fellow of the Royal Society, vice president of the Society of Antiquaries, distinguished member of the Dilettante Club, author of several books. Sir Joshua Reynolds, his intimate friend, painted his portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery.

Sir William, who was home on leave of absence when he met Emma, took her back with him to Italy. But before they sailed she had prevailed on him to marry her.

It was easy. He was old.

The marriage was kept secret until, in 1791, she led her husband back to England on another leave of absence and up to the altar of St. George's Church, where, on September 6th of that year, they were married all over again; this time with every atom of publicity Emma could compass. She was then twenty-seven; her husband was sixty-one.

In state they returned to the court of Naples—the most corrupt, licentious, false, utterly abominable court in all Europe. If you will glance at the annals of the courts of that period you will find this statement is as true as it is sweeping. On her earlier visit, as the supposed brevet bride of the ambassador, Emma had been warmly received by Marie Caroline, Queen of Naples and sister to Marie Antoinette of France. Emma and Marie Caroline were kindred spirits—which is perhaps the unkindest thing I could say about either of them—and they quickly formed a lasting friendship for each other.

Emma was glad to get back to Naples. Apart from her marriage, her visit to England had not been a success. A certain element in London society, attracted by her beauty, her voice, and her talent as an actress, had taken her up. But Queen Charlotte had refused her a presentation at the British court, and the more reputable element of the nobility had followed royal example and given her a wide berth. English society under George III. was severely respectable—at least in the matter of externals; a quality it was soon to mislay, under George IV. Hence Emma's joy at returning to a court where respectability was a term to be found only in the dictionary.

The King of Naples was a fool. His wife was the little kingdom's ruler. Emma, Lady Hamilton, became her chief adviser. Writes one historian:

It is not too much to say of these two women that for years they wielded the destinies of Naples, and seriously affected the character of the wars that ended with the peace of Europe in 1815, when both were dead…. Both were endowed with powers of mind far above the average of their sex; both exhibited energy and understanding that inspired them to bold and decisive, if not always laudable, deeds; both were as remarkable for their personal beauty as for their self-reliance, their knowledge of men, and their determination to make the most of their information. To say that Marie Caroline loved Lady Hamilton is to misstate a fact; there was no love in the royal composition; but her ungovernable and undying hatred of the French inclined her, no doubt, in the first instance toward the wife of the English ambassador, and the subsequent devotion of the favorite secured an attachment that is confessed and reiterated through whole pages of a vehement and overstrained correspondence.

Naples, just then, was between two fires. There was fear of a French invasion—which arrived on schedule time—and there was also danger that England would ruin Neopolitan commerce. Emma's white hands were at once plunged, wrist-deep, into the political dough; and a sorry mess she proceeded to make of it. For example, the King of Spain wrote a confidential letter to his brother, the King of Naples, accusing the English government of all sorts of public and private crimes and telling of Spain's secret alliance with France. The king showed it to his wife, who in turn showed it to Lady Hamilton. Emma stole and secretly sent the letter to the British cabinet. The result was a bloody war between England and Spain.

About two years after Emma's marriage, an English warship, the Agamemnon, touched at Naples, and her captain called to pay his respects to the British ambassador and to deliver a letter from the admiral of the Mediterranean fleet. After a few minutes' talk with the captain, Sir William insisted that the latter should meet Lady Hamilton.

He bustled into the drawing-room to prepare Emma for the visitor's arrival, saying excitedly to her:

"I am bringing you a little man who cannot boast of being very handsome, but who, I pronounce, will one day astonish the world. I know it from the very words of conversation I have had with him."

On the heels of Sir William's announcement, the "little man" came into the room. At first glance, he scarcely seemed to justify Hamilton's enthusiasm. He was clad in a full-laced uniform. His lank, unpowdered hair was tied in a stiff Hessian queue of extraordinary length. Old-fashioned, flaring waistcoat flaps added to the general oddity of his figure.

Sir William introduced him as "Captain Horatio Nelson."

Lady Hamilton lavished on the queer guest no especial cordiality. It is not known that she gave him a second thought. Nelson, little more impressed by the super-woman, wrote to his wife in England an account of the call, saying of Lady Hamilton—whose story, of course, he and everybody knew:

"She is a young woman of amiable manners, who does honor to the station to which she has been raised."

Yet Nelson had unwittingly met the woman who was to tarnish the pure glory of his fame; and Emma had met the man but for whom she would to-day be forgotten. So little does Fate forecast her dramas that, at the first meeting, neither of the two immortal lovers seems to have felt any attraction for the other.

Not for five busy years did Nelson and Emma Hamilton see each other again.

Then Nelson came back to Naples, this time in triumph—a world-renowned hero, the champion of the seas, Britain's idol. He had become an admiral, a peer of England, a scourge of his country's foes. Back to Naples he came. Part of him; not all—for victorious warfare had set cruel marks on him. He had left his right eye at Calvi in 1794, and his right arm at Teneriffe in 1797. He was more odd looking than ever, but he was an acclaimed hero. And Naples in general and Emma Hamilton in particular welcomed him with rapture.

He was in search of the French fleet, and he wanted the King of Naples to let him reprovision his ships in the Neapolitan harbor. Now, France and Naples just then happened to be at peace. And, by their treaty, no more than two English warships at a time could enter any Neapolitan or Sicilian port. The king's council declared the treaty must stand. Lady Hamilton decided otherwise.

She used all her power with the queen to have the treaty set aside. As a result Marie Caroline issued an order directing "all governors of the two Sicilies to water, victual, and aid" Nelson's fleet. This order made it possible for Nelson to go forth reprovisioned—and to crush the French in the Battle of the Nile.

In the first rumor of this battle that reached Naples, Nelson was reported killed. Soon afterward he appeared, alive and well, in the harbor. Here is his letter to his wife, telling how Lady Hamilton received him on his return. Nelson, by the way, had been married for nearly twelve years. He and his wife were devoted to each other. Judging from this letter, he was lamentably ignorant of women or was incredibly sure of Lady Nelson's love and trust. Or else his courage was greater than that of mortal husband. He wrote:

Sir William and Lady Hamilton came out to sea to meet me. They, my most respectable friends, had nearly been laid up and seriously ill, first from anxiety and then from joy. It was imprudently told Lady Hamilton, in a moment, that I was alive; and the effect was like a shot. She fell, apparently dead, and is not yet perfectly recovered from severe bruises. Alongside came my honored friends. The scene in the boat was terribly affecting. Up flew her ladyship, and, exclaiming: "Oh, God, is it possible?" she fell into my arm, more dead than alive. Tears, however, soon set matters to rights; when alongside came the king…. I hope, some day, to have the pleasure of introducing you to Lady Hamilton. She is one of the very best women in the world; she is an honor to her sex. Her kindness, with Sir William's, to me, is more than I can express. I am in their house, and I may tell you, it required all the kindness of my friends to set me up. Lady Hamilton intends writing to you. May God Almighty bless you, and give us in due time a happy meeting!

France sought revenge for the help given to Nelson's fleet, and declared war on Naples. The Neapolitans, in fury at being dragged into such a needless conflict, rose against their dear king and adored queen—especially against their adored queen—and threatened to kill them. By Lady Hamilton's aid the royal family reached Nelson's flagship and took refuge there from the mob. Sir William and Lady Hamilton went along. The populace looted the British embassy and stole everything of value Sir William owned—about one hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars' worth of property in all. Thus, Hamilton was the third man who had lost a fortune through Emma.

Meanwhile, Nelson had sailed to Palermo, taking the fugitives along. There he made his home with the Hamiltons. And scandal awoke, even in that easy-going crowd. Nor did the scandal die down to any appreciable extent on the birth of Lady Hamilton's daughter, Horatia, a year or so later.

Sir William's conduct in the matter is still a puzzle. He felt, or professed to feel, that there was no occasion for jealousy. And so for a long time the trio shared the same house.

One of the courtiers who had fled with the king and queen to Palermo was Prince Caraccioli, Nelson's close friend and Lady Hamilton's bitter enemy. Caraccioli asked leave to go back to Naples to look after his endangered property. As soon as he reached the city, he threw in his lot with the rebels and was made admiral of their navy.

Presently, by the aid of England's fleet, the royal family returned. The rebellion was put down, and the king and queen were once more seated firmly on their thrones. The rebel leaders were seized and brought to trial. Nelson is said to have promised immunity to Caraccioli if he would surrender. Relying on his friend's pledge, Caraccioli surrendered. At Emma's request Nelson had the overtrustful man hanged from the yardarm of his own flagship.

This is the darkest smear on Nelson's character, a smear that even his most blatant admirers have never been able to wipe away. It is not in keeping with anything else in his life. But by this time he belonged to Lady Hamilton, body and soul.

She, by the way, had managed to acquire from her friend, the Queen of Naples, a nice tendency toward blood-thirstiness; as witness the following sweet anecdote by Pryne Lockhart Gordon, who tells of dining with the Hamiltons at Palermo, in company with a Turkish officer:

In the course of conversation, the officer boasted that with the sword he wore he had put to death a number of French prisoners. "Look," he said, "there is their blood remaining on it." When the speech was translated to her, Lady Hamilton's eyes beamed with delight. "Oh, let me see the sword that did the glorious deed!" she exclaimed. Taking the sword in her hands, which were covered with jewels, she looked at it, then kissed the incrusted blood on the blade, and passed it on to Nelson. Only one who was a witness to the spectacle can imagine how disgusting it was.

Enshrined once more at Naples, hailed as savior of the realm, acclaimed for her share in the Nile victory, the confidante of royalty—it would be pleasant to say good-by here to Emma Lyon, ex-nursemaid, ex-barmaid, ex-lady's maid, nameless offspring of a Lancashire inn slavey. It was the climax of a wonderful life. But there was anticlimax aplenty to follow.

Nelson went home to England to receive the plaudits of his fellow countrymen and to settle accounts with his wife. Home, too, came the Hamiltons, Sir William having been recalled.

Lady Nelson was not at the dock to meet her hero husband. Bad news traveled fast, even before we boosted it along by wire and then by wireless. Lady Nelson had heard. And Lady Nelson was waiting at home. Thither, blithely enough, fared the man in whose praise a million Englishmen were cheering themselves hoarse—and in whose silver-buckled shoes perhaps no married Englishman would just then have cared or dared to stand. But Nelson was a hero. He went home.

I once had a collie puppy that had never chanced to be at close quarters with a cat. I was privileged to see him when he made his first gleefully fearless attack upon one, ignorant of the potential anguish tucked away behind a feline's velvety paws. Somehow—with no disrespect to a great man—I always think of that poor, about-to-be-disillusioned puppy when I try to visualize the picture of Nelson's home-coming.

Just what happened no one knows. But whatever it was, it did not teach Nelson the wisdom of husbandly reticence. For, a few weeks later, he remarked at breakfast:

"I have just received another letter from dear Lady Hamilton."

"I am sick of hearing of 'dear' Lady Hamilton!" flared the long-suffering wife. "You can choose between us. You must give up her or me."

"Take care, Fanny!" warned Nelson. "I love you dearly. But I cannot forget all I owe to dear Lady Hamilton."

"This is the end, then," announced Lady Nelson, and she left the house.

Only once again did she and her husband meet.

Nelson cast off all pretense at concealment after his wife left him. His affair with Lady Hamilton became public property. Their daughter, Horatia, was openly acclaimed by him as his heiress. The English were in a quandary. They loved Nelson; they hated the woman who had dragged his name into the filth. They could not snub her without making him unhappy; they could not honor him without causing her to shine by reflected glory. It was unpleasant all around.

In 1805 the deadlock was broken. Nelson was again to fight the French. He told Lady Hamilton and many others that this campaign was to end in his death. He ordered his coffin made ready for him. Then he sailed against the French fleet, met it off Cape Trafalgar, and annihilated it. In the thick of the fight a musket ball gave him his death wound. He was carried below, and there, the battle raging around him, he laboriously wrote a codicil to his will, entreating his king and country to repay his services by settling a pension on Lady Hamilton. Then to his next-in-command he panted:

"I am going fast. Come nearer. Pray let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair and all other things belonging to me. Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton—poor Lady Hamilton! Thank God I have done my duty!"

And so he died, this knightly little demigod—true lover, false husband—who had fouled his snowy escutcheon for a worthless woman.

Now comes the inevitable anticlimax.

All England turned with loathing from Lady Hamilton. Her husband was dead. Lovers stood aloof. Folk who had received her for Nelson's sake barred their doors against her. She had followed the popular custom of living in luxury on nothing a year. Now her creditors swarmed upon her.

Her house was sold for debt. Next she lived in Bond Street lodgings, growing poorer day by day until she was condemned to the debtor's prison. A kind-hearted—or hopeful—alderman bought her out of jail. A former coachman of hers, whose wages were still unpaid, threatened her with arrest for debt. She fled to Calais.

There she lived in an attic, saved from absolute starvation by a fellow Englishwoman, a Mrs. Hunter. Her youth and charm had fled. The power that had lured Nelson and Greville and Hamilton to ruin was gone.

In 1815 she died. She was buried in a pine box, with an old black silk petticoat for a pall. No clergyman could be found to take charge of her funeral. So the burial service was read by a fellow debt exile—a half-pay Irish army captain.

One wonders—perhaps morbidly—if Nelson's possible punishment in another world might not have been the knowledge of what befell his "dear" Lady Hamilton in her latter days.

THE END.

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